It may be as well to say at the beginning that even Copernicus was not the first to suggest that the earth moved, and not the sun; and that, curiously enough, his anticipator was another churchman, Nicholas of Cusa, the famous Bishop of Brixen.
"Catholic Churchmen in Science"
James J. Walsh
The man who had in his earlier works sometimes seemed the most general and abstract even of eighteenth-century writers, becomes here, by force of his interest in the primary things of humanity, almost a pioneer of the new love of externalities, a relater of details, an anticipator of his own Boswell.
"Dr. Johnson and His Circle"
John Bailey
As he states it: I claim, against a strictly logical empirical method, three classes of facts: first, the authentic facts of the Moral Sense, whenever it appears as the transcender of the ripest average utility; second, the facts of the Imagination, as the anticipator of mental methods by pervading everything with personalty, by imputing life to objects, or by occasional direct suggestion; third, the facts of the Harmonic Sense, as the reconciler of discrete and apparently sundered objects, as the prophet and artist of number and mathematical ratio, as the unifier of all the contents of the soul into the acclaim which rises when the law of unity fills the scene.
"Recollections and Impressions 1822-1890"
Octavius Brooks Frothingham