n6 SCIENCE AND THE HUMAN MIND 



nomy affected the human mind in other ways. Cer- 

 tainly it was one of the influences which led the fiery 

 Dominican Giordano Bruno (c. 1548-1600) to break 

 with the Roman Church, and to become an outcast 

 both from Catholic Rome and Calvinist Geneva. 

 Bruno used the work of Copernicus to discredit the 

 authority of Aristotle, for whom he had a perfect 

 hatred, contrasting him most unfavourably with the 

 older Greek philosophers. Passing from Paris to 

 England and England to Germany, Bruno every- 

 where attacked openly the Roman Church, its clergy, 

 and the doctrines they taught : the Jewish scriptures 

 he treated as myths, the miracles of the saints as 

 magical tricks. 



Accepting a treacherous invitation to Venice in 

 1596, Bruno fell into the clutches of the Inquisition. 

 He was imprisoned, sent to Rome in 1593 and burnt 

 at the stake in 1600. 



At last we see the ideas concealed in the manuscripts 

 of Leonardo da Vinci, then doubtless floating about in 

 the minds of his Italian successors, coming 

 to the light of day in the epoch-making 

 work of Galileo Galilei (1564-1642). In Leonardo, the 

 spirit of modern science is present everywhere, fram- 

 ing, moulding and developing his thoughts on all the 

 innumerable subjects on which he pondered. But in 

 Galileo it has gone further. With an equally sound 

 grasp of principle, he has learnt the modern need of 

 concentration, and works out his more limited problems 

 in a more complete and methodical way than the 

 wider sweep of Leonardo's soul could stop to accom- 

 plish. In reading Galileo we feel at once that modern 



