Reactions against Protestant bigotry in Holland on other lines were

not much more successful, and indeed were not numerous. One of the

most interesting is that of Dirk Coornhert (1522-1590), who by his

manifold literary activities [148] became one of the founders of Dutch

prose. In his youth Coornhert had visited Spain and Portugal, and had

there, it is said, seen an execution of victims of the Inquisition,

[149] deriving thence the aversion to intolerance which stamped

his whole life's work. It does not appear, however, that any such

peninsular experience was required, seeing that the Dutch Inquisition

became abundantly active about the same period. Learning Latin

at thirty, in order to read Augustine, he became a translator of

Cicero and--singularly enough--of Boccaccio. An engraver to trade,

he became first notary and later secretary to the burgomaster of

Haarlem; and, failing to steer clear of the strifes of the time,

was arrested and imprisoned at the Hague in 1567. On his release

he sought safety at Kleef in Santen, whence he returned after the

capture of Brill to become secretary of the new national Government

at Haarlem; but he had again to take to flight, and lived at Kleef

from 1572 to 1577. In 1578 he debated at Leyden with two preachers of

Delft on predestination, which he declared to be unscriptural; and was

officially ordered to keep silence. Thereupon he published a protest,

and got into fresh trouble by drawing up, as notary, an appeal to

the Prince of Orange on behalf of his Catholic fellow-countrymen for

freedom of worship, and by holding another debate at the Hague. [150]

Always his master-ideal was that of toleration, in support of which

he wrote strongly against Beza and Calvin (this in a Latin treatise

published only after his death), declaring the persecution of heretics

to be a crime in the kingdom of God; and it was as a moralist that he

gave the lead to Arminius on the question of predestination. [151]

"Against Protestant and Catholic sacerdotalism and scholastic he

set forth humanist world-wisdom and Biblical ethic," [152] to that

end publishing a translation of Boëthius (1585), and composing his

chief work on Zedekunst (Ethics). Christianity, he insisted, lay not

in profession or creed, but in practice. By way of restraining the

ever-increasing malignity of theological strifes, he made the quaint

proposal that the clergy should not be allowed to utter anything but

the actual words of the Scriptures, and that all works of theology

should be sequestrated. For these and other heteroclite suggestions

he was expelled from Delft (where he sought finally to settle, 1587)

by the magistrates, at the instance of the preachers, but was allowed

to die in peace at Gouda, where he wrote to the last. [153]

All the while, though he drew for doctrine on Plutarch, Cicero, Seneca,

and Marcus Aurelius equally with the Bible, Coornhert habitually

founded on the latter as the final authority. [154] On no other footing

could any one in his age and country stand as a teacher. It was not

till after generations of furious intolerance that a larger outlook

was possible in the Netherlands; and the first steps towards it were

naturally taken independently of theology. Although Grotius figured

for a century as one of the chief exponents of Christian evidences,

it is certain that his great work on the Law of War and Peace (1625)

made for a rationalistic conception of society. "Modern historians

of jurisprudence, like Lerminier and Bluntschli, represent it as the

distinctive merit of Grotius that he freed the science from bondage

to theology." [155] The breach, indeed, is not direct, as theistic

sanctions are paraded in the Prolegomena; but along with these goes

the avowal that natural ethic would be valid even were there no God,

and--as against the formula of Horace, Utilitas justi mater--that

"the mother of natural right is human nature itself." [156]

Where Grotius, defender of the faith, figured as a heretic, unbelief

could not speak out, though there are traces of its underground

life. The charge of atheism was brought against the Excercitationes

Philosophicæ of Gorlæus, published in 1620; but, the book being

posthumous, conclusions could not be tried. Views far short of

atheism, however, were dangerous to their holders; for the merely

Socinian work of Voelkel, published at Amsterdam in 1642, was burned

by order of the authorities, and a second impression shared the same

fate. [157] In 1653 the States of Holland forbade the publication of

all Unitarian books and all Socinian worship; and though the veto

as to books was soon evaded, that on worship was enforced. [158]

Still, Holland was relatively tolerant as beside other countries; and

when the Unitarian physician Daniel Zwicker (1612-1678), of Dantzig,

found his own country too hot to hold him, he came to Holland (about

1652) "for security and convenience." [159] He was able to publish

at Amsterdam in 1658 his Latin Irenicum Irenicorum, wherein he lays

down three principles for the settlement of Christian difficulties,

the first being "the universal reason of mankind," while Scripture

and tradition hold only the second and third places. His book is

a remarkable investigation of the rise of the doctrines of the

Logos and the Trinity, which he traced to polytheism, making out

that the first Christians, whom he identified with the Nazarenes,

regarded Jesus as a man. The book evoked many answers, and it

is somewhat surprising that Zwicker escaped serious persecution,

dying peacefully in Amsterdam in 1678, whereas writers much less

pronounced in their heresy incurred aggressive hostility. Descartes,

as we shall see, during his stay in Holland was menaced by clerical

fanaticism. Some fared worse. In the generation after Grotius, one

Koerbagh, a doctor, for publishing (1668) a dictionary of definitions

containing advanced ideas, had to fly from Amsterdam. At Culenberg he

translated a Unitarian work and began another; but was betrayed, tried

for blasphemy, and sentenced to ten years' imprisonment, to be followed

by ten years' banishment. He compromised by dying in prison within

the year. Even as late as 1678 the juri-consult Hadrian Beverland

(afterwards appointed, through Isaac Vossius, to a lay office under

the Church of England) was imprisoned and struck off the rolls of

Leyden University for his Peccatum Originale, in which he speculated

erotically as to the nature of the sin of Adam and Eve. The book was

furiously answered, and publicly burned. [160] It was only after an

age of such intolerance that Holland, at the end of the seventeenth

century, began to become for England a model of freedom in opinion,

as formerly in trade. And it seems to have been through Holland,

in the latter part of the seventeenth century, that there came the

fresh Unitarian impulse which led to the considerable spread of the

movement in England after the Revolution of 1688. [161]

Unitarianism, which we have seen thus invading Holland somewhat

persistently during half a century, was then as now impotent beyond

a certain point by reason of its divided allegiance, though it has

always had the support of some good minds. Its denial of the deity of

Jesus could not be made out without a certain superposing of reason

on Scripture; and yet to Scripture it always finally appealed. The

majority of men accepting such authority have always tended to

believe more uncritically; and the majority of men who are habitually

critical will always repudiate the Scriptural jurisdiction. In

Poland, accordingly, the movement, so flourishing in its earlier

years, was soon arrested, as we have seen, by the perception that

it drove many Protestants back to Catholicism; among these being

presumably a number whose critical insight showed them that there was

no firm standing-ground between Catholicism and Naturalism. Every new

advance within the Unitarian pale terrified the main body, many of

whom were mere Arians, holding by the term Trinity, and merely making

the Son subordinate to the Father. Thus when one of their most learned

ministers, Simon Budny, followed in the steps of Ferencz Davides (whom

we have seen dying in prison in Transylvania in 1579), and represented

Jesus as a "mere" man, he was condemned by a synod (1582) and deposed

from his office (1584). He recanted, and was reinstated, [162] but

his adherents seem to have been excommunicated. The sect thus formed

were termed Semi-Judaizers by another heretic, Martin Czechowicz, who

himself denied the pre-existence of Jesus, and made him only a species

of demi-god; [163] yet Fausto Sozzini, better known as Faustus Socinus,

who also wrote against them, and who had worked with Biandrata to have

Davides imprisoned, conceded that prayer to Christ was optional. [164]

Faustus, who arrived in Poland in 1579, seems to have been moved

to his strenuously "moderate" policy, which for a time unified the

bulk of the party, mainly by a desire to keep on tolerable terms with

Protestantism. That, however, did not serve him with the Catholics;

and when the reaction set in he suffered severely at their hands. His

treatise, De Jesu Christu Servatore, created bitter resentment; and

in 1598 the Catholic rabble of Cracow, led "as usual by the students

of the university," dragged him from his house. His life was saved

only by the strenuous efforts of the rector and two professors of

the university; and his library was destroyed, with his manuscripts,

whereof "he particularly regretted a treatise which he had composed

against the atheists"; [165] though it is not recorded that the

atheists had ever menaced either his life or his property. He seems to

have been zealous against all heresy that outwent his own, preaching

passive obedience in politics as emphatically as any churchman,

and condemning alike the rising of the Dutch against Spanish rule

and the resistance of the French Protestants to their king. [166]

This attitude may have had something to do with the better side

of the ethical doctrines of the sect, which leant considerably to

non-resistance. Czechowicz (who was deposed by his fellow-Socinians

for schism) seems not only to have preached a patient endurance of

injuries, but to have meant it; [167] and to the Socinian sect belongs

the main credit of setting up a humane compromise on the doctrine

of eternal punishment. [168] The time, of course, had not come for

any favourable reception of such a compromise in Christendom; and

it is noted of the German Socinian, Ernst Schoner (Sonerus), who

wrote against the orthodox dogma, that his works are "exceedingly

scarce." [169] Unitarianism as a whole, indeed, made little headway

outside of Poland and Transylvania.

