Giordano Bruno

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]

Of the philosophers who represent the main line of development of modern thought on the Continent in the seventeenth century,—Descartes, Gassendi, Spinoza, Leibniz,—there is not one who has not been accused of having borrowed his chief doctrines, without acknowledgment, from the Italian philosopher. Descartes.Bishop Huet[632] described Bruno as the antesignanus of the Cartesian philosophy, and pointed to the De Immenso et innumerabilibus as containing indications of almost all its ideas. The charge is of course absurd so far as Descartes’ characteristic philosophy is concerned—the ideas by which he created a revolution in modern thought. Bruno indeed begged men to throw over all prejudices, all traditional beliefs, before entering upon the study of nature: he agreed with Descartes therefore in rejecting wholly every authority but that of man’s own reason, in demanding complete freedom of thought, not only from outward, but also from inward, subjective fetters. Most nearly he approaches the “Cartesian doubt” in the preface to the Articuli adv. Mathematicos.[633] “As to the liberal arts, so far from me is the custom or institution of believing masters or parents, or even the common sense which (by its own account) often and in many ways is proved to deceive us and lead us astray, that I never settle anything in philosophy rashly or without reason; but what is thought perfectly certain and evident, whenever and wherever it has been brought into controversy, is as doubtful to me as things that are thought too difficult of belief, or too absurd.” But this is still very far from the universal doubt of Descartes,—doubt, not of this or that particular opinion or belief, but of all possible beliefs. Bruno’s aim was knowledge, to add to or correct the sum of general opinion as to the world as a whole, as to man’s relation to it and to God; Descartes’ was certainty, to find a basis from which a system of thought might be built up de novo, and from which at the same time a secure ground for morality and religion might be derived. The doubt was nothing without the certainty to which it led,—the certainty of self-consciousness,—which, as it has been said, is only the other side, the positive expression of the universal doubt itself. On the other hand, in the subsequent steps of the Cartesian philosophy,—the arguments on the nature of God, and the relation of the infinite to the finite substances,—many touches suggest the influence of Bruno’s comprehensive attempt to combine a philosophical pantheism with a scientific atomism. It is unlikely that Descartes should have been ignorant of a writer well known to Mersenne and Huet. The former[634] would have excused Bruno “had he been content to philosophise upon a point, an atom, or on unity,—but because he attacked the Christian religion, it is reasonable to decry him as one of the most wicked men the earth has ever produced!” Certainly the fact that Descartes nowhere mentions the guilty philosopher is of no importance in deciding as to the influence of the latter upon him.[635]

Gassendi 1592–1655.It was only natural that Gassendi’s critics should have placed him in a close relation to the Nolan. There is no improbability in the idea that Gassendi was attracted to the latter as an opponent of the Aristotelian philosophy, against which he himself had already written in his youth—although no part of the work was published until 1624.[636] Both also approached the reform of natural philosophy from the same standpoint, that of sense-experience, and both arrived at an atomic theory of the ultimate constitution of nature. Bruno, before Gassendi, had attempted to place the ethical teaching of Epicurus in a fairer light than popular prejudice allowed, but while Gassendi followed Epicurus in his atomism only too strictly, Bruno was much more independent, and advanced much nearer to the modern view. So in his general theory of the system of the world, Gassendi stops half-way—with the conception of a limited matter, but in an endless space, of a beginning for the world, but in an endless time, of a plurality of worlds with the earth as centre of our system: here also it is Bruno that is the more advanced, and the more daring thinker;—yet, from the respect with which Gassendi writes of Copernicus, it is clear that his sympathies were with the new hypothesis. It may be added that although Gassendi rejected the notion of a world-soul, in the ordinary sense, as distinct from God, and that of souls of the individual worlds, or of stones, etc., yet he too was fain to explain the attraction of the magnet for the iron, of the earth for the stone, of atom for atom, by an influence passing from the one to the other, by which the one became aware of the other’s existence, and was impelled towards it, i.e. by a kind of sense, or feeling, a soul, which was at the same time the principle of movement.

