MODERN THINKERS
AND
PRESENT PROBLEMS
AN APPROACH TO MODERN PHILOSOPHY
THROUGH ITS HISTORY
BY
EDGAR A. SINGER, Jr., Ph.D.
PROFESSOR OF PHILOSOPHY
IN THE UNIVERSITY OF PENNSYLVANIA
NEW YORK
HENRY HOLT AND COMPANY
1923
Copyright, 1923,
BY
HENRY HOLT AND COMPANY
PRINTED IN
UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
PREFACE
These papers, which had been written from time to time and for various
occasions, have been brought together without any attempt to make
them tell a smooth unbroken story, yet not without regard to their
connectedness. They have sometimes served me to bring before the mind
of youth certain problems on which philosophers have thought again and
again. But if they have had any interest for youth, if they are to have
any for maturity, it can only be because the names that stand over the
chapters might, if moments had names, be those of moments in each man’s
history.
And as such, unless I have altogether failed to make my characters
real, these names will be recognized. Who has not sometime been that
Bruno who stepped from his Father’s House, where all had revolved so
solicitously about himself, to find without the cold stars gazing down
on his atomy from their places in endless emptiness?
Who has not come to feel, with Spinoza, those inviolable laws of
mechanism which govern the world about him creeping into his own inmost
being, threatening there all that he had so simply and yet so dearly
clung to as his freedom and autonomy?
How many reflecting in their maturity on the unquestioning faiths
of their childhood have thought to bring these to the test of such
experience as natural science depends on, only to find, as Hume found,
these faiths unconfirmed?
And of those who have lived through this moment of disillusionment,
there will always be some who will have come in their own way to the
position severe reasoning forced on Kant: The spiritual aspects of
reality are not issues of science and intellection, but belong to that
other order of truth grasped by the “practical reason.”
Others, meanwhile, will have refused to let their speculation go beyond
the insight experience yields, and of these some at least will have
found that experience holds out nothing hopeful for now or forever.
They will have seen with Schopenhauer into the “deep abyss” and found
at the bottom of it only this counsel: Not-being is better than being.
Or if perhaps they have for a moment thought, with Nietzsche, that
evolutionary science had brought to view a goal that gave heart to the
pitiless struggle of life by holding before it the vision of the “far
future man,” they may in the end have come to see beyond this Superman.
But to have seen beyond him nothing but the super-superman is to have
seen the goal vanish and the heart lose its hope.
And what then? The pages on “Pragmatism” and on “Progress” may offer
suggestions of an answer. They are still historical in their spirit,
and like those that had gone before them mean to illustrate, not to
demonstrate or affirm. They, too, would stand for moments of any
thoughtful life and will have done all they were intended to do if they
inform such a life with, and give it a sense of attachment to the world
that has gone before and is going on ’round.
But if one would at the outset know something of what the writer
suspects to be the outcome of ordered and historically guided
reflection on these subjects, let him turn to the closing chapter, if
not for encouragement then for warning.
* * * * *
Every one will remember the word to his reader with which Montaigne
closes the preface to his Essays. ’Tis but of himself he would write
and “it is then no reason thou shouldst employ thy time about so
frivolous and vain a subject. Therefore farewell.”
I cannot close _my_ preface without confessing a misgiving that must
have beset everyone who ever wrote of the past: that whereas he set out
to lose himself in history, he may have found in history nothing but
himself. But on the bare chance of this having befallen me, I need not
say “farewell” beforehand; for well I know no reader will accompany me
far through this past save one who finds _him_self there too.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
CHAPTER PAGE
I. Giordano Bruno, 1548-1600 3
II. Benedict de Spinoza 1632-1677 37
III. A Disciple of Spinoza (An Illustration) 65
IV. David Hume, 1711-1776 97
V. Immanuel Kant, 1724-1804 129
VI. Arthur Schopenhauer, 1788-1860 155
VII. Friedrich Nietzsche, 1844-1900 183
VIII. Pragmatism 213
IX. Progress 249
X. Royce on Love and Loyalty 283
XI. Retrospect and Prospect 303
I
GIORDANO BRUNO
1548-1600
The straightest way to the heart of old matters is an old letter. Here
is one written on the twenty-third of May, 1592, by a gentleman of
Venice to the Father of the Venetian Inquisition.
“Very Reverend Father and Most-to-be-observed Sir:
“I, Gioanni Mocenigo, son of the Clarissimo Messer Marcoantonio,
compelled by my conscience and ordered by my confessor, denounce to
Your Very Reverend Paternity Giordano Bruno of Nola, whom I have heard
say on various occasions when he was conversing with me in my own
house, that Catholics do but blaspheme when they hold the Bread to be
transubstantiated into the Flesh; that he is against the Mass; that
no religion satisfies him; that Christ was a charlatan who, since he
resorted to tricks to fool people, might well enough have foreseen
that he would die a criminal’s death; that there is no distinction
of Persons in God; ... that the world is eternal and that there are
an infinite number of worlds, and that God is continually making an
infinity of them because He wants as many as He can have; that Christ
performed specious miracles; that he was a magician and the apostles
were magicians too.”...