In Spain, meantime, there was no recovery from the paralysis wrought

by the combined tyranny of Church and Crown, incarnate in the

Inquisition. The monstrous multiplication of her clergy might alone

have sufficed to set up stagnation in her mental life; but, not content

with the turning of a vast multitude [170] of men and women away from

the ordinary work of life, her rulers set themselves to expatriate

as many more on the score of heresy. A century after the expulsion

of the Jews came the turn of the Moors, whose last hold in Spain,

Granada, had been overthrown in 1492. Within a generation they had been

deprived of all exterior practice of their religion; [171] but that

did not suffice, and the Inquisition never left them alone. Harried,

persecuted, compulsorily baptized, deprived of their Arabic books,

they repeatedly revolted, only to be beaten down. At length, in the

opening years of the seventeenth century (1610-1613), under Philip III,

on the score that the great Armada had failed because heretics were

tolerated at home, it was decided to expel the whole race; and now a

million Moriscoes, among the most industrious inhabitants of Spain,

were driven the way of the Jews. It is needless here to recall the

ruinous effect upon the material life of Spain: [172] the aspect

of the matter which specially concerns us is the consummation of

the policy of killing out all intellectual variation. The Moriscoes

may have counted for little in positive culture; but they were one

of the last and most important factors of variation in the country;

and when Spain was thus successively denuded of precisely the most

original and energetic types among the Jewish, the Spanish, and the

Moorish stocks, her mental arrest was complete.

To modern freethought, accordingly, she has till our own age

contributed practically nothing. Huarte seems to have had no Spanish

successors. The brilliant dramatic literature of the reigns of the

three Philips, which influenced the rising drama alike of France

and England, is notably unintellectual, [173] dealing endlessly in

plot and adventure, but yielding no great study of character, and

certainly doing nothing to further ethics. Calderon was a thorough

fanatic, and became a priest; [174] Lope de Vega found solace under

bereavement in zealously performing the duties of an Inquisitor; and

was so utterly swayed by the atrocious creed of persecution which

was blighting Spain that he joined in the general exultation over

the expulsion of the Moriscoes. Even the mind of Cervantes had not on

this side deepened beyond the average of his race and time; [175] his

old wrongs at Moorish hands perhaps warping his better judgment. His

humorous and otherwise kindly spirit, so incongruously neighboured,

must indeed have counted for much in keeping life sweet in Spain

in the succeeding centuries of bigotry and ignorance. But from the

seventeenth century till the other day the brains were out, in the

sense that genius was lacking. That species of variation had been too

effectually extirpated during two centuries to assert itself until

after a similar duration of normal conditions. The "immense advantage

of religious unity," which even a modern Spanish historian [176] has

described as a gain balancing the economic loss from the expulsion of

the Moriscoes, was precisely the condition of minimum intellectual

activity--the unity of stagnation. No kind of ratiocinative thought

was allowed to raise its head. A Latin translation of the Hypotyposes

of Sextus Empiricus had been permitted, or at least published, in

Catholic France; but when Martin Martinez de Cantatapiedra, a learned

orientalist and professor of theology, ventured to do the same thing

in Spain--doubtless with the idea of promoting faith by discouraging

reason--he was haled before the Inquisition, and the book proscribed

(1583). He was further charged with Lutheran leanings on the score

that he had a preference for the actual text of Scripture over that

of the commentators. [177] In such an atmosphere it was natural that

works on mathematics, astronomy, and physics should be censured as

"favouring materialism and sometimes atheism." [178] It has been

held by one historian that at the death of Philip II there arose

some such sense of relief throughout Spain as was felt later in

France at the death of Louis XIV; that "the Spaniards now ventured

to sport with the chains which they had not the power to break";

and that Cervantes profited by the change in conceiving and writing

his Don Quixote. [179] But the same historian had before seen that

"poetic freedom was circumscribed by the same shackles which fettered

moral liberty. Thoughts which could not be expressed without fear of

the dungeon and the stake were no longer materials for the poet to

work on. His imagination, instead of improving them into poetic ideas

... had to be taught to reject them. But the eloquence of prose was

more completely bowed down under the inquisitorial yoke than poetry,

because it was more closely allied to truth, which of all things

was the most dreaded." [180] Cervantes, Lope de Vega, and Calderon

proved that within the iron wall of Catholic orthodoxy, in an age

when conclusions were but slowly being tried between dogma and reason,

there could be a vigorous play of imaginative genius on the field of

human nature; even as in Velasquez, sheltered by royal favour, the

genius of colour and portraiture could become incarnate. But after

these have passed away, the laws of social progress are revealed

in the defect of all further Spanish genius. Even of Cervantes it

is recorded--on very doubtful authority, however--that he said "I

could have made Don Quixote much more amusing if it were not for the

Inquisition"; and it is matter of history that a passage in his book

[181] disparaging perfunctory works of charity was in 1619 ordered

by the Holy Office to be expunged as impious and contrary to the faith.

See H. E. Watts, Miguel de Cervantes, p. 167. Don Quixote was

"always under suspicion of the orthodox." Id. p. 166. Mr. Watts,

saying nothing of Cervantes's approval of the expulsion of the

Moriscoes, claims that his "head was clear of the follies and

extravagances of the reigning superstition" (id. p. 231). But

the case is truly summed up by Mr. Ormsby when he says: "For one

passage capable of being tortured into covert satire" against

things ecclesiastical, "there are ten in Don Quixote and the

novels that show--what indeed is very obvious from the little

we know of his life and character--that Cervantes was a faithful

son of the Church" (tr. of Don Quixote, 1885, introd. i, 57).

When the total intellectual life of a nation falls ever further

in the rear of the world's movement, even the imaginative arts are

stunted. Turkey excepted, the civilized nations of Europe which for

two centuries have contributed the fewest great names to the world's

bead-roll have been Spain, Austria, Portugal, Belgium, and Greece,

all noted for their "religious unity." And of all of these Spain is

the supreme instance of positive decadence, she having exhibited in

the first half of the sixteenth century a greater complex of energy

than any of the others. [182] The lesson is monumental.

§ 6. Scientific Thought

It remains to trace briefly the movement of scientific and speculative

thought which constituted the transition between the Scholastic

and the modern philosophy. It may be compendiously noted under the

names of Copernicus, Bruno, Vanini, Galileo, Ramus, Gassendi, Bacon,

and Descartes.

The great performance of Copernicus (Nicolaus Koppernigk, 1473-1543),

given to the world with an editor's treacherous preface as he lay

paralysed on his deathbed, did not become a general possession for

over a hundred years. The long reluctance of its author to let it be

published, despite the express invitation of a cardinal in the name of

the pope, was well founded in his knowledge of the strength of common

prejudice; and perhaps partly in a sense of the scientific imperfection

of his own case. [183] Only the special favour accorded to his first

sketch at Rome--a favour which he had further carefully planned for

in his dedicatory epistle to Pope Paul--saved his main treatise from

prohibition till long after its work was done. [184] It was in fact,

with all its burden of traditional error, the most momentous challenge

that had yet been offered in the modern world to established beliefs,

alike theological and lay, for it seemed to flout "common sense"

as completely as it did the cosmogony of the sacred books. It was

probably from scraps of ancient lore current in Italy in his years

of youthful study there that he first derived his idea; and in Italy

none had dared publicly to propound the geocentric theory. Its gradual

victory, therefore, is the first great modern instance of a triumph

of reason over spontaneous and instilled prejudice; and Galileo's

account of his reception of it should be a classic document in the

history of rationalism.

It was when he was a student in his teens that there came to Pisa

one Christianus Urstitius of Rostock, a follower of Copernicus,

to lecture on the new doctrine. The young Galileo, being satisfied

that "that opinion could be no other than a solemn madness," did

not attend; and those of his acquaintance who did made a jest of the

matter, all save one, "very intelligent and wary," who told him that

"the business was not altogether to be laughed at." Thenceforth he

began to inquire of Copernicans, with the result inevitable to such

a mind as his. "Of as many as I examined I found not so much as one

who told me not that he had been a long time of the contrary opinion,

but to have changed it for this, as convinced by the strength of the

reasons proving the same; and afterwards questioning them one by one,

to see whether they were well possessed of the reasons of the other

side, I found them all to be very ready and perfect in them, so that

I could not truly say that they took this opinion out of ignorance,

vanity, or to show the acuteness of their wits." On the other hand,

the opposing Aristoteleans and Ptolemeans had seldom even superficially

studied the Copernican system, and had in no case been converted from

it. "Whereupon, considering that there was no man who followed the

opinion of Copernicus that had not been first on the contrary side,

and that was not very well acquainted with the reasons of Aristotle and

Ptolemy, while, on the contrary, there was not one of the followers

of Ptolemy that had ever been of the judgment of Copernicus, and

had left that to embrace this of Aristotle," he began to realize

how strong must be the reasons that thus drew men away from beliefs

"imbibed with their milk." [185] We can divine how slow would be the

progress of a doctrine which could only thus begin to find its way

into one of the most gifted scientific minds of the modern world. It

was only a minority of the élite of the intellectual life who could

receive it, even after the lapse of a hundred years.