Spinoza.It is, however, on the development of Spinoza’s[637] thought that the most direct influence of Bruno can be shown. Sigwart[638] and Avenarius[639] have proved that in preparing the short treatise on “God, Man, and his Blessedness,” Spinoza must have had the Causa and Infinito of Bruno almost before his eyes. The treatise consists of several parts which are more or less independent of one another, and which represent tentative approaches towards the finished Ethics; but it differs from the Ethics in the far greater prominence of the mystical, Neoplatonist element. Pollock suggests that it may have been his free-thinking teacher Dr. Van den Ende who introduced Spinoza to Bruno’s writings: there is no external evidence of the acquaintanceship, but that, it is needless to say, is of slight importance. Spinoza certainly read Italian, and he practised in other cases the same neglect of authorities, of whose substance he was making use: it was indeed the custom of the time—there were few who followed Burton’s example.

There are certain general resemblances between the finished philosophies of the two authors, so far as Bruno can be said to have a finished philosophy. The first principle of both is the unity out of which all things spring, to which all return, and in which all have their true nature, or highest reality,—a unity with which both identify nature and spirit alike, and which is for both God. God is accordingly beyond the reach of all human knowledge; determination is negation, limit, by which the infinite is untouched. All attributes in God are one only, or none; thought is one with extension, love with intelligence; yet in strictness God is neither thought nor extension, intelligence nor love, or he is these in another than our human meaning. So far as this central thought is concerned, it is Bruno that is the deeper thinker. In him the One is not a dead negation, in which real things are absorbed to the loss of all their reality and life, as it is with Spinoza: rather it is a living fountain, gushing forth in the infinite streams of living beings: the whole of nature is the expression of its own inward being. The One is in process; the whole, in which this process results, is a harmony every member of which has its own independent reality and worth, over against all others, as a manifestation of divinity. The life of the one is that of its members; all are necessary to it, as it to them. Carrière[640] indeed places Bruno above Spinoza as having found in the one a self-consciousness, a subject infinite in that it knows itself and all things in itself, preserving all things, as necessary to its external enjoyment and love; while Spinoza is still within the bonds of substance—in God there is neither understanding nor will, in Him all difference vanishes, the modes are an illusion. So the Spinozistic parallelism between thought and matter finds its counterpart in Bruno, with whom all that is thought, all that is possible, is also real, or actual, i.e. has extended or material existence. It is true that this conception is much more precisely expressed in Spinoza, with his clean-cut distinction between the world of body and the world of mind or ideas, to which the possible belongs, but it was a distinction which he could not consistently uphold; on the other hand, the universal animism, the doctrine that to every material thing or event there corresponds a spiritual reality or process, which is only the other side of the parallelism of soul and body, is more clearly and vigorously defended by the earlier philosopher. The natural and the spiritual, matter and form, are not two principles, or elements which combine to produce a given result, or which harmonise with one another: they are one and the same thing, and their truth is their life, their soul, their thought. Bruno was in earnest with his animism, as his confident belief in magical correlations showed.[641]

From their principles both derived a conviction of the necessity[642] and of the goodness of all things, but it is Bruno rather than Spinoza who attempted to reconcile individual liberty with determinism in the universe as a whole, and individual moral responsibility with the necessary goodness of the all. The corresponding relativity of evil, the fallacy of “fortune” or “chance” (as anything but “uncertainty” of the finite mind), were already asserted by Bruno, and his ideas as to the relation between the religion of the Church, or the teaching of the Bible, and the investigations of science, are precisely those which Spinoza adopts.