The letter runs on in breathless denunciation, but already one begins
to make out the image of Bruno reflected in the average mind of his
time. The limited intelligence of Mocenigo has honestly misunderstood
some of Bruno’s utterances, his malice has distorted others; but the
perversity of the whole is not due to these faults of detail. Lost in
this jumble of stock heresies lies hidden a great idea, the greatest
perhaps that has ever been contributed by a single mind to the cause of
our science. “And he says the world is eternal and that there are an
infinity of worlds.” This sentence has brought the old world to an end,
has shattered the heavens under which Christendom was then living, yet
it falls on the ear of its time with no more meaning or portent than a
doubt respecting the doctrine of transubstantiation or the authenticity
of miracles. Bruno, throughout the course of his driven life and up to
the moment of his tragic death, knew most forms of martyrdom. He bore
none of these meekly, for his was a lusty soul that did not love to
suffer. But neither the hatred nor the cruelty of his world seems to
have hurt him so to the quick as did its stupidity. Doubt him and hate
if you will; but value him you must! He was master of a great idea and
unacquainted with modesty.
Meanwhile Mocenigo has more to say of this sinner: “He has expressed
the intention of making himself the founder of a new sect under the
name of the new philosophy. He has said that the Virgin could not have
brought a child into the world, and that our Catholic faith is full
of blasphemies against the majesty of God; that it would be better to
suppress the largesses of wrangling friars because they befoul the
world; that they are all asses and that our common opinions are the
teaching of asses; that we have no proof that our faith has merit
with God; that the simple rule of not doing unto others what we would
not have done unto us is sufficient for right living.”... Perhaps I
may stop here. Evidently one who could be guilty of all these follies
would be ingenious in inventing others, and Mocenigo’s letter may run
endlessly on.
While this letter was writing, Bruno lay locked in a room of Mocenigo’s
house. “I had thought to learn from him,” Mocenigo explains, “not
knowing him to be the wicked man he is, and having noted all these
things to lay before your Very Reverend Paternity, and fearing that he
would take his departure as he said he wished to do, I have locked him
in a room at your disposal. As I think him possessed of the devil, I
hope you will decide quickly what is to be done with him....”
* * * * *
It has sometimes been wondered how Bruno came to accept the invitation
of Mocenigo to take up his residence in Venice. Italy was for him a
place of such peril that it seems incredible he should have ventured to
set foot in it. “Tell me one thing more,” concludes a letter written
in this same year 1592 by a gentleman of Bologna to a friend in Padua,
“tell me one thing more. Giordano Bruno, whom you knew at Wittenberg,
the Nolan, is said to be living among you just now at Padua. Is it
really so? What sort of man is this that he dares to enter Italy, which
he left in exile as he himself used to confess? I wonder, I wonder. I
cannot yet believe the rumor, although I have it on good authority. You
shall tell me whether it is true.” And history has wondered all the
more seeing that Bruno himself had long before prophesied the result.
“Torches,” he had written, “fifty or a hundred, will not fail me though
the march be at noonday should it be my fate to die in a Catholic
country.”
So far as documents furnish any answer to this question, it lies
suggested in a second letter written by Mocenigo to the Holy
Inquisition two days after the denunciation. “In the course of the day
that I kept Giordano Bruno locked up, I asked him whether the things
that he would not teach me, as he promised to do in return for the
many kindnesses I had done him and the many gifts that I had given
him, whether he would not consent to teach me them if I abstained
from denouncing him for all the criminal things he had uttered to me
against our Lord Jesus Christ and against the Holy Catholic Church. He
answered that he did not fear the Inquisition, for he had harmed no
one by living in his own way, and moreover he could not recall having
said anything sinful, but that if he had said such things he had said
them only to me, and he need not fear that I would do him harm in the
way I suggested.” Those who can may believe that Bruno is here telling
the truth about himself. Those who can may believe that he who eight
years before and at a safe distance from Italy had so clearly seen
the torches that awaited him there, had since grown blind to them or
indifferent.
The next document of the trial is brief enough. Under date of the
following day--that is, Tuesday, the twenty-sixth of May--is found this
entry: “Clarissimo Dom Aloysius Fuscari presiding. Presented himself
Dom Matheus de Avantio, Captain of the Constabulary, and reported as
follows: Sabbath at three o’clock of the night,[1] I arrested Giordano
Bruno of Nola, whom I found in a house over against Saint Samuels, in
which dwells the Clarissimo Ser Gioanni Mocenigo, and I have imprisoned
him in the Prisons of the Holy Office, and this I have done by order of
this Holy Tribunal.”
The doors of the prison closing on Bruno bring to an end the story of
his life, but from behind these doors there come to us fragments of the
story itself as Bruno retells it to his judges. For on the very day
of his arrest he is examined by a tribunal composed of the Apostolic
Nuncio, the Patriarch of Venice, the Very Reverend Father Inquisitor.
Before these, as the clerk of the tribunal records it, was brought a
certain man of ordinary height with a chestnut beard, who, when he
had been admonished to speak the truth, and before any question could
be put to him, burst out of his own accord: “I will tell the truth.