The doctrine of the earth's two-fold motion, as we have seen,

had actually been taught in the fifteenth century by Nicolaus of

Cusa (1401-1464), who, instead of being prosecuted, was made a

cardinal, so little was the question then considered (Ueberweg,

ii, 23-24). See above, vol. i, p. 368, as to Pulci. Only very

slowly did the work even of Copernicus make its impression. Green

(Short History, ed. 1881, p. 297) makes first the mistake of

stating that it influenced thought in the fifteenth century, and

then the further mistake of saying that it was brought home to the

general intelligence by Galileo and Kepler in the later years of

the sixteenth century (id. p. 412). Galileo's European notoriety

dates from 1616; his Dialogues of the Two Systems of the World

appeared only in 1632; and his Dialogues of the New Sciences in

1638. Kepler's indecisive Mysterium Cosmographicum appeared only in

1597; his treatise on the motions of the planet Mars not till 1609.

One of the first to bring the new cosmological conception to bear on

philosophic thought was Giordano Bruno of Nola (1548-1600), whose

life and death of lonely chivalry have won him his place as the

typical martyr of modern freethought. [186] He may be conceived as a

blending of the pantheistic and naturalistic lore of ancient Greece,

[187] assimilated through the Florentine Platonists, with the spirit

of modern science (itself a revival of the Greek) as it first takes

firm form in Copernicus, whose doctrine Bruno early and ardently

embraced. Baptized Filippo, he took Giordano as his cloister-name

when he entered the great convent of S. Domenico Maggiore at Naples

in 1563, in his fifteenth year. No human being was ever more unfitly

placed among the Dominicans, punningly named the "hounds of the Lord"

(domini canes) for their work as the corps of the Inquisition; and

very early in his cloister life he came near being formally proceeded

against for showing disregard of sacred images, and making light of

the sanctity of the Virgin. [188] He passed his novitiate, however,

without further trouble, and was fully ordained a priest in 1572,

in his twenty-fourth year. Passing then through several Neapolitan

monasteries during a period of three years, he seems to have become

not a little of a freethinker on his return to his first cloister, as

he had already reached Arian opinions in regard to Christ, and soon

proceeded to substitute a mystical and Pythagorean for the orthodox

view of the Trinity. [189]

For the second time a "process" was begun against him, and he

took flight to Rome (1576), presenting himself at a convent of his

Order. News speedily came from Naples of the process against him,

and of the discovery that he had possessed a volume of the works

of Chrysostom and Jerome with the scholia of Erasmus--a prohibited

thing. Only a few months before Bartolomeo Carranza, Bishop of Toledo,

who had won the praise of the Council of Trent for his index of

prohibited books, had been condemned to abjure for the doctrine that

"the worship of the relics of the saints is of human institution,"

and had died in the same year at the convent to which Bruno had

now gone. Thus doubly warned, he threw off his priestly habit, and

fled to the Genoese territory, [190] where, in the commune of Noli,

he taught grammar and astronomy. In 1578 he visited successively

Turin, Venice, Padua, Bergamo, and Milan, resuming at the last-named

town his monk's habit. Thereafter he again returned to Turin,

passing thence to Chambéry at the end of 1578, and thence to Geneva

early in 1579. [191] His wish, he said, was "to live in liberty and

security"; but for that he must first renounce his Dominican habit;

other Italian refugees, of whom there were many at Geneva, helping

him to a layman's suit. Becoming a corrector of the press, he seems

to have conformed externally to Calvinism; but after a stay of two

and a-half months he published a short diatribe against one Antonio

de La Faye, who professed philosophy at the Academy; and for this he

was arrested and sentenced to excommunication, while his bookseller

was subjected to one day's imprisonment and a fine. [192] After three

weeks the excommunication was raised; but he nevertheless left Geneva,

and afterwards spoke of Calvinism as the "deformed religion." After

a few weeks' sojourn at Lyons he went to Toulouse, the very centre

of inquisitional orthodoxy; and there, strangely enough, he was able

to stay for more than a year, [193] taking his degree as Master of

Arts and becoming professor of astronomy. But the civil wars made

Toulouse unsafe; and at length, probably in 1581 or 1582, he reached

Paris, where for a time he lectured as professor extraordinary. [194]

In 1583 he reached England, where he remained till 1585, lecturing,

debating at Oxford on the Copernican theory, and publishing a number

of his works, four of them dedicated to his patron Castelnau de

Mauvissière, the French ambassador. Oxford was then a stronghold

of bigoted Aristotelianism, where bachelors and masters deviating

from the master were fined, or, if openly hostile, expelled. [195]

In that camp Bruno was not welcome. But he had other shelter, at the

French Embassy in London, and there he had notable acquaintances. He

had met Sir Philip Sidney at Milan in 1578; and his dialogue, Cena de

le Ceneri, gives a vivid account of a discussion in which he took a

leading part at a banquet given by Sir Fulke Greville. His picture of

"Oxford ignorance and English ill-manners" [196] is not lenient; and

there is no reason to suppose that his doctrine was then assimilated

by many; [197] but his stay in the household of Castelnau was one

of the happiest periods of his chequered life. While in England he

wrote no fewer than seven works, four of them dedicated to Castelnau,

and two--the Heroic Fervours and the Expulsion of the Triumphant

Beast--to Sir Philip Sidney.

Returning to Paris on the recall of Castelnau in 1585, he made an

attempt to reconcile himself to the Church, but it was fruitless;

and thereafter he went his own way. After a public disputation at the

university in 1586, he set out on a new peregrination, visiting first

Mayence, Marburg, and Wittemberg. At Marburg he was refused leave to

debate; and at Wittemberg he seems to have been carefully conciliatory,

as he not only matriculated but taught for over a year (1586-1588),

till the Calvinist party carried the day over the Lutheran. [198]

Thereafter he reached Prague, Helmstadt, Frankfort, and Zurich. At

length, on the fatal invitation of the Venetian youth Mocenigo, he

re-entered Italian territory, where, in Venice, he was betrayed to

the Inquisition by his treacherous and worthless pupil. [199]

What had been done for freethought by Bruno in his fourteen years of

wandering, debating, and teaching through Europe it is impossible to

estimate; but it is safe to say that he was one of the most powerful

antagonists to orthodox unreason that had yet appeared. Of all men of

his time he had perhaps the least affinity with the Christian creed,

which was repellent to him alike in the Catholic and the Protestant

versions. The attempt to prove him a believer on the strength of

a non-autograph manuscript [200] is idle. His approbation of a

religion for the discipline of uncivilized peoples is put in terms

of unbelief. [201] In the Spaccio della bestia trionfante he derides

the notion of a union of divine and human natures, and substantially

proclaims a natural (theistic) religion, negating all "revealed"

religions alike. Where Boccaccio had accredited all the three leading

religions, Bruno disallows all with paganism, though he puts that

above Christianity. [202] And his disbelief grew more stringent with

his years. Among the heretical propositions charged against him by

the Inquisition were these: that there is transmigration of souls;

that magic is right and proper; that the Holy Spirit is the same thing

as the soul of the world; that the world is eternal; that Moses, like

the Egyptians, wrought miracles by magic; that the sacred writings

are but a romance (sogno); that the devil will be saved; that only

the Hebrews are descended from Adam, other men having descended from

progenitors created by God before Adam; that Christ was not God,

but was a notorious sorcerer (insigne mago), who, having deceived

men, was deservedly hanged, not crucified; that the prophets and

the apostles were bad men and sorcerers, and that many of them were

hanged as such. The cruder of these propositions rest solely on the

allegation of Mocenigo, and were warmly repudiated by Bruno: others

are professedly drawn, always, of course, by forcing his language,

but not without some colourable pretext, from his two "poems,"

De triplice, minimo, et mensura, and De monade, numero et figura,

published at Frankfort in 1591, in the last year of his freedom. [203]

But the allusions in the Sigillus Sigillorum [204] to the weeping

worship of a suffering Adonis, to the exhibition of suffering and

miserable Gods, to transpierced divinities, and to sham miracles,

were certainly intended to contemn the Christian system.

Alike in the details of his propaganda and in the temper of his

utterance, Bruno expresses from first to last the spirit of freethought

and free speech. Libertas philosophica [205] is the breath of his

nostrils; and by his life and his death alike he upholds the ideal

for men as no other before him did. The wariness of Rabelais and the

non-committal skepticism of Montaigne are alike alien to him; he is

too lacking in reticence, too explosive, to give due heed even to

the common-sense amenities of life, much more to hedge his meaning

with safeguarding qualifications. And it was doubtless as much by

the contagion of his mood as by his lore that he impressed men.

