324 GIORDANO BRUNO PART 



frequent as time went on. Even so, however, one 

 may trace how his ideas filtered through many minds 

 and helped to determine the course of modern philo- 

 sophy, of which Bruno has as high claims as either 

 Bacon or Descartes to be named the founder. 



In English writers the only contemporary notices 

 of Bruno which have been found are in two small 

 works on mnemonics, one by a professed opponent of 

 Bruno's friend, Alexander Dicson, the other by the 

 poet Thomas Watson. The former, the Anti-die sonus 

 of a certain Cambridge scholar, G. P., of date 1584, 

 was dedicated to Thomas MofFat or Moufet, a well- 

 known philosopher and doctor of medicine, from whom 

 support was hoped against the " Dicson School." Of 

 this school Bruno, who was then in England, must 

 have been regarded as a member. The author is a 

 follower of Ramus, and ridicules the art of memory 

 which consists in locis et umbris and its " self-parading 

 memoriographs, such as Metrodorus, Rosselius, the 

 Nolan, and Dicson ; these are the reefs and whirlpools 

 in which the purer science of memory would have been 

 wholly destroyed, had she not clung to her faith in the 

 Rameans as a pillar of refuge." It is an interesting 

 note, for it shows that Bruno's antipathy to Ramus 

 was returned by Ramus' followers, an antipathy so 

 difficult to understand when we remember that both 

 were reformers in philosophy, and that both zealously 

 attacked Aristotle. The work against which G. P. 

 writes is Alexander Dicson's ~De Umbra rationis et 

 iudicii, sive de memoriae virtute Prosopopoeia^ dedicated 

 to the Earl of Leicester (1583). There can be no 

 doubt that it is based upon Bruno's De Umbris Idearum 

 (1582), with which it agrees both in substance and in 

 metaphysical basis. Dicson, as already pointed out, 