Several times have I been threatened with being brought before this
Holy Office, but I have always taken the threat for a joke, because
I am ever ready to give account of myself.” Whereupon he tells how,
having found himself at Frankfurt the previous year, he received there
two letters from Gioanni Mocenigo, inviting him to come to Venice to
instruct Mocenigo in the art of memory and the art of invention, for
which this Venetian gentleman had promised to pay him well and treat
him in a way that should content him. And so Bruno had come to Venice
seven or eight months before, living first in lodgings, then for a
brief space in Padua, until some two months prior to his arrest he had
taken up his residence in Mocenigo’s own house. We already know how,
“compelled by his conscience and ordered by his confessor,” Mocenigo
finally disposed of his guest.
Then Bruno questioned by the tribunal, laid before it a formal account
of his life. “My name is Giordano Bruno, of the family of the Bruni, of
the city of Nola, twelve miles from Naples. In this place I was born
and raised, and my profession was and is letters and the sciences. My
father was named Gioanni, and my mother Fraulissa Savolina, and my
father’s calling was that of a soldier. He is dead since, and my mother
too.
“I am about forty-four years of age, and I was born, so far as I have
heard from my people, in the year 1548. I remained in Naples learning
the humanities, logic, and dialectics until fourteen years of age ...
and then I took the habit of Saint Dominic in the monastery or convent
of Saint Dominic in Naples, and was invested by a Padre who was then
prior of that convent, called Maestro Ambrosio Pasqua. When the year
of probation was passed, I was admitted by him to profession, which
was solemnly made in the same convent.... Later I was promoted to
holy orders and at the usual season to the priesthood. I sang my first
mass in Campagnia, a city of the same state at a distance from Naples,
residing the while in a convent of the order, the San Bartholomeo, and
continued in the religious habit of Saint Dominic, celebrating masses
and the divine offices, obedient to the superior of the Order and to
the priors of the monasteries and convents where I was stationed until
1576....”
I have not wanted to interrupt Bruno, nor to hurry him in his story,
tedious as it is in the telling. Little event after little event of his
secular and of his religious life befalls with the trivial monotony
of dropping rain. But is it not just so that these little events and
endless others like them must have fallen on the soul of the living
Bruno, soaking in, soaking in, unnoticed as rain, until his very humors
ran with their humor? Now their humor was the spirit of the old world,
the spirit of his Father’s House. Would it not be curious if, having
pulled down this ridiculous old dwelling and in the very act of dancing
among its ruins, Bruno should suddenly come to see that it was the
only house his soul, being such a soul as it was, could dwell in? If
something of this kind did not happen at a moment of his life we are
fast approaching, then only the gods know what did happen. But I am
anticipating, or rather laying up reflections against our hour of need.
For the moment we have no more than come to the day in Bruno’s life
when he stepped out of his Father’s House to make his way _ins Freie
hinaus_.
* * * * *
Fifty years ago, before Berti had unearthed the documents of this
trial, it was difficult to trace the life of Bruno. Since then it has
become well-nigh impossible. Documents are a great embarrassment to the
conscientious historian. They are there, these documents, and have to
be put in the text; the truth about the case must be relegated to the
foot-notes. Now the text runs in this wise: “In 1576 ... I was in Rome
at the Convent of Minerva, obedient to the orders of Maestro Sisto de
Luca, Procurator of the Order. Thither I had gone to present myself
because at Naples two processes had been instituted against me, the
first for having given away certain images of the saints and retaining
only a crucifix, it being thought that this showed a lack of respect
for the images of the saints; and the other for having said to a novice
who was reading a story of the Seven Beatitudes in verse, What did he
think he was doing with a book like that?--why didn’t he throw it away
and read rather some other book, as the lives of the Holy Fathers? This
process was renewed at the time I went to Rome, with other articles
added to it which I do not know, for I abandoned the order and threw
aside the habit and went to Noli in the region of Genoa, where I
supported myself four or five months teaching grammar to young boys.”
This is indeed the text, but is not a comment inevitable? What! Bruno
would have us believe that in 1576 he is of such fearful mood and timid
temper that, having no more on his conscience than the events recited,
he abandons church and country, peace and security at the mere frown of
his Order, but that in 1592, having in the meanwhile upset, smashed,
and abused the Christian world, he can look upon the Inquisition
without fear, bethinking him that he had harmed no man in living in his
own way?
However, flee he did. What followed on this flight he recounts to his
judges as his trial proceeds. Sixteen years of as hard-driven a life
as one could wish for one’s dearest foe, from Italy to Switzerland
(to the Geneva of Calvin’s day, where one may imagine that Bruno was
as much at home as fire on an iceberg), then across to France, from
Lyons to Toulouse, from Toulouse to Paris, from France to England, from
London back to Paris, then hastily to Germany, through many German and
Bohemian cities! Sixteen years of homeless, friendless poverty, now
teaching small boys, now lecturing at great universities, now living
with fine gentlemen, received by a king or a queen, now gathering a few
curious students about him, who somehow confused the promise of the
great idea with old mysteries and the arts we call black. Until at last
we find him at Frankfurt receiving Mocenigo’s letters promising him a
home in Italy, his native land, and a treatment that should content him.