His personal and literary influence was probably most powerful in

respect of his eager propaganda of the Copernican doctrine, which he

of his own force vitally expanded and made part of a pantheistic

conception of the universe. [206] Where Copernicus adhered by

implication to the idea of an external and limitary sphere--the last

of the eight of the Ptolemaic theory--Bruno reverted boldly to the

doctrine of Anaximandros, and declared firmly for the infinity of

space and of the series of the worlds. In regard to biology he makes

an equivalent advance, starting from the thought of Empedocles and

Lucretius, and substituting an idea of natural selection for that

of creative providence. [207] The conception is definitely thought

out, and marks him as one of the renovators of scientific no less

than of philosophic thought for the modern world; though the special

paralysis of science under Christian theology kept his ideas on this

side pretty much a dead letter for his own day. And indeed it was

to the universal and not the particular that his thought chiefly

and most enthusiastically turned. A philosophic poet rather than

a philosopher or man of science, he yet set abroad for the modern

world that conception of the physical infinity of the universe which,

once psychologically assimilated, makes an end of the medieval theory

of things. On this head he was eagerly affirmative; and the merely

Pyrrhonic skeptics he assailed as he did the "asinine" orthodox,

though he insisted on doubt as the beginning of wisdom.

Of his extensive literary output not much is stamped with lasting

scientific fitness or literary charm; and some of his treatises, as

those on mnemonics, have no more value than the product of his didactic

model, Raymond Lully. As a writer he is at his best in the sweeping

expatiation of his more general philosophic treatises, where he attains

a lifting ardour of inspiration, a fervour of soaring outlook, that

puts him in the front rank of the thinkers of his age. And if his

literary character is at times open to severe criticism in respect

of his lack of balance, sobriety, and self-command, his final courage

atones for such shortcomings.

His case, indeed, serves to remind us that at certain junctures it is

only the unbalanced types that aid humanity's advance. The perfectly

prudent and self-sufficing man does not achieve revolutions, does

not revolt against tyrannies; he wisely adapts himself and subsists,

letting the evil prevail as it may. It is the more impatient and

unreticent, the eager and hot-brained--in a word, the faulty--who clash

with oppression and break a way for quieter spirits through the hedges

of enthroned authority. The serenely contemplative spirit is rather

a possession than a possessor for his fellows; he may inform and

enlighten, but is not in himself a countering or inspiriting force:

a Shelley avails more than a Goethe against tyrannous power. And it

may be that the battling enthusiast in his own way wins liberation

for himself from "fear of fortune and death," as he wins for others

liberty of action. [208] Even such a liberator, bearing other men's

griefs and taking stripes that they might be kept whole, was Bruno.

And though he quailed at the first shock of capture and torture,

when the end came he vindicated human nature as worthily as could

any quietist. It was a long-drawn test. Charged on the traitor's

testimony with many "blasphemies," he denied them all, [209] but stood

to his published writings [210] and vividly expounded his theories,

[211] professing in the usual manner to believe in conformity with

the Church's teachings, whatever he might write on philosophy. It

is impossible to trust the Inquisition records as to his words

of self-humiliation; [212] though on the other hand no blame can

rationally attach to anyone who, in his place, should try to deceive

such enemies, morally on a level with hostile savages. It is certain

that the Inquisitors frequently wrung recantations by torture. [213]

What is historically certain is that Bruno was not released, but sent

on to Rome, and was kept there in prison for seven years. He was not

the sort of heretic likely to be released; though the fact of his being

a Dominican, and the desire to maintain the Church's intellectual

credit, delayed so long his execution. Certainly not an atheist (he

called himself in several of his book-titles Philotheus; he consigns

insano ateismo to perdition; [214] and his quasi-pantheism or monism

often lapses into theistic modes), [215] he yet was from first to last

essentially though not professedly anti-Christian in his view of the

universe. If the Church had cause to fear any philosophic teaching,

it was his, preached with the ardour of a prophet and the eloquence

of a poet. His doctrine that the worlds in space are innumerable was

as offensive to orthodox ears as his specific negations of Christian

dogma, outgoing as it did the later idea of Kepler and Galileo. He had,

moreover, finally refused to make any fresh recantation; and the only

detailed document extant concerning his final trial describes him as

saying to his judges: "With more fear, perchance, do you pass sentence

on me than I receive it." [216] According to all accessible records,

he was burned alive at Rome in February, 1600, in the Field of Flowers,

near where his statue now stands. As was probably customary, they tied

his tongue before leading him to the stake, lest he should speak to

the people; [217] and his martyrdom was an edifying spectacle for the

vast multitude of pilgrims who had come from all parts of Christendom

for the jubilee of the pope. [218] At the stake, when he was at the

point of death, there was duly presented to him the crucifix, and he

duly put it aside.

An attempt has been made by Professor Desdouits in a pamphlet

(La légende tragique de Jordano Bruno; Paris, 1885) to show that

there is no evidence that Bruno was burned; and an anonymous

writer in the Scottish Review (October, 1888, Art. II), rabidly

hostile to Bruno, has maintained the same proposition. Doubt on

the subject dates from Bayle. Its main ground is the fewness of

the documentary records, of which, further, the genuineness is

now called in question. But no good reason is shown for doubting

them. They are three.

1. The Latin letter of Gaspar Schopp (Scioppius), dated February

17, 1600, is an eye-witness's account of the sentencing and

burning of Bruno at that date. (See it in full, in the original

Latin, in Berti, p. 461 sq., and in App. V to Frith, Life of

Bruno, and partly translated in Prof. Adamson's lectures, as

cited. It was rep. by Struvius in his Acta Literaria, tom. v,

and by La Croze in his Entretiens sur divers sujets in 1711,

p. 287.) It was not printed till 1621, but the grounds urged for

its rejection are totally inadequate, and involve assumptions,

which are themselves entirely unproved, as to what Scioppius was

likely to do. Finally, no intelligible reason is suggested for

the forging of such a document. The remarks of Prof. Desdouits

on this head have no force whatever. The writer in the Scottish

Review (p. 263, and note) suggests as "at least as possible an

hypothesis as any other that he [Bruno] was the author of the

forged accounts of his own death." Comment is unnecessary.

2. There are preserved two extracts from Roman news-letters

(Avvisi) of the time; one, dated February 12, 1600, commenting on

the case; the other, dated February 19, relating the execution

on the 17th. (See both in S. R., pp. 264-65. They were first

printed by Berti in Documenti intorno a Giordano Bruno, Rome,

1880, and are reprinted in his Vita, ed. 1889, cap. xix; also

by Levi, as cited.) Against these testimonies the sole plea is

that they mis-state Bruno's opinions and the duration of his

imprisonment--a test which would reduce to mythology the contents

of most newspapers in our own day. The writer in the Scottish

Review makes the suicidal suggestion that, inasmuch as the errors

as to dates occur in Schopp's letter, "the so-called Schopp

was fabricated from these notices, or they from Schopp"--thus

admitting one to be historical.

3. There has been found, by a Catholic investigator, a double entry

in the books of the Lay Brotherhood of San Giovanni Decollato,

whose function was to minister to prisoners under capital sentence,

giving a circumstantial account of Bruno's execution. (See it in

S. R., pp. 266, 269, 270.) In this case, the main entry being dated

"1600. Thursday. February 16th," the anonymous writer argues that

"the whole thing resolves itself into a make-up," because February

16 was the Wednesday. The entry refers to the procedure of the

Wednesday night and the Thursday morning; and such an error could

easily occur in any case. Whatever may be one day proved, the

cavils thus far count for nothing. All the while, the records

as to Bruno remain in the hands of the Catholic authorities;

but, despite the discredit constantly cast on the Church on the

score of Bruno's execution, they offer no official denial of the

common statement; while they do officially admit (S. R., p. 252)

that on February 8 Bruno was sentenced as an "obstinate heretic,"

and "given over to the Secular Court." On the other hand, the

episode is well vouched; and the argument from the silence of

ambassadors' letters is so far void. No pretence is made of

tracing Bruno anywhere after February, 1600.

Since the foregoing note appeared in the first edition I have

met with the essay of Mr. R. Copley Christie, "Was Giordano

Bruno Really Burned?" (Macmillan's Magazine, October, 1885;

rep. in Mr. Christie's Selected Essays and Papers, 1902). This

is a crushing answer to the thesis of M. Desdouits, showing as

it does clear grounds not only for affirming the genuineness

of the letter of Scioppius, but for doubting the diligence

of M. Desdouits. Mr. Christie points out (1) that in his book

Ecclesiasticus, printed in 1612, Scioppius refers to the burning of

Bruno almost in the words of his letter of 1600; (2) that in 1607

Kepler wrote to a correspondent of the burning of Bruno, giving as

his authority J. M. Wacker, who in 1600 was living at Rome as the

imperial ambassador; and (3) that the tract Machiavellizatio, 1621,

in which the letter of Scioppius was first printed, was well known

in its day, being placed on the Index, and answered by two writers

without eliciting any repudiation from Scioppius, who lived till

1649. As M. Desdouits staked his case on the absence of allusion to

the subject before 1661 (overlooking even the allusion by Mersenne,

in 1624, cited by Bayle), his theory may be taken as exploded.

