2. A Renaissance Theory of Matter: Bruno. It has
already been suggested that the Renaissance does not
conveniently mark an epoch in the history of Western
concepts of matter. It was a period of accelerating
scientific advance, but so were the later Middle Ages
and, even more certainly, the Enlightenment which
followed. In its early stages the literary and humanistic
preoccupations and the conviction of the vast superi-
ority of antiquity to anything offered by the medievals
no doubt led to the neglect of some interesting medie-
val inquiries e.g., those into “uniform difform” (uni-
formly accelerated) motions just as the logical, cosmo-
logical, and theological preoccupations of the
thirteenth century had probably retarded a literary
renascence. But the scientific value of a more accurate
and complete translation of Archimedes (1543), for
example, which humanistic scholarship had made pos-
sible, should not be underrated. By the middle of the
sixteenth century the most prominent names in philos-
ophy were not primarily humanists but natural philoso-
phers—Telesio, Patrizi, Bruno. What does distinguish
the theories of matter of the Renaissance from those
of the Middle Ages and the seventeenth century is that
it is far more difficult to discover anything like a con-
sensus. Perhaps for that very reason the embattled but
commanding figure of Bruno is especially revealing.
Poet, moralist, logician (the “Lullian art”), cos-
mologist; Catholic, Lutheran, Calvinist; inspired by
Plotinus and Nicolas of Cusa in metaphysics and by
Lucretius and Copernicus in cosmology, Giordano
Bruno was a wide-ranging dissolvent of the Aristotelian
orthodoxies lodged in the universities and, though to
a far lesser degree, a prophet of systems to come. He
found the sort of philosophical significance in Coper-
nicus that Spencer found in Darwin: the geocentric
and anthropocentric theories had been exploded; noth-
ing but an infinite (and thus centerless) universe was
compatible with an infinite God. Similarly biological
hierarchies with man regularly at the apex were mere
pretension—for one thing other heavenly bodies were
probably populated as well. His theory of matter ap-
pears to have undergone an evolution from inherited
Aristotelian hylomorphism towards pantheism. The
ephemeral individuals of ordinary experience became
accidents rather than substances, accidents of either
matter or form which as more permanent features of
the universe, he later dealt with as substances. Yet in
the final analysis matter and form were one in God,
who thus became the only substance and (apparently
the final position) identical with nature. (No direct
influence on Spinoza has been traced.) The first efficient
cause was the World Soul or Universal Intellect imma-
nent in its own matter; at the more local level likewise
all future forms were virtually—i.e., incipiently, not
merely potentially—present in the matter (cf.
logoi
spermatikoi of Stoics,
rationes seminales of Augustine).
Yet, paradoxically, Bruno seems to have clung to the
Aristotelian distinction between elements subject re-
spectively to gravity and levity, in spite of the facts
that this seemed to comport awkwardly with his in-
finite, and therefore directionless, universe (cf., how-
ever, Lucretius' absolute “down”), and that Coperni-
cus, Gilbert, and Kepler were already thinking of
multiple heavenly bodies as exercising gravitional
attraction. Very far from the observational and mathe-
matically-armed scientist, Bruno nevertheless probably
deserves to be considered a scientific martyr—for his
unsparing exposure of inconsistencies in existing theo-
ries, his eclectic independence, his imaginativeness in
attempted syntheses, and his courage in finally refusing
to recant before he was burned by the Inquisition in
1600.
