Bruno’s philosophical religion is in the end a theism, but theism of a purely intellectual or rationalist type. The natural world is after all nothing over against God who subsists in absolute simplicity—as Mind; in absolute immobility, changelessness—as Intellect (the World of Ideas); in absolute perfection, self-sufficiency, and self-satisfaction—as Love, or Holy Spirit. Over against this self-contained Trinity, the changing and passing world is a non-ens: as it changes not, neither can it know change: to know change would be a change in itself—its knowledge is as immutable, as simple as itself. “Although we see things come into being that before were not, and the world itself, as is believed, was produced out of nothing—a new thing, yet from this change and novelty of effects, no change in His action or power can be inferred, for He exists above all motion and all vicissitude, an unchanging agent in eternity; not as artificers, or material principles, moved by changing dispositions to new willing, new faculty, new effects, but from the instant of eternity, above time and above change, He creates all that which becomes in time, in change, in motion, in vicissitude. Before and above time and motion there is not always time and motion, but there we find divinity, immutable and invariable. He has from eternity willed that to be which now is.” “There liberty makes necessity, necessity attests liberty.”[605] “Past is not past to it (the First Intelligence), nor future future, but the whole of eternity is present to it as one whole, all together, in its completeness.”[606] Seldom, even in recent idealist philosophy, has the World of Ideas maintained its hold so powerfully over a mind whose whole trend was towards a naturalistic interpretation of things. The religious instinct dominates to the last Bruno’s thought; these passages are from the very latest of his works. Each and all of his speculations on nature, on its elements, its individuals, its general laws, bring him back to the all-embracing Mind, in which nature has its source, but which nature by no means exhausts. So his speculations on the nature of man, on the moral life, on the inspiration of the artist and of the generous human soul, the hunter after truth, point again to a thought, a world above nature, revealed neither capriciously nor yet to the natural faculties of the seeker, but to a divinely implanted power of intuitive insight. It was an attempt, more consistent perhaps and more thorough than any other has been, to combine the independence and freedom and worth of individual souls, of the finite many, in one thought with the absolute unity, necessity, eternity of God. And this, after all, is the one aim philosophy has to achieve.
CHAPTER IX
BRUNO IN THE HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY
Perhaps no philosopher of equal originality and strength has had so little apparent influence upon contemporary or later thought as Bruno. His name hardly occurs in any of the writers of his own or the following century; when it does occur, it is mentioned only that the author may make sufficiently clear the discrepancy between the actual or reputed views of Bruno and those of himself. Yet it is easy to underestimate the influence his writings and his personality exercised; neither in France, in England, nor in Germany could his prolonged stay have failed to rouse, in some at least of his hearers, sympathy with his lofty conception of the universe and of man’s destiny; through them Bruno’s books must have passed into the hands of many philosophers, both before and after they were placed upon the Index Expurgatorius in 1603. A natural consequence of this public ban would be that Bruno was no longer quoted or referred to as an authority; but all thinkers of sceptical or liberal tendency would at least be eager to read his works when the opportunity offered itself. Owing to the great scarcity of the copies and their increasing costliness, this would become a chance less and less frequent as time went on. Even so, however, one may trace how his ideas filtered through many minds and helped to determine the course of modern philosophy, of which Bruno has as high claims as either Bacon or Descartes to be named the founder.
