16 COSMOS. 



reveal the image of the divinity in the visible world 

 We do not here refer, as its title might lead to suppose, to 

 the little pseudo- Aristotelian work, entitled the " Cosmos," 

 undoubtedly a Stoic production. Although it describes the 

 heavens and the earth, and oceanic and aerial currents, with 

 much truthfulness, and frequently with rhetorical animation 

 and picturesque colouring, it shows no tendency to refer 

 cosmical phenomena to general physical principles based on 

 the properties of matter. 



I have purposely dwelt at length on the most brilliant 

 period of the Cosmical views of antiquity, in order to contrast 

 the earliest efforts made towards the generalization of ideas, 

 with the efforts of modern times. In the intellectual movement 

 of centuries, whose influence on the extension of Cosmical 

 contemplation has been denned in another portion of the 

 present work, ** the close of the thirteenth and the beginning 

 of the fourteenth century were specially distinguished ; but 

 the Opus majus of Roger Bacon, the Mirror of Nature 

 of Vincenzo de Beauvais, the Physical Geography (Liber 

 cosmographicus] of Albertus Magnus, the Picture of the 

 World (Imago Mundi) of Cardinal Petrus d'Alliaco (Pierre 

 d'Ailly) are works, which, however powerfully they may 

 have influenced the age in which thev were written, do not 

 fulfil by their contents the promise of their titles. Among 

 the Italian opponents of Aristotle's physics, Bernardino 

 Telesio of Cosenza is designated the founder of a rational 

 science of nature. All the phenomena of inert matter are con- 

 sidered by him as the effects of two incorporeal principles (agen- 

 cies or forces) heated cold. All forms of organic life " ani- 



mundi\ and which is decreased by distance, in accordance 

 with the laws of light, and impels the planets in elliptic orbits 

 (Compare Apelt, Epochen der Gesch. der Menschheit. bd. 1 

 . 274.) 



87 Cosmos, vol. ii. p. 615-625. 



