328 GIORDANO BRUNO PART 



expect greater knowledge and maturer judgment from 

 an old man than from a young, so from our own age 

 we should expect (if it knew its strength, and were 

 willing to make trial and to put it forth) far greater 

 things than from old times," etc. 1 So faith and 

 religion are to be kept apart from investigation, science, 

 or philosophy, although the latter does not on that 

 account carry us away from God ; the one shows the 

 will, the other (natural philosophy) the power of God. 2 

 To faith are to be given the things that are of faith, to 

 philosophy the things that are of philosophy. 3 It was 

 on the same ground also the use of other than natural 

 principles to explain natural phenomena that both 

 Bruno and Bacon condemned the physical works of 

 Aristotle. He " corrupted natural philosophy with his 

 dialectics gave the human soul, the noblest of sub- 

 stances, a genus from words of second intention ; 

 settled the business of the dense and the rare, through 

 which bodies occupy greater or less dimensions or 

 spaces, by the feigned distinction between act and 

 potency ; asserted a unique and proper movement of 

 each body, being more concerned for an answer one 

 might make in a discussion and to have something 

 positive in words, than for the inward truth of things, 

 as is best shown by a comparison of his philosophy 

 with the others celebrated among the Greeks." And 

 Bacon, like Bruno and other innovators of the day, 

 goes back to Anaxagoras, Leucippus and Democritus, 

 Parmenides, Empedocles, Heraclitus, whose principles 

 " have something of natural philosophy, and savour of 



1 Nov. Org. i. ax. 84 ; cf. 77 (the argument ex consemu\ and De Augm. i. p. 458. 

 In their note E. and S. refer to Esdras, c. 14, v. 10 : "the world has lost its youth, 

 and the times begin to wax old " j and to Casmann's Prcbhmata Marina (1596), as 

 well as to Bruno's Cena (1584). 



2 Nov. Org. i. 89. 3 lb. i. 65. 