Antidicsonus.In English writers the only contemporary notices of Bruno which have been found are in two small works on mnemonics,—one by a professed opponent of Bruno’s friend, Alexander Dicson, the other by the poet Thomas Watson. The former, the Anti-dicsonus of a certain Cambridge scholar, G. P., of date 1584, was dedicated to Thomas Moffat or Moufet, a well-known philosopher and doctor of medicine, from whom support was hoped against the “Dicson School.” Of this school Bruno, who was then in England, must have been regarded as a member. The author is a follower of Ramus, and ridicules the art of memory which consists in locis et umbris and its “self-parading memoriographs, such as Metrodorus, Rosselius, the Nolan, and Dicson; these are the reefs and whirlpools in which the purer science of memory would have been wholly destroyed, had she not clung to her faith in the Rameans as a pillar of refuge.” It is an interesting note, for it shows that Bruno’s antipathy to Ramus was returned by Ramus’ followers,—an antipathy so difficult to understand when we remember that both were reformers in philosophy, and that both zealously attacked Aristotle. The work against which G. P. writes is Alexander Dicson’s De Umbra rationis et iudicii, sive de memoriae virtute Prosopopoeia, dedicated to the Earl of Leicester (1583). There can be no doubt that it is based upon Bruno’s De Umbris Idearum (1582), with which it agrees both in substance and in metaphysical basis. Dicson, as already pointed out, was one of Bruno’s mouthpieces in an Italian dialogue. Here at least is an avenue for influence from Bruno upon English thought. Unfortunately Dicson’s work is not of great value, and, with the man himself, has long been forgotten. But G. P.’s reliance upon Moffat’s support to repel “the attacks of Scepsius,[607] and the wrath and violence towards me of the whole school of Dicson,” shows that on the side, at any rate, of his mnemonic doctrine Bruno’s teaching had not fallen on wholly barren soil. Thomas Watson.Again, he is spoken of with respect, if not quite with admiration, in Thomas Watson’s dedication of his Compendium Memoriae Localis (n. d., but probably 1585) to Henry Noël, Queen Elizabeth’s courtier. “I very much fear if my little work (nugae meae) is compared with the mystical and deeply learned Sigilli of the Nolan, or with the Umbra artificiosa of Dicson, it may bring more infamy to its author than utility to the reader.” The scholarly poet, terse and brilliant Latinist, could hardly have felt in harmony with the passionate but confused thought, the virile but unscholarly style of Bruno; yet the art of memory he professes in this compendium is no other than that of Bruno and of Dicson, and the “Memoriographs,” whom “G. P.” attacks.
Bacon.If we turn to Bacon, who was in London while Bruno was with Mauvissière, already in high favour with the Queen, and at home in the society of Burghley, Leicester, Walsingham, and Sidney, we find entire neglect of Bruno’s philosophy. Only in one passage, perhaps, does Bacon mention Bruno’s name; it is in the introduction to the Historia Naturalis et Experimentalis.[608] After a list of the philosophers of Greece, and the remark that “all these made up at their pleasure feigned accounts (or “plots”) of worlds, as of fables, and recited, published these fables of theirs—some more consistent certainly and probable, others harder of belief,” he adds that among the moderns, through the instruction of schools and colleges, the imagination is kept within stricter bounds, yet men have not ceased imagining. “Patrizzi, Talesio, Bruno, Severin of Denmark, Gilbert of England, Campanella, have tried the stage, acted new plays which were neither marked by applauding favour of the public, nor by brilliancy of plot.” The names are those of men with whom it is no shame for Bruno to stand side by side; and one and all are instances of Bacon’s incapacity for grasping the true direction in which the thought of his time was flowing; but the mere mention of Bruno in such a context implies that his works were still read, and that they were estimated at a high value by the lovers of “philosophy.” There are, however, many points of contact between Bacon and Bruno, suggesting an influence, indirect if not direct, of the latter upon the former. Bacon was perfectly at home in Italian literature, and it is unlikely that he omitted to read Bruno’s dialogues. Two casual but significant proofs that he did so are, the legend related of Mount Athos and of Olympus, that men had written in the ashes of the sacrifices offered upon their summits, and had returned the following year to find the ashes and the writing undisturbed, the inference being that the summits of these mountains were in a region of perpetual calm;[609] and the suggestion that the movements of the heavenly bodies may be in spiral lines instead of in perfect circles.[610] The latter especially is a characteristic thought of Bruno.
