beings to occupy a plurality of other sun-centered worlds. In his Discovery of a World in the Moone (1638), Wilkins broached the probability of an Earthlike moon with lunar inhabitants, the dark areas interpreted as seas, the entire body surrounded by a vaporous atmosphere. The existence of Lunatics was further testimony to the divine wisdom. And the pluralist argument became a significant resource for attracting adherents to a multiplicity of sun-centered systems in an infinite universe. 15. In England, prominent midcentury astrologers like Vincent Wing (1619-1668) and Thomas Streete (1621?-1689) learned their Copernicus through Kepler and Descartes and associated the accuracy of their predictions with Kepler’s Rudolfine Tables (1627). 16. Isaac Newton (1642-1727) and Robert Hooke (1635-1702) were members of a generation that encountered the Copernican Question not directly through Copernicus’s De revolutionibus but as a controversy already matured and refracted through the midcentury literature of the heavens and natural philosophy. Newton himself made his earliest acquaintance with the Copernican ordering and Kepler’s elliptical orbits through the astronomer-astrologers Wing and Streete. Ultimately, however, he rejected the claims of astrology as a form of idolatry, much as did Pico—based upon the projection of human qualities onto the stars and planets—and contrary to Newton’s belief in the power of God to act directly in the world without need of intermediaries. However, like Copernicus, Newton never published his views about astrology. 16. The problem of closure. Westman argues that “the diversity already evident at the beginning of the [seventeenth] century persisted among Copernicus’s midcentury followers. To identify oneself publicly with the Copernican arrangement or to declare its truth did not entail allegiance to the uniform set of commitments in natural philosophy evoked by the nineteenth- and twentieth century term “Copernicanism”. The Copernican question achieved closure—an end to questioning and criticism from competing alternatives—in different ways among different audiences. These endings occurred through no single proof and with audiences as variously overlapping as almanac readers, practicing astrologers, planetary table makers, extraterrestrializers, itinerant scientific lecturers and, of course, philosophizing astronomers and high-end, new-style natural philosophers.” 17. Newton’s powerful achievement was his construction of a natural philosophy of mathematizable forces in which the sun’s position at or near the center of the planets could be deduced rather than assumed as a premise, as Copernicus had done: “The Copernican system is proved a priori,” Newton wrote, “for if the common center of gravity is calculated for any