The short tractate.In the De Deo seu Homine, however, the correspondences are much greater and more definite between Spinoza and Bruno, showing that the former passed through a phase of Neoplatonism, in which his pantheism was much less formal or abstract than it afterwards became. Thus the predicates applied in the Ethics to God are applied here to nature, as by Bruno also:—Nature is infinite in the sense of “without limits or bounds,” containing no parts in itself, and therefore not a whole over against other wholes; there cannot be two infinites, or boundless worlds.[643] The parallelism between outward nature and the thought or understanding of God is also more after Bruno’s mode of expression (ch. ii. § 11, 19). “Neither substance nor qualities can be in the infinite understanding of God, which are not formaliter in nature (1) because of the infinite power of God—there is no cause or ground in Him why He should create one thing rather than another, hence He creates all; (2) because of the simplicity of His will; (3) because He cannot refrain from doing what is good.” The thesis, and the first and third of the arguments by which it is supported, are all verbally close to Bruno’s argument in the Infinito and in the De Immenso. So the effort of all finite things after self-conservation,[644] and their consequent movement, are explained not mechanically, through the action of one material thing upon another, but rather spiritually, through the unity of nature in which all share. Thus even that possibility of an action of thought upon matter (extension) is allowed, which in the Ethics is, formally at least, denied. In the Tractate also there is more emphasis laid upon the goodness of God, as the source of the infinite world of finite beings, whereas in the Ethics a logical, mechanical necessity takes its place. It is in the second, more mystical and ethical part, of the treatise, however, that the influence of the Nolan philosopher is most apparent, and here it is the Summa Terminorum or Heroici Furori that seems to have formed the direct or indirect source of many of the conceptions—such, for example, as the distinction between Ratio and Intellectus. Ratio.Ratio is discursive thought, building up knowledge by successive steps; Intellectus “intuitive thought,” direct and simultaneous perception of the whole of the object—the only adequate or complete form of knowledge, for which reasoning is merely a preparation in us. Our knowledge of God, so far as it is possible at all, is of the second type: we cannot know Him as he is, through His effects, His creation: it is only the few to whom He reveals Himself that can know Him as He is, by direct contact with Him. Yet this revelation is constantly open to all men; for each and all God is, always, intimately present, “more intimately than each is to himself.”[645] Other ideas which Sigwart has found common to the Short Tractate and the writings of Bruno, are those of the Love of God as springing from the knowledge of God; the correspondence between the degrees or stages of love and those of knowledge; the inability of our minds to rest in a finite object or finite good, the constant pressure onwards towards other and other objects; the contrast between sensible love and intellectual love; God as the highest, most complete object, the knowledge of Him above and embracing in itself all other knowledge, making the knower one with his object, transforming him into God himself; the divine Harmony in the soul which ensues; the love of God which is man’s highest blessedness, which is wholly disinterested, and blind to all earthly good or beautiful things; love which is unlimited in its possibility, as its object is infinite: with this limitless possibility of Love is the idea of immortality connected; but “Bruno deduces from the immortality of man the possibility of a love which increases infinitely; while for Spinoza, on the contrary, the infinitely increasing love of God is a ground of proof for immortality.”[646] When there is added to these many instances of doctrines in Spinoza’s earlier work which were later modified in the direction of greater rigidity and mechanical systematisation, the fact that the Tractate embraces two tentative dialogues, in one of which Spinoza is represented by a Theophilus (as Bruno in so many of his dialogues is represented), it is impossible not to feel convinced that Spinoza for a period of his life at least was a follower of Bruno. It is true that many of these ideas are not the property of Bruno alone, but of the school of Neoplatonism of which he like Spinoza was at any rate a partial adherent, but nowhere else than in Bruno is to be found the same “collocation” of these ideas as occur in this tractate of Spinoza. It is an open question whether the movement of the latter away from the Italian’s philosophy was entirely a progressive, and not in some respects a retrograde movement.