Bacon, like Bruno, was a believer in a purified natural magic, the handmaid of metaphysics, “because of its broad ways and wider dominion over nature.”[611] They are united in their admiration for the Book of Job as a compendium of natural philosophy. Bacon writes that “if we take that small book of Job and diligently work through it, we shall find it full, and, as it were, pregnant with the mysteries of natural philosophy.”[612] Both recur with conviction to the saying of Solomon that there is nothing new under the sun. “As to novelty, there is no one who has thoroughly imbibed letters and philosophy, but has had it impressed on his heart that there is nothing new upon the earth.”[613] Deeper harmonies, if not more suggestive, exist between the two reformers of philosophy than these. One is the argument against authority, against general agreement, against antiquity of belief, as grounds or reasons for belief, and the special application of this argument to undermine the hold of the Aristotelian philosophy upon the minds of men. “It is the old age of the world and the fulness of years that are to be regarded as its true antiquity. For that age, with respect to us ancient and older, with respect to the world itself was new and younger.” “As we expect greater knowledge and maturer judgment from an old man than from a young, so from our own age we should expect (if it knew its strength, and were willing to make trial and to put it forth) far greater things than from old times,” etc.[614] So faith and religion are to be kept apart from investigation, science, or philosophy, although the latter does not on that account carry us away from God; the one shows the will, the other (natural philosophy) the power of God.[615] To faith are to be given the things that are of faith, to philosophy the things that are of philosophy.[616] It was on the same ground also—the use of other than natural principles to explain natural phenomena—that both Bruno and Bacon condemned the physical works of Aristotle. He “corrupted natural philosophy with his dialectics—gave the human soul, the noblest of substances, a genus from words of second intention; settled the business of the dense and the rare, through which bodies occupy greater or less dimensions or spaces, by the feigned distinction between act and potency; asserted a unique and proper movement of each body, being more concerned for an answer one might make in a discussion and to have something positive in words, than for the inward truth of things, as is best shown by a comparison of his philosophy with the others celebrated among the Greeks.” And Bacon, like Bruno and other innovators of the day, goes back to Anaxagoras, Leucippus and Democritus, Parmenides, Empedocles, Heraclitus, whose principles “have something of natural philosophy, and savour of the nature of things—experience, bodily existence, whereas the physics of Aristotle, for the most part, sound of nothing but dialectical terms.”[617]
Method.The false straining after simplicity of explanation, the tendency to seek for similarities rather than differences, to expect order on the surface rather than at the root of things, is condemned as vigorously by Bruno as by Bacon, although not placed in the forefront of the theory of method, as it is by the latter writer. One of the Idols of the Tribe was—“the tendency to suppose greater order and equality in things than is actually to be found; although in nature many things are monodica (i.e. monadica, unique), and full of imparity, yet the mind feigns parallels, correspondences, relations which are not. Hence the erroneous idea, e.g. that ‘in the heavens all things move in perfect circles,’ rejecting utterly spiral lines and dracones (except for the name): hence the element of fire and its sphere were introduced to constitute a quaternio with the other three that were actually perceived by sense,” etc.[618] These things were condemned also, and for the same reason, by Bruno, who, however, went further, and insisted on the uniqueness of every individual existence in the universe. Again Bacon retained (without, however, giving it a place in his philosophy) the scholastic distinction between divine or angelic, intuitive, knowledge, and the acquired piecemeal knowledge of man. “God, the inditer and worker of forms, and perhaps angels and (higher) intelligences, know forms immediately by affirmation, and from the beginning of their contemplation. But that is certainly above men to whom it is conceded only to advance in the beginning by negatives, to come to rest in the last place only, in affirmatives, after exclusion of every kind.”[619] In Bruno the same distinction is drawn, but it is made also within human knowledge, the intuitive knowledge of the heroic mind being the same in kind as that of the higher intelligences, and only different from that of God in that it does not create what it intuits. So the scholastic distinction of natura naturans as the form or immanent principle of things, and natura naturata as the sum of things actually existing, the outward expression in matter of the activity of the form—a distinction which, in Bruno, is transcended by the identification of one with the other, as two aspects of a higher unity—also reappears in Bacon’s theory of form. However different the “form” of Bacon may have seemed to himself from the scholastic “form,” it is still the immanent cause of the properties of the body to which it belongs, or in which it adheres, and as such is actually named by Bacon the natura naturans.[620] Omnia animata.So with Bacon, as with Bruno, Campanella, and Telesius, all things are endowed with life, with sensation, with soul, which is the inward principle of their external movements. He ridiculed Gilbert, who first suggested a scientific explanation of magnetism and electricity, and put forward on his own account as a theory of electrical attraction that “friction excites the appetite of bodies for contact, which appetite does not like air much, but prefers something else which is tangible.” The phenomena of chemical affinity and the like were also explained, precisely as Campanella or Cardan would account for them, by the delight in mutual contact, i.e. by an inherent sensibility, and desire or striving of like towards like.