CHAPTER V 



GIORDANO BRUNO ADVOCATES THE COPERNICAN 

 ASTRONOMY AND THE PLURALITY OF WORLDS 

 ARRESTED BY THE HOLY INQUISITION IM- 

 PRISONED FOR SEVEN YEARS, THEN BURNED 

 ALIVE HIS VIEWS AND DOCTRINES. 



THE promoters and advocates of the true study of 

 nature and of the advance of knowledge had kept 

 thus far strictly within the lines of religious dogma 

 as accepted substantially both by the Church of 

 Rome and by the Protestants. About the middle 

 of the sixteenth century a man was born who attacked 

 the foundation of orthodox belief, as 'well as those of 

 the philosophy and physics on which both divisions 

 of Faith rested. His teachings, though influencing 

 and forming to a great degree the doctrines of Des- 

 cartes, Spinoza and the other master minds of the 

 seventeenth century, had remained but little known 

 to the laity and the generality of readers until the 

 latter half of this century, when the wider progress of 

 science has brought his name prominently before the 

 World, One of the great philosophers of the sixteenth 



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