While with Eckhart, the world-process both in its arising and in its passing was regarded as a knowing process, with Boehme it is rather a
struggling
of the will between good and evil.
Windelband - History of Philosophy
] Warring Tradition* : Protestantism.
365
means of the Scriptures, and the combination of doctrines could not reach such an organic union as had been attained by the slow ripen ing of Thoinism in the Middle Ages ; but the Peripatetic system was in this instance treated rather as but a supplement to theology in the department of profane science, and for this end, Melancthon knew how to sift, arrange, and set forth the material in his text-books with so great skill that it became the basis for a doctrine which was in the main one in its nature, and as such was taught at the Protestant universities for two centuries.
7. But in Protestantism there were still other traditional forces active. Luther's work of liberation owed its origin and its success not least to Mysticism, — not indeed to that sublime, spiritualised form of viewing the world to which the genius of Master Eckhart had given expression, but to the movement of deepest piety which, as " practical Mysticism," had spread from the Rhine in the " League of the Friends of God," and in the " Brothers of the Common Life. "
For this Mysticism, the disposition, purity of heart, and the imita tion of Christ were the sole content of religion; assent to dog mas, the external works of holiness, the whole worldly organisation of Church life, appeared to be matters of indifference and even hindrances : the believing soul demands only the freedom of its own religious life, — a demand that transcends all these outward works. This was the inner source of the Reformation. Luther himself had not only searched Augustine, he had also edited the " German The ology " : and his word let loose the storm of this religious longing, with which, in the conflict against Rome, an impulse of national independence was also mingled.
But when the Protestant State Church became again consolidated in the fixed forms of a theoretical system of doctrine, and clung to this the more anxiously in proportion as it was obliged to struggle for its existence in the strife of Confessions, then the supra-confes- sional impulse of Mysticism became undeceived, as did also the national consciousness. The theological fixation of the thought of the Reformation appeared as its ruin, and as Luther had once waged his warfare against the " sophistry " of the Scholastics, so now a movement of Mysticism that was quietly stirring farther and wider among the people, directed itself against his own creation. In men like Osiander and Schwenckfeld he had to contend against parts of his own nature and its development. But in this movement it became evident that the doctrines of mediaeval Mysticism had been quietly maintained and continued in legendary form amid all kinds of fantastic ideas and obscure imagery. The Mysticism which conies to light in the teachings of men like Sebastian Franck, or in the
366 The Renaissance : Humanistic Period. [1'akt VI
secretly circulated tracts of Valentine Weigel, has its support in the idealism of Eckhart, which transformed all the outer into the inner, all the historical into the eternal, and saw in the process of Nature and history but the symbol of the spiritual and divine. This con stituted, though frequently in strange form, the deeper ground of the battle which the Mystics of the sixteenth century waged in Germany against the " letter " of theology.
8. Look where we will in the intellectual movement of the fif teenth and sixteenth centuries, we see everywhere tradition arrayed against tradition, and every controversy is a battle between trans mitted doctrines. The spirit of the Western peoples has now taken up into itself the entire material which the past offers for its cul ture, and in the feverish excitement into which it is finally put by direct contact with the highest achievements of ancient science, it struggles upward to the attainment of complete independence. It feels sufficiently hardened to execute work of its own, and overflow ing with its wealth of thought, it seeks new tasks. One feels the impulsive blood of youth pulsate in its literature, as though some thing unheard of, something which had never before been, must now come into being. The men of the Renaissance announce to us nothing less than the approach of a total renovation of science and of the state of humanity. The warfare between the transmitted doctrines leads to a surfeit of the past; learned research into the old wisdom ends with throwing aside all book-rubbish, and full of the youthful joy of dawning, growing life, the mind goes forth into the cosmic life of Nature ever young.
The classical portrayal of this temper of the Renaissance is the first monologue in Goethe's Faust.
§ 29. Hacrocosm and Microcosm.
By Scotism and Terminism the faith -metaphysics of the Middle Ages had become disintegrated and split in twain : everything supersensuous had been given to dogma, and as the object of philos ophy there remained the world of experience. But before thought had as yet had time to become clear as to the methods and special problems of this secular knowledge, Humanism, and with it above all, the Platonic Weltanschauung, burst in. No wonder that the solu tion of the problem, which was itself at first seen but dimly, was first sought in connection with this theory : and this doctrine must have been the more welcome, especially in its Neo-Platonic form, as it showed the world of the supersensuous presageful in the back ground, but made the particulars of the world of sense stand out
Chap. 1, § 20. ] Macrocosm and Microcosm: Bruno, Boehme. 367
distinctly in purposefully defined outlines. The supersensuous itself, and all therein that was connected with man's religious life, might be cheerfully set off to theology ; philosophy could dedicate itself to the task of being natural science, with all the calmer con science in proportion as it followed the Neo-Platonic precedent of
Nature as a product of spirit, and thus believed that in the conception of the deity it retained a point of unity for the diverging branches of science, the spiritual and the secular. Did theology teach how God reveals himself in the Scripture, it was now the business of philosophy to apprehend with admiration his revela tion in Nature. On this account the beginnings of modern natural science were theosophical and thoroughly Neo-Platonic.
1. The characteristic fact, however, is that in this revival of Neo-Platonisra, the last dualistic motives which had belonged to the same were also completely set aside. They disappeared together with the specifically religious interest which had supported them, and the theoretical element of recognising in Nature the creative divine power came forward pure and unmixed. 1 The fundamental tendency in the natural philosophy of the Renaissance was therefore the fanciful or imaginative conception of the divine unity of the liv ing All. the admiration of the macrocosm : the fundamental thought of Plotinus of the beauty of the universe has been taken up by no other time so sympathetically as by this ; and this beauty was now also regarded as a manifestation of the divine Idea. Such a view is expressed in almost entirely Neo-Platonic forms by Patrizzi, in a more original form and with strongly ]>oetical quality by Giordano Bruno, and likewise by Jacob Boehme. With Bruno the symbol of the all-forming and all-animating primitive light is still dominant (cf. p. 245) ; with Boehme, on the contrary, we find that of the organism ; the world is a tree which from root to flower and fruit is permeated by one life-giving sap, and which is formed and ordered from within outward by its own germinal activity. *
In this inheres naturally the inclination to complete monism and pantheism. Everything must have its cause, and the last cause can be but one, — God. ' He according to Bruno, at the same time
the formal, the efficient, and the final cause according to Boehme he " at once the rational ground and efficient cause Urgrund " and Ursache") of the world (principium and causa with Bruno).
In certain senae thU might also be expressed by saying that thereby the Stoic elements of Neo-Platonism came with controlling force into the fore ground.
Cf. the remarkable agreement between Bruno, Delta Cauia Pr. e. U. , TL (Lag. 231 f. ) and Boehme, Aurora, Vorrede.
Aurora, Chap. HI.
apprehending
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868 The Renai$$ance : Humanistic Period. [Pakt IV
Hence the universe is also nothing but " the essential nature of God himself made creatural. " ' And yet the idea of the transcendence of God is here, too, connected with this view, as it had been in Xeo- Platonism. Boehme holds that God should be thought not as a force devoid of reason and " science," but as the " all-knowing, all- seeing, all-hearing, all-smelling, all-tasting" spirit: and Bruno adds another analogy ; for him God is the artist who works unceasingly and shapes out his inner nature to rich life.
Harmony is accordingly, for Bruno also, the inmost nature of the world, and he who can apprehend it with the gaze of enthusiasm
(as does the philosopher in the dialogues and poetic inventions Degli Eroici Furori), for him the apparent defects and imperfections of detail vanish in the beauty of the whole. He needs no special the odicy ; the world is perfect because it is the life of God, even down to every detail, and he only complains who cannot raise himself to a view of the whole. The world-joy of the aesthetic Renaissance sings philosophical dithyrambs in Bruno's writings. A universalistic optimism that carries everything before it prevails in his poetic thought.
2. The conceptions which lie at the basis of this unfolding of the metaphysical fantasy in Bruno had their source in the main in Nicolau* Cusanus, whose teachings had been preserved by Charles Bouille, though in his exposition they had to some degree lost their vivid freshness. Just this the Nolan knew how to restore. He not only raised the principle of the coincidentia oppositorum to the artis tic reconciliation of contrasts, to the harmonious total action of opposing partial forces in the divine primitive essence, but above all he gave to the conceptions of the infinite and the finite a far wider reaching significance. As regards the deity and its relation to the world, the Neo-Platonic relations are essentially retained. God himself, as the unity exalted above all opposites, cannot be appre hended through any finite attribute or qualification, and there fore is unknowable in his own proper essence (negative theology) ; but at the same time he is still thought as the inexhaustible, world-force, as the natura naturans, which in eternal change forms and " unfolds " itself purposefully and in conformity with law, into the natura naturata. This identification of the essence of God and the world is a general doctrine of the natural philosophy of the Renaissance ; it is found likewise in Paracelsus, in Sebastian Franck, in Boehme, and finally also with the whole body of the " Platonists. " That it could also assume an extremely naturalistic form, and could
1 Aurora, Chap. II.
infinite
Crap. 1, § 29. ] Macrocosm and Microcosm : hruno. 369
lead to the denial of all transcendence, is proved by the agitative and boastfully polemical doctrine of Vanini. 1 " —
For the natura naturata, on the other hand, for the "universe
the sum-total of creatures — the characteristic of true " infinity " is not Claimed, but rather that of unlimitedness in space and time. This conception gained an incomparably clearer form and more fixed significance by the Copernican theory. The spherical form of the earth and its revolution about its axis had been a familiar idea to Cusanua as well as to the old Pythagoreans, perhaps, indeed, through them ; but only the victoriously proved hypothesis of the motion of the earth about the sun could furnish a rational basis for the completely new view of man's position in the universe, which is peculiar to modern science. The anthropocentric idea of the world which had ruled the Middle Ages became out of joint. Man, as well as the earth, must cease to be regarded as centre of the universe and centre of the world. Men like Patrizzi and Boehme also raised themselves above such " restriction " on the basis of the teaching of Copernicus, which for that reason was condemned by the dogmatic authorities of all confessions ; but the fame of having thought out the Copernican system to its end, both in natural philosophy and in metaphysics, belongs to Giordano Bruno.