Yet these years of travail were those in which his works were written,
the Italian dialogues in England, the Latin poems in Germany. The
great idea had received full expression, the “Excubitor,” as Bruno
called himself, the Awakener of sleeping minds, had blown his trumpet
and the walls of the world had fallen. Splendid is the enthusiasm
with which Bruno first announces this new vision of the morning: “Lo!
here is one who has swept the air, pierced the heavens, sped by the
stars and passed beyond the bounds of the world, who has annihilated
the fantastic spheres with which foolish mathematicians and vulgar
philosophers had closed us in. The key of his diligent curiosity has
opened to the view of every sense and every power of reason such
closets of truth as can be opened by us. He has stripped nature of her
robe and veil. He has given eyes to the mole, vision to the blind....
No longer is our reason imprisoned within the confines of imaginary
heavens.... We know that there is but one heaven, one immense ether,
where magnificent fires maintain their proper distances by reason of
that eternal life in which they have part. These flaming bodies are the
ambassadors which announce the excellence of God’s glory and majesty.”
This is indeed the voice of an Awakener. But, alas for awakeners! the
vision of the morning is never fair to those just shaken out of their
dreams. In an introductory letter to the last of the dialogues we catch
an echo of the sleeper’s complaint: “If I shoved a plow, if I kept a
flock, if I cultivated a garden, if I mended old clothes, no one would
notice me, few would consider me, not many would find fault with me,
and I could easily please everybody. But for having been studious of
the field of nature, solicitous for the pasture of the soul, enamored
of the cultivation of the mind, a very Daedalus fashioning raiment for
the intellect, every passer-by threatens me, every one who sees me
attacks me, who comes upon me rends me, who lays hold on me devours.
It is not one, it is not a few; it is many, it is almost all. If you
would know why this is, I will tell you the reason of it--I despise the
crowd, I hate the mob, the multitude contents me not. One thing I love,
one thing for whose sake I am free in bondage, content in pain, rich
in poverty, alive in very death. One thing for whose sake I envy not
those who are slaves in their liberty, troubled in their pleasure, poor
in their riches, dead in their life. Their body is the chain that binds
them, in their mind is the hell that tortures them, in their spirit
the falsehood that makes them sick, in their soul the lethargy that
kills. Not theirs the greatness of mind which frees, the breadth of
view which ennobles. Not theirs the splendor which illumines, nor the
science which gives life.” It is a brave, even an over-brave flourish
with which Bruno ends this proemial epistle: “And so the gods deliver
me from all those who unjustly hate me, and my God be always propitious
unto me!... The stars let my sowing fit the field and the field my
sowing, that the world be made content with the useful and glorious
fruits of my labors!... And if I err, I truly do not believe myself
to err; whether speaking or writing, I do not dispute for the love
of victory.... For love of true wisdom and desire for true insight I
exhaust, I crucify, I torture myself....”
* * * * *
Brave is the flourish, how over-brave we realize with unexpected
intensity as we follow this solemn trial to its last scene. Having
recounted the episodes of his life, Bruno proceeds to the explanation
and defense of his teachings. At first the new philosophy is presented
with no little boldness and confidence, its difference from the formal
teaching of Christianity admitted and even pointed out. But always with
a certain reserve, as of one who would say, “Yes, I have broken the
frame and melted the flesh of your religion, but if you will let me, I
will show how much more nobly its divine spirit dwells in the new body
I have made for it.” Now this new body differs in no important way from
the physical universe as we see it today, so that Bruno’s problem has
been the problem of all Christian thought since his time. What Aquinas
had done in the way of making the spirit of Christianity at home in
the finite heaven-enclosed world of Aristotle, that Bruno felt must
be done over again, now that the world was no longer finite and the
distinction between Heaven and Earth had vanished. This is the thought
that pervades the first days of Bruno’s account of himself before the
Venetian tribunal, but as one by one the accusations of Mocenigo’s
letter fall on him, he seems to lose hope and confidence in himself. He
denies, and denies, and denies!
I am not convinced that he is telling the truth in these denials. I am
not convinced that Mocenigo’s account of him, barring a few obvious
misunderstandings, is false in spirit. No more am I convinced that
Bruno has been frightened into lying himself out of danger. He seems
to me to say, “Alas! if these matters on which you question me are of
the essence of Christianity, then have I been wrong in supposing that
the old wine can be put in the new bottle.” Driven and perplexed, he
has to decide which lies nearest to his heart, the new bottle or the
old wine. Remember him fleeing in his early manhood from his Father’s
House, ostensibly in childish fear and unwillingly, but really perhaps
because he needed space, endless space, through which to follow the new
idea. Remember him coming back to Italy sixteen years later, ostensibly
because he realized that his manner of living and thinking had hurt
no man and so ought to bring down no judgment on his head, but really
perhaps because the craving for the old wine was deeper in him than
the enthusiasm for the new bottle. Perhaps then we can understand the
closing scene of his trial at Venice. “It may be,” he cries, “in the
long time that has passed I have committed other sins and departed from
the Church in other ways than those which I have explained, and that
I have not cleansed myself of all matters of censure, but although
I have thought much over these things, I can recall nothing more. I
have confessed, and I now confess anew my errors, and I am here in the
hands of Your Most Illustrious Lordships to receive punishment for the
saving of my soul. My soul cannot express the depth of its contrition
for my fault.” And falling on his knees, he said, “I humbly ask pardon
of the Lord God and of Your Most Illustrious Lordships for all the
errors which I have committed and which I now stand ready to expiate
in such wise as your wisdom may think proper and judge expedient for
my soul. And moreover, I beg that you give me a punishment which shall
exceed in severity rather than set any public example which may throw
dishonor on the sacred religious habit I have worn. And if by God’s
mercy and the mercy of Your Most Illustrious Lordships, life shall be
spared me, I promise to make such notable reform of my life as shall
pay for the scandal I have given with equal and greater edification.”