Leibniz.At first sight it might seem much more natural to connect Leibniz with Bruno, because of the obvious correspondence of many of their fundamental ideas:—their analysis of the universe into a system of independent realities, each differing from every other—each mirroring the universe in itself from its own individual point of view; each therefore in a sense containing or comprising the all in itself, as each is again a necessary constituent of the all. In place of Spinoza’s dead world, we find in Leibniz, as in Bruno, finite things in constant flow, constant change, each passing necessarily through every phase through which any other has passed—representing the universe as it is in time, as well as the universe as it is at any moment in actual existence; each experiencing, in other words, the life, the process, as well as the quality, the being of the all. Everything that is, is necessarily, everything that occurs, occurs necessarily, in Bruno because the whole flows out from the thought of God, as God thinks it (i.e. in the relations in which it stands in the one all-embracing thought of God); in Leibniz, because of the will of God, who in His goodness has chosen the best of all ideal systems, within which each thing or event has its necessary place. In both, all things are, from the point of view of the whole, good:—in Bruno because in God truth and goodness, will and understanding, are one; in Leibniz because of the will of God, which has chosen for the best: evil is finitude, or again is ignorance, an error of standpoint. In both freedom and necessity are one, because the necessity belongs to God’s own nature; He wills out of Himself, undetermined, uninfluenced from without, and this is freedom. In both, as we have seen, the principle of sufficient reason is a ground both for the infinite number and infinite variety of the finite beings in the universe, and for the impossibility that two should exist which are exactly identical one with another. Were it known that Leibniz had studied Bruno before his system was formed, we might almost say that he had chosen that aspect of the Nolan philosophy which with Spinoza had been disregarded, viz. the aspect in which all rights are given to the finite individual, and to the world of finite beings, as each representing the infinite, containing the infinite in itself, and, so far as possibility goes, each of infinite divine worth. Whereas just that side which appealed to Spinoza would have failed to touch Leibniz—the side in which God appears as one with the universe, not as beyond or outside of it, but as immanent in the whole, and present in the fulness of His nature to each and every member of the whole. Philosophically Leibniz’ mission was to develop the Cartesian doctrine of the three substances—God, finite spirit, and body—in a direction which identified the first and third with the second, broke up the unity of God into the immeasurable many of the monad spirits, and its infinity into indefiniteness. The God of Leibniz, even as the highest of the monads, is separate from, apart from, the other monads—a finite along with other finites. So each of the ordinary monads is a world by itself, shut up within itself, with no windows from which it can look out upon the world, and really be affected by what is passing without it. There is no without—each is, in a word, God, and so far as it is concerned there may be no other being in existence. Bruno, on the contrary, was fully conscious—at times—of the necessity of holding the balance between the infinite unity of God and the finite units or realities, which are the expression, the manifestation, the self-revelation of the one. Why this revelation? he does not indeed ask; but given it as actual, he finds the reconciliation in it at once of the necessity of the whole and the liberty of the unit, the goodness of the all and the moral frailty of the individual.[647]