He developed from this system the theory that the universe forms a system of countless worlds, each of which moves about its central sun, leads its own proper life, grows from chaotic conditions to clear and definite formation, and again yields to the destiny of dissolution. The tradition of Democritus and Epicurus had perhaps a share in the formation of this conception of a plurality of worlds arising and perishing again ; but it is the peculiar feature of Bruno's doctrine, that he regarded the plurality of solar systems not as a mechanical juxtaposition, but as an organic living whole, and regarded the pro cess of the growth and decay of worlds as maintained by the pulse- beat of the one divine All-life.
3. While in this way universalism, with its bold flight into spatial and temporal boundlessness, threatened to claim the fantasy entirely for its own, there was an effective counterpoise in the Peripatetic- Stoic doctrine of the analogy between macrocosm and microcosm, which found in man's nature the sum, the '• quintessence " of the cosmical powers. We see this doctrine reviving in the most varied
* Lucilio Vanini (born 1686 at Naples, burned 1619 at Toulouse), a dissolute adrenturer, wrote Amphitheatrum Acttrnot Providential (Lyons, 1616) and Dt admirandu natura; regina drtrque mortalium arcanin (Paris, 1616).
* Nlcolaus Copernicus, De lievnlutinnibitt Orbium Ctrlrntium (Nuremberg, IMS).
370 The Renaissance : Humanistic Period. [Part IV.
forms during the Renaissance ; it controls entirely the theory of knowledge at this period, and moreover the Neo-Platonic triple division is almost universally authoritative in connection with furnishing a scheme for metaphysical anthropology. One can know only what one himself the mode in which this was expressed by Valentine Weigel: man knows the all in so far as he the all. This was a pervading principle of Eckhart's Mysticism. But this idealism now took on definite form. As body, man belongs to the material world indeed, he unites within himself, as Paracelsus, and following him Weigel and Boehme teach, the essence of all material things in finest and most compact form. Just on this account he competent to understand the corporeal world. As intellectual being, however, he of " sidereal " origin, and therefore able to know the intellectual world in all its forms. Finally, as divine " spark," as spiraculum vital, as a partial manifestation of the highest princi ple of life, he also able to become conscious of the divine nature whose image he is.
A more abstract application of this same principle, according to which all knowledge of the world rooted in man's knowledge himself, found in the thought of Campanella, involving not the Neo-Platonic separation of world-strata (although this too present in Campanella), but the fundamental categories of all reality. Man — the thought here too — knows in the proper sense only himself, and knows all else only from and through himself. All knowledge
perception (sentire), but we perceive, not the things, but only the states into which these set us. In this process, however, we learn by experience that inasmuch as we are, we can do something, we know something and will something, and further, that we find ourselves limited by corresponding functions of other beings. From this " follows that power, knowledge, and will are the " primali- ties of all reality, and that they belong to God in an unlimited degree, he known as all-powerful, all-knowing, and all-good.
The doctrine that all knowledge of God and of the world ultimately locked up in man's knowledge of himself, nevertheless only an epistemological inference from the more general metaphys ical principle according to which the divine nature was held to be fully and entirely contained in each of its finite manifestations. Giordano Bruno follows the Cusan also in holding that God the smallest as well as the greatest, as truly the vital principle of the individual being as that of the universe. And accordingly every individual thing, and not merely man, becomes a " mirror " of the world-substance. Each without exception according to its essen tial nature the deity itself, but each in its own way, which is
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4.
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Chap. 1, § 29. ] Macrocosm and Microcosm : Campanella, Bruno. 371
different from all the rest. This thought Bruno incorporated in his conception of the monad. He understood by this the individual substance (Einzelwesen), which, as continually "formed" matter, constitutes one of the partial manifestations of the world-force, in the interaction of which the world-life consists. It is living from the beginning, and is imperishable ; it is corporeal as well as spiritual in its nature. Each monad is a form in which the Divine Being finds individual existence, a finite existence-form of the infinite essence. Since, now, there is nothing but God and the monads, the universe is animated even to the smallest nook and corner, and the infinite all-life individualises itself at every point to a special and peculiar nature. It results from this that each thing, in the move
ments of its life, follows in part the law of its special nature, and in part a more general law, just as a planet or heavenly body moves at the same time on its own axis and about its sun. Cam panella, who took up this doctrine also in connection with the Copernican system, designated this striving toward the whole, this tendency toward the original source of all reality, as religion, and spoke in this sense of a " natural " religion, that is of religion as "natural impulse," — one would now perhaps say centripetal im pulse, — which he with logical consistency ascribed to all things in general, and which in man was held to assume the special form of " rational " religion ; that of the striving to become one with God by love and knowledge.
This principle of the infinite variability of the divine ground of the world which presents itself in a special form in every particular thing, found in similar form also with Paracelsus. Here, as with Kicolaus Cusanus, taught that all substances are present in everything, that each thing therefore presents microcosm, and yet that each has also its special principle of life and activity. This special mind or spirit of the individual called by Paracelsus the Archeus Jacob Boehme, to whom this doctrine passed over, calls
the Primus.
With Bruno the conception of the monad connects itself in very interesting manner, though without further effect upon his physical view with that of the atom, which was brought to him, as to the earlier period, by the Epicurean tradition through Lucretius. The "smallest" — in metaphysics the monad, in mathematics the point — in physics the atom, the indivisible spherical element of the corporeal world. Memories of the Pythagorean and Platonic theory of the elements, and of the related atomic theory of Deinocritus, became thus alive in the midst of Neo-Platonism they found also an independent revival with men like Basso, Sennert, and others,
;
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a
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372 The Renaissance : Humanistic Period. [Part IV
and so led to the so-called corpuscular theory, according to which the corporeal world consists of inseparable atom-complexes, the coi- puscles. In the atoms themselves, the theory assumed in conneo tion with their mathematical form an original and unchangeable law of action, to which, it held, the mode of action of the corpuscles is also to be traced. 1
5. Here the workings of mathematics assert themselves in the old Pythagorean form, or as modified by Democritus and Plato. The ultimate constituents of physical reality are determined by- their geometrical form, and the qualitative determinations of experience must be traced back to this. The combination of elements presup poses numbers and their order as the principle of multiplicity. 1 Thus spatial forms and number-relations again make their appear ance as the essential and original in the physical world, and thereby the Aristotelian-Stoic doctrine of the qualitatively determined forces, of the inner Forms of things, of the quulitates occulta, was displaced. As this latter doctrine had formerly gained the victory over the principle of Pythagoras, Democritus, and Plato, so it must in turn yield to this : and herein lies one of the most important prepara tions for the origin of modern natural science.
The beginnings of this are found already with Nicolaus Cusanus ; but now they receive an essential strengthening from the same source from which their presence in his thought is explained : namely, from the old literature, and in particular from the Neo- Pythagorean writings. Just for this reason, however, they still have the fantastic m-taphysical garb of number-mysticism and num ber-symbolism. The book of Nature is written in numbers ; the har mony of things is that of the number-system. All is arranged by God according to measure and number ; all life is an unfolding of mathematical relations. But just as in antiquity, so here, this thought is unfolded at first as an arbitrary interpretation of concep tions, and a mysterious speculation. The procedure of the world forth from God, from the construction of the Trinity on, — as, for example, in the attempt of Bouille", — is again to be conceived as the process of the transformation of unity into the number-system. Such fantasies were followed by men like Cardan and Pico. Reuchlin added further the mythological creations of the Jewish Cabbala.
6. Thus the principle which was destined for the most fruitful development made its entrance into the new world wrapped again in the old metaphysical fantasticalness, and fresh forces were
i Cf. K. Lasswitz, Geschichte des Atomismus, I. pp. 359 ft°. (Hamburg and
Leips. 1890).
* Cf . for this especially G. Bruno, De. Triplid Minimo.
Chap. 1, §29. ] Macrocosm and Microcosm : Paracelsus. 373
needed to strip off this covering, and free it for its right working. Meanwhile, however, it became mingled with quite other efforts, which likewise had their origin in the Neo-Platonic tradition. To the idea of a universal psychical life, to the fanciful spiritualisation of Nature, belonged also the impulse to interfere in the course of things with mysterious means, with conjurations and magic arts, and so to guide it according to the will of man. Here, too, a higher thought hovered before the fantastic impulse of the excited age, — the thought of mastering Nature by a knowledge of the forces working in it. But this thought was also received in the wrappings of ancient superstition. If, as was the case with the Neo-Platonists, the life of Nature was regarded as a dominance of spirits, as a mys teriously connected system of internal forces, it was a proper aim to make these subject by knowledge and will. Thus magic became a favourite subject of thought in the Renaissance, and science again concerned itself with the task of bringing system into superstition.
