It is with such views that Jacob Boehme seeks to fathom that world which for him, according to the knowledge of his time, was reckoned as the actual world of fact. For him all is fact which is so regarded by the natural science of his time and by the Bible. His way of conceiving things is one thing, his world of facts quite another. One can imagine the former applied to a totally different knowledge of facts. And thus there appears before our eyes a Jacob Boehme as he might stand at the parting of the nineteenth and the twentieth centuries. Such a one would not saturate with his way of conceiving things the six days’ creation work of the Bible and the fight of the angels and the devils, but Lyell’s geological knowledge and the facts of Haeckel’s _The History of Creation_. He who can penetrate into the spirit of Jacob Boehme’s writings must arrive at this conviction.[18] [18] We may here name the most important of Boehme’s writings: _Die Morgenröthe im Aufgang_; _Die drei Prinzipien göttlichen Lebens oder über das dreifache Leben des Menschen_; _Das umgewandte Auge_; _“Signatura rerum” oder von der Geburt und Bezeichnung aller Wesen_; _Das “Mysterium Magnum_.” GIORDANO BRUNO AND ANGELUS SILESIUS In the first decennium of the sixteenth century, the scientific genius of Nicholas Copernicus (1473-1543) thinks out in the castle of Heilsberg, in Prussia, an intellectual structure which compels the men of subsequent epochs to look up to the starry heavens with other conceptions than those which their forefathers in antiquity and the Middle Ages had. To them the earth was their dwelling-place, at rest in the centre of the Universe. The stars, however, were for them beings of a perfect nature, whose motion took place in circles because the circle is the representative of perfection. In that which the stars showed to human senses they beheld something of the nature of soul, something spiritual. It was one kind of speech that the things and processes upon earth spoke to man; quite another, that of the shining stars, beyond the moon in the pure æther, which seemed like some spiritual nature filling space. Nicholas of Cusa had already formed other ideas. Through Copernicus, earth became for man a brother-being in face of the other heavenly bodies, a star moving like others. All the difference that earth has to show for man he could now reduce to this: that earth is his dwelling-place. He was no longer forced to think differently about the events of this earth and those of the rest of universal space. The world of his senses had expanded itself into the most remote spaces. He was compelled henceforth to allow that which penetrated his eye from the æther to count as sense-world just as much as the things of earth. He could no longer seek in the æther in sensuous fashion for the Spirit.