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Dictionary of the History of Ideas

Studies of Selected Pivotal Ideas
  
  
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1. The Principle of Plenitude and the Plurality of
Worlds.
According to Lovejoy ([1936], Ch. IV), the
Renaissance idea of a plurality of inhabited worlds in
a physical universe infinite in space owes more to the
persisting force of the principle of plenitude than to
the new Copernican astronomy. The doctrine of an
infinity of worlds, as put forward most notably by
Giordano Bruno, is associated with his interest in the
new astronomy; but it is equally true that this doctrine,
as well as the hypothesis that there is life on these
worlds, could not be deduced from astronomical data
alone. The argument of which Bruno avails himself is
clearly a development of the principle of plenitude.
We may not think that a finite effect comes from an
infinite cause; in God, and therefore in the temporal
order that derives from Him, the possible and the real
coincide. Divine power cannot remain idle, divine
goodness cannot but be infinitely diffused, being infi-
nitely communicable. God, then, is a fertile father
(padre fecondo), endowed with an illimitable genera-
tive capacity (capacissimo di innumerevoli mondi),
as found in De l'infinito universo e mondi (1584),
Dial. I.

Descartes' authority, in the course of the seventeenth
century, lends support to this rejection of the idea of
the universe as a finite and self-contained sphere; and
the idea of a plurality of inhabited worlds is given great
currency in Fontenelle's Entretiens sur la pluralité des
mondes
(1686).