Astrology as it is, not as it has been represented : a compendium / with a prefatory address and introduction ; also a view of the history of astrology ... by a cavalry officer.
- Richard James Morrison
- Date:
- 1856
Licence: Public Domain Mark
Credit: Astrology as it is, not as it has been represented : a compendium / with a prefatory address and introduction ; also a view of the history of astrology ... by a cavalry officer. Source: Wellcome Collection.
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![made their study for so many years, and still con- tinue on unwearied in the pursuit? Are all the students of Astrology men of such very weak ca- pacities that their minds will bear no comparison with those of their neighbours ? Even if the world chooses to believe this, what shall we say of the mind of such a man as Claudius Ptolemy, the greatest Astrologer the world ever saw, the writer of the Tetrabilos, or Four Books on the Influence of the Stars, who obtained among the Greeks the cognomen of the “ most wise,” the “ most divine,” on account of his great learning ? He was the first among the ancients who collected the different observations of Aristotle, Hipparchus, Posidonius, and others, on the economy of the world, and formed from them, after years of abstruse study, his Me^/aXr] 'ZwTagiv, which first gave rise to that sys- tem called after him the Ptolemaic.* Another Prince of Astrologers was Placidus de Titus, Mathematician to His Serene Highness Leopold William, Archduke of Austria, who in the year 1647 published in three books that elaborate Treatise known as the Piacidian method or system of Celestial Phi- losophy, and dedicated it to Cardinal Facchinette, * Experience has since proved that the Ptolemaic System is wrong, but we must recollect that by it observers were enabled to foretell eclipses, and that it represented the actual phenomena of the heavens in their geocentric positions, or as they appear to a spectator on the earth; and as in Astrology the Planets’ places are taken as they appear to us from the earth, and not from the Sun, the truth or falsity of his System does not in the slightest degree invalidate Astrology.](https://iiif.wellcomecollection.org/image/b24866143_0034.jp2/full/800%2C/0/default.jpg)
