Page:Mind (Old Series) Volume 9.djvu/252

 240 THOMAS WHITTAKER : ferred from the remains of classical antiquity to physical science. The representatives of classical learning were now frequently pedants of the type satirised by Bruno in his comedy II Candelaio. The latter part of the sixteenth century was a period of literary decadence in Italy, not, as in England and France, a period of literary creation. But in England and France the scientific movement had scarcely begun. After he had seen the chief countries of Europe and their universities, Bruno expressed most admiration for the spirit of free intellectual activity that was already making itself felt in the universities of Germany. He praised Luther as the liberator of the human intellect, as a new Alcides greater than the first in that with the pen instead of the club he had subdued a more dangerous and more power- ful Cerberus. He seems to have thought that pre-eminence in science as well as in learning had passed for a time from Italy to Germany. But science and learning were regarded by Bruno as a means to an end. He has drawn the distinction between knowledge that is " instrumental " or " organic " and that which by itself leads to the perfection of the mind. 1 One reason why he so often attacked "the grammarians" was that they were the great representatives in his time of the pursuit of instrumental knowledge as an end in itself. They were at the same time the most prominent among the official defenders of the authority of Aristotle and of received opinions generally, and thus there was another ground of his hostility. But he saw that others besides the humanists might give themselves up to "laborious idleness". He ridiculed some of the researches of mathematicians, physicists and scholastic philosophers no less than those of the gram- marians. And he admitted that the minute studies of the grammarians as well as those of logicians, physicists and mathematicians have a certain utility in providing exercises for those who will afterwards go on to the true end of study. Notwithstanding the admiration which he so often ex- presses for Copernicus, Bruno was of opinion that he had had too much regard for " mathematical " and too little for "physical" considerations, that he had had in view facility of calculation rather than the nature of things. In his re- formed astronomy Copernicus had retained the eighth sphere of the Ptolemaic system, the sphere which was supposed to carry round the fixed stars by its revolution. Bruno abolished the whole system of spheres and substituted for it the idea 1 Summa Terminorum metaphysicorum, ed. Gfrbrer, p. 440.