Bruno has been zealously blackened by Catholic writers for the

obscenity of some of his writing [219] and the alleged freedom of his

life--piquant charges, when we remember the life of the Papal Italy in

which he was born. Lucilio Vanini (otherwise Julius Cæsar Vanini), the

next martyr of freethought, also an Italian (b. at Taurisano, 1585),

is open to the more relevant charges of an inordinate vanity and some

duplicity. Figuring as a Carmelite friar, which he was not, he came

to England (1612) and deceitfully professed to abjure Catholicism,

[220] gaining, however, nothing by the step, and contriving to be

reconciled to the Church, after being imprisoned for forty-nine days

on an unrecorded charge. Previously he had figured, like Bruno,

as a wandering scholar at Amsterdam, Brussels, Cologne, Geneva,

and Lyons; and afterwards he taught natural philosophy for a year

at Genoa. His treatise, Amphitheatrum Æterna Providentiæ (Lyons,

1615), is professedly directed against "ancient philosophers,

Atheists, Epicureans, Peripatetics, and Stoics," and is ostensibly

quite orthodox. [221] In one passage he untruthfully tells how, when

imprisoned in England, he burned with the desire to shed his blood

for the Catholic Church. [222] In another, after declaring that some

Christian doctors have argued very weakly against the Epicureans

on immortality, he avows that he, "Christianus nomine cognomine

Catholicus," could hardly have held the doctrine if he had not

learned it from the Church, "the most certain and infallible mistress

of truth." [223] As usual, the attack leaves us in doubt as to the

amount of real atheism current at the time. The preface asserts that

"Atheotêto autem secta pestilentissima quotidie, latius et latius

vires acquirit eundo," and there are various hostile allusions to

atheists in the text; [224] but the arguments cited from them are

such as might be brought by deists against miracles and the Christian

doctrine of sin; and there is an allusion of the customary kind to

"Nicolaus Machiavellus Atheorum facile princeps," [225] which puts

all in doubt. The later published Dialogues, De Admirandis Naturæ

Arcanis, [226] while showing a freer critical spirit, would seem

to be in part earlier in composition, if we can trust the printer's

preface, which represents them as collected from various quarters,

and published only with the reluctant consent of the author. [227]

This, of course, may be a mystification; in any case the Dialogues

twice mention the Amphitheatrum; and the fourth book, in which this

mention occurs, may be taken on this and other grounds to set forth

his later ideas. Even the Dialogues, however, while discussing many

questions of creed and science in a free fashion, no less profess

orthodoxy; and, while one passage is pantheistic, [228] they also

denounce atheism. [229] And whereas one passage does avow that the

author in his Amphitheatrum had said many things he did not believe,

the context clearly suggests that the reference was not to the main

argument, but to some of its dubious facts. [230] In any case, though

the title--chosen by the editors--speaks daringly enough of "Nature,

the queen and goddess of mortals," Vanini cannot be shown to be an

atheist; [231] and the attacks upon him as an immoral writer are not

any better supported. [232] The publication of the dialogues was in

fact formally authorized by the Sorbonne, [233] and it does not even

appear that when he was charged with atheism and blasphemy at Toulouse

that work was founded on, save in respect of its title. [234] The

charges rested on the testimony of a treacherous associate as to his

private conversation; and, if true, it only amounted to proving his

pantheism, expressed in his use of the word "Nature." At his trial he

expressly avowed and argued for theism. The judges, by one account,

did not agree. Yet he was convicted, by the voices of the majority,

and burned alive (February 9, 1619) on the day of his sentence. Drawn

on a hurdle, in his shirt, with a placard on his shoulders inscribed

"Atheist and Blasphemer of the name of God," he went to his death

with a high heart, rejoicing, as he cried in Italian, to die like

a philosopher. [235] A Catholic historian, [236] who was present,

says he hardily declared that "Jesus facing death sweated with fear:

I die undaunted." But before burning him they tore out his tongue by

the roots; and the Christian historian is humorous over the victim's

long cry of agony. [237] No martyr ever faced death with a more

dauntless courage than this

Lonely antagonist of Destiny

That went down scornful before many spears; [238]

and if the man had all the faults falsely imputed to him, [239]

his death might shame his accusers.

Vanini, like Bruno, can now be recognized and understood as an Italian

of vivacious temperament, studious without the student's calm, early

learned, alert in debate, fluent, imprudent, and ill-balanced. By

his own account he studied theology under the Carmelite Bartolomeo

Argotti, phoenix of the preachers of the time; [240] but from the

English Carmelite, John Bacon, "the prince of Averroïsts," [241] he

declares, he "learned to swear only by Averroës"; and of Pomponazzi

he speaks as his master, and as "prince of the philosophers of our

age." [242] He has criticized both freely in his Amphitheatrum;

but whereas that work is a professed vindication of orthodoxy, we

may infer from the De Arcanis that the arguments of these skeptics,

like those of the contemporary atheists whom he had met in his travels,

had kept their hold on his thought even while he controverted them. For

it cannot be disputed that the long passages which he quotes from the

"atheist at Amsterdam" [243] are put with a zest and cogency which

are not infused into the professed rebuttals, and are in themselves

quite enough to arouse the anger and suspicion of a pious reader. A

writer who set forth so fully the acute arguments of unbelievers,

unprintable by their authors, might well be suspected of writing at

Christianity when he confuted the creeds of the pagans. As was noted

later of Fontenelle, he put arguments against oracles which endangered

prophecy; his dismissal of sorcery as the dream of troubled brains

appeals to reason and not to faith; and his disparagement of pagan

miracles logically bore upon the Christian.

When he comes to the question of immortality he grows overtly

irreverent. Asked by the interlocutor in the last dialogue to give

his views on the immortality of the soul, he begs to be excused,

protesting: "I have vowed to my God that that question shall

not be handled by me till I become old, rich, and a German." And

without overt irreverence he is ever and again unserious. Perfectly

transparent is the irony of the appeal, "Let us give faith to the

prescripts of the Church, and due honour to the sacrosanct Gregorian

apparitions," [244] and the protestation, "I will not invalidate the

powers of holy water, to which Alexander, Doctor and Pontifex of

the Christians, and interpreter of the divine will, accorded such

countless privileges." [245] And even in the Amphitheatrum, with

all the parade of defending the faith, there is a plain balance of

cogency on the side of the case for the attack, [246] and a notable

disposition to rely finally on lines of argument to which faith

could never give real welcome. The writer's mind, it is clear, was

familiar with doubt. In the malice of orthodoxy there is sometimes an

instinctive perception of hostility; and though Vanini had written,

among other things, [247] an Apologia pro lege mosaïcâ et christianâ,

to which he often refers, and an Apologia pro concilio Tridentino,

he can be seen even in the hymn to deity with which he concludes his

Amphitheatrum to have no part in evangelical Christianity.

He was in fact a deist with the inevitable leaning of the philosophic

theist to pantheism; and whatever he may have said to arouse priestly

hatred at Toulouse, he was rather less of an atheist than Spinoza

or Bruno or John Scotus. On his trial, [248] pressed as to his real

beliefs by judges who had doubtless challenged his identification

of God with Nature, he passed from a profession of orthodox faith in

a trinity into a flowing discourse which could as well have availed

for a vindication of pantheism as for the proposition of a personal

God. Seeing a straw on the ground, he picked it up and talked of its

history; and when brought back again from his affirmation of Deity to

his doctrine of Nature, he set forth the familiar orthodox theorem

that, while Nature wrought the succession of seeds and fruits,

there must have been a first seed which was created. It was the

habitual standing ground of theism; and they burned him all the

same. It remains an open question whether personal enmity on the

part of the prosecuting official [249] or a real belief that he had

uttered blasphemies against Jesus or Mary was the determining force,

or whether even less motive sufficed. A vituperative Jesuit of that

age sees intolerable freethinking in his suggestion of the unreality

of demoniacal possession and the futility of exorcisms. [250] And for

that much they were not incapable of burning men in Catholic Toulouse

in the days of Mary de Medici.