In this unhappy posture I leave Bruno the man to take up the story of
his great idea. We shall see him once more indeed, at the moment when,
eight years later, he calmly dies for the idea he now so abjectly
abandons; but no understanding of the alternating enthusiasm and
despair that filled this life can afford to neglect the qualities of
the gospel it stood for, forsook, then died for in the end.
* * * * *
Like all very great ideas, this one is of the simplest. It begins with
the observation that the flame of a candle grows bigger as we approach
it, smaller as we recede from it. Nothing very new in this, you say,
nor very imposing. No, it is the next step that was so new in Bruno’s
day, and of such tremendous destructive and creative power. Yet it is
just as simple as the first. What is true of a candle flame must be
true of a sun and of a star. Is it not indeed simple? Yes, but in all
the long while the world had lasted it had occurred to no one before
Bruno to seize upon this simple idea and to follow whither it led. It
led far, wonderfully far. It led Bruno to journey in imagination out
and out toward those most distant stars that were then called fixed,
and were indeed supposed to be fixed in one great sphere that enclosed
all things, beyond which was nothing, and not even nothing, for there
was no beyond; space ended where matter ended, at the walls of the
world. But Bruno as he journeyed saw this great sun of ours growing
smaller and smaller as he receded from it, and yonder star growing
larger and larger as he approached it, until the most wonderful thing
happened. The sun began to look more and more like a star, and the star
more and more like a sun. There was now no escaping the conclusion--the
stars that had been called fixed are other suns, our sun but a
near-lying star.
A child might have grasped this idea which brought a world to an end.
Do I say a child? It may be that Bruno was that child, for his mind
throughout had much of the waywardness, something of the random and
tumultuous association of a child’s mind. The past might interest him,
might even inspire him; it never had the power of capturing and holding
him. But childish as it was, this idea did destroy the old world, for
if stars were in no wise different from the sun we know, nor the sun
from a star, evidently there was at least one star that was not fixed
to the ethereal sphere that contained all things. There could then be
no longer any motive for supposing these other suns to be all at the
same distance from the center. They might be anywhere, they might even
(Bruno had this very modern idea) be moving with respect to each other.
Inevitably Bruno must come to look upon the stars as suns sprinkled
irregularly throughout the regions of infinite space.
Nor was this all. Coming after Copernicus as he did, Bruno had from
the first grasped with enthusiasm Copernicus’ idea that not the
Earth but the Sun was the center of the sphere. I say the center of
the sphere, for we must remember that Copernicus never touched the
boundary of the world, but only changed its center from Earth to Sun.
In Copernicus’ thought we still lived within a star-spangled heaven.
But now that Bruno had shattered this heaven and sprinkled these stars
through space, he could not well help surrounding those other suns with
planets, until not merely an infinity of suns but an infinity of solar
systems spread themselves out before his imagination. But could he stop
here? When one has once destroyed the distinction between Heaven and
Earth, when one has once begun to think of nature as everywhere alike,
it is not easy to stop. Was not one of the planets making its journey
around our sun inhabited with manifold forms of life? Then why should
they not all be? And is it likely that one solar system should be a
scene of life and the infinity of others not? So it was that Bruno,
looking out into space, saw as many inhabited globes as there were
“hundreds of thousands of stars.”
* * * * *
These are the matters which Bruno brought back with him from his
journey to the stars and beyond the confines of the world. I have told
them simply, for eloquence is wasted in describing such feats of the
imagination. They are of themselves eloquent. And we recall with what
enthusiasm Bruno himself recounted his journey. Is it not possible,
however, that when he returned to earth and told his journeyings to
men, he came to perceive, as these men at once perceived, that his new
vision was not all made of beauty? Is there not in this infinite cosmos
that which may depress and even terrify?
In his “Garden of Epicurus,” Anatole France has put the two worlds side
by side. One has only to do this to feel that Bruno, who at first held
out his hands to the new vision, may afterwards have snatched them back
again to shut it out.
