It contains the theory of the natural and material elements or principles of things—light and fire, wind or air, water or vapour or darkness, and earth or the dry, with their “forms,” time and place—leaving the metaphysical and the immaterial principles (spirit and soul) for consideration elsewhere. It is not of great scientific value. Bruno makes use of abstract terms even more readily than Aristotle (e.g. “lux seminaliter est ubique, et in tenebris,” p. 514). The chief aim of the work is to illustrate the magical applications of the different elements[154] (cf. pp. 516, 525, etc.). Its value mainly lies in the light it throws on Bruno’s atomic theory, and on one or two other minor points of his philosophy—the harmony, co-ordination, and sympathy between all natural things, the doctrines of liberty and necessity, etc.
9. De Medicina Lulliana, partim ex mathematicis, partim ex physicis principiis educta.—Written immediately after the above (de rerum principiis), to which it occasionally refers: merely a collection of abstracts from works of Lully on medicine, as a practical application of the system of magic contained in the three previous writings. It is accordingly of the astrological type of mediæval medicine.
10. De Vinculis in genere. Noroff MSS.—A first sketch in Bruno’s own hand, dating probably from Frankfort; and a later, much more detailed, in Besler’s, copied at Padua. It in a sense completes the tractates on Magic, by dealing with “attraction” in general, of which the attractions and sympathies of natural and mathematical magic are special cases. As it stands, however (for neither sketch is finished: Bruno’s covers wider ground than Besler’s, the latter breaks off abruptly before the natural end is reached), it is a psychological essay on the human passions, and more especially on human love, from a purely objective, matter-of-fact standpoint. In it the most grossly material and the highest spiritual sources of love are placed side by side; and to love, including self-love, are reduced all passions, all effects, even hate, which is an outcome, a reversion of love.
PART II
PHILOSOPHY OF BRUNO
CHAPTER I
THE SOURCES OF THE PHILOSOPHY
In the school and the monastery at Naples Bruno passed as a matter of course through a training in the Scholastic Philosophy. Before entering the monastery of St. Dominic at fifteen years of age he had studied “humane letters, logic, and dialectic,”[155] and had attended, among other lectures, a private course by Theophilus of Varrano, an Augustine monk and distinguished Aristotelian. From him, probably, Bruno received an impetus towards the study of Aristotle in the original works, if not also in the original tongue, which stood him in admirable stead when he came later to attack the foundations of the vulgar philosophy. He was familiar at first hand with all the main writings of Aristotle.[156] He had read, too, and cites, most of the earlier commentators—Adrastus and Alexander of Aphrodisias, Porphyry, Themistius, Simplicius, and “Philoponus”[157]—as well as the later, the Arabians and other Schoolmen. He had accordingly a more thorough acquaintance with the mind of Aristotle than any of the latter’s staunchest supporters in his time: the lack of the historic sense prevented him, however, from taking a just view of the system as a whole: it was not the Aristotle of Greek philosophy whom he rejected, and against whom he wielded the powerful weapons of his armoury, but the Aristotle of his own day,—a living force with which no one could avoid a reckoning, the influence of which was no longer for good, but which formed, as Bruno felt, a barrier against the progressive thought and spirit of the time. In the introductory letter to the Figuratio Arist. Phys. Auditus, Bruno gave three reasons for undertaking the work:[158]—(1) “that he might not appear, like so many others, to be taking up the office of censor without a sufficient knowledge of his subject; (2) that he might present to his opponents the philosophy of Aristotle as it really was, for the majority of the Aristotelians admired it rather from their faith in the man Aristotle than from discriminate judgment concerning the principles of the philosophy; (3) that he might seem not an audacious caviller against thoughts that were beyond his depth, but a genuine and legitimate disputant on doctrines that were clear to himself.”[159] The name of Aristotle was a charm; his opinion final not in matters of pure philosophy alone, but equally in natural theory; his natural philosophy had been harmonised with scriptural authority, and was the accepted doctrine of the Church. The cry which his critic heard had weight behind it: “You against Aristotle—against so many authorities, so great names? I would rather be in error along with them, than find truth with you!”[160] The danger lay not so much in the error of Aristotle’s theory of nature, or of his metaphysical theories, as in his authority; “many of the Peripatetics,” Bruno says in the Cena, “grow angry, and flush and quarrel about Aristotle, yet do not understand even the meanings of the titles of his books.”[161] It was the influence of this authority that Bruno, in the interests of true philosophy and science, set to work to undermine. The charge which he brought against Aristotle was the same as that which Bacon afterwards brought—that he attempted to explain nature by logical categories. “It is not strange that from impossible, logical, and imaginary distinctions quite discordant with the truth of things, he infers an infinite number of other untruths” (inconvenientia).