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] [Sidenote: Descartes.] 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. 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