662 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY, 



he revived the notion of the infinity of worlds ; and, combining with 

 it the doctrine of Copernicus, reached the sublime generalization that 

 the fixed stars are suns, scattered numberless through space and ac- 

 companied by satellites, which bear the same relation to them as the 

 earth does to our sun, or our moon to our earth. This was an expan- 

 sion of transcendent import ; but Bruno came closer than this to our 

 present line of thought. Struck with the problem of the generation 

 and maintenance of organisms, and duly pondering it, he came to the 

 conclusion that Nature in her productions does not imitate the technic 

 of man. Her process is one of unraveling and unfolding. The infinity 

 of forms under which matter appears was not imposed upon it by an 

 external artificer ; by its own intrinsic force and virtue it brings these 

 forms forth. Matter is not the mere naked, empty capacity which 

 philosophers have j^ictured her to be, but the universal mother, who 

 brings forth all things as the fruil^of her own womb. 



This outspoken man was originally a Dominican monk. He was 

 accused of heresy and had to fly, seeking refuge in Geneva, Paris, 

 England, and Germany. In 1592 he fell into the hands of the Inqui- 

 sition at Venice. He was imprisoned for many years, tried, degraded, 

 excommunicated, and handed over to the civil power, with the request 

 that he should be treated gently and " without the shedding of blood." 

 This meant that he was to be burnt ; and burnt accordingly he was, 

 on February 16, 1600. To escape a similar fate, Galileo, thirty-three 

 years afterward, abjured, upon his knees and with his hand on the 

 holy gospels, the heliocentric doctrine. After Galileo came Kepler, 

 who from his German home defied the power beyond the Alps. He 

 traced out from preexisting observations the laws of planetary motion. 

 The problem was thus prepared for Newton, who bound those empiri- 

 cal laws together by the principle of gravitation. 



During the middle ages the doctrine of atoms had to all appear- 

 ance vanished from discussion. In all probability it held its ground 

 among sober-minded and thoughtful men, though neither the Church 

 nor the world was prepared to hear of it with tolerance. Once, in the 

 year 1348, it received distinct expression. But retraction by compul- 

 sion immediately followed, and, thus discouraged, it slumbered till the 

 seventeenth century, when it was revived by a contemporary of 

 Hobbes and Descartes, the Pere Gassendi. 



The analytic and synthetic tendencies of the human mind exhibit 

 themselves throughout history, great writers ranging themselves some- 

 times on the one side, sometimes on the other. Men of lofty feelings, 

 and minds open to the elevating impressions produced by Nature as a 

 whole, whose satisfaction, therefore, is rather ethical than logical, have 

 leaned to the synthetic side ; while the analytic harmonizes best with 

 the more precise and more mechanical bias which seeks the satisfaction 

 of the understanding. Some form of pantheism was usually ado])ted 

 by the one, while a detached Creator, working more or less after the 