Astrology, with its influences of the stars upon human life, the interpretation of dreams and signs, necromancy, with its conjura tions of spirits, the predictions of persons in the ecstatic state, — all these elements of the Stoic and Ne>Platonic divination were then in most luxuriant bloom. Pico and Reuchlin brought them into con nection with the number-mysticism ; Agrippa of Nettesheim adopted all the sceptical attacks against the possibility of rational science, in order to seek help in mystical illuminations and secret magic arts. Cardan proceeded with all seriousness to the task of deter mining the laws of these operations, and Campanella conceded them an unusually wide space in his idea of the world.
Physicians especially, whose vocation demanded an interference in the course of Nature and might seem permitted 10 expect special advantage in secret arts, showed an inclination toward these magic arts. From this point of view Paracelsus desired to reform medi
cine. He also proceeds from the sympathy of all things, from the idea of the universe as a spiritually connected system. He finds the essence of disease in the injuring of the individual vital prin ciple, the Archeus, by foreign powers, and seeks the means where with to free and strengthen the Archeus. Since this latter process must come about by a corresponding composition of materials, all sorts of magical drinks, tinctures, and other secret remedies must be brewed, and thus the arts of alchemy were set in motion, which, in spite of all its fantastic performances, ultimately yielded a number of useful results for chemical knowledge in the course of its incred ibly extended pursuits.
In this connection the fundamental metaphysical presupposition
374 The Menaistance : Humanistic Petiod. [Pabx IV.
of the unity of all vital force led of itself to the thought that there must be also a simple, most efficacious, universal remedy for the strengthening of every Archeus whatever, a panacea against all diseases and for the maintenance of all the vital forces ; and con nection with the macrocosmic efforts of magic nourished the hope that the possession of this secret would lend the highest magic power, and afford the most desirable treasures. All this was to be achieved by the " philosopher's stone " ; it was to heal all diseases, transmute all substances into gold, conjure all spirits into the power of its possessor. And thus the purposes which it was thought would be satisfied in the ventures of alchemy, were ultimately very real and sober.
7. The introduction of this magical view of Nature into the subtle religious system of German Mysticism constitutes the peculiar feat ure of Boehme's philosophy. He, too, is seized by the thought that philosophy should be knowledge of Nature ; but the deep earnest ness of the religious need which lay at the basis of the German Reformation did not allow him to content himself with the separa tion of religious metaphysics and natural science, customary at his time, and he sought to work the two into one again. Similar efforts which tended to transcend the dogmatic, fixed form of Protestant ism, and hoped to solve the problems of the new science with the aid of a Christian metaphysics, throve also by the side of the official Peripatetic system. TaureUus aimed to produce such a supra-con- fessional philosophy of Christianity, and with a true instinct for his purpose, adopted many elements of the Augustinian doctrine of the will, but was not able to work enough real material from the inter ests of his time into these thoughts, and so came ultimately rather to a complete separation of empirical research from all metaphysics. A similar process went on in the mystical movement, which grew with the popular opposition against the new orthodoxy all the more in proportion as the latter dried and hardened within itself. The mystical doctrines also remained suspended in vague generality until the teaching of Paracelsus was brought to them, at first by Weigel, and then completely by Boehme.
In Boehme's doctrine Neo-Platonism assumes again a completely religious colouring. Here, too, man is regarded as the microcosm from and by which the bodily, the " sidereal," and the divine worlds can be known, if one follows the right illumination and is not mis led by learned theories. Self-knowledge, nevertheless, is religious knowledge, which finds the opposition of good and evil as a funda mental trait of human nature. The same opposition fills the whole world; it rules in heaven as on earth, and since God is the sole
Chap. I, § 29. ] Macrocosm and Microcosm : Boehme. 375
cause of all, this opposition must be sought in him also. Boehme extends the coincidentia oppositorum to the extreme limit, and finds the ground of duality in the necessity of the self-revelation of the divine Primordial Ground. As light can be revealed only in con nection with darkness, so God's goodness can be revealed only in connection with his anger. Thus Boehme portrays the process of the eternal self-generation of God, describing how from the dark ground of Being within him the urgent impulse ("Drang"), or will, which has only itself for its object, attains self-revelation in the divine wisdom, and how that which has thus become revealed forms itself into the world. While the theogonic development thus passes over immediately into the cosmogonic, the effort is everywhere shown in this latter development to carry the fundamental religious antithesis into the physical categories of the system of Paracelsus. Thus three kingdoms of the world and seven forms, or "qualia" (" Qualen "), are constructed, which ascend from the material forces of attraction and repulsion to those of light and warmth, and from there on to those of the sensible and intellectual functions. To this portrayal of the eternal nature of things is then attached the history of the earthly world, which begins with the fall of Lucifer and the process of rendering the spiritual essence perceptible to the senses, and ends with the overcoming of the proud infatuation (" Vergafflsei n " ) for the creature, with the mystical devotion of man to the deity, and ultimately with the restoration of the spiritual nature. All this is presented by Boehme in prophetic discourse, full of deep conviction, with a unique mingling of profundity and dilettantism. It is the attempt of the Eckhartian Mysticism to become master of the modern interests of science, and the first still tentatively uncertain step toward raising natural science into an idealistic metaphysics. But because this is made from the stand point of the deepest religious life, the intellectualistic features of
the older Mysticism retreat, with Boehme, more into the background.
While with Eckhart, the world-process both in its arising and in its passing was regarded as a knowing process, with Boehme it is rather a struggling of the will between good and evil.
8. In all these ways the result of the separation of philosophy from dogmatic theology always was that the knowledge of Nature that was sought took on the form of the older metaphysics. This procedure was inevitable so long as the desire for a knowledge of Nature could provide neither a material of facts which it had itself acquired, nor new conceptions to serve as forms for the elaboration
of this material. As a prerequisite for this, it was necessary to see the inadequacy of metaphysical theories, and putting them aside,
376 The Renaissance : Humanistic Period. [Part IV.
to turn to empiricism. This service was rendered to the genesis of modern thought by the tendencies of Nominalism aud Terminism, in part, also, by the rhetorical and grammatical opposition to the science of the schools, and also by the revival of ancient Scepticism.
The writings of Ludovico Vices must be regarded as a common starting-point for these various efforts ; but they prove also that the importance of these endeavours is essentially negative in char acter. In place of the obscure words and arbitrary conceptions of metaphysics, a demand is made in nominalistic fashion for the im mediate, intuitive apprehension of things themselves by experience : but the remarks as to the manner in which this should be scientifi cally set about are meagre and uncertain ; he speaks of experiment, but without any very deep insight into its nature. Quite so lies the case at a later time with Sanchez. And if the artificial subtle ties of the syllogistic method were attacked with great hue and cry, this line of thought had ultimately only the Ramistic fancies of "natural logic" to pufin their stead.
Further, this empiricism, just by virtue of its origin from Termin ism, could move only with a very uncertain step in the presence of external Nature. It could not deny the background of Occam's dualism. Sense-perception was held to be, not a copy of a thing, but an inner state of the subject corresponding to the presence of the thing. These scruples could be only strengthened by the theories of ancient Scepticism, for this added the doctrine of the deceptions of the senses and the consideration of the relativity and change of all perceptions. Hence this empiricism of the Humanists now also threw itself more upon inner perception, which was univer sally regarded as much surer than outer perception. Vives is most fortunate where he speaks the language of empirical psychology ; men like Nizolius, Montaigne, and Sanchez shared this view, and Charron gave it practical significance. Strenuously as all these urge toward looking at things themselves, outer perception ultimately turns out comparatively empty.
How little certain of itself, and how little fruitful in principles this empiricism was at that time, is shown best of all by its two main representatives in Italy, — Telesio and Campanella. The former, one of the most stirring and influential opponents of Aristotelianisni( is everywhere famous even in his own time (and also with Bruno and Bacon), as he who demanded most strongly that science should build only on the basis of facts perceived by the senses. He founded in Naples an academy which he called the Academia Cosen- tina, after the name of his home, and, in fact, contributed much toward the cultivation of the sense for empirical natural science. ,
Chap. 1, § 29. ] Macrocosm and Microcotm : Campanella. 87T
But if we look to see how he treats Nature "juxta propria principiu," we are met by genuinely physical theories which from few observations hastily leap over to most general metaphysical principles quite after the fashion of the ancient Ionics. The dry-warm and the moist-cold are set forth as the two opposing fundamental forces, out of whose conflict both the macrocosmic and the microcosmic life are to be ex plained. This same inner contradiction appears almost more promi nent still in Campanella. He teaches the most pronounced sens ualism. All knowledge is for him a " feeling " (sentire) ; even recollection, judgment, and inference are for him but modified forms of that feeling. But in his case also, sensualism tilts over into psychological idealism ; he is far too good a Nominalist not to know that all perception is but a feeling of the states of the incip ient himself. Thus he takes his starting-point in inner experience, and following the principle of the analogy of macrocosmus and microcosmus, builds upon a simple apercu (cf. above) an extended ontology. Into this he then draws also the quite scholastic antith esis of Being and Non-being (ens and non-ens), which, following the Neo-Platonic example, is identified with that of the perfect and imperfect, and between the two he spreads the variegated meta physical picture of a world-system arranged in successive strata.
80 tenaciously do the long-wonted habits of metaphysical thought cling everywhere to the beginnings of the new research.