[621] In both Bacon and Bruno, also, this universal animism is combined with an atomistic theory of mechanical nature, and with the belief that no physical phenomenon is understood until it can be expressed in mathematical terms: “the more our inquiry inclines to simple natures, the plainer and clearer shall things become; for we shall have to deal with the simple instead of the manifold, the computable instead of the surd, the definite and certain instead of the vague,—as in the elements of letters, and the notes of harmonies, and an inquiry is best conducted when the physical is defined by the mathematical.”[622] The last result of analysis is not, with either Bacon or Bruno, the atom of the Epicurean physics, viz. an immutable substance floating in empty space; but Bacon’s particulae verae are much more confusedly thought out than the Italian’s theory—of a subtle ethereal matter diffused throughout the universe, and of the denser atoms which are in constant motion within it. There is, however, the same perpetual flux and reflux in matter with Bacon as with Bruno.[623] In the last resort, Bacon took refuge in a hope of future explanation—always, however, by simple, positive, computable factors—regarding atoms and void, as on a par with materia prima, human abstractions, entirely unfruitful, not light-bringing “anticipations of nature.” In regard to the relation between the human understanding and nature, both had absolute convictions of the power of the former, directed by the rules of experience and limited by the data of sensation, to comprehend the latter; but while Bruno saw in the negative limits of the understanding a positive hint of a reality beyond, the more careful Bacon saw only a further ground for falling back from reason upon faith. Thus the incapacity of the mind to rest in any finite space, without thinking of a space beyond that and beyond, or of imagining a body than which none could be greater, was proof to Bruno that space itself was infinite, and that body or matter was immeasurable, i.e. infinite in extent and in quantity. Bacon also makes use of this impossibility in the human intellect of resting, acquiescing, at any point as a finality. “It must ever pass beyond—but it is in vain. Thus it is unthinkable that there should be any extreme or outermost rim to the world, our mind always of necessity thinks there may be something beyond: nor can we think how eternity could have flowed down to this day: the distinction between an infinity a parte ante and an infinity a parte post cannot be maintained, for it would follow that one infinite is greater than another, and that an infinite is used up, and declines into a finite. Similar is the subtlety about lines always divisible (however small parts we take), from the impotency of thought.”[624] But the conclusion drawn is simply the positivist one, that such endless questioning after the unknowable is profitless and absurd. The one sees in it a metaphysical or cosmological argument—infinite capacity for knowing implies an infinite to be known, as infinite or endless desire implies an infinite or limitless good: the other a methodological argument against attempting to fly when we are born to creep. In two other cases Bacon rejected the work of Bruno, and rightly, viz. in regard to the Art of Lully, and the Art of Memory; and it is possible that he may have had Bruno in his mind in writing both passages. “Some men, rather ostentatious than learned, have laboured about a certain method not deserving the name of a true method, as being rather a kind of imposture, which may nevertheless have proved acceptable to some triflers. Such was the Art of Lully, simply a massed collection of technical terms. This kind of collection resembles an old broker’s shop, where many fragments of things are to be found, but nothing of any value.”[625] Again, “there exists certainly some kind of art (of memory), but we are convinced that better precepts for confirming and extending the memory might be laid down than are contained in this art, and also that the practice of the art might be made better than as it has been received. As now managed, it is but barren and useless.”[626]
On the Continent it was rather the cosmological theories of Bruno that attracted attention; and there, no less than in England, every suspicion of sympathy with the heretic was avoided. Kepler.Only Kepler had the courage to complain (as a letter of Martin Hasdal to Galilei tells) that Galilei had omitted to make praiseful mention of Bruno in his Nuntius Sidereus.[627] Galilei, a thorough diplomatist, would hardly have gone so far:[628] yet in the metaphysical basis of his theory of the universe, and in his theory of knowledge, he only elaborates ideas already suggested by Bruno.[629] But Kepler, fearless before men, shrank from the thought of the infinite world in which Bruno found a glorious freedom for the play of his mind. Kepler could not, and did not, give up his enclosing sphere of fixed stars, shutting in the solar system as comfortably as the orange-skin its seeds, not accepting the giddy hypothesis of Bruno that each of the stars is itself a sun, with a solar system of its own, and that beyond and beyond, in endless series, are other suns and other worlds.[630]
Even Vanini the unfortunate, if light-headed, sceptic, who in 1619, at Toulouse, met with a fate similar to that of Bruno, but more horrible, mentions the latter only by indication in his earlier work,—the Amphitheatre of the Eternal Providence (p. 359)—“Nonnulli semiphilosophi novi have said that beyond the last sphere of the heavens there is an infinite created universe, as if from God no finite action could proceed.”[631]