There are in fact reasons for surmizing that in the cases alike of

Bruno and of Vanini it was the attitude of the speculator towards

scientific problems that primarily or mainly aroused distrust and anger

among the theologians. Vanini is careful to speak equivocally of the

eternity of the universe; and though he makes a passing mention of

Kepler, [251] he does not name Copernicus. He had learned something

from the fate of Bruno. Yet in the Dialogue De coeli forma et motore

[252] he declares so explicitly for a naturalistic explanation of

the movements of the heavenly bodies that he must have aroused in

some orthodox readers such anger as was set up in Plato by a physical

theory of sun and stars. After an à priori discussion on Aristotelian

lines, the querist in the dialogue asks what may fitly be held, with

an eye to religion, concerning the movements of the spheres. "This,"

answers Vanini, "unless I am in error: the mass of the heaven is

moved in its proper gyratory way by the nature of its elements." "How

then," asks the querist, "are the heavens moved by certain and fixed

laws, unless divine minds, participating in the primal motion,

there operate?" "Where is the wonder?" returns Vanini. "Does not

a certain and fixed law of motion act in the most paltry clockwork

machines, made by a drunken German, even as there works silently in

a tertian and quartan fever a motion which comes and goes at fixed

periods without transgressing its line by a moment? The sea also at

certain and fixed times, by its nature, as you peripatetics affirm,

is moved in progressions and regressions. No less, then, I affirm

the heaven to be forever carried by the same motion in virtue of

its nature (a sua pura forma) and not to be moved by the will of

intelligence." And the disciple assents. Kepler had seen fit, either

in sincerity or of prudence, to leave "divine minds" in the planets;

and Vanini's negation, though not accompanied by any assertion of

the motion of the earth, was enough to provoke the minds which had

only three years before put Copernicus on the Index, and challenged

Galileo for venting his doctrine.

It is at this stage that we begin to realize the full play of the

Counter-Reformation, as against the spirit of science. The movement

of mere theological and ecclesiastical heresy had visibly begun to

recede in the world of mind, and in its stead, alike in Protestant

and in Catholic lands, there was emerging a new activity of scientific

research, vaguely menacing to all theistic faith. Kepler represented

it in Germany, Harriott and Harvey and Gilbert and Bacon in England;

from Italy had come of late the portents of Bruno and Galileo;

even Spain yielded the Examen de Ingenios of Huarte (1575), where

with due protestation of theism the physicist insists upon natural

causation; and now Vanini was exhibiting the same incorrigible zest

for a naturalistic explanation of all things. His dialogues are

full of such questionings; the mere metaphysic and theosophy of

the Amphitheatrum are being superseded by discussions on physical

and physiological phenomena. It was for this, doubtless, that the

De Arcanis won the special vogue over which the Jesuit Garasse was

angrily exclaiming ten years later. [253] Not merely the doubts cast

upon sorcery and diabolical possession, but the whole drift, often

enough erratic, of the inquiry as to how things in nature came about,

caught the curiosity of the time, soon to be stimulated by more potent

and better-governed minds than that of the ill-starred Vanini. And

for every new inquirer there would be a hostile zealot in the Church,

where the anti-intellectual instinct was now so much more potent than

it had been in the days before Luther, when heresy was diagnosed only

as a danger to revenue.

It was with Galileo that there began the practical application

of the Copernican theory to astronomy, and, indeed, the decisive

demonstration of its truth. With him, accordingly, began the positive

rejection of the Copernican theory by the Church; for thus far it had

never been officially vetoed--having indeed been generally treated

as a wild absurdity. Almost immediately after the publication of

Galileo's Sidereus Nuncius (1610) his name is found in the papers

of the Inquisition, with that of Cremonini of Padua, as a subject of

investigation. [254] The juxtaposition is noteworthy. Cremonini was

an Aristotelian, with Averroïst leanings, and reputed an atheist;

[255] and it was presumably on this score that the Inquisition was

looking into his case. At the same time, as an Aristotelian he was

strongly opposed to Galileo, and is said to have been one of those

who refused to look through Galileo's telescope. [256] Galileo, on

the other hand, was ostensibly a good Catholic; but his discovery

of the moons of Jupiter was a signal confirmation of the Copernican

theory, and the new status at once given to that made a corresponding

commotion in the Church. Thus he had against him both the unbelieving

pedants of the schools and the typical priests.

In his book the great discoverer had said nothing explicitly on the

subject of the Copernican theory; but in lectures and conversations

he had freely avowed his belief in it; and the implications of the

published treatise were clear to all thinkers. [257] And though,

when he visited Rome in 1611, he was well received by Pope Paul V,

and his discoveries were favourably reported of by the four scientific

experts nominated at the request of Cardinal Bellarmin to examine them,

[258] it only needed that the Biblical cry should be raised to change

the situation. The Church still contained men individually open to

new scientific ideas; but she was then more than ever dominated

by the forces of tradition; and as soon as those forces had been

practically evoked his prosecution was bound to follow. The cry of

"religion in danger" silenced the saner men at Rome.

The fashion in which Galileo's sidereal discoveries were met is indeed

typical of the whole history of freethought. The clergy pointed to the

story of Joshua stopping the sun and moon; the average layman scouted

the new theory as plain folly; and typical schoolmen insisted that

"the heavens are unchangeable," and that there was no authority in

Aristotle for the new assertions. With such minds the man of science

had to argue, and in deference to such he had at length to affect to

doubt his own demonstrations. [259] The Catholic Reaction had finally

created as bitter a spirit of hostility to free science in the Church

as existed among the Protestants; and in Italy even those who saw the

moons of Jupiter through his telescope dared not avow what they had

seen. [260] It was therefore an unfortunate step on Galileo's part to

go from Padua, which was under the rule of Venice, then anti-papal,

[261] to Tuscany, on the invitation of the Grand Duke. When in 1613

he published his treatise on the solar spots, definitely upholding

Copernicus against Jesuits and Aristotelians, trouble became

inevitable; and his letter [262] to his pupil, Father Castelli,

professor of mathematics at Pisa, discussing the Biblical argument

with which they had both been met, at once evoked an explosion when

circulated by Castelli. New trouble arose when Galileo in 1615 wrote

his apology in the form of a letter to his patroness the Dowager Grand

Duchess Cristina of Tuscany, extracts from which became current. An

outcry of ignorant Dominican monks [263] sufficed to set at work the

machinery of the Index, [264] the first result of which (1616) was to

put on the list of condemned books the great treatise of Copernicus,

published seventy-three years before. Galileo personally escaped for

the present through the friendly intervention of the Pope, Paul V, on

the appeal of his patron, the Grand Duke of Tuscany, apparently on the

ground that he had not publicly taught the Copernican theory. It would

seem as if some of the heads of the Church were at heart Copernicans;

[265] but they were in any case obliged to disown a doctrine felt by

so many others to be subversive of the Church's authority.

See the details of the procedure in Domenico Berti, Il Processo

Originale de Galileo Galilei, ed. 1878, cap. iv; in Fahie,

ch. viii; and in Gebler, ch. vi. The last-cited writer claims

to show that, of two records of the "admonition" to Galileo,

one, the more stringent in its terms, was false, though made at

the date it bears, to permit of subsequent proceedings against

Galileo. But the whole thesis is otiose. It is admitted (Gebler,

p. 89) that Galileo was admonished "not to defend or hold the

Copernican doctrine." Gebler contends, however, that this was not

a command to keep "entire silence," and that therefore Galileo

is not justly to be charged with having disobeyed the injunction

of the Inquisition when, in his Dialogues on the Two Principal

Systems of the World, the Ptolemaic and Copernican (1632),

he dealt dialectically with the subject, neither affirming nor

denying, but treating both theories as hypotheses. But the real

issue is not Galileo's cautious disobedience (see Gebler's own

admissions, p. 149) to an irrational decree, but the crime of

the Church in silencing him. It is not likely that the "enemies"

of Galileo, as Gebler supposes (pp. 90, 338), anticipated his

later dialectical handling of the subject, and so falsified the

decision of the Inquisition against him in 1616. Gebler had at

first adopted the German theory that the absolute command to

silence was forged in 1632; and, finding the document certainly

belonged to 1616, framed the new theory, quite unnecessarily,

to save Galileo's credit. The two records are quite in the

spirit and manner of Inquisitorial diplomacy. As Berti remarks,

"the Holy Office proceeded with much heedlessness (legerezza)

and much confusion" in 1616. Its first judgment, in either form,

merely emphasizes the guilt of the second. Cp. Fahie, pp. 167-69.

