208 GIORDANO BRUNO PART 



Bruno believed the heaviest bodies, as the metals, to be 

 the most solid and concrete, and therefore to contain 

 most moisture. It is moisture also which, penetrating 

 through the arteries, veins, and bones of the earth, 

 gives to it both variety of aspect and the power of life. 

 The visible moisture on the earth's surface, the seas and 

 lakes, is a mere nothing as compared to that which is 

 diffused through its interior is but the sweat, as it 

 were, of the earth's body. 1 Bruno's passion for homo- 

 geneity led him to understand that in its surface the land 

 under the sea is similar to that above it, with which the 

 former is continually changing place, and it is divided 

 up into plains, mountains, valleys, the islands and rocks of 

 the sea being the tops of the mountains : a remarkable 

 intuition of the truth, however arrived at. As to the 

 Earth : familiar elements, earth and fire, Bruno could neither 

 allow a special place or sphere nor a special direction 

 of movement to either, as in the Aristotelian cosmology. 

 The earth was not the centre of the universe, and there 

 were earths or similar planets everywhere. To the 

 several arguments of the Peripatetics 2 for the centrality 

 of the earth, from the heaviness, the darkness, solidity, 

 composite character of the earth's matter, and the 

 movements of its parts, from the idea that contraries 

 shun one another so that the coldest element, for 

 example, should be in the centre, the hottest at the 

 extreme, Bruno opposed the common-sense answers 

 that his own theory suggested to him* His appeal was 

 always from " fictitious order " to the evidence of 

 " sense and reason." The argument has no longer any 

 interest in itself, and to pursue it into detail would 

 hardly be edifying ; but so full is it, so weighty and so 

 vigorous, that one wonders how even the " Peripatetics " 



1 After Empedocles. 2 De Imm. bk. iii. ch. 5. 



