still under the Ptolemaic dispensation, 1902

"The greatest spiritual change in ourselves which the past forty years have wrought is, I take it, the change in our conceptions of the relation of man to the universe, and of the possibility of knowledge of anything whatsoever that lies outside the narrow limits set for us by our senses and by the constitution of our mental powers. For us at least, faith in human fancies about invisible things long since died away, and, for my own part, I have no sentimental regret at its vanishing. Without it, I find myself more in harmony with the exceedingly minute section of the universe to which I belong; not, indeed, in closer intellectual agreement with most of the good men and women my contemporaries, of whom all but an insignificant fraction are still living under the Ptolemaic dispensation, undisturbed in their practical conviction that this earth is the centre of the universe, and man the chief object of creation. Even when their religion has gone as a controlling force, their superstition remains affecting their imaginations." 

-- Letter of C. E. Norton to Goldwin Smith, 19 July 1902, in Letters of Charles Eliot Norton, Vol. II, 1913, p. 326.