CHAPTER II.
THE NATURAL SCIENCE PERIOD.
Damiron, Essai stir VHistoire de la Philosophie au IT" Steele. Paris, 1846. Kuno Fischer, Francis Bacon und seine Nachfolger. 2d ed. , Leips. 1875.
Ch. de Remusat, Histoire de la Philosophie en Angleterre depuis Baconjusqu'a
Locke. 2 vols. , Paris, 1875.
Natural science acquired its decisive influence upon the develop ment of modern philosophy by first gaining its own independence with the aid of a conscious use of a scientific method, and then from this position being able to determine the general movement of thought as regards both form and content. In so far the develop ment of the method of natural science from Kepler and Galileo down to Newton is not indeed itself the evolution of modern philos ophy, but is yet that series of events in reference to which this evolution constantly proceeds.
For this reason the positive beginnings of modern philosophy are in general to be sought, not so much in new conceptions with new content, as in methodical reflection, out of which, with the progress of time, there resulted of course new material and so new points of view for the treatment of both theoretical and practical problems. But at first the points of departure of modern thought were in all cases where permanently fruitful conceptions of the task and thereby conditioned procedure of the new science grew out of the humanistic opposition against Scholasticism, and out of the excited metaphysical fantasies of the transitional period.
In this consists from the outset an essential difference between modern and ancient philosophy. The former is as reflective in its beginning as the latter was nai've, and this is self-explaining, since the former must develop out of those traditions which the latter created. In this way it is characteristic of the greater number of the systems of modern philosophy to seek the path to the real or " material " problems by considering the science of method and the theory of knowledge ; and in particular the seventeenth century with
respect to its philosophy may be characterised as a strife of methods. 378
Chap. 2. ]
While, however, the movement of the humanistic period had in the main taken place in Italy and Germany, the cooler and more considerate temper of the two western civilised peoples now became prominent Italy was made dumb by the counter-reformation, Ger many was crippled by the ruinous war between the confessions. England and France, on the contrary, experienced in the seventeenth century the bloom of their intellectual civilisation, and between them the Netherlands became a flourishing seat of art and science.
In the development of the method of natural science the lines of empiricism and of mathematical theory converged : in philosophical generalisation the two came forward in an independent attitude. The programme of the experience philosophy was laid down by Bacon, but the method which formed its fundamental thought was not car ried out by him in the fruitful manner which he had anticipated. Much more comprehensive was the form in which Descartes brought together the scientific movement of his time to establish rationalism anew, by filling the scholastic system of conceptions with the rich content of the Galilean research. From this resulted far-reaching metaphysical problems, which in the second half of the seventeenth century called forth an extraordinarily vigorous movement of philo sophical thought, — a movement in which the new principles entered into manifold antithetical combinations with the principles of mediae
val philosophy. Out of the Cartesian school rose Occasionalism, of which Oeulincx and Malebranclie are the chief representatives. But the complete issue of this development was found in the two great philosophical systems brought forward by Spinoza and Leibniz.
The influence which the powerful development of theoretical phil osophy exercised also upon the treatment of practical problems shows itself principally in the field of the philosophy of law (or right). In thia department Hobbes, who was in like measure a disciple of Bacon and of Descartes, and as such marks an important point in the line of development of methods and metaphysics above noted, takes the decisive position as the introducer of an ethical naturalism which is found in altered form even with his opponents, such as Herbert oj
Cherbury and Cumberland. In these antitheses the problems of the philosophy of the Enlightenment are in process of preparation.
The teriea of great natural scientists who exercised an immediate influence also upon philosophical questions was opened by Johann Kepler ( IftM-HMO) of Weil, a town in WUrtt*mberg, who died in Regensburg after a life spent in struggle with need and anxiety. Among his works (ed. by Krisch, Frankfurt, 1868-71, 8 vols. ), the most important are Mytterium Cotmngraphieum, Harmo nize Mundi. Aflronomia . Vara leu Phyrica Catlentis Tradita CommeutariU de
Motibu* Stella- Mortis. Cf. Ohr. Sigwart, Kleine Srhriflen. I. 182 ff. ; R. Kucken, Pkilut. Monatih. , 1878, pp. 30 ff. — In immediate attachment to htm stands OaUleo Galilei (born I'M at I'Ua, died 1042 at ArcetriJ. Ilia works were
Natural Science Period. 379
380 Philosophy of the Renaissance. [Part IV.
published in 15 vols. (Florence, 1842-56) with a biographical supplementary volume by Arrago. Vols. 11-14 contain the Fisico-Mathematica ; among which we notice II Saggiatore (1623) and the dialogue on the Ptolemaic and the Copernican systems (1632). Cf. II. Martin, Galileo, let droits de la science et la methode de* sciences physiques (Paris, 1668) ; P. Natorp, Gal. als Philo- soph. (PAi'ios. Monatsh. , 1882, pp. 193 ft\). Isaac Newton (1642-1727) comes into consideration chiefly on account of his Philosophim Naturalis Principia Mathematica (1687; 2d ed. by Cotes, 1713; German by Wolfers, 1872) and his Optics (1704). —Of his contemporaries we notice the chemist, Robert Boyle (1626-1691; Chemista Scepticus ; Origo Formarum et Qualitatum; De Ipsa Natura), and the Netherlander, Christian Huyghens (1629-1695; De Causa Gravitatis; De Lumine).
Cf. W. Whewell, History of the Inductive Sciences (Loud. 1837 ; German by Littrow, Leips. 1839 ff. ) ; E. F. Apelt, Die Epochen der Geschichte der Mensch- heit (Jena, 1845) ; E. DUhring, Kritische Geschichte der Principien der Mechanilc (Leips. 1872) ; A. Lange, Gfsch. des Materialismus, 2d ed. , Iseriobn, 1873 [Eng. tr. History of Materialism by E. C. Thomas, Lond. , 4th ed. , 1892J ; K. Lasswitz, Gesch. der Atomistik, 2 vols. (Hamburg and Leips. 1890).
Francis Bacon, Baron of Verulam, Viscount of St. Albans, was born in 1561, studied in Cambridge, had a brilliant career under the reigns of Elizabeth and James I. , until, as the result of political opposition, he was proceeded against, convicted of venality, and deposed from the position of Lord High Chancellor. He died 1626. The latest edition of his works is that by Spedding and Heath (Lond. 1857 ff. ). Aside from the Essays (Sermones Fideles) the main writings are De Dignilate et Augmentis Scientiarum (1623 ; originally published under the title, The Two Books of Frattis Bacon on the Proftrience and Advancementof Learning, Divine and Human, 1605) and Novum Organon Scientiarum (1620; originally under the title, Cogitata et Visa, 1012). ' Cf. Ch. de Remusat, Bacon, Sa vie, son temps, sa philosophic et son influence
jusqu'a nos jours (Paris, 1864) ; H. Heussler, Fr. B. und seine geschichtlichf Stellung (Breslau, 1889) ; [Bacon, by J. Nichol, in Blackwood's series, Edin. 1888 : Ed. of the Novum Organum by Fowler, Oxford, 1878].
Rene Descartes (Cartesius), born 1596, in Touraine, and educated in the Jesuit school at La Fleche, was originally destined for a soldier and took part in the campaigns of 1618-1621 in the service of various leaders, but then betook himself for the first time to Paris, and later, withdrew for many years, at differ ent places in the Netherlands, into a scientific solitude, which he kept in the most diligent and careful manner. After controversies in which his doctrine had become involved at the universities in that country had rendered this place of residence disagreeable, he accepted, in 1649, an invitation of Queen Christine of Sweden to Stockholm, where he died the following year. His works have been collected in Latin in the Amsterdam editions (1650, etc. ), and in French by V. Cousin (11 vols. , Paris, 1824 ff. ) ; the important writings have been trans lated into German by Kuno Fischer (Mannheim, 1863) [Eng. tr. of the Method,
Meditations and Selections from the Principles by J. Veitch, Edin. and Lond. , 1st ed. , 1850-62, 10th ed. , 1890 ; of the Meditations by Lowndes, Lond. 1878, also in Jour. Spec. Phil. , Vol. IV. , 1870, by W. R. Walker; and of the Rules for the Direction of the Mind, with selections from the Med. 's, The World, The Passions of the Soul, etc. , by H. A. P. Torrey, N. Y. 1892]. The main works are Le Monde ou Traiti de la Lumiere (posthumously printed, 1654) ; Fssays, 16:17, among them the Discours de la Methode and the Dioptrics ; Meditationes de Prima Philosophia, 1641, supplemented by the objections of various savants and Descartes' replies ; Principia Philosophia;, 1644 ; Passions de VAme, 1650. Cf. F. Bouillier, Histoire de la Philosophic Cartisienne (Paris, 1854) ; X. Schmid-
1 It is well known that very recently much noise has been made over the discovery that Lord Bacon wrote Shakspere's works also, in his leisure hours. To fuse two great literary phenomena into one may have something alluring in it, but in any case a mistake has been made in the person. For it would be much more probable that Shakspere had incidentally composed the Baconian philosophy. [The Germans seem to take this "noise" much more seriously than Shakspere's countrymen. — Tr. ]
Chap. 2. ]
schwarzenberg, It. D. nnd seine Reform der Philosophic (Nordlingen, 1850) ; G. Glogau in Zeifehr. f. Philos. , 1878, pp. 209 S. ; P. Natorp, D. 's Erkenntniss- theorie (Marburg, 1882). [Descartes by J. P. Mahaffy in Blackwood's series, K. liii. and l'liila . 1881 ; W. Wallace, Art.
means of the Scriptures, and the combination of doctrines could not reach such an organic union as had been attained by the slow ripen ing of Thoinism in the Middle Ages ; but the Peripatetic system was in this instance treated rather as but a supplement to theology in the department of profane science, and for this end, Melancthon knew how to sift, arrange, and set forth the material in his text-books with so great skill that it became the basis for a doctrine which was in the main one in its nature, and as such was taught at the Protestant universities for two centuries.
