COPERNICUS IN ITALY. 



405 



of irony. Our English self-love suffers consider- 

 able mortification at his hands. He dipped his 

 pen in gall when he wrote of that " happy land," 

 guarded by Arcturus, the Bearward, under the 

 influence of the constellation Bootes. The pict- 

 ure he draws of London apprentices and London 

 roughs reminds us of the concise answer given 

 by an African explorer of the last century, when 

 requested to describe the manners and customs 

 of the tribe he had visited : " Manners they have 

 none, and their customs, sir, are very beastly." 

 In the midst of the hustling, jeering crowd of 

 draymen, porters, and serving-men, armed with 

 pikes, halberds, or spits, conjured up before us 

 by Bruno's vivid words, we seem to see his slight 

 southern figure, trembling with rage as he feels 

 for the handle of his Neapolitan stiletto, and faces 

 the " grim English giants " with those sad, in- 

 domitable eyes, which might be thought to hold 

 a foreshadowing of his tragical fate. 



Although an ardent advocate of the Coperni- 

 can theory in its main principles, Giordano Bruno 

 was so on grounds of his own choosing. He 

 pleaded the same cause, but held a different brief. 

 He boasted of seeing with his own eyes, not with 

 those of either Copernicus or Ptolemy ; and, in 

 point of intellectual descent, he seems more close- 

 ly related to the " divine Cusa," whose works he 

 had attentively studied, than to the sober astrono- 

 mer of Thorn or the successful charlatan of Alex- 

 andria. The metaphysical flaw of the middle 

 ages still lay at the root of Bruno's cosmical 

 conceptions. He was no mathematician ; indeed, 

 he could hardly describe a simple geometrical fig- 

 ure without betraying his helplessness in this re- 

 spect ; and his mind was so constituted as to lead 

 him to despise what he did not possess. " Mere 

 mathematicians " served by their observations 

 and calculations to prepare the way for those, 

 like himself, gifted with deeper insight into the 

 mighty meanings of celestial phenomena ; they 

 were translators of strange words, but without 

 the faculty of interpreting their higher sense. 



The idea of a central force ruling the motions 

 of the planetary bodies, which had been enter- 

 tained in an imperfect form by Copernicus, and 

 which it was reserved for a still greater mind to 

 raise to the dignity of a law, was rejected by the 

 philosopher of Nola in one of his incisive, scorn- 

 ful sentences. It was to him inconceivable that 

 force should act upon matter save by direct con- 

 tact, and the difficulty of Bruno was shared by 

 Newton, who endeavored to meet it with the un- 

 tenable hypothesis of an inward pressure of space- 

 pervading ether. The difficulty is, in truth, un- 



answerable, unless we suppose that impalpable 

 substance called " ether," which we know to be 

 diffused between star and star, as well as be- 

 tween atom and atom, to be the medium through 

 which all material forces whatever, from the at- 

 traction of gravitation to chemical affinity, exert 

 their energy. Force, acting through an absolute 

 vacuum, is as inconceivable to us as it was to 

 Giordano Bruno ; and the attempt to realize it 

 encounters a repugnance in our mental consti- 

 tutions as strong as that which prohibits our 

 conceiving an effect without a cause ; but the in- 

 conceivability does not vanish with the use of 

 the word " contact." Contact is only a rude 

 method of describing a balance of forces. We 

 say two bodies are in contact when the mutually 

 attractive energy of their masses is counteracted 

 by the repulsive energy of the particles forming 

 their surfaces. But inter-atomic action without 

 a conveying medium is precisely as unimaginable 

 as the compelling action of the sun upon the 

 earth exerted across 92,000,000 miles of blank 

 space ; and the Trforr part of an inch, unbridged, 

 is as metaphysically impassable as the awful gulf 

 which separates us from the farthest nebula. 

 Space has a relative, not an absolute existence ; 

 the measure of all things, it has itself no meas- 

 ure. Thus, the objection urged by Bruno against 

 the dawning theory of gravitation applies equally 

 to all the forces which hold together the visible 

 frame of Nature ; and, reaching deeper than he 

 himself suspected, can only be proved to be in- 

 valid by being shown to be universal. 



It was Giordano Bruno's pride to have broken 

 down the barriers of heaven, and, like the " little 

 old woman " on her broomstick in the nursery 

 rhyme, to have " cleared the cobwebs out of the 

 sky," in the shape of the last vestiges of cycles, 

 epicycles, and rotating spheres. Space — im- 

 mense, ethereal, illimitable — lay open before 

 him ; peopled with shining spheres — " the Divine 

 Animals " of Plato — consciously rejoicing as they 

 swept through their voluntary, majestic orbits ; 

 " constellated suns unshaken," differing from our 

 sun in species, not in genus ; " infinitely infinite " 

 in number ; nourishing in their bosoms an end- 

 less variety of sentient beings ; renovated by par- 

 tial change, subsisting in an eternal cause. Their 

 motions he conceived to be imperceptible to us, 

 not because they were " fixed," but because their 

 revolutions, by reason of their inconceivable dis- 

 tance from the earth, could only be apprehended 

 by a careful series of observations. Now, the 

 moving principle of observation is the belief that 

 the thing to be observed is at least possible, and 



