is often successful. In the case of Patrizzi it was otherwise his book was little read; and his own notions of philosophy, borrowed from the later Platonists, and that rabble of spurious writers who had misled Ficinus and Picus of Mirandola, dressed up by Patrizzi with a fantastic terminology, had little chance of subverting so well-established and acute a system as that of Aristotle." Telesio. 9. Bernard Telesio, a native of Cosenza, had greater success, and attained a more celebrated name. System of The first two books of his treatise, “De Natura Rerum juxta Propria Principia," appeared at Rome in 1565; the rest was published in 1586. These contain an hypothesis more intelligible than that of Patrizzi, and less destitute of a certain apparent correspondence with the phænomena of nature. Two active incorporeal principles, heat and cold, contend with perpetual opposition for the dominion over a third, which is passive matter. Of these three all nature consists. The region of pure heat is in the heavens, in the sun and stars, where it is united with the most subtle matter; that of cold in the centre of the earth, where matter is most condensed; all between is their battle-field, in which they continually struggle, and alternately conquer. These principles are not only active, but intelligent, so far at least as to perceive their own acts and mutual impressions. Heat is the cause of motion; cold is by nature immovable, and tends to keep all things in repose." 10. Telesio has been generally supposed to have borrowed this theory from that of Parmenides, in which the antagonist principles of heat and cold had been employed in a similar manner. Buhle denies the identity of the two systems, and considers that of Telesio as more nearly allied to the Aristotelian, except in substituting heat and cold for the more abstract notions of form and privation. Heat and cold, it might rather perhaps be said, seem to be merely ill-chosen names for the hypothetical causes of motion and rest; and the real laws of nature with respect to both of these, were as little discoverable in the Telesian as in the more established theory. Yet its author perceived that the one Buhle, ii. 548. Brucker, iv. 422. Buhle, ii. 563. Ginguéné, vii. 501. possessed an expansive, the other a condensing power; and his principles of heat and cold bear a partial analogy to repulsion and attraction, the antagonist forces which modern philosophy employs. Lord Bacon was sufficiently struck with the system of Telesio to illustrate it in a separate fragment of the Instauratio Magna, though sensible of its nadequacy to solve the mysteries of nature; and a man of eccentric genius, Campanella, to whom we shall come hereafter, adopted it as the basis of his own wilder speculations. Telesio seems to have ascribed a sort of intelligence to plants, which his last-mentioned disciple carried to a strange excess of paradox. 11. The name of Telesio is perhaps hardly so well known at present as that of Jordano Bruno. Jordano It was far otherwise formerly; and we do not find that the philosophy of this singular and unfortunate man attracted much further notice than to cost him his life. It may be doubted, indeed, whether the Inquisition at Rome did not rather attend to his former profession of Protestantism and invectives against the church, than to the latent atheism it pretended to detect in his writings, which are at least as innocent as those of Cesalpin. The self-conceit of Bruno, his contemptuous language about Aristotle and his followers, the paradoxical strain, the obscurity and confusion, in many places, of his writings, we may add, his poverty and frequent change of place, had rendered him of little estimation in the eyes of the world. But in the last century the fate of Bruno excited some degree of interest about his opinions. Whether his hypotheses were truly atheistical became the subject of controversy; his works, by which it should have been decided, were so scarce that few could speak with knowledge of their contents; and Brucker, who inclines to think there was no sufficient ground for the imputation, admits that he had only seen one of Bruno's minor treatises. The later German philosophers, however, have paid more attention to these obscure books, from a similarity which they sometimes found in Bruno's theories to their own. Buhle has devoted above a hundred pages to this subject. The Italian treatises have within a few years been reprinted in Germany, and it is not un h h Vol. ii. p. 604-730. His Italian works. Cena de li Ceneri. common in modern books to find an eulogy on the philosopher of Nola. I have not made myself acquainted with his Latin writings, except through the means of Buhle, who has taken a great deal of pains to explain them. The three principal Italian treatises are entitled, La Cena de li Ceneri, Della Causa, Principio ed Uno, and Dell' Infinito Universo. Each of these is in five dialogues. The Cena de li Ceneri contains a physical theory of the world, in which the author makes some show of geometrical diagrams, but deviates so often into rhapsodies of vanity and nonsense, that it is difficult to pronounce whether he had much knowledge of the science. Copernicus, to whose theory of the terrestrial motion Bruno entirely adheres, he praises as superior to any former astronomer; but intimates that he did not go far beyond vulgar prejudices, being more of a mathematician than a philosopher. The gravity of bodies he treats as a most absurd hypothesis, all natural motion, as he fancies, being circular. Yet he seems to have had some dim glimpse of what is meant by the composition of motions, asserting that the earth has four simple motions, out of which one is compounded.1 Della Causa, Principio ed 12. The second, and much more important treatise, Della Causa, Principio ed Uno, professes to reveal the metaphysical philosophy of Bruno, a system which, at least in pretext, brought him to the stake at Rome, and the purport of which has been the theme of much controversy. The extreme scarcity of his writings has, no doubt, contributed to this variety of judgment; but though his style, strictly speaking, is not obscure, and he seems by no means inclined to conceal his meaning, I am not able to resolve with certainty the problem that Brucker and those whom he quotes have discussed.