7. But in Protestantism there were still other traditional forces active. Luther's work of liberation owed its origin and its success not least to Mysticism, — not indeed to that sublime, spiritualised form of viewing the world to which the genius of Master Eckhart had given expression, but to the movement of deepest piety which, as " practical Mysticism," had spread from the Rhine in the " League of the Friends of God," and in the " Brothers of the Common Life. "
For this Mysticism, the disposition, purity of heart, and the imita tion of Christ were the sole content of religion; assent to dog mas, the external works of holiness, the whole worldly organisation of Church life, appeared to be matters of indifference and even hindrances : the believing soul demands only the freedom of its own religious life, — a demand that transcends all these outward works. This was the inner source of the Reformation. Luther himself had not only searched Augustine, he had also edited the " German The ology " : and his word let loose the storm of this religious longing, with which, in the conflict against Rome, an impulse of national independence was also mingled.
But when the Protestant State Church became again consolidated in the fixed forms of a theoretical system of doctrine, and clung to this the more anxiously in proportion as it was obliged to struggle for its existence in the strife of Confessions, then the supra-confes- sional impulse of Mysticism became undeceived, as did also the national consciousness. The theological fixation of the thought of the Reformation appeared as its ruin, and as Luther had once waged his warfare against the " sophistry " of the Scholastics, so now a movement of Mysticism that was quietly stirring farther and wider among the people, directed itself against his own creation. In men like Osiander and Schwenckfeld he had to contend against parts of his own nature and its development. But in this movement it became evident that the doctrines of mediaeval Mysticism had been quietly maintained and continued in legendary form amid all kinds of fantastic ideas and obscure imagery. The Mysticism which conies to light in the teachings of men like Sebastian Franck, or in the
366 The Renaissance : Humanistic Period. [1'akt VI
secretly circulated tracts of Valentine Weigel, has its support in the idealism of Eckhart, which transformed all the outer into the inner, all the historical into the eternal, and saw in the process of Nature and history but the symbol of the spiritual and divine. This con stituted, though frequently in strange form, the deeper ground of the battle which the Mystics of the sixteenth century waged in Germany against the " letter " of theology.
8. Look where we will in the intellectual movement of the fif teenth and sixteenth centuries, we see everywhere tradition arrayed against tradition, and every controversy is a battle between trans mitted doctrines. The spirit of the Western peoples has now taken up into itself the entire material which the past offers for its cul ture, and in the feverish excitement into which it is finally put by direct contact with the highest achievements of ancient science, it struggles upward to the attainment of complete independence. It feels sufficiently hardened to execute work of its own, and overflow ing with its wealth of thought, it seeks new tasks. One feels the impulsive blood of youth pulsate in its literature, as though some thing unheard of, something which had never before been, must now come into being. The men of the Renaissance announce to us nothing less than the approach of a total renovation of science and of the state of humanity. The warfare between the transmitted doctrines leads to a surfeit of the past; learned research into the old wisdom ends with throwing aside all book-rubbish, and full of the youthful joy of dawning, growing life, the mind goes forth into the cosmic life of Nature ever young.
The classical portrayal of this temper of the Renaissance is the first monologue in Goethe's Faust.
§ 29. Hacrocosm and Microcosm.
By Scotism and Terminism the faith -metaphysics of the Middle Ages had become disintegrated and split in twain : everything supersensuous had been given to dogma, and as the object of philos ophy there remained the world of experience. But before thought had as yet had time to become clear as to the methods and special problems of this secular knowledge, Humanism, and with it above all, the Platonic Weltanschauung, burst in. No wonder that the solu tion of the problem, which was itself at first seen but dimly, was first sought in connection with this theory : and this doctrine must have been the more welcome, especially in its Neo-Platonic form, as it showed the world of the supersensuous presageful in the back ground, but made the particulars of the world of sense stand out
Chap. 1, § 20. ] Macrocosm and Microcosm: Bruno, Boehme. 367
distinctly in purposefully defined outlines. The supersensuous itself, and all therein that was connected with man's religious life, might be cheerfully set off to theology ; philosophy could dedicate itself to the task of being natural science, with all the calmer con science in proportion as it followed the Neo-Platonic precedent of
Nature as a product of spirit, and thus believed that in the conception of the deity it retained a point of unity for the diverging branches of science, the spiritual and the secular. Did theology teach how God reveals himself in the Scripture, it was now the business of philosophy to apprehend with admiration his revela tion in Nature. On this account the beginnings of modern natural science were theosophical and thoroughly Neo-Platonic.
1. The characteristic fact, however, is that in this revival of Neo-Platonisra, the last dualistic motives which had belonged to the same were also completely set aside. They disappeared together with the specifically religious interest which had supported them, and the theoretical element of recognising in Nature the creative divine power came forward pure and unmixed. 1 The fundamental tendency in the natural philosophy of the Renaissance was therefore the fanciful or imaginative conception of the divine unity of the liv ing All. the admiration of the macrocosm : the fundamental thought of Plotinus of the beauty of the universe has been taken up by no other time so sympathetically as by this ; and this beauty was now also regarded as a manifestation of the divine Idea. Such a view is expressed in almost entirely Neo-Platonic forms by Patrizzi, in a more original form and with strongly ]>oetical quality by Giordano Bruno, and likewise by Jacob Boehme. With Bruno the symbol of the all-forming and all-animating primitive light is still dominant (cf. p. 245) ; with Boehme, on the contrary, we find that of the organism ; the world is a tree which from root to flower and fruit is permeated by one life-giving sap, and which is formed and ordered from within outward by its own germinal activity. *
In this inheres naturally the inclination to complete monism and pantheism. Everything must have its cause, and the last cause can be but one, — God. ' He according to Bruno, at the same time
the formal, the efficient, and the final cause according to Boehme he " at once the rational ground and efficient cause Urgrund " and Ursache") of the world (principium and causa with Bruno).
In certain senae thU might also be expressed by saying that thereby the Stoic elements of Neo-Platonism came with controlling force into the fore ground.
Cf. the remarkable agreement between Bruno, Delta Cauia Pr. e. U. , TL (Lag. 231 f. ) and Boehme, Aurora, Vorrede.
Aurora, Chap. HI.
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868 The Renai$$ance : Humanistic Period. [Pakt IV
Hence the universe is also nothing but " the essential nature of God himself made creatural. " ' And yet the idea of the transcendence of God is here, too, connected with this view, as it had been in Xeo- Platonism. Boehme holds that God should be thought not as a force devoid of reason and " science," but as the " all-knowing, all- seeing, all-hearing, all-smelling, all-tasting" spirit: and Bruno adds another analogy ; for him God is the artist who works unceasingly and shapes out his inner nature to rich life.
Harmony is accordingly, for Bruno also, the inmost nature of the world, and he who can apprehend it with the gaze of enthusiasm
(as does the philosopher in the dialogues and poetic inventions Degli Eroici Furori), for him the apparent defects and imperfections of detail vanish in the beauty of the whole. He needs no special the odicy ; the world is perfect because it is the life of God, even down to every detail, and he only complains who cannot raise himself to a view of the whole. The world-joy of the aesthetic Renaissance sings philosophical dithyrambs in Bruno's writings. A universalistic optimism that carries everything before it prevails in his poetic thought.
2. The conceptions which lie at the basis of this unfolding of the metaphysical fantasy in Bruno had their source in the main in Nicolau* Cusanus, whose teachings had been preserved by Charles Bouille, though in his exposition they had to some degree lost their vivid freshness. Just this the Nolan knew how to restore. He not only raised the principle of the coincidentia oppositorum to the artis tic reconciliation of contrasts, to the harmonious total action of opposing partial forces in the divine primitive essence, but above all he gave to the conceptions of the infinite and the finite a far wider reaching significance. As regards the deity and its relation to the world, the Neo-Platonic relations are essentially retained. God himself, as the unity exalted above all opposites, cannot be appre hended through any finite attribute or qualification, and there fore is unknowable in his own proper essence (negative theology) ; but at the same time he is still thought as the inexhaustible, world-force, as the natura naturans, which in eternal change forms and " unfolds " itself purposefully and in conformity with law, into the natura naturata. This identification of the essence of God and the world is a general doctrine of the natural philosophy of the Renaissance ; it is found likewise in Paracelsus, in Sebastian Franck, in Boehme, and finally also with the whole body of the " Platonists. " That it could also assume an extremely naturalistic form, and could
1 Aurora, Chap. II.
infinite
Crap. 1, § 29. ] Macrocosm and Microcosm : hruno. 369
lead to the denial of all transcendence, is proved by the agitative and boastfully polemical doctrine of Vanini. 1 " —
For the natura naturata, on the other hand, for the "universe
the sum-total of creatures — the characteristic of true " infinity " is not Claimed, but rather that of unlimitedness in space and time. This conception gained an incomparably clearer form and more fixed significance by the Copernican theory. The spherical form of the earth and its revolution about its axis had been a familiar idea to Cusanua as well as to the old Pythagoreans, perhaps, indeed, through them ; but only the victoriously proved hypothesis of the motion of the earth about the sun could furnish a rational basis for the completely new view of man's position in the universe, which is peculiar to modern science. The anthropocentric idea of the world which had ruled the Middle Ages became out of joint. Man, as well as the earth, must cease to be regarded as centre of the universe and centre of the world. Men like Patrizzi and Boehme also raised themselves above such " restriction " on the basis of the teaching of Copernicus, which for that reason was condemned by the dogmatic authorities of all confessions ; but the fame of having thought out the Copernican system to its end, both in natural philosophy and in metaphysics, belongs to Giordano Bruno.
