138 GIORDANO BRUNO PART 



Patrizzi. The great logician was merely " a French arch- 

 pedant, who has written The School upon the Liberal 

 Arts^ and the Animadversions against Aristotle. We 

 may admit that he understood Aristotle, but he under- 

 stood him badly ; and had he understood him well, he 

 would perhaps have been minded to make honourable 

 war upon him, as the judicious Telesio has done." 1 The 

 fashionable philosopher and Platonist is " un altro 

 stereo di pedanti, an Italian who has soiled so many 

 quires with his Discussiones Peripateticae ; we cannot 

 say he understood Aristotle, either well or ill, but 

 he has read and re-read, stitched and unstitched, and 

 compared with a thousand other Greek authors, friendly 

 and unfriendly to Aristotle, and in the end has under- 

 gone great labour, not only without any profit, but also 

 with very great disprofit, so that he who would see into 

 what presumptuous folly and vanity the pedantic habit 

 may plunge a man, let him look at that book, before 

 the memory of it is lost." Tocco has laid his finger 

 upon the reason for Bruno's dislike of these moderns, 

 and it explains his objection to the Scholastics generally: 

 it was that they attempted to remodel and reform the 

 Logic and Rhetoric of Aristotle, the very parts of his 

 work which Bruno regarded as the most perfect, and 

 neglected the physical works, the theory of which had 

 so powerful an authority to back it, and therefore all 

 the more required the energies of the stronger minds of 

 the time to be directed upon it. 2 



Luiiy, One of the mediaeval writers Bruno associated so 



"35-1305- c i ose iy w i t h himself, that his indebtedness might easily be 



exaggerated : this was Raymond Lully, whose grim 



figure stands out from the shadowy thirteenth century, 



1 Causa, Lag. 246. 

 2 Tocco, Fonti flu rccenti, etc., p. 538. 