“We have some trouble,” says France, “in imagining the state of mind
of a man in olden times who firmly believed that the Earth was the
center of the Universe, and that all the stars turned round it. He felt
under his feet damned souls writhing in flames, and perhaps he had seen
with his own eyes, and smelled with his own nostrils the sulphurous
fumes of Hell escaping from some fissures in the rocks. Lifting his
head he contemplated the spheres, ... those bearing the Moon, Mercury,
Venus--the one that Dante visited on Good Friday of the year 1300--the
Sun, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, then the incorruptible firmament from which
the stars were suspended like lamps. Beyond, his mind’s eye discerned
the Ninth Heaven to which the saints were rapt, the Primum Mobile or
Crystalline; and finally Empyrion, dwelling of the blessed, toward
which, he firmly hoped, two angels robed in white would bear away,
as it were a little child, his soul washed in baptism and perfumed
with the oil of the last sacraments. In those days God had no other
children than man, and all his creation was ordered in a fashion at
once childlike and poetic like an immense cathedral. Thus imagined, the
universe was so simple that it was represented in its entirety with its
true figure and motions in certain great clocks run by machinery and
appropriately painted.”
[Illustration: Dante’s Conception of the Universe
(From Hearnshaw’s _Mediaeval Contributions to Modern Civilization_.)]
But now! “We are done with the spheres and the planets under which
one was born lucky or unlucky, jovial or saturnine. The solid vault
of the firmament is shattered. Our eye and our thought plunge into
infinite abysses of heaven. Beyond the planets we discover no longer
the Empyrion of the elect and of the angels, but a hundred millions of
rolling suns escorted by their cortège of obscure satellites invisible
to us. In the midst of this infinity of worlds our own Sun is but a
bubble of gas and our Earth but a fleck of mud.”
The contrast speaks for itself and needs no comment. It is enough to
point out the effect it must have had upon the ethical and religious
notions of him who first realized it. What in such a world are we to
make of the central episode of Christianity? Bruno’s imagination that
had swept through space and sped by the stars had found these worlds
inhabited by beings “perhaps better, perhaps worse than we are.” If
there was no evidence that these dwellers in distant solar systems were
so much better than we as to need no saving, neither was there any
evidence that they were so much worse as to deserve none. We were no
longer the only children of God. What then? Are we to suppose that the
drama of Redemption is being enacted over and over again throughout the
infinity of worlds? Is the Son of God being sacrificed over and over
again for the sake of His other children? Is He at this moment perhaps
redeeming with His life the dwellers on some star in the night yonder?
But destruction did not stop here. Not only the gentler aspects which
Christianity had given to the sterner religion of pagandom were
threatened. That older religion itself, with its well-thought-out
theory of the relation between God and man, must either be rejected or
remodeled. For Aristotle as well as for Aquinas, God and man had formed
the real plot of the universe. God, revealing himself most clearly in
the turning of the enclosing heaven, set thereby the rest of nature in
motion and stirred things down to their very center. So that in the
region of earth, water, air and fire there came to be composed bodies
mixed of all these. They were the living beings we know, which, holding
their ingredients in proper proportion for a while, fell apart again
and passed away.
These living beings differed in power. As we pass from the vegetable
through the animal to the human they show themselves increasingly able
to control the matter in which and of which they are. Highest of all is
the human male. It is for the sake of producing him that the mechanism
which fills the region between Heaven and Earth exists and is operated.
One might almost say that Nature is God’s workshop for producing man.
But why should God be thus interested in producing this particular kind
of animal? Aristotle’s answer comes less clearly than one could wish,
yet it comes. It is because man differs from the animals not only in
degree but in kind. He is not altogether animal. In his superior body
there is contained a soul which is not only of God’s making, but of
God’s very substance. That is why man alone can know God. It is as
though God needed to be known, recognized, reflected as in a mirror.
As for man, he is a bit of divinity momentarily estranged from his
home and dwelling, but with the privilege of returning thither can he
but free his soul from earthly and sensuous entanglements and interest
himself in knowing his Father which is in Heaven.
And now that Bruno has destroyed this difference between Heaven and
Earth, has he not destroyed along with it the distinction between God
and man? Has not his infinite homogenous world left man a mere mite
shivering on his fleck of mud as it rolls around its bubble of gas? Man
is no longer the center of interest; he no longer plays an important
part in any thinkable plot. “Man is no more than an ant in the presence
of the infinite,” cries Bruno. “A star is no more than a man.”
We can understand that Bruno’s awakening, with however great an
enthusiasm it may have been heralded, can be no pleasant awakening for
the sleeper. The world of his dreams was infinitely fairer and warmer
than that reality to whose garish light his eyes have been opened. It
cannot be expected that the awakened should feel any gratitude, and he
did not. But what is less obvious is the matter of Bruno’s own feeling
as the consequences of his new idea gradually unfold themselves to
him. Can that first enthusiasm be sustained to the end, or must he too
shrink before the fuller vision of what he has done?
* * * * *
If we were to classify men in terms of their reactions to new ideas, I
think we should all hit upon these three types. Let me call the first
the radical. He is easy to initiate into a new truth, bold to accept
it at all costs, loses at once all perspective and sees in the past
only a bundle of errors without beauty and with no other interest
than to furnish matter for jest. And then there is the conservative.
The hold that the past has on such a mind is sometimes enormous. He
is capable of clinging to it at the expense of all the rest of his
science and experience. If it has enthralled his heart and imagination,
he falls into a mood which the Renaissance called the acceptance
of “two-fold truth.” He believes against all evidence. He believes
as Tertullian had it, just because the thing is absurd. He insists
with Pascal, that the heart has its reasons which the reason cannot
understand. He is a creature of faiths and of mysticisms. Finally
there is the philosopher, the only one of the three completely made
for unhappiness. He gets no thrill from novelty. He has followed human
thought through too many revolutions to expect the most violent of
cataclysms to change things much. He struggles to keep his perspective
as he would keep his reason, and the views of older humanity do not
lose their beauty because their expression has been proved wrong.