Thus officially "admonished" for his heresy, but not punished, in

1616, Galileo kept silence for some years, till in 1618 he published

his (erroneous) theory of the tides, which he sent with an ironical

epistle to the friendly Archduke Leopold of Austria, professing

to be propounding a mere dream, disallowed by the official veto on

Copernicus. [266] This, however, did him less harm than his essay Il

Saggiatore ("The Scales"), in which he opposed the Jesuit Grassi on the

question of comets. Receiving the imprimatur in 1623, it was dedicated

to the new pope, Urban VIII, who, as the Cardinal Maffeo Barberini,

had been Galileo's friend. The latter could now hope for freedom of

speech, as he had all along had a number of friends at the papal court,

besides many priests, among his admirers and disciples. But the enmity

of the Jesuits countervailed all. They did not succeed in procuring a

censure of the Saggiatore, though that subtly vindicates the Copernican

system while professing to hold it disproved by the fiat of the Church;

[267] but when, venturing further, he after another lapse of years

produced his Dialogues on the Two Systems, for which he obtained

the papal imprimatur in 1632, they caught him in their net. Having

constant access to the pope, they contrived to make him believe that

Galileo had ridiculed him in one of the personages of his Dialogues. It

was quite false; but one of the pope's anti-Copernican arguments was

there unconsciously made light of; and his wounded vanity was probably

a main factor in the impeachment which followed. [268] His Holiness

professed to have been deceived into granting the imprimatur; [269]

a Special Commission was set on foot; the proceedings of 1616 were

raked up; and Galileo was again summoned to Rome. He was old and frail,

and sent medical certificates of his unfitness for such travel; but

it was insisted on, and as under the papal tyranny there was no help,

he accordingly made the journey. After many delays he was tried, and,

on his formal abjuration, sentenced to formal imprisonment (1633)

for teaching the "absurd" and "false doctrine" of the motion of the

earth and the non-motion of the sun from east to west. In this case

the pope, whatever were his motives, acted as a hot anti-Copernican,

expressing his personal opinion on the question again and again, and

always in an anti-Copernican sense. In both cases, however, the popes,

while agreeing to the verdict, abstained from officially ratifying it,

[270] so that, in proceeding to force Galileo to abjure his doctrine,

the Inquisition technically exceeded its powers--a circumstance

in which some Catholics appear to find comfort. Seeing that three

of the ten cardinals named in the preamble to the sentence did not

sign, it has been inferred that they dissented; but there is no good

reason to suppose that either the pope or they wilfully abstained

from signing. They had gained their point--the humiliation of the

great discoverer.

Compare Gebler, p. 241; Private Life, p. 257, quoting

Tiraboschi. For an exposure of the many perversions of the facts

as to Galileo by Catholic writers see Parchappe, Galilée, sa

vie, etc., 2e Partie. To such straits has the Catholic Church

been reduced in this matter that part of its defence of the

treatment of Galileo is the plea that he unwarrantably asserted

that the fixity of the sun and the motion of the earth were

taught in the Scriptures. Sir Robert Inglis is quoted as having

maintained this view in England in 1824 (Mendham, The Literary

Policy of the Church of Rome, 2nd ed. 1830, p. 176), and the

same proposition was maintained in 1850 by a Roman cardinal. See

Galileo e l'Inquisizione, by Monsignor Marini, Roma, 1850, pp. 1,

53-54, etc. Had Galileo really taught as is there asserted, he

would only have been assenting to what his priestly opponents

constantly dinned in his ears. But in point of fact he had not so

assented; for in his letter to Castelli (see Gebler, pp. 46-50)

he had earnestly deprecated the argument from the Bible, urging

that, though Scripture could not err, its interpreters might

misunderstand it; and even going so far as to argue, with much

ingenuity, that the story of Joshua, literally interpreted,

could be made to harmonize with the Copernican theory, but not

at all with the Ptolemaic.

The thesis revived by Monsignor Marini deserves to rank as the

highest flight of absurdity and effrontery in the entire discussion

(cp. Berti, Giordano Bruno, 1889, p. 306, note). Every step in

both procedures of the Inquisition insists on the falsity and

the anti-scriptural character of the doctrine that the earth

moves round the sun (see Berti, Il Processo, p. 115 sq.; Gebler,

pp. 76-77, 230-34); and never once is it hinted that Galileo's

error lay in ascribing to the Bible the doctrine of the earth's

fixity. In the Roman Index of 1664 the works of Galileo and

Copernicus are alike vetoed, with all other writings affirming

the movement of the earth and the stability of the sun; and in

the Index of 1704 are included libri omnes docentes mobilitatem

terrae et immobilitatem solis (Putnam, The Censorship of the

Church of Rome, 1906-1907, i, 308, 312).

The stories of his being tortured and blinded, and saying "Still

it moves," are indeed myths. [271] The broken-spirited old man was

in no mood so to speak; he was, moreover, in all respects save his

science, an orthodox Catholic, [272] and as such not likely to defy

the Church to its face. In reality he was formally in the custody

of the Inquisition--and this not in a cell, but in the house of an

official--for only twenty-two days. After the sentence he was again

formally detained for some seventeen days in the Villa Medici, but

was then allowed to return to his own rural home at Acatri, [273]

on condition that he lived in solitude, receiving no visitors. He

was thus much more truly a prisoner than the so-called "prisoner of

the Vatican" in our own day. The worst part of the sentence, however,

was the placing of all his works, published and unpublished, on the

Index Expurgatorius, and the gag thus laid on all utterance of rational

scientific thought in Italy--an evil of incalculable influence. "The

lack of liberty and speculation," writes a careful Italian student,

"was the cause of the death first of the Accademia dei Lincei, an

institution unique in its time; then of the Accademia del Cimento. Thus

Italy, after the marvellous period of vigorous native civilization

in the thirteenth century, after a second period of civilization

less native but still its own, as being Latin, saw itself arrested

on the threshold of a third and not less splendid period. Vexations

and prohibitions expelled courage, spontaneity, and universality from

the national mind; literary style became uncertain, indeterminate;

and, forbidden to treat of government, science, or religion,

turned to things frivolous and fruitless. For the great academies,

instituted to renovate and further the study of natural philosophy,

were substituted small ones without any such aim. Intellectual energy,

the love of research and of objective truth, greatness of feeling and

nobility of character, all suffered. Nothing so injures a people as

the compulsion to express or conceal its thought solely from motives

of fear. The nation in which those conditions were set up became

intellectually inferior to those in which it was possible to pass

freely in the vast regions of knowledge. Her culture grew restricted,

devoid of originality, vaporous, umbratile; there arose habits of

servility and dissimulation; great books, great men, great purposes

were denaturalized." [274]

It was thus in the other countries of Europe that Galileo's teaching

bore its fruit, for he speedily got his condemned Dialogues published

in Latin by the Elzevirs; and in 1638, also at the hands of the

Elzevirs, appeared his Dialogues of the New Sciences [i.e., of

mechanics and motion], the "foundation of mechanical physics." By

this time he was totally blind, and then only, when physicians could

not help him save by prolonging his life, was he allowed to live under

strict surveillance in Florence, needing a special indulgence from the

Inquisition to permit him even to go to church at Easter. The desire of

his last blind days, to have with him his best-beloved pupil, Father

Castelli, was granted only under rigid limitation and supervision,

though even the papacy could not keep from him the plaudits of the

thinkers of Europe. Finally he passed away in his rural "prison"--after

five years of blindness--in 1642, the year of Newton's birth. At that

time his doctrines were under anathema in Italy, and known elsewhere

only to a few. Hobbes in 1634 tried in vain to procure for the Earl of

Newcastle a copy of the earlier Dialogues in London, and wrote: "It

is not possible to get it for money.... I hear say it is called-in,

in Italy, as a book that will do more hurt to their religion than

all the books of Luther and Calvin, such opposition they think is

between their religion and natural reason." [275] Not till 1757

did the papacy permit other books teaching the Copernican system;

in 1765 Galileo was still under ban; not until 1822 was permission

given to treat the theory as true; and not until 1835 was the work

of Copernicus withdrawn from the Index. [276]

While modern science was thus being placed on its special basis, a

continuous resistance was being made in the schools to the dogmatism

which held the mutilated lore of Aristotle as the sum of human

wisdom. Like the ecclesiastical revolution, this had been protracted

through centuries. Aristotelianism, whether theistic or pantheistic,

whether orthodox or heterodox, [277] had become a dogmatism like

another, a code that vetoed revision, a fetter laid on the mind. Even

as a negation of Christian superstition it had become impotent, for the

Peripatetics were not only ready to make common cause with the Jesuits

against Galileo, as we have seen; some of them were content even to

join in the appeal to the Bible. [278] The result of such uncritical

partisanship was that the immense service of Aristotle to mental

life--the comprehensive grasp which gave him his long supremacy as

against rival system-makers, and makes him still so much more important

than any of the thinkers who in the sixteenth century revolted against

him--was by opponents disregarded and denied, though the range and

depth of his influence are apparent in all the polemic against him,

notably in that of Bacon, who is constantly citing him, and relates

his reasoning to him, however antagonistically, at every turn.

