same name with one another:--"He takes the word _vacuum_ in a sense
in which no one has ever understood it, building castles in the air,
and then pulling down his 'vacuum,' but not that of any other who has
spoken of a vacuum or made use of the name. So he acts in all other
cases,--those for example of 'motion,' 'infinite,' 'matter,' 'form,'
'demonstration,' 'being,' always building on the faith of his own
definition, which gives the name a new sense."[168]
[Sidenote: The Pre-Aristotelians.]
The close study of Aristotle himself, which was one of the greatest
results of the Humanist movement, had the effect of bringing into
greater prominence the earlier Greek philosophers, whose doctrines
Aristotle states and criticises in many of his works--notably the
_Physics_ and _Metaphysics_. The rediscovery of antiquity included
that of ancient philosophy; and Bruno's dissatisfaction with Aristotle
led him into greater sympathy with the nature-philosophers whom
Aristotle decried. Towards these earlier Greeks, as towards other
philosophers, his attitude is wholly that of an Eclectic: he does
not attempt to appreciate their relative value, nor to discover any
evolution of thought through the successive systems. From each he
takes that which agrees or appears to agree with his own philosophy,
and treats it as an anticipation of, or as an authority for, the
latter. The "universal intelligence," for example, as the universal
efficient cause in nature, is a doctrine ascribed in the _Causa_
indiscriminately to the Pythagoreans, the Platonists, the Magi,
Orpheus, Empedocles, and Plotinus.[169] The belief in an infinite ether
(Heraclitus' Fire) surrounding the earth, and containing innumerable
worlds within it, in the _Cena_ is attributed, equally without
discrimination, to Heraclitus, Democritus, Epicurus, Pythagoras,
Parmenides, and Melissus.[170] Xenophanes represented for Bruno the
static aspect of Pantheism--the Absolute One as in itself, apart from
all reference to the finite;[171] Heraclitus its dynamic aspect--the
Absolute as unfolding, revealing itself, "appearing" in and through
the finite.[172] Anaxagoras expressed the relation between the
finite individual and the One,--"All things are in all things," for
"omnipotent, all-producing divinity pervades the whole, therefore
nothing is so small but that divinity lies concealed in it."[173]
"Everything is in everything, because spirit or soul is in all things,
and therefore out of anything may be produced anything else."[174]
To Anaxagoras, as to Bruno, nature was divine.[175] No special
distinction was made by Bruno between the teaching of Anaxagoras and
that of Empedocles: in one passage he attributes to the former the
theory of effluxes and influxes of atoms through the pores of bodies,
which really belongs to the latter,[176] and in another suggests that
Empedocles only put in a more "abstract" way what Anaxagoras had shown
"concretely," that all things are in all.[177]
[Sidenote: Democritus]
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