He developed from this system the theory that the universe forms a system of countless worlds, each of which moves about its central sun, leads its own proper life, grows from chaotic conditions to clear and definite formation, and again yields to the destiny of dissolution. The tradition of Democritus and Epicurus had perhaps a share in the formation of this conception of a plurality of worlds arising and perishing again ; but it is the peculiar feature of Bruno's doctrine, that he regarded the plurality of solar systems not as a mechanical juxtaposition, but as an organic living whole, and regarded the pro cess of the growth and decay of worlds as maintained by the pulse- beat of the one divine All-life.
3. While in this way universalism, with its bold flight into spatial and temporal boundlessness, threatened to claim the fantasy entirely for its own, there was an effective counterpoise in the Peripatetic- Stoic doctrine of the analogy between macrocosm and microcosm, which found in man's nature the sum, the '• quintessence " of the cosmical powers. We see this doctrine reviving in the most varied
* Lucilio Vanini (born 1686 at Naples, burned 1619 at Toulouse), a dissolute adrenturer, wrote Amphitheatrum Acttrnot Providential (Lyons, 1616) and Dt admirandu natura; regina drtrque mortalium arcanin (Paris, 1616).
* Nlcolaus Copernicus, De lievnlutinnibitt Orbium Ctrlrntium (Nuremberg, IMS).
370 The Renaissance : Humanistic Period. [Part IV.
forms during the Renaissance ; it controls entirely the theory of knowledge at this period, and moreover the Neo-Platonic triple division is almost universally authoritative in connection with furnishing a scheme for metaphysical anthropology. One can know only what one himself the mode in which this was expressed by Valentine Weigel: man knows the all in so far as he the all. This was a pervading principle of Eckhart's Mysticism. But this idealism now took on definite form. As body, man belongs to the material world indeed, he unites within himself, as Paracelsus, and following him Weigel and Boehme teach, the essence of all material things in finest and most compact form. Just on this account he competent to understand the corporeal world. As intellectual being, however, he of " sidereal " origin, and therefore able to know the intellectual world in all its forms. Finally, as divine " spark," as spiraculum vital, as a partial manifestation of the highest princi ple of life, he also able to become conscious of the divine nature whose image he is.
A more abstract application of this same principle, according to which all knowledge of the world rooted in man's knowledge himself, found in the thought of Campanella, involving not the Neo-Platonic separation of world-strata (although this too present in Campanella), but the fundamental categories of all reality. Man — the thought here too — knows in the proper sense only himself, and knows all else only from and through himself. All knowledge
perception (sentire), but we perceive, not the things, but only the states into which these set us. In this process, however, we learn by experience that inasmuch as we are, we can do something, we know something and will something, and further, that we find ourselves limited by corresponding functions of other beings. From this " follows that power, knowledge, and will are the " primali- ties of all reality, and that they belong to God in an unlimited degree, he known as all-powerful, all-knowing, and all-good.
The doctrine that all knowledge of God and of the world ultimately locked up in man's knowledge of himself, nevertheless only an epistemological inference from the more general metaphys ical principle according to which the divine nature was held to be fully and entirely contained in each of its finite manifestations. Giordano Bruno follows the Cusan also in holding that God the smallest as well as the greatest, as truly the vital principle of the individual being as that of the universe. And accordingly every individual thing, and not merely man, becomes a " mirror " of the world-substance. Each without exception according to its essen tial nature the deity itself, but each in its own way, which is
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Chap. 1, § 29. ] Macrocosm and Microcosm : Campanella, Bruno. 371
different from all the rest. This thought Bruno incorporated in his conception of the monad. He understood by this the individual substance (Einzelwesen), which, as continually "formed" matter, constitutes one of the partial manifestations of the world-force, in the interaction of which the world-life consists. It is living from the beginning, and is imperishable ; it is corporeal as well as spiritual in its nature. Each monad is a form in which the Divine Being finds individual existence, a finite existence-form of the infinite essence. Since, now, there is nothing but God and the monads, the universe is animated even to the smallest nook and corner, and the infinite all-life individualises itself at every point to a special and peculiar nature. It results from this that each thing, in the move
ments of its life, follows in part the law of its special nature, and in part a more general law, just as a planet or heavenly body moves at the same time on its own axis and about its sun. Cam panella, who took up this doctrine also in connection with the Copernican system, designated this striving toward the whole, this tendency toward the original source of all reality, as religion, and spoke in this sense of a " natural " religion, that is of religion as "natural impulse," — one would now perhaps say centripetal im pulse, — which he with logical consistency ascribed to all things in general, and which in man was held to assume the special form of " rational " religion ; that of the striving to become one with God by love and knowledge.
This principle of the infinite variability of the divine ground of the world which presents itself in a special form in every particular thing, found in similar form also with Paracelsus. Here, as with Kicolaus Cusanus, taught that all substances are present in everything, that each thing therefore presents microcosm, and yet that each has also its special principle of life and activity. This special mind or spirit of the individual called by Paracelsus the Archeus Jacob Boehme, to whom this doctrine passed over, calls
the Primus.
With Bruno the conception of the monad connects itself in very interesting manner, though without further effect upon his physical view with that of the atom, which was brought to him, as to the earlier period, by the Epicurean tradition through Lucretius. The "smallest" — in metaphysics the monad, in mathematics the point — in physics the atom, the indivisible spherical element of the corporeal world. Memories of the Pythagorean and Platonic theory of the elements, and of the related atomic theory of Deinocritus, became thus alive in the midst of Neo-Platonism they found also an independent revival with men like Basso, Sennert, and others,
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372 The Renaissance : Humanistic Period. [Part IV
and so led to the so-called corpuscular theory, according to which the corporeal world consists of inseparable atom-complexes, the coi- puscles. In the atoms themselves, the theory assumed in conneo tion with their mathematical form an original and unchangeable law of action, to which, it held, the mode of action of the corpuscles is also to be traced. 1
5. Here the workings of mathematics assert themselves in the old Pythagorean form, or as modified by Democritus and Plato. The ultimate constituents of physical reality are determined by- their geometrical form, and the qualitative determinations of experience must be traced back to this. The combination of elements presup poses numbers and their order as the principle of multiplicity. 1 Thus spatial forms and number-relations again make their appear ance as the essential and original in the physical world, and thereby the Aristotelian-Stoic doctrine of the qualitatively determined forces, of the inner Forms of things, of the quulitates occulta, was displaced. As this latter doctrine had formerly gained the victory over the principle of Pythagoras, Democritus, and Plato, so it must in turn yield to this : and herein lies one of the most important prepara tions for the origin of modern natural science.
The beginnings of this are found already with Nicolaus Cusanus ; but now they receive an essential strengthening from the same source from which their presence in his thought is explained : namely, from the old literature, and in particular from the Neo- Pythagorean writings. Just for this reason, however, they still have the fantastic m-taphysical garb of number-mysticism and num ber-symbolism. The book of Nature is written in numbers ; the har mony of things is that of the number-system. All is arranged by God according to measure and number ; all life is an unfolding of mathematical relations. But just as in antiquity, so here, this thought is unfolded at first as an arbitrary interpretation of concep tions, and a mysterious speculation. The procedure of the world forth from God, from the construction of the Trinity on, — as, for example, in the attempt of Bouille", — is again to be conceived as the process of the transformation of unity into the number-system. Such fantasies were followed by men like Cardan and Pico. Reuchlin added further the mythological creations of the Jewish Cabbala.
6. Thus the principle which was destined for the most fruitful development made its entrance into the new world wrapped again in the old metaphysical fantasticalness, and fresh forces were
i Cf. K. Lasswitz, Geschichte des Atomismus, I. pp. 359 ft°. (Hamburg and
Leips. 1890).
* Cf . for this especially G. Bruno, De. Triplid Minimo.
Chap. 1, §29. ] Macrocosm and Microcosm : Paracelsus. 373
needed to strip off this covering, and free it for its right working. Meanwhile, however, it became mingled with quite other efforts, which likewise had their origin in the Neo-Platonic tradition. To the idea of a universal psychical life, to the fanciful spiritualisation of Nature, belonged also the impulse to interfere in the course of things with mysterious means, with conjurations and magic arts, and so to guide it according to the will of man. Here, too, a higher thought hovered before the fantastic impulse of the excited age, — the thought of mastering Nature by a knowledge of the forces working in it. But this thought was also received in the wrappings of ancient superstition. If, as was the case with the Neo-Platonists, the life of Nature was regarded as a dominance of spirits, as a mys teriously connected system of internal forces, it was a proper aim to make these subject by knowledge and will. Thus magic became a favourite subject of thought in the Renaissance, and science again concerned itself with the task of bringing system into superstition.