Interesting as this speculative comparison of the two philosophies may be, there is not, however, even the slightest ground for attributing any direct historical influence of Bruno upon Leibniz. If influence occurred at all—which is doubtful—it was through Spinoza or some of the minor philosophical writings of the time. Lacroze (in a letter of 1737) accused Leibniz of “having drawn his whole system” from Bruno’s book De Maximo et Minimo (sic!): he added that he had told Leibniz this fact himself, both by word of mouth and in writing, and that the reason why so few had noticed it was that the philosophical writings of Bruno were obscure and repellent. The same suggestion has been repeatedly made since—more especially as regards the name “Monad,” which Leibniz, after much searching and deliberation, gave to his “real unities” from 1696 onwards.[648] Brunnhofer goes so far as to see both the ideas and the main formulas of Leibniz in Bruno—the monad-doctrines, monads as living mirrors of the universe, as fulgurations of God, the Pre-established Harmony—the future as involved in the present, “the present is pregnant with the future,”—the phenomenality of sense-objects—God as the highest monad, etc. He argues that Leibniz derived his idea that “the monads have no windows by which anything can enter or depart” from casual remarks by Bruno as to the “windows of the soul,” “the gates of the senses” by which images enter in, or “the chinks and holes” by which we gaze outwards upon the world. The coup de grâce was given to this legend, for so we must call it, by Ludwig Stein in his Leibniz und Spinoza.[649] He showed that Leibniz was already in full possession of the idea of the monad at least ten years before he found the most fitting expression for it, and that after 1696 he used the word “Monad” always as the distinctive badge or typical name for his substances or forces; that before 1700 he knew of Bruno only one of the Lullian works (the De Arte Combinatoriâ, v. Dutens, ii. 367), and perhaps the mathematical articles (adv. Mathematicos, ib. iii. 147). Apart from these works, which could have no reference to his own philosophy, he was acquainted with Bruno only by hearsay, as a reputed forerunner of Descartes; even as librarian of the Brunswick Library, although some of Bruno’s works were in his guardianship, he is not likely to have read them until his attention was called to them by their alleged resemblance to his own theory. And then, as we learn from the letter to Lacroze (11th April 1708),[650] he hardly appreciated them at their true value—“Mr. Toland has not spoken to me of the Specchio (i.e. Spaccio, an error that does not show much familiarity with Bruno) della Bestia trionfante of Giordano Bruno. I think I have seen the book at some time, and that it is against the Pope. I have two works of his on the Infinite, one in Latin, the other in Italian. The author is not wanting in genius, but is not very profound (ne manque pas d’esprit, mais il n’est pas trop profond).” Elsewhere he speaks of Bruno only as believing in “innumerable worlds” with Leucippus and Democritus, and as having been burnt, not, as he believes, on account of his book the De Immenso, but for other opinions.[651]

There is therefore little reason to suppose that Leibniz had great interest in Bruno, or that he had read his works so carefully as to have derived any sustenance or advancement for his philosophy from them. Stein has in any case shown that the term “Monad” came to Leibniz, not from Bruno at all, but from the younger Van Helmont, in whose theory it plays almost as important a part as in Leibniz—although the difference between the two “Monads” was greater than the resemblance.[652]

Meanwhile literature in France and England had not lost sight of Bruno.[653] In 1633 there was published in the former a play, Boniface et le Pédant, which has been described as a refined and Gallicised imitation of the Candelaio; in its turn it suggested, perhaps, the Pédant Joué of Cyrano de Bergerac, and some of the pedant-scenes in Molière.[654] In 1634 in England a masque by Thomas Carew—the Coelum Britannicum—was played in English by Charles I., which was based, partly at least, upon the Spaccio, with Charles I. in the place of Truth.[655]