Required to readjust his thought of yesterday to the new fact of today,
he undertakes the task cheerfully enough as part of the day’s work.
That is what yesterdays, todays, and if it may be, tomorrows are given
to him for. He measures his success by the extent to which he can mold
new thought to the satisfaction of old desire, to old desire newly
instructed.
And Bruno--to which of these classes does he belong? Is he the radical
who would light-heartedly take his place on the fleck of mud and watch
it roll around its bubble of gas, while he laughs at his neighbors,
who in the face of such a universe charm themselves into a continued
faith that they are somehow divine souls in whom a God of Heaven is
interested? Or will he, on the other hand, become one of those thus
held by the past? Will the awakener, now himself fully awakened, try
to snatch at the fading dream and somehow manage to keep his faith in
what he knows can’t be true? Or will he set laboriously to work, as a
philosopher should, to find that interpretation of the new facts which
lies closest to the meaning, though it may differ from the verbal
expression of world-old desires and longings?
Alas! if Bruno would but make up his mind to be any one of these three,
the task of his biographer would be easy. But the real Bruno, the
Bruno who mocked, who thought, who recanted, and who died, was not a
type. He was a man, and as he was the most human of men, he gathered
the greatest possible number of inconsistencies to his heart. Yes,
he was a radical who mocked and jeered. Yes, he was a philosopher
who labored and thought. And yes, finally, he was a mystic who could
hold as a splendid if inexplicable possession of his faith, all the
things his reason showed to be impossible. I have shown you Bruno’s
mockery reflected in the somewhat muddy and turbid medium of Mocenigo’s
denunciation. I have shown you Bruno the mystic, kneeling before the
Inquisition, completely abandoning the great idea. It remains for
me to show Bruno the philosopher, Bruno the Pantheist, Bruno the
unacknowledged inspiration of much that is recognized as great in
Spinoza and Leibnitz, the acknowledged and highly honored forerunner of
much we take to be greatest in the German Idealism that centers about
1800.
* * * * *
We left the great idea at the moment, when, having pierced the heavens,
it had come to realize the consequences of its act. The gentle meaning
of Christ, the sterner pagan wisdom of God and man had been lost in an
infinity that knew no enclosing heaven, in a dreary waste of sameness
that knew no distinction, not even that between man and God. Bruno the
philosopher was not one to let this work of scientific devastation
go on unchallenged. What if there were a God who could dwell just as
clearly in a heaven that was everywhere as in a Heaven that was above?
What if man could have an interest for and could serve this God, not
because he was different in kind from the ant, but because he was, or
rather in proportion as he was, different in degree? Does not the life
that quickens an animate thing pervade that thing? Is it not the same
life which in me beckons with my finger, beats with my heart, thinks
with my brain? What then if this infinite world of ours were one great
living thing made up of other living things, as our body is made up of
finger, and heart, and brain, each of which in doing its own work does
consciously or unconsciously the work of the whole? “Natura est Deus in
rebus.” This is one of the phrases Bruno found in trying to express his
philosophy. Nature is God in things, or let us put it--God is the life;
suns and planets, men and ants, falling rain and mounting mist are but
the gestures of this life. Each thinks it does what it does for its
own sake, but those who think clearest realize that the joy of their
doing as well as the solace of their undoing is the part they play in
working out the ideal of the whole. “And He lives in me as I live in my
hand”--the phrase is Von Hofmannsthal’s, the thought is Bruno’s, and it
is the whole thought of Bruno the Pantheist.
* * * * *
The end of this life is told in a letter written by one Gaspard Schopp
(a converted Lutheran) to his friend Rittershausen, rector of the
University of Altdorf:
“If I write to you now, it is because this very day Giordano Bruno was
publicly burned for heresy in the Field of Flowers in front of the
theater of Pompey.... If you were in Rome, you would learn from each
and every Italian that a Lutheran was burned, and so you would be not
a little strengthened in your opinion of our savage hatred. But you
must know, my Rittershausen, that our Italians do not draw a sharp line
between heretics and heretics, nor do they know fine distinctions,
but if any one is a heretic they take him for a Lutheran, in which
simplicity I pray that God may continue them....