Astrology, with its influences of the stars upon human life, the interpretation of dreams and signs, necromancy, with its conjura tions of spirits, the predictions of persons in the ecstatic state, — all these elements of the Stoic and Ne>Platonic divination were then in most luxuriant bloom. Pico and Reuchlin brought them into con nection with the number-mysticism ; Agrippa of Nettesheim adopted all the sceptical attacks against the possibility of rational science, in order to seek help in mystical illuminations and secret magic arts. Cardan proceeded with all seriousness to the task of deter mining the laws of these operations, and Campanella conceded them an unusually wide space in his idea of the world.
Physicians especially, whose vocation demanded an interference in the course of Nature and might seem permitted 10 expect special advantage in secret arts, showed an inclination toward these magic arts. From this point of view Paracelsus desired to reform medi
cine. He also proceeds from the sympathy of all things, from the idea of the universe as a spiritually connected system. He finds the essence of disease in the injuring of the individual vital prin ciple, the Archeus, by foreign powers, and seeks the means where with to free and strengthen the Archeus. Since this latter process must come about by a corresponding composition of materials, all sorts of magical drinks, tinctures, and other secret remedies must be brewed, and thus the arts of alchemy were set in motion, which, in spite of all its fantastic performances, ultimately yielded a number of useful results for chemical knowledge in the course of its incred ibly extended pursuits.
In this connection the fundamental metaphysical presupposition
374 The Menaistance : Humanistic Petiod. [Pabx IV.
of the unity of all vital force led of itself to the thought that there must be also a simple, most efficacious, universal remedy for the strengthening of every Archeus whatever, a panacea against all diseases and for the maintenance of all the vital forces ; and con nection with the macrocosmic efforts of magic nourished the hope that the possession of this secret would lend the highest magic power, and afford the most desirable treasures. All this was to be achieved by the " philosopher's stone " ; it was to heal all diseases, transmute all substances into gold, conjure all spirits into the power of its possessor. And thus the purposes which it was thought would be satisfied in the ventures of alchemy, were ultimately very real and sober.
7. The introduction of this magical view of Nature into the subtle religious system of German Mysticism constitutes the peculiar feat ure of Boehme's philosophy. He, too, is seized by the thought that philosophy should be knowledge of Nature ; but the deep earnest ness of the religious need which lay at the basis of the German Reformation did not allow him to content himself with the separa tion of religious metaphysics and natural science, customary at his time, and he sought to work the two into one again. Similar efforts which tended to transcend the dogmatic, fixed form of Protestant ism, and hoped to solve the problems of the new science with the aid of a Christian metaphysics, throve also by the side of the official Peripatetic system. TaureUus aimed to produce such a supra-con- fessional philosophy of Christianity, and with a true instinct for his purpose, adopted many elements of the Augustinian doctrine of the will, but was not able to work enough real material from the inter ests of his time into these thoughts, and so came ultimately rather to a complete separation of empirical research from all metaphysics. A similar process went on in the mystical movement, which grew with the popular opposition against the new orthodoxy all the more in proportion as the latter dried and hardened within itself. The mystical doctrines also remained suspended in vague generality until the teaching of Paracelsus was brought to them, at first by Weigel, and then completely by Boehme.
In Boehme's doctrine Neo-Platonism assumes again a completely religious colouring. Here, too, man is regarded as the microcosm from and by which the bodily, the " sidereal," and the divine worlds can be known, if one follows the right illumination and is not mis led by learned theories. Self-knowledge, nevertheless, is religious knowledge, which finds the opposition of good and evil as a funda mental trait of human nature. The same opposition fills the whole world; it rules in heaven as on earth, and since God is the sole
Chap. I, § 29. ] Macrocosm and Microcosm : Boehme. 375
cause of all, this opposition must be sought in him also. Boehme extends the coincidentia oppositorum to the extreme limit, and finds the ground of duality in the necessity of the self-revelation of the divine Primordial Ground. As light can be revealed only in con nection with darkness, so God's goodness can be revealed only in connection with his anger. Thus Boehme portrays the process of the eternal self-generation of God, describing how from the dark ground of Being within him the urgent impulse ("Drang"), or will, which has only itself for its object, attains self-revelation in the divine wisdom, and how that which has thus become revealed forms itself into the world. While the theogonic development thus passes over immediately into the cosmogonic, the effort is everywhere shown in this latter development to carry the fundamental religious antithesis into the physical categories of the system of Paracelsus. Thus three kingdoms of the world and seven forms, or "qualia" (" Qualen "), are constructed, which ascend from the material forces of attraction and repulsion to those of light and warmth, and from there on to those of the sensible and intellectual functions. To this portrayal of the eternal nature of things is then attached the history of the earthly world, which begins with the fall of Lucifer and the process of rendering the spiritual essence perceptible to the senses, and ends with the overcoming of the proud infatuation (" Vergafflsei n " ) for the creature, with the mystical devotion of man to the deity, and ultimately with the restoration of the spiritual nature. All this is presented by Boehme in prophetic discourse, full of deep conviction, with a unique mingling of profundity and dilettantism. It is the attempt of the Eckhartian Mysticism to become master of the modern interests of science, and the first still tentatively uncertain step toward raising natural science into an idealistic metaphysics. But because this is made from the stand point of the deepest religious life, the intellectualistic features of
the older Mysticism retreat, with Boehme, more into the background.
While with Eckhart, the world-process both in its arising and in its passing was regarded as a knowing process, with Boehme it is rather a struggling of the will between good and evil.
8. In all these ways the result of the separation of philosophy from dogmatic theology always was that the knowledge of Nature that was sought took on the form of the older metaphysics. This procedure was inevitable so long as the desire for a knowledge of Nature could provide neither a material of facts which it had itself acquired, nor new conceptions to serve as forms for the elaboration
of this material. As a prerequisite for this, it was necessary to see the inadequacy of metaphysical theories, and putting them aside,
376 The Renaissance : Humanistic Period. [Part IV.
to turn to empiricism. This service was rendered to the genesis of modern thought by the tendencies of Nominalism aud Terminism, in part, also, by the rhetorical and grammatical opposition to the science of the schools, and also by the revival of ancient Scepticism.
The writings of Ludovico Vices must be regarded as a common starting-point for these various efforts ; but they prove also that the importance of these endeavours is essentially negative in char acter. In place of the obscure words and arbitrary conceptions of metaphysics, a demand is made in nominalistic fashion for the im mediate, intuitive apprehension of things themselves by experience : but the remarks as to the manner in which this should be scientifi cally set about are meagre and uncertain ; he speaks of experiment, but without any very deep insight into its nature. Quite so lies the case at a later time with Sanchez. And if the artificial subtle ties of the syllogistic method were attacked with great hue and cry, this line of thought had ultimately only the Ramistic fancies of "natural logic" to pufin their stead.
Further, this empiricism, just by virtue of its origin from Termin ism, could move only with a very uncertain step in the presence of external Nature. It could not deny the background of Occam's dualism. Sense-perception was held to be, not a copy of a thing, but an inner state of the subject corresponding to the presence of the thing. These scruples could be only strengthened by the theories of ancient Scepticism, for this added the doctrine of the deceptions of the senses and the consideration of the relativity and change of all perceptions. Hence this empiricism of the Humanists now also threw itself more upon inner perception, which was univer sally regarded as much surer than outer perception. Vives is most fortunate where he speaks the language of empirical psychology ; men like Nizolius, Montaigne, and Sanchez shared this view, and Charron gave it practical significance. Strenuously as all these urge toward looking at things themselves, outer perception ultimately turns out comparatively empty.
How little certain of itself, and how little fruitful in principles this empiricism was at that time, is shown best of all by its two main representatives in Italy, — Telesio and Campanella. The former, one of the most stirring and influential opponents of Aristotelianisni( is everywhere famous even in his own time (and also with Bruno and Bacon), as he who demanded most strongly that science should build only on the basis of facts perceived by the senses. He founded in Naples an academy which he called the Academia Cosen- tina, after the name of his home, and, in fact, contributed much toward the cultivation of the sense for empirical natural science. ,
Chap. 1, § 29. ] Macrocosm and Microcotm : Campanella. 87T
But if we look to see how he treats Nature "juxta propria principiu," we are met by genuinely physical theories which from few observations hastily leap over to most general metaphysical principles quite after the fashion of the ancient Ionics. The dry-warm and the moist-cold are set forth as the two opposing fundamental forces, out of whose conflict both the macrocosmic and the microcosmic life are to be ex plained. This same inner contradiction appears almost more promi nent still in Campanella. He teaches the most pronounced sens ualism. All knowledge is for him a " feeling " (sentire) ; even recollection, judgment, and inference are for him but modified forms of that feeling. But in his case also, sensualism tilts over into psychological idealism ; he is far too good a Nominalist not to know that all perception is but a feeling of the states of the incip ient himself. Thus he takes his starting-point in inner experience, and following the principle of the analogy of macrocosmus and microcosmus, builds upon a simple apercu (cf. above) an extended ontology. Into this he then draws also the quite scholastic antith esis of Being and Non-being (ens and non-ens), which, following the Neo-Platonic example, is identified with that of the perfect and imperfect, and between the two he spreads the variegated meta physical picture of a world-system arranged in successive strata.
80 tenaciously do the long-wonted habits of metaphysical thought cling everywhere to the beginnings of the new research.
CHAPTER II.
THE NATURAL SCIENCE PERIOD.