Bayle.Pierre Bayle, by the article in his Dictionnaire Historique et Critique (1697), which had a very wide influence, probably damned Bruno’s reputation for a century. The article on Spinoza also did the same service for the Dutch philosopher, with whom, indeed, Bayle joined Bruno, as having held the same “abominable doctrine” of atheism. He had no real knowledge of Bruno, the biography is frivolous and inexact, and the philosophy—a garbled version—is reported on hearsay.[656] It was Bayle’s authority which stamped Bruno with the sarcastic description of “a knight errant in philosophy,” which has sometimes been spoken of as a happy touch of Hegel’s invention, but really dates back to one Lionardo Nicodemo (1683), who described Bruno as “playing the part of a wandering knight (i.e. a travelling scholastic), now here, now there, at different universities in France, England, Germany, Switzerland, Italy, with shield pendant, and lance in rest, challenging the Aristotelians to learned combat.”[657] Budgell.In England the same aspersion upon Bruno’s name was stereotyped by an article in the Spectator of May 27, 1712 (one of Budgell’s). The writer, however, had the fairness, which Bayle had not, to read Bruno’s Spaccio before making reflections upon it. Contrary to his expectations, for Bruno was “a professed atheist, with a design to depreciate religion,” he found “very little danger” in it. This did not prevent him from taking Bruno as a text for a would-be humorous disquisition on Atheism. Toland.It was John Toland,[658] the “poor denizen of Grub Street,” and once famous, or infamous, author of Christianity not Mysterious, who in England first paid Bruno something of the respect he deserved. His championship was not, perhaps, of the most discerning or of the most valuable, but it was honest. A copy of the Spaccio had come into his possession,—one which he believed to be the only one then in existence,—and as a result of his reading he claimed Bruno as the founder of free thought. He had studied the sayings on Divine Magic in that work, and had fastened on the fact that Bruno “regarded magic as nothing but a more recondite, non-vulgar, although perfectly natural wisdom.” This was certainly true; but Toland added, “So he sometimes calls the eternal vicissitude of material forms Transmigration,” which was at least misleading. Among his manuscripts Toland left “an account of Giordano Bruno’s Book of the Universe” (De l’ Infinito), along with a translation of the introductory epistle.[659] And somewhat earlier, in 1713, a translation of the Spaccio was made into English by W. Morehead,[660] who may have been one of Toland’s brethren, as the Quarterly Reviewer suggests. Toland himself was, however, believed to be the author. He had visited Lacroze at Berlin in 1706, and had defended the Nolan against that virulent searcher-out of atheists, deists, pantheists, and the like “miscreants and libertines.” To a fellow-enthusiast in Germany (Baron Hohendorf) Toland wrote three years later, giving the proofs of Bruno’s punishment, with a translation of Schopp’s account, and stating his belief as to Bruno’s real doctrine (viz. free-thinking).[661] “The author,” he wrote, “gives full play to his spirit, which is always diverting, but at the same time very powerful; he is often diffuse, but never wearisome. In a very small space he has expounded a complete system of natural religion, the theory of ancient cosmography, history, comparison and refutation of different opinions, besides many curious observations on diverse subjects. But the author abounds in pleasantries, and in satirical traits: he is impious in a sovereign degree, and does not always keep himself within the limits of allegory.” And so Bruno, like Spinoza in this also, went down to posterity as a worthless, impious atheist, one of the reputed authors of the mythical work De Tribus Impostoribus, which no one had ever seen, but in which the three founders of the great religions of the world were attacked as conscious cheats! So far was the world as yet from understanding the martyr for truth and for “the religion of thought.”