Naturally, the less sacrosanct dogmatism was the more freely

assailed; and in the sixteenth century the attacks became numerous

and vehement. Luther was a furious anti-Aristotelian, [279] as were

also some Calvinists; but in 1570 we find Beza declaring to Ramus

[280] that "the Genevese have decreed, once and for ever, that they

will never, neither in logic nor in any other branch of learning,

turn away from the teaching of Aristotle." At Oxford the same code

held. [281] In Italy, Telesio, who notably anticipates the tone

of Bacon as to natural science, and is largely followed by him,

influenced Bruno in the anti-Aristotelian direction, [282] though

it was in a long line from Aristotle that he got his principle

of the eternity of the universe. The Spaniard Ludovicus Vives, too

(1492-1540), pronounced by Lange one of the clearest heads of his age,

had insisted on progress beyond Aristotle in the spirit of naturalist

science. [283] But the typical anti-Aristotelian of the century was

Ramus (Pierre de la Ramée, 1515-1572), whose long and strenuous battle

against the ruling school at Paris brought him to his death in the

Massacre of St. Bartholomew. [284] Ramus hardily laid it down that

"there is no authority over reason, but reason ought to be queen and

ruler over authority." [285] Such a message was of more value than

his imperfect attempt to supersede the Aristotelian logic. Bacon, who

carried on in England the warfare against the Aristotelian tradition,

never ventured so to express himself as against the theological

tyranny in particular, though, as we have seen, the general energy and

vividness of his argumentation gave him an influence which undermined

the orthodoxies to which he professed to conform. On the other hand,

he did no such service to exact science as was rendered in his day by

Kepler and Galileo and their English emulators; and his full didactic

influence came much later into play.

Like fallacies to Bacon's may be found in Descartes, whose

seventeenth-century reputation as a champion of theism proved mainly

the eagerness of theists for a plausible defence. Already in his own

day his arguments were logically confuted by both Gassendi and Hobbes;

and his partial success with theists was a success of partisanism. It

was primarily in respect of his habitual appeal to reason and argument,

in disregard of the assumptions of faith, and secondarily in respect of

his real scientific work, that he counts for freethought. Ultimately

his method undermined his creed; and it is not too much to say of

him that, next to Copernicus, Kepler, and Galileo, [286] he laid a

good part of the foundation of modern philosophy and science, [287]

Gassendi largely aiding. Though he never does justice to Galileo,

from his fear of provoking the Church, it can hardly be doubted that

he owes to him in large part the early determination of his mind to

scientific methods; for it is difficult to believe that the account

he gives of his mental development in the Discours de la Méthode

(1637) is biographically true. It is rather the schemed statement,

by a ripened mind, of how it might best have been developed. Nor did

Descartes, any more than Bacon, live up to the intellectual idea he

had framed. All through his life he anxiously sought to propitiate

the Church; [288] and his scientific as well as his philosophic work

was hampered in consequence. In England Henry More, who latterly

recoiled from his philosophy, still thought his physics had been

spoiled by fear of the Church, declaring that the imprisonment of

Galileo "frighted Des Cartes into such a distorted description of

motion that no man's reason could make good sense of it, nor modesty

permit him to fancy anything nonsense in so excellent an author." [289]

But nonetheless the unusual rationalism of Descartes's method,

avowedly aiming at the uprooting of all his own prejudices [290]

as a first step to truth, displeased the Jesuits, and could not

escape the hostile attention of the Protestant theologians of Holland,

where Descartes passed so many years of his life. Despite his constant

theism, accordingly, he had at length to withdraw. [291] A Jesuit, Père

Bourdin, sought to have the Discours de la Méthode at once condemned by

the French clergy, but the attempt failed for the time being. France

was just then, in fact, the most freethinking part of Europe; [292]

and Descartes, though not so unsparing with his prejudices as he

set out to be, was the greatest innovator in philosophy that had

arisen in the Christian era. He made real scientific discoveries,

too, where Bacon only inspired an approach and schemed a wandering

road to them. He first effectively applied algebra to geometry;

he first scientifically explained the rainbow; he at once accepted

and founded on Harvey's discovery of the circulation of the blood,

which most physiologists of the day derided; and he welcomed Aselli's

discovery of the lacteals, which was rejected by Harvey. [293] And

though as regards religion his timorous conformities deprive him

of any heroic status, it is perhaps not too much to pronounce him

"the great reformer and liberator of the European intellect." [294]

One not given to warm sympathy with freethought has avowed that "the

common root of modern philosophy is the doubt which is alike Baconian

and Cartesian." [295]

Only less important, in some regards, was the influence of Pierre

Gassend or Gassendi (1592-1655), who, living his life as a canon of

the Church, reverted in his doctrine to the philosophy of Epicurus,

alike in physics and ethics. [296] It seems clear that he never had

any religious leanings, but simply entered the Church on the advice of

friends who pointed out to him how much better a provision it gave,

in income and leisure, than the professorship he held in his youth

at the university of Aix. [297] Professing like Descartes a strict

submission to the Church, he yet set forth a theory of things which

had in all ages been recognized as fundamentally irreconcilable with

the Christian creed; and his substantial exemption from penalties

is to be set down to his position, his prudence, and his careful

conformities. The correspondent of Galileo and Kepler, he was

the friend of La Mothe le Vayer and Naudé; and Gui Patin was his

physician and intimate. [298] Strong as a physicist and astronomer

where Descartes was weak, he divides with him and Galileo the credit

of practically renewing natural philosophy; Newton being Gassendist

rather than Cartesian. [299] Indeed, Gassendi's youthful attack

on the Aristotelian physics (1624) makes him the predecessor of

Descartes; and he expressly opposed his contemporary on points of

physics and metaphysics on which he thought him chimerical, and so

promoted unbelief where Descartes made for orthodoxy. [300] Of the

criticisms on his Méditations to which Descartes published replies,

those of Gassendi are, with the partial exception of those of Hobbes,

distinctly the most searching and sustained. The later position

of Hume, indeed, is explicitly taken up in the first objection of

Cratérus; [301] but the persistent pressure of Gassendi on the theistic

and spiritistic assumptions of Descartes reads like the reasoning of

a modern atheist. [302] Yet the works of Descartes were in time placed

on the Index, condemned by the king's council, and even vetoed in the

universities, while those of Gassendi were not, though his early work

on Aristotelianism had to be stopped after the first volume because

of the anger it aroused. [303] Himself one of the most abstemious of

men, [304] like his master Epicurus (of whom he wrote a Life, 1647),

he attracted disciples of another temperamental cast as well as many

of his own; and as usual his system is associated with the former,

who are duly vilified by orthodoxy, although certainly no worse than

the average orthodox.

Among his other practical services to rationalism was a curious

experiment, made in a village of the Lower Alps, by way of

investigating the doctrine of witchcraft. A drug prepared by one

sorcerer was administered to others of the craft in presence of

witnesses. It threw them into a deep sleep, on awakening from which

they declared that they had been at a witches' Sabbath. As they had

never left their beds, the experiment went far to discredit the

superstition. [305] One significant result of the experiment was

seen in the course later taken by Colbert in overriding a decision

of the Parlement of Rouen as to witchcraft (1670). That Parlement

proposed to burn fourteen sorcerers. Colbert, who had doubtless read

Montaigne as well as Gassendi, gave Montaigne's prescription that

the culprits should be dosed with hellebore--a medicine for brain

disturbance. [306] In 1672, finally, the king issued a declaration

forbidding the tribunals to admit charges of mere sorcery; [307]

and any future condemnations were on the score of blasphemy and

poisoning. Yet further, in the section of his posthumous Syntagma

Philosophicum (1658) entitled De Effectibus Siderum, [308] Gassendi

dealt the first great blow on the rationalist side to the venerable

creed of astrology, assailed often, but to little purpose, from the

side of faith; bringing to his task, indeed, more asperity than he is

commonly credited with, but also a stringent scientific and logical

method, lacking in the polemic of the churchmen, who had attacked

astrology mainly because it ignored revelation. It is sobering to

remember, however, that he was one of those who could not assimilate

Harvey's discovery of the circulation of the blood, which Descartes

at once adopted and propounded.

Such anomalies meet us many times in the history of scientific as of

other lines of thought; and the residual lesson is the recognition

that progress is infinitely multiplex in its causation. Nothing

is more vital in this regard than scientific truth, which is as a

light-house in seas of speculation; and those who, like Galileo and

Descartes, add to the world's exact knowledge, perform a specific

service not matched by that of the Bacons, who urge right method

without applying it. Yet in that kind also an incalculable influence

has been wielded. Many minds can accept scientific truths without being

thereby led to scientific ways of thought; and thus the reasoners and

speculators, the Brunos and the Vaninis, play their fruitful part, as

do the mentors who turn men's eyes on their own vices of intellectual

habit. And in respect of creeds and philosophies, finally, it is

not so much sheer soundness of result as educativeness of method,

effectual appeal to the thinking faculty and to the spirit of reason,

that determines a thinker's influence. This kind of impact we shall

find historically to be the service done by Descartes to European

thought for a hundred years.

From Descartes, then, as regards philosophy, more than from any

professed thinker of his day, but also from the other thinkers we have

noted, from the reactions of scientific discovery, from the terrible

experience of the potency of religion as a breeder of strife and its

impotence as a curber of evil, and from the practical freethinking

of the more open-minded of that age in general, derives the great

rationalistic movement, which, taking clear literary form first in

the seventeenth century, has with some fluctuations broadened and

deepened down to our own day.