Damiron, Essai stir VHistoire de la Philosophie au IT" Steele. Paris, 1846. Kuno Fischer, Francis Bacon und seine Nachfolger. 2d ed. , Leips. 1875.
Ch. de Remusat, Histoire de la Philosophie en Angleterre depuis Baconjusqu'a
Locke. 2 vols. , Paris, 1875.
Natural science acquired its decisive influence upon the develop ment of modern philosophy by first gaining its own independence with the aid of a conscious use of a scientific method, and then from this position being able to determine the general movement of thought as regards both form and content. In so far the develop ment of the method of natural science from Kepler and Galileo down to Newton is not indeed itself the evolution of modern philos ophy, but is yet that series of events in reference to which this evolution constantly proceeds.
For this reason the positive beginnings of modern philosophy are in general to be sought, not so much in new conceptions with new content, as in methodical reflection, out of which, with the progress of time, there resulted of course new material and so new points of view for the treatment of both theoretical and practical problems. But at first the points of departure of modern thought were in all cases where permanently fruitful conceptions of the task and thereby conditioned procedure of the new science grew out of the humanistic opposition against Scholasticism, and out of the excited metaphysical fantasies of the transitional period.
In this consists from the outset an essential difference between modern and ancient philosophy. The former is as reflective in its beginning as the latter was nai've, and this is self-explaining, since the former must develop out of those traditions which the latter created. In this way it is characteristic of the greater number of the systems of modern philosophy to seek the path to the real or " material " problems by considering the science of method and the theory of knowledge ; and in particular the seventeenth century with
respect to its philosophy may be characterised as a strife of methods. 378
Chap. 2. ]
While, however, the movement of the humanistic period had in the main taken place in Italy and Germany, the cooler and more considerate temper of the two western civilised peoples now became prominent Italy was made dumb by the counter-reformation, Ger many was crippled by the ruinous war between the confessions. England and France, on the contrary, experienced in the seventeenth century the bloom of their intellectual civilisation, and between them the Netherlands became a flourishing seat of art and science.
In the development of the method of natural science the lines of empiricism and of mathematical theory converged : in philosophical generalisation the two came forward in an independent attitude. The programme of the experience philosophy was laid down by Bacon, but the method which formed its fundamental thought was not car ried out by him in the fruitful manner which he had anticipated. Much more comprehensive was the form in which Descartes brought together the scientific movement of his time to establish rationalism anew, by filling the scholastic system of conceptions with the rich content of the Galilean research. From this resulted far-reaching metaphysical problems, which in the second half of the seventeenth century called forth an extraordinarily vigorous movement of philo sophical thought, — a movement in which the new principles entered into manifold antithetical combinations with the principles of mediae
val philosophy. Out of the Cartesian school rose Occasionalism, of which Oeulincx and Malebranclie are the chief representatives. But the complete issue of this development was found in the two great philosophical systems brought forward by Spinoza and Leibniz.
The influence which the powerful development of theoretical phil osophy exercised also upon the treatment of practical problems shows itself principally in the field of the philosophy of law (or right). In thia department Hobbes, who was in like measure a disciple of Bacon and of Descartes, and as such marks an important point in the line of development of methods and metaphysics above noted, takes the decisive position as the introducer of an ethical naturalism which is found in altered form even with his opponents, such as Herbert oj
Cherbury and Cumberland. In these antitheses the problems of the philosophy of the Enlightenment are in process of preparation.
The teriea of great natural scientists who exercised an immediate influence also upon philosophical questions was opened by Johann Kepler ( IftM-HMO) of Weil, a town in WUrtt*mberg, who died in Regensburg after a life spent in struggle with need and anxiety. Among his works (ed. by Krisch, Frankfurt, 1868-71, 8 vols. ), the most important are Mytterium Cotmngraphieum, Harmo nize Mundi. Aflronomia . Vara leu Phyrica Catlentis Tradita CommeutariU de
Motibu* Stella- Mortis. Cf. Ohr. Sigwart, Kleine Srhriflen. I. 182 ff. ; R. Kucken, Pkilut. Monatih. , 1878, pp. 30 ff. — In immediate attachment to htm stands OaUleo Galilei (born I'M at I'Ua, died 1042 at ArcetriJ. Ilia works were
Natural Science Period. 379
380 Philosophy of the Renaissance. [Part IV.
published in 15 vols. (Florence, 1842-56) with a biographical supplementary volume by Arrago. Vols. 11-14 contain the Fisico-Mathematica ; among which we notice II Saggiatore (1623) and the dialogue on the Ptolemaic and the Copernican systems (1632). Cf. II. Martin, Galileo, let droits de la science et la methode de* sciences physiques (Paris, 1668) ; P. Natorp, Gal. als Philo- soph. (PAi'ios. Monatsh. , 1882, pp. 193 ft\). Isaac Newton (1642-1727) comes into consideration chiefly on account of his Philosophim Naturalis Principia Mathematica (1687; 2d ed. by Cotes, 1713; German by Wolfers, 1872) and his Optics (1704). —Of his contemporaries we notice the chemist, Robert Boyle (1626-1691; Chemista Scepticus ; Origo Formarum et Qualitatum; De Ipsa Natura), and the Netherlander, Christian Huyghens (1629-1695; De Causa Gravitatis; De Lumine).
Cf. W. Whewell, History of the Inductive Sciences (Loud. 1837 ; German by Littrow, Leips. 1839 ff. ) ; E. F. Apelt, Die Epochen der Geschichte der Mensch- heit (Jena, 1845) ; E. DUhring, Kritische Geschichte der Principien der Mechanilc (Leips. 1872) ; A. Lange, Gfsch. des Materialismus, 2d ed. , Iseriobn, 1873 [Eng. tr. History of Materialism by E. C. Thomas, Lond. , 4th ed. , 1892J ; K. Lasswitz, Gesch. der Atomistik, 2 vols. (Hamburg and Leips. 1890).
Francis Bacon, Baron of Verulam, Viscount of St. Albans, was born in 1561, studied in Cambridge, had a brilliant career under the reigns of Elizabeth and James I. , until, as the result of political opposition, he was proceeded against, convicted of venality, and deposed from the position of Lord High Chancellor. He died 1626. The latest edition of his works is that by Spedding and Heath (Lond. 1857 ff. ). Aside from the Essays (Sermones Fideles) the main writings are De Dignilate et Augmentis Scientiarum (1623 ; originally published under the title, The Two Books of Frattis Bacon on the Proftrience and Advancementof Learning, Divine and Human, 1605) and Novum Organon Scientiarum (1620; originally under the title, Cogitata et Visa, 1012). ' Cf. Ch. de Remusat, Bacon, Sa vie, son temps, sa philosophic et son influence
jusqu'a nos jours (Paris, 1864) ; H. Heussler, Fr. B. und seine geschichtlichf Stellung (Breslau, 1889) ; [Bacon, by J. Nichol, in Blackwood's series, Edin. 1888 : Ed. of the Novum Organum by Fowler, Oxford, 1878].
Rene Descartes (Cartesius), born 1596, in Touraine, and educated in the Jesuit school at La Fleche, was originally destined for a soldier and took part in the campaigns of 1618-1621 in the service of various leaders, but then betook himself for the first time to Paris, and later, withdrew for many years, at differ ent places in the Netherlands, into a scientific solitude, which he kept in the most diligent and careful manner. After controversies in which his doctrine had become involved at the universities in that country had rendered this place of residence disagreeable, he accepted, in 1649, an invitation of Queen Christine of Sweden to Stockholm, where he died the following year. His works have been collected in Latin in the Amsterdam editions (1650, etc. ), and in French by V. Cousin (11 vols. , Paris, 1824 ff. ) ; the important writings have been trans lated into German by Kuno Fischer (Mannheim, 1863) [Eng. tr. of the Method,
Meditations and Selections from the Principles by J. Veitch, Edin. and Lond. , 1st ed. , 1850-62, 10th ed. , 1890 ; of the Meditations by Lowndes, Lond. 1878, also in Jour. Spec. Phil. , Vol. IV. , 1870, by W. R. Walker; and of the Rules for the Direction of the Mind, with selections from the Med. 's, The World, The Passions of the Soul, etc. , by H. A. P. Torrey, N. Y. 1892]. The main works are Le Monde ou Traiti de la Lumiere (posthumously printed, 1654) ; Fssays, 16:17, among them the Discours de la Methode and the Dioptrics ; Meditationes de Prima Philosophia, 1641, supplemented by the objections of various savants and Descartes' replies ; Principia Philosophia;, 1644 ; Passions de VAme, 1650. Cf. F. Bouillier, Histoire de la Philosophic Cartisienne (Paris, 1854) ; X. Schmid-
1 It is well known that very recently much noise has been made over the discovery that Lord Bacon wrote Shakspere's works also, in his leisure hours. To fuse two great literary phenomena into one may have something alluring in it, but in any case a mistake has been made in the person. For it would be much more probable that Shakspere had incidentally composed the Baconian philosophy. [The Germans seem to take this "noise" much more seriously than Shakspere's countrymen. — Tr. ]
Chap. 2. ]
schwarzenberg, It. D. nnd seine Reform der Philosophic (Nordlingen, 1850) ; G. Glogau in Zeifehr. f. Philos. , 1878, pp. 209 S. ; P. Natorp, D. 's Erkenntniss- theorie (Marburg, 1882). [Descartes by J. P. Mahaffy in Blackwood's series, K. liii. and l'liila . 1881 ; W. Wallace, Art.