It was from Germany that the reaction came. The story of the restoration of Bruno’s name (his Ehrenrettung) has been told by Bartholmèss, and needs but a very brief sketch here. Heumann[662] repudiated Lacroze’s description of him as an atheist and forerunner of Spinoza’s pantheism, describing him as a martyr for the Lutheran faith and as an eclectic in philosophy. Brucker[663]—without the historical sense, but a painstaking and learned, if diffuse, analyst, judging all philosophies by the standard of orthodox Protestantism and the Leibnizian philosophy—yet sympathised with Bruno, described him as an “eclectic, combining ideas of the Eleatics with those of Democritus and Epicurus, Copernicus and Pythagoras, not an impostor, but an intellectual enthusiast—cum ratione insanivit.” Throughout the remaining part of the century a number of monographs appeared, by Jordan, Christiani, Kindervater; with, on the contra side, Lessman and Lauckhard. Adelung thought Bruno worthy of a place in his History of Human Folly (1785). In the same year (1785) appeared F. H. Jacobi’s Letters on Spinoza’s Philosophy, which contained a “restoration” at one stroke of both Bruno and Spinoza to their place among the great names of the history of thought.[664] This fine thinker—if not great thinker—penetrated by the beauty and calm of Spinoza’s pantheism, saw in Bruno a true forerunner. Bruno had “taken up the substance of the ancient philosophy, transformed it into flesh and blood, was wholly permeated by its spirit, without ceasing to be himself.” Naturally it was in the Causa that Jacobi found the greatest affinity with Spinoza, as in it the starting-point of Bruno is from the One, the Highest, which is at the same time the All—the universe, the unity of the One and Many, of Spirit and Nature. Jakobi’s friend, Hamann, the “Wizard of the North,” the mystical critic of Kantianism, went a step further than Jakobi himself; Bruno’s principle of the coincidence of opposites, he said, was of more value to him than all the Kantian criticism. In the pantheistic or monistic side of Bruno’s philosophy he found sympathy with his own revolt against the excessive intellectualism and rationalism which seemed to him to be the chief danger of the Kantian philosophy.[665] Goethe also was carried away by the flowing tide of enthusiasm, and, indeed, his own philosophical conception had much affinity with that of the Nolan, although in their inner natures the two men differed toto coelo.[666] Buhle—first in his Comment on the Rise and Progress of Pantheism (1790), afterwards in his learned and careful History of Philosophy[667]—placed Bruno amongst the highest of pantheistic writers. Even Tennemann[667] grows eloquent over the brilliant effort of Bruno, by which he almost achieved a philosophy of the Absolute two centuries before Schelling and Hegel.[668] Fulleborn is more cautious and critical, but in his Contributions to the History of Philosophy he gives analyses and extracts from several of Bruno’s works.[669] Schelling himself, as is clear from the dialogue which he wrote bearing Bruno’s name, regarded the Italian as nearest to himself among his forerunners in the philosophy of the absolute. There is obviously a close analogy between the two; and Schelling may be said to take, with regard to the course of philosophy after him, the same place which Bruno took as regards the lines of development in the philosophy of the seventeenth century. Both had a wider view, and perhaps a deeper insight, than their successors, while lacking the power of strenuous thought necessary to carry out their views into the completeness of a philosophical system. It is doubtful, however, whether Schelling knew much more of Bruno than Jakobi’s essay and his abstract of the Causa had to tell.

Hegel took a much less enthusiastic view of Bruno’s philosophy than did his contemporary and sometime partner—to place Bruno on a level with Spinoza was to give him a higher reputation than he deserved: his doctrine was a mere re-echo of the Alexandrine. Yet Hegel, too, saw something to admire in this “Bacchantic” spirit, revelling in the discovery of its oneness with the Idea, and with all other beings, with the all of nature which is an externalisation of spirit. It was under the influence of Hegel or of the Hegelian philosophy that the first really complete and satisfactory studies of Bruno appeared:—Christian Bartholmèss’ Jordano Bruno,[670] and Moritz Carrière’s Philosophische Weltanschauung der Reformationszeit.[671] The quick and generous enthusiasm of the first, the wide philosophic comprehension of the second have probably done more to attract public attention to the forgotten Nolan, and to guarantee him a permanent place in the history of philosophy, than any other writings about him. Since their time the literature upon Bruno has steadily increased, and with it has grown the comprehension of and sympathy with the man as well as with the idea he so fearlessly proclaimed, and so strenuously defended. It is no part of the purpose of this work to parallel Bruno with any of the more modern philosophers. It is foolhardy to say, for example, as Brunnhofer does, that Schopenhauer alone reaches the same height of literary style in modern philosophy, “although the Nolan leaves the Frankfort philosopher far behind him through the strength of his philosophical conception of the universe, which holds its own against pessimism and optimism alike.”[672] It is foolhardy, and it is misleading, to place him in comparison with philosophers who have nearly three centuries of thought, of social, industrial, and literary growth, between him and them. Like all the philosophers whom a touch of poetical imagination has redeemed, Bruno stands more or less alone, and he overtops all the others of his century. None of the ordinary rubrics of historical terminology in philosophy apply to him, not even that of “Eclectic.” He is far more than that. His philosophy, as perhaps these pages have shown, bears the stamp of individuality, the individuality of a strong mind, fed with nearly all the knowledge, and all the out-reaching guesses at truth of its own time, and of the times that had gone before, striving to turn this difficult mass into nourishment for itself, and to transmit the achievement to others. He was an eclectic, just as every great thinker is an eclectic, but it is the bricks merely, not the style of architecture, that he has borrowed from others. He never founded a school, not merely because the circumstances of his life, and the fate of his writings, precluded him from being widely known or studied in any country, but also because his philosophy was too much a thing of himself to be readily attractive to many of his hearers or readers. Yet it has been a force making for the progress of thought and of liberty, and it is still an active force. Human nature has not yet lost the tendency to rest calmly in its “habit of believing,” to shut itself up in its finite world, refusing either to look abroad, or to look at itself from an external point of view; it is still apt to think “geocentrically,” to take its molehills for mountains, while “underlooking,” if the term may be allowed, the real mountains that are before it, to hold doggedly to one contrary, reject utterly the other, whereas the truth always lies in their unity. To these recurring foibles of humanity, and more especially, perhaps, of philosophic humanity, the fresh and vigorous writings of the Dominican monk and martyr of the sixteenth century will ever form a healthy counterpoise.

