galileo galilei is one of the few figures in the history of science who has attracted the imagination even of laymen to the natural sciences. the battle of this great physicist against the domination of his church, a battle which he ultimately lost, manifests fundamental human interest that extends beyond the individual. galileo pits the right of the thinking individual against the right of an institution that defends its claim to set norms for individual thinking because it posseses superhuman truths.

in the fourth volume of his history of the experimental method in italy (caverni 1891–1900, 4:506–33), raffaello caverni fulfilled the promise he had made four years earlier in an introductory overview of his work (ibid., 1:135–36): to prove on the basis of the history of the discovery of the parabolic shape of the projectile trajectory that galileo claimed the intellectual property of his eminent contemporaries as his own, and to show how this was accomplished. one had the right to expect that the proponent of such an entirely new opinion in a case which he himself considered to be, in the words of bacon, an instantia praerogativa for the justification of his view, would weigh the value of each individual argument with absolute impartiality and do complete justice to the ambiguity of the given facts. he would have to state his case in compelling logic so that a clear-thinking individual would have no choice, in this case at least, but to believe in the dishonorable theft by a great man. in these expectations we have been disappointed thoroughly by caverni: his argumentation is in all aspects that of a shrewd lawyer who considers it his task to allow only one side of the question to come to light, to collect everything that might be utilized in favor of his biased reading, to hold back anything which might give rise to the idea that things could be viewed in another way. he believed it permissible for his own purposes to operate with presumptions as if they were facts, and to regard as proven what is at best probable.