“Now Bruno was that Nolan ... a professed Dominican who some
twenty-three years agone began to doubt of Transubstantiation ...
then forthright to deny it, and likewise the virginity of the Blessed
Mary. He migrated to Geneva, ... whence, not approving himself
altogether sound in his Calvinism (than which, nevertheless, nothing
leads straighter to atheism), he was driven to Lyons, whence to
Toulouse, from whence he passed on to Paris, where he was a professor,
but extraordinarius, as he found that the professor ordinarius was
obliged to attend Mass. Thence to London, where he published a little
book called the ‘Beast Triumphant,’ meaning thereby the Pope, whom
your party is wont to honor with the name of beast.[2] From here to
Wittenberg, where, if I am not mistaken, he lectured publicly for two
years. Having gone on to Prague, he published there the works, ‘On the
Boundless,’ ‘On the Innumerable Worlds,’ and yet one other, ‘On the
Shadows of Ideas,’ in which he taught horrible and moreover most absurd
things, as that there are innumerable worlds, that the soul passes from
one body into another, ... that magic is a good thing and permissible,
the Holy Spirit is nothing but the soul of the world, and that this
was what Moses meant when he wrote, ‘The spirit of God moved on the
face of the waters,’ that the world is eternal.... In a word, whatever
is asserted by the Pagan philosophers, whatever by our older or newer
heretics he (Bruno) maintained.
“From Prague he went on to Brunswick and Helmstadt, and there for a
time is said to have taught. Then to Frankfurt for the publishing
of certain books, and later fell into the hands of the Inquisition
at Venice, whence when they had had enough of him, he was sent to
Rome. Frequently examined by the Holy Office ... of the Inquisition,
convicted by the highest theologians, he now besought eighty days that
he might consider, now promised recantation, now defended his point
anew, now obtained another eighty days; but was really doing nothing
but make a fool of the Pontiff and the Inquisition.
“So that, nearly eight years after he had come before the Inquisition
here, on the ninth of February in the Palace of the Grand Inquisitor,
there being present the Most Illustrious Cardinals of the Holy Office
of the Inquisition, ... theologians of counsel, and the secular
magistrate, governor of the city, Bruno was brought in, and on bended
knees heard sentence pronounced against him. And it was in this way:
the story of his life was told, of his studies and teachings, and with
what diligence and fraternal admonishment the Inquisition had sought to
effect his conversion, and what obduracy and impiety he had shown. Then
they defrocked him, as we say, and straightway excommunicated him and
handed him over to the secular arm to be punished, asking that this be
done with clemency and without the shedding of blood.
“While this was passing he answered nothing, except this word: ‘In
greater fear, perhaps, do you impose sentence upon me than I do receive
it.’ So, taken away to prison by the governor’s lictors, he was
allowed a fortnight in case he should wish to recant his errors; but
in vain. Today he was led to the stake. When the image of our Saviour
on the Cross was shown to him as he was about to die, he turned away
his head and sullenly rejected it. In great misery he thus died, and
is gone, I think, to tell in those other worlds of his imagining after
what manner the men of Rome are wont to treat impious blasphemers....”
* * * * *
Surely, he came to that other world of his imagining. It is our world
and he dwells among us. Little does he remember of the men of Rome,
of their Illustrious Lordships of Venice, of all the toil and travail
of that old life of his--hardly enough to fill an idle hour in the
telling. But we know him easily for the unchanged soul he was. He
is that one who came to us of a day and opened our eyes to new and
troubling visions. “Now you are free,” he said, “be glad!” He is that
same one who stole back another day and whispered, “But you are afraid!
Remember your Father’s House, how safe it was and warm.” He may be
there to close the eyes that have seen enough, with what counsel then,
who can tell? But once he was fond of saying, “Not only he who wins
deserves the laurels; but also he who dies no coward.”
II
BENEDICT DE SPINOZA
1632-1677
“All things excellent are as difficult as they are rare.” These words
which bring to a close Spinoza’s masterpiece “Ethics, after the manner
of Geometry,” sum up the experience of a life as rare as it was
difficult.
But then, the things that make life difficult are so much a question
of the nature that accepts or invites them! We may be sure that
few, brought to the lap of Lachesis, would have the courage to pick
therefrom Spinoza’s lot. To be born of exiled Jews, to be cast off by
family and race as an offender against holy traditions, to live then in
loneliness among Christians whose faith one does not accept, to die by
inches at the age of forty-five,--even as lives go this would hardly
be called an easy one. How seriously then must we take the sustaining
power of a philosophy which enabled Spinoza, partly accepting, partly
inviting his destiny, to lend it an aspect of calm beauty that touches
our wonder!
One is tempted to recall the unhappy Bruno; without, tossed and
hunted; within, torn by a conflict between a new science at once grand
and desolate, and a memory of things lovable but untrue. In him a
lofty philosophy was to have quieted this struggle and consoled this
isolation but did not, unless indeed it did at that last moment when he
stood at his stake in the Field of Flowers.
There is much likeness but an all-important difference between Bruno
and Spinoza, whose names a curious fate linked together first in
general condemnation, then in general praise. The two were alike in
this, that if anything more lonely can be conceived than the fugitive
existence of Bruno, it is the monk-like reclusion of Spinoza; if
anything more desolate than the infinite wind-swept universe of Bruno,
it is this same universe bereft of the quivering life and all-inspiring
purpose that Bruno found in it, this world left on our hands a rolling
mechanism fatal and purposeless. But the difference is profound. The
philosophy, yes, one may boldly say the religion of Spinoza, sustained
him from day to day, from hour to hour. Bruno’s was rather the poet’s
vision, vivid enough while it lasted, but dispelled by the shock of
reality to return only at such moments as that in which his life went
out. Is it in the power of a thought, is it in the temperament of a man
that this difference lies explained?