Page:Cambridge Modern History Volume 2.djvu/736

 conceived the universe as manufactured and limited, and God as transcendent, the two being correlated in the manner of the later deism, The one school was inclined to read nature through Deity, the other Deity through nature; but in each case nature took its meaning from the temper and fundamental postulates of the school. The traditional ideas were Aristotelian; the universe was geocentric; its main fact was the opposition of heaven and earth, with the involved antithesis of the higher or celestial element, and the four lower elements, earth, air, fire, water, all movement being explained from their attempts to effect a change of place.

This theory could not satisfy men who believe in a philosophy of immanence; and efforts were soon made to dislodge it. One of the earliest and most notable of these stands associated with the name of Bernardino Telesio (1508-80). He was a devout son of the Church as well as a zealous student of nature, and he disliked Aristotle for two reasons: first, because his philosophy knows neither piety nor a Creator; and, secondly, because he tried to interpret nature without questioning herself. Telesio's fundamental principle was this: nature must be explained in her own terms according to the method of experience and by the instrument of the senses. He conceived matter as a substance incapable of increase or decrease, more or less passive, yet susceptible of being acted upon by two forces, heat and cold, which, as causes, respectively, of expansion and contraction, produce all motion and all change. The heavens are the home of heat, and the earth of cold; and the constant effort of heat to illumine the dark and quicken the cold issue in a conflict whence come all the movement and variety of nature. The whole proceeds according to immanent laws and without the intervention of God. Nature is self-contained and self-sufficient; which however did not mean that she is without intelligence; on the contrary, there is a soul in things; each supplements and serves the other; mind lives in each, and works through the whole. Bacon saw in Telesio a return to Parmenides; others have seen in him an anticipation of Kant; others again have construed his principle "non ratione sed sensu" as if he were the first of modern empiricists, the forerunner of the sensuous philosophy, both English and French. In all these views there is a measure of truth. He clothed his doctrines in a guise more or less mythical; he could best conceive natural forces as personal, and he was never so ideal as when he meant to be most realistic. But he intended to be true to his principle, to construe nature not through metaphysics or theology, but from herself alone. It is this that makes him so significant in the history of thought, anticipating so much of what Bacon achieved, and places him, in spite of his crude and allegorical nomenclature, amid the forefathers of modern physics.

The speculations of Telesio did not stand alone; they were characteristic of his race and time. Italy, during what remained of the century,