16 COSMOS. 



tribution of masses) maintain the planets in tneir eternal orb- 

 its.* The stars here 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 

 M Cosmos," undoubtedly a Stoic production. Although it de- 

 scribes the heavens and the earth, and oceanic and aerial 

 currents, with much truthfulness, and frequently with rhetor- 

 ical animation and picturesque coloring, it shows no tenden- 

 cy to refer cosmical phenomena to general physical princi- 

 ples based on the properties of matter. 



I have purposely dwelt at length on the most brilliant pe- 

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

 the earliest efforts made toward the generalization of ideas 

 with the efforts of modern times. In the intellectual move- 

 ment of centuries, whose influence on the extension of cos- 

 mical contemplation has been defined in another portion of 

 the present work,f the close of the thirteenth and the begin- 

 ning 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 Cos- 

 mographicus) 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 influ- 

 enced the age in which they were written, do not fulfill by 

 their contents the promise of their titles. Among the Italian 

 opponents of Aristotle's physics, Bernardino Telesio of Cosen- 

 za is designated the founder of a rational science of nature. 

 All the phenomena of inert matter are considered by him as 

 the effects of two incorporeal principles (agencies or forces) 

 —heat and cold. All forms of organic life — "animated" 



* See the passage in Aristot, Meteor., xii., 8, p. 1074, of which there 

 is a remarkable elucidation in the Commentary of Alexander Aphro- 

 Sisiensis. The stars are not inanimate bodies, but must be regarded as 

 active and living beings. (Aristot., De Coelo, lib. ii., cap. 12, p. 292.) 

 They are the most divine of created things ; to, deiorepa twv <pavep&v. 

 (Aristot., De Coelo, lib. i., cap. 9, p. 278, and lib. ii., cap. 1, p. 284.) 

 In the small pseudo-Aristotelian work De Mundo, which frequently 

 breathes a religious spirit in relation to the preserving almightiness of 

 God (cap. 6, p. 400), the high aether is also called divine (cap. 2, p. 392). 

 That which the imaginative Kepler calls moving spirits (amines mo trices) 

 in his work, Mysterium Cosmo graphicum (cap. 20, p. 71), is the distort- 

 ed idea of a force (virtus) whose main seat is in the sun (anima mun* 

 di), and which is decreased by distance in accordance with the laws of 

 light, and impels the planets in elliptic orbits. (Compare Apelt, Epoch 

 en der Gesch. der Menschheit, bd. i., s 274.) 



♦ Cosmos, vol ii., p. 241-250. 