[162] “Matter is formless only to logical abstraction, as with Aristotle, who is constantly dividing by reason what is indivisible according to nature and truth:”[163] “a logical intention (or concept) is made into a principle (or element) of nature.”[164] However unfair and indeed absurd the charge must appear when Aristotle is considered in his actual place within the development of philosophy and science, and however far Bruno or Bacon or any of the nature-philosophers of the Renaissance was from avoiding the use in explanation of similar purely logical or metaphysical conceptions, it was still a great and necessary step to call attention to the need of observation and experiment upon nature, and to the value of mathematics as a method of calculating and correlating the phenomena observed. Aristotle’s rejection of mathematical method.This was a second objection to Aristotle, that he despised mathematics, “being too much of a logician (and stronger in criticism than in argument),” yet, Bruno adds, “when he sought to explain any of the more profound facts of nature, he was often driven by necessity to the repudiated mathematics.” Many of Bruno’s own mathematical applications savour rather of Neopythagorean mysticism than of the spirit of modern science, and his geometry was far from Euclidean, but he at least made a serious attempt to account for the building-up of bodies and of the universe on mathematical principles. A third objection, which again we find in Bacon, is as to Aristotle’s treatment of his predecessors. His treatment of the earlier Greeks.His depreciation of them is condemned in the Causa:—“Of all philosophers I do not know one who founds more upon imagination, or is further removed from nature than he: and if sometimes what he says is excellent, we know that it does not spring from his own principles, but is always a proposition taken from other philosophers.”[165] In another passage he is described as a “dry sophist, aiming with malicious explanations and frivolous arguments to pervert the opinions of the ancients, and to oppose the truth, not so much perhaps through imbecility of intelligence as through the influence of envy and ambition.”[166] So Bacon speaks of him as imposing “innumerable fictions upon the nature of things at his own will: being everywhere more anxious as to how one should extricate oneself by an answer, and how some positive reply in words should be made, than as to the internal truth of things.”[167] In particular it was argued that Aristotle confused the various meanings of the same name with one another:—“He takes the word vacuum in a sense in which no one has ever understood it, building castles in the air, and then pulling down his ‘vacuum,’ but not that of any other who has spoken of a vacuum or made use of the name. So he acts in all other cases,—those for example of ‘motion,’ ‘infinite,’ ‘matter,’ ‘form,’ ‘demonstration,’ ‘being,’ always building on the faith of his own definition, which gives the name a new sense.”[168]
The Pre-Aristotelians.The close study of Aristotle himself, which was one of the greatest results of the Humanist movement, had the effect of bringing into greater prominence the earlier Greek philosophers, whose doctrines Aristotle states and criticises in many of his works—notably the Physics and Metaphysics. The rediscovery of antiquity included that of ancient philosophy; and Bruno’s dissatisfaction with Aristotle led him into greater sympathy with the nature-philosophers whom Aristotle decried. Towards these earlier Greeks, as towards other philosophers, his attitude is wholly that of an Eclectic: he does not attempt to appreciate their relative value, nor to discover any evolution of thought through the successive systems. From each he takes that which agrees or appears to agree with his own philosophy, and treats it as an anticipation of, or as an authority for, the latter. The “universal intelligence,” for example, as the universal efficient cause in nature, is a doctrine ascribed in the Causa indiscriminately to the Pythagoreans, the Platonists, the Magi, Orpheus, Empedocles, and Plotinus.[169] The belief in an infinite ether (Heraclitus’ Fire) surrounding the earth, and containing innumerable worlds within it, in the Cena is attributed, equally without discrimination, to Heraclitus, Democritus, Epicurus, Pythagoras, Parmenides, and Melissus.[170] Xenophanes represented for Bruno the static aspect of Pantheism—the Absolute One as in itself, apart from all reference to the finite;[171] Heraclitus its dynamic aspect—the Absolute as unfolding, revealing itself, “appearing” in and through the finite.[172] Anaxagoras expressed the relation between the finite individual and the One,—“All things are in all things,” for “omnipotent, all-producing divinity pervades the whole, therefore nothing is so small but that divinity lies concealed in it.”[173] “Everything is in everything, because spirit or soul is in all things, and therefore out of anything may be produced anything else.”[174] To Anaxagoras, as to Bruno, nature was divine.[175] No special distinction was made by Bruno between the teaching of Anaxagoras and that of Empedocles: in one passage he attributes to the former the theory of effluxes and influxes of atoms through the pores of bodies, which really belongs to the latter,[176] and in another suggests that Empedocles only put in a more “abstract” way what Anaxagoras had shown “concretely,” that all things are in all.[177]