ADDITIONAL NOTES

3. To p. 33. Sidney and Greville.—Greville had been a schoolmate of Sidney at Shrewsbury, but proceeded to Jesus College, Cambridge, while Sidney went to Christ Church at Oxford; afterwards they were constant friends at Court. When Sidney went to Heidelberg in 1577, the Queen would not allow the handsome Greville to accompany him, nor would she let either go with Drake to the West Indies in 1585, and Greville was kept at home from Leicester’s Expedition to the Low Countries, in which poor Sidney met with a heroic death (Oct. 17, 1586). In a letter of 1586, Greville describes Sidney as “that prince of gentlemen”: writing to Douglas after Sidney’s death, he says that the name of Sidney’s friendship has carried him above his own worth. The epitaph Greville wrote for himself is familiar, but will bear repetition:—“Fulke Greville, Servant to Queen Elizabeth, Councillor to King James, and friend to Sir Philip Sidney. Trophaeum Peccati.”

4. To p. 35. Vautrollier and Bruno.—Vautrollier traded in Scotland as early as 1580 as a bookseller: he had already enjoyed the patronage of King James, and was even encouraged to return with a printing press, which he did in 1584. Thereafter he published in both London and Edinburgh till 1587. On the other hand some of Bruno’s works were printed in 1585, so that the theory of Vautrollier’s flight to Scotland owing to his being the printer of Bruno’s works, falls through. The business in London was carried on during his absence by his wife, and the “troubles” out of which Mr. Randolph helped him were quite unconnected with Bruno, and may have arisen from his printing of John Knox’s History of the Reformation in Scotland, which Archbishop Whitgift suppressed. The letter to Mr. Randolph is in L’Espine’s Treatise of Apostasy, 1587 (Vautrollier: London).

5. To p. 51. Mordentius.—Fabrizio Mordente of Salerno was a mathematician of the sixteenth century, of whom only two works are known to have existed,—one published in 1597, the other written in conjunction with his brother Gaspar in 1591. He was the inventor of an eight-point compasses of which Bruno writes in the second of the Mordentius dialogues, and on which he bestows apparently extravagant praise. The peculiarity of the invention, as far as one can discover, consisted in the introduction of four “runners,” two on either limb of the compasses, and secured by screws; but there seems to have been no gradation of the compasses, and it is difficult to perceive any great value in the novelty, without that essential addition. The first of the two dialogues suggests a possible origin for some of Bruno’s ideas on atomic geometry, as we find, attributed to Mordentius, two ideas that were applied to some purpose in Bruno’s own mathematical works. They are (1) that of the measurement of inappreciable subdivisions of continuous quantities by integration, and (2) that of the impossibility of infinite division, the continuous being composed of discrete minima, beyond which no division can go, and the minima (like the maxima) being relative, differing in different subjects, so that, for example, what in astronomy is a minimal quantity may in geodesy be greater than the diameter of the earth.