It seemed to depreciate their dignity, to lessen their importance.

To them there was something shocking in a God who cannot be swayed by human entreaty, a cold, passionless divinity--something frightful in fatalism, destiny.
But the orderly movement of the heavens could not fail in all ages to make a deep impression on thoughtful observers--the rising and setting of the sun; the increasing or diminishing light of the day; the waxing and waning of the moon; the return of the seasons in their proper courses; the measured march of the wandering planets in the sky--what are all these, and a thousand such, but manifestations of an orderly and unchanging procession of events?
The faith of early observers in this interpretation may perhaps have been shaken by the occurrence of such a phenomenon as an eclipse, a sudden and mysterious breach of the ordinary course of natural events; but it would be resumed in tenfold strength as soon as the discovery was made that eclipses themselves recur, and may be predicted.
Astronomical predictions of all kinds depend upon the admission of this fact--that there never has been and never will be any intervention in the operation of natural laws.

The scientific philosopher affirms that the condition of the world at any given moment is the direct result of its condition in the preceding moment, and the direct cause of its condition in the subsequent moment.

Law and chance are only different names for mechanical necessity.
About fifty years after the death of Copernicus, John Kepler, a native of Wurtemberg, who had adopted the heliocentric theory, and who was deeply impressed with the belief that relationships exist in the revolutions of the planetary bodies round the sun, and that these if correctly examined would reveal the laws under which those movements take place, devoted himself to the study of the distances, times, and velocities of the planets, and the form of their orbits.

His method was, to submit the observations to which he had access, such as those of Tycho Brahe, to computations based first on one and then on another hypothesis, rejecting the hypothesis if he found that the calculations did not accord with the observations.