[Footnote 1: On Ramus cf. Waddington's treatises, one in Latin, Paris, 1849, the other in French, Paris, 1855.]
[Footnote 2: Schmid Schwarzenburg has written on Taurellus, 1860, 2d ed., 1864.]
The high regard which Leibnitz expressed for Taurellus may be in part explained by the many anticipations of his own thoughts to be found in the earlier writer. The intimate relation into which sensibility and understanding are brought is an instance of this from the theory of knowledge. Receptivity is not passivity, but activity arrested (through the body). All knowledge is inborn; all men are potential philosophers (and, so far as they are loyal to conscience, Christians); the spirit is a thinking and a thinkable universe. Taurellus's philosophy of nature, recognizing the relative truth of atomism, makes the world consist of manifold simple substances combined into formal unity: he calls it a well constructed system of wholes. A discussion of the origin of evil is also given, with a solution based on the existence and misuse of freedom. Finally, it is to be mentioned to the great credit of Taurellus, that, like his younger contemporaries, Galileo and Kepler, he vigorously opposed the Aristotelian and Scholastic animation of the material world and the anthropomorphic conception of its forces, thus preparing the way for the modern view of nature to be perfected by Newton.
%3. The Italian Philosophy of Nature%.
We turn now from the restorers of ancient doctrines and their opponents to the men who, continuing the opposition to the authority of Aristotle, point out new paths for the study of nature. The physician, Hieronymus Cardanus of Milan (1501-76), whose inclinations toward the fanciful were restrained, though not suppressed, by his mathematical training, may be considered the forerunner of the school. While the people should accept the dogmas of the Church with submissive faith, the thinker may and should subordinate all things to the truth. The wise man belongs to that rare class who neither deceive nor are deceived; others are either deceivers or deceived, or both. In his theory of nature, Cardanus advances two principles: one passive, matter (the three cold and moist elements), and an active, formative one, the world-soul, which, pervading the All and bringing it into unity, appears as warmth and light. The causes of motion are attraction and repulsion, which in higher beings become love and hate. Even superhuman spirits, the demons, are subject to the mechanical laws of nature.
The standard bearer of the Italian philosophy of nature was Bernardinus Telesius[1] of Cosenza (1508-88; De Rerum Natura juxta Propria Principia, 1565, enlarged 1586), the founder of a scientific society in Naples called the Telesian, or after the name of his birthplace, the Cosentian Academy. Telesius maintained that the Aristotelian doctrine must be replaced by an unprejudiced empiricism; that nature must be explained from itself, and by as few principles as possible. Beside inert matter, this requires only two active forces, on whose interaction all becoming and all life depend. These are warmth, which expands, and cold, which contracts; the former resides in the sun and thence proceeds, the latter is situated in the earth. Although Telesius acknowledges an immaterial, immortal soul, he puts the emphasis on sensuous experience, without which the understanding is incapable of attaining certain knowledge. He is a sensationalist both in the theory of knowledge and in ethics, holding the functions of judgment and thought deducible from the fundamental power of perception, and considering the virtues different manifestations of the instinct of self-preservation (which he ascribes to matter as well).
[Footnote 1: Cf. on Telesius, Florentine, 2 vols., Naples, 1872-74; K. Heiland, Erkenntnisslehre und Ethik des Telesius, Doctor's Dissertation at Leipsic, 1891. Further, Rixner and Siber, Leben und Lehrmeinungen berühmter Physiker am Ende des XVI. und am Anfang des XVII. Jahrhunderts, Sulzbach (1819-26), 7 Hefte, 2d ed., 1829. Hefte 2-6 discuss Cardanus, Telesius, Patritius, Bruno, and Campanella; the first is devoted to Paracelsus, and the seventh to the older Van Helmont (Joh. Bapt.).]
With the name of Telesius we usually associate that of Franciscus Patritius (1529-97), professor of the Platonic philosophy in Ferrara and Rome (Discussiones Peripateticae, 1581; Nova de Universis Philosophia, 1591), who, combining Neoplatonic and Telesian principles, holds that the incorporeal or spiritual light emanates from the divine original light, in which all reality is seminally contained; the heavenly or ethereal light from the incorporeal; and the earthly or corporeal, from the heavenly—while the original light divides into three persons, the One and All (Unomnia), unity or life, and spirit.
The Italian philosophy of nature culminates in Bruno and Campanella, of whom the former, although he is the earlier, appears the more advanced because of his freer attitude toward the Church. Giordano Bruno was born in 1548 at Nola, and educated at Naples; abandoning his membership in the Dominican Order, he lived, with various changes of residence, in France, England, and Germany. Returning to his native land, he was arrested in Venice and imprisoned for seven years at Rome, where, on February 17, 1600, he suffered death at the stake, refusing to recant. (The same fate overtook his fellow-countryman, Vanini, in 1619, at Toulouse.) Besides three didactic poems in Latin (Frankfort, 1591), the Italian dialogues, Della Causa, Principio ed Uno, Venice, 1584 (German translation by Lasson, 1872), are of chief importance. The Italian treatises have been edited by Wagner, Leipsic, 1829, and by De Lagarde, 2 vols., Göttingen, 1888; the Latin appeared at Naples, in 3 vols., 1880, 1886, and 1891. Of a passionate and imaginative nature, Bruno was not an essentially creative thinker, but borrowed the ideas which he proclaimed with burning enthusiasm and lofty eloquence, and through which he has exercised great influence on later philosophy, from Telesius and Nicolas, complaining the while that the priestly garb of the latter sometimes hindered the free movement of his thought. Beside these thinkers he has a high regard for Pythagoras, Plato, Lucretius, Raymundus Lullus, and Copernicus (died 1543).[1] He forms the transition link between Nicolas of Cusa and Leibnitz, as also the link between Cardanus and Spinoza. To Spinoza Bruno offered the naturalistic conception of God (God is the "first cause" immanent in the universe, to which self-manifestation or self-revelation is essential; He is natura naturans, the numberless worlds are natura naturata); Leibnitz he anticipated by his doctrine of the "monads," the individual, imperishable elements of the existent, in which matter and form, incorrectly divorced by Aristotle as though two antithetical principles, constitute one unity. The characteristic traits of the philosophy of Bruno are the lack of differentiation between pantheistic and individualistic elements, the mediaeval animation and endlessness of the world, and, finally, the religious relation to the universe or the extravagant deification of nature (nature and the world are entirely synonymous, the All, the world-soul, and God nearly so, while even matter is called a divine being).[2]
[Footnote 1: Nicolaus Copernicus (Koppernik; 1473-1543) was born at Thorn; studied astronomy, law, and medicine at Cracow, Bologna, and Padua; and died a Canon of Frauenberg. His treatise, De Revolutionibus Orbium Caelestium, which was dedicated to Pope Paul III., appeared at Nuremberg in 1543, with a preface added to it by the preacher, Andreas Osiander, which calls the heliocentric system merely an hypothesis advanced as a basis for astronomical calculations. Copernicus reached his theory rather by speculation than by observation; its first suggestion came from the Pythagorean doctrine of the motion of the earth. On Copernicus cf. Leop. Prowe, vol. i. Copernicus Leben, vol. ii. (Urkunden), Berlin, 1883-84; and K. Lohmeyer in Sybel's Historische Zeitschrift, vol. lvii., 1887.]