* Yet the system of Bruno, so far as I understand it from what I have read of his writings, and from Buhle's analysis of them, may be said to contain a sort of double pantheism. The world is animated by an omnipresent intelligent soul, the first cause of every form that matter can assume, but not i Dial. v. p. 120 (1830). These dialogues were written, or purport to have been written, in England. He extols Leicester, Walsingham, and especially k Brucker, vol. v. 52. of matter itself. This soul of the universe is the only physical agent, the interior artist that works in the vast whole, that calls out the plant from the seed and matures the fruit, that lives in all things, though they may not seem to live, and in fact do not, when unorganised, live separately considered, though they all partake of the universal life, and in their component parts may be rendered living. A table as a table, a coat as a coat, are not alive, but inasmuch as they derive their substance from nature, they are composed of living particles." There is nothing so small. or so unimportant, but that a portion of spirit dwells in it, and this spiritual substance requires but a proper subject to become a plant or an animal. Forms particular are in constant change; but the first form, being the source of all others, as well as the first matter, are eternal. The soul of the world is the constituent principle of the universe and of all its parts. And thus we have an intrinsic, eternal, self-subsistent principle of form, far better than that which the sophists feigned, whose substances are compounded and corruptible, and, therefore, nothing else than accidents." Forms in particular are the accidents of matter, and we m Thus Buhle, or at least his French translator; but the original words are different. Dico dunque che la tavola come tavola non è animata, nè la veste, nè il cuojo come cuojo, nè il vetro come vetro, ma come cose naturali e composte hanno in se la materia e la forma. Sia pur cosa quanto piccola e minima si voglia, ha in se parte di sustanza spirituale, la quale, se trova il soggetto disposto, si stende ad esser pianta, ad esser animale, e riceve membri de qual si voglia corpo, che comunemente si dice animato; per chè spirto si trova in tutte le cose, e non è minimo corpusculo, che non contegna cotal porzione in se, che non inanimi, p. 241. Buhle seems not to have understood the words in italics, which certainly are not remarkably plain, and to have substituted what he thought might pass for meaning. The recent theories of equivocal generation, held by some philosophers, more on the Continent than in England, according to which all matter, or at least all matter susceptible of organisation by its elements, may become organised and living under peculiar circumstances, seem not very dissimilar to this system of Bruno. "Or, quanto a la causa effettrice, dico l' efficiente fisico universale esser l' intelletto universale, ch'è la prima e principial facultà dell' anima del mondo, la qual è forma universale di quello. . . . L'intelletto universale è l' intima più reale e propria facultà, e parte potenziale dell' anima del mondo. Questo è uno medesimo ch' empie il tutto, illumina l' universo, e indrizza la natura à produrre le sue specie, come si conviene, e cosi ha rispetto à la produzione di cose naturali, come il nostro intelletto è la congrua produzione di specie razionali. Questo è nominato da Platonici fabbro del mondo. P. 255. Dunque abbiamo un principio intrinseco formale eterno e sussistente, incomparabilmente migliore di quello, che han finto li sophisti, che versano circa gl' accidenti, ignoranti de la sustanza de le cose, e che vengono a ponere le sustanze corrottibili, perchè quello chiamano massimamente, primamente e principalmente sustanza, che risulta da la composizione; il che non è altro, ch' uno accidente, che non contiene in se nulla stabilità e verità e si risolve in nulla. P. 242. should make a divinity of matter like some Arabian peripatetics, if we did not recur to the living fountain of form -the eternal soul of the world. The first matter is neither corporeal nor sensible, it is eternal and unchangeable, the fruitful mother of forms and their grave. Form and matter, says Bruno, pursuing this fanciful analogy, may be compared to male and female. Form never errs, is never imperfect, but through its conjunction with matter; it might adopt the words of the father of the human race: Mulier quam mihi dedisti, (la materia, la quale mi hai dato consorte,) me decepit (lei è cagione d'ogni mio peccato). The speculations of Bruno now become more and more subtle, and he admits that our understandings cannot grasp what he pretends to demonstrate the identity of a simply active and simply passive principle; but the question really is, whether we can see any meaning in his propositions. 13. We have said that the system of Bruno seems to involve a double pantheism. The first is of a Pantheism simple kind, the hylozoism, which has been exhi- of Bruno. bited in the preceding paragraph; it excludes a creative deity, in the strict sense of creation, but leaving an active provident intelligence, cannot be reckoned by any means chargeable with positive atheism. But to this soul of the world Bruno appears not to have ascribed the name of divinity. The first form, and the first matter, and all the forms generated by the two, make, in his theory, but one being, the infinite unchangeable universe, in which is every thing, both in power and in act, and which, being all things collectively, is no one thing separately; it is form and not form, matter and not matter, soul. and not soul. He expands this mysterious language much farther, resolving the whole nature of the Deity into an abstract, barren, all-embracing unity.P • Son tre sorti d' intelletto; il divino, ch'è tutto; questo mondano, che fà tutto; gli altri particulari, che si fanno tutte... E vera causa efficiente (l' intelletto mondano) non tanto estrinseca, come anco intrinseca di tutte cose naturali.... Mi par, che detrahano à la divina bontà e à l'eccellenza di questo grande animale e simulacro del primo principio quelli, che non vogliano intendere, nè affirmare, il mondo con li suoi membri essere animato. P. 239. PE' dunque l' universo uno, infinito, immobile. Uno dico è la possibilità assoluta, uno l'atto, una la forma o anima, una la materia o corpo, una la cosa, uno lo ente, uno il massimo e ottimo, il quale non deve posser essere compreso, e però infinibile e interminabile, e per tanto infinito e interminato, e per conseguenza immobile. Questo non si muove localmente; per chè non ha cosa fuor di sè, |