A Philosophy of the Infinite
Universe
by Giordano Bruno
These are the doubts, difficulties and motives, about the
solution whereof I have said enough in our dialogues to expose the
intimate and radicated errors of the common philosophy, and to show
the weight and worth of our own. Here you will meet with the reasons
why we should not fear that any part of this Universe should fall or
fly off, that the least particle should be lost in empty space, or
be truly annihilated. Here you will perceive the reason of that
vicissitude which may be observed in the constant change of all
things, whereby it happens, that there is nothing so ill but may
befall us or be prevented, nor anything so good but may be lost or
obtained by us; since in this infinite field the parts and modes do
perpetually vary, though the substance and the whole do eternally
persevere the same.
From this contemplation (if we do but rightly consider), it will
follow that we ought never to be dispirited by any strange accidents
through excess of fear or pain, nor ever be elated by any prosperous
event through excess of hope or pleasure; whence we have the way to
true morality, and, following it, we would become the magnanimous
despisers of what men of childish thoughts do fondly esteem, and the
wise judges of the history of nature which is written in our minds,
and the strict executioners of those divine laws which are engraven
in the center of our hearts. We would know that it is no harder
thing to fly from hence up into heaven, than to fly from heaven back
again to the earth, that ascending thither and ascending hither are
all one; that we are no more circumferential to the other globes
than they are to us, nor they more central to us than we are to
them, and that none of them is more above the stars than we, as they
are no less than we covered over or comprehended by the sky. Behold
us therefore free from envying them! behold us delivered from the
vain anxiety and foolish care of desiring to enjoy that good afar
off, which in as great a degree we may possess so near at hand, and
even at home! Behold us freed from the terror that they should fall
upon us, any more than we should hope that we might fall upon them;
since every one as well as all of these globes are sustained by
infinite ether, in which this our animal freely runs, and keeps to
his prescribed course, as the rest of the planets do to theirs.
...
We fear not, therefore, that what is accumulated in this world,
should, by the malice of some wandering spirit, or by the wrath of
some evil genius, be shook and scattered, as it were, into smoke or
dust, out of this cupola of the sky, and beyond the starry mantle of
the firmament; nor that the nature of things can otherwise come to
be annihilated in substance, than, as it seems to our eyes, that the
air contained in the concavity of a bubble is become nothing when
that bubble is burst; because we know that in the world one thing
ever succeeds another, there being no utmost bottom, whence,
as by the hand of some artificer, things are irreparably struck into
nothing. There are no ends, limits, margins, or walls, that keep
back or subtract any parcel of the infinite abundance of things.
Thence it is that the earth and sea are ever equally fertile, and
thence the perpetual brightness of the sun, eternal fuel circulating
to those devouring fires, and a supply of waters being eternally
furnished to the evaporated seas, from the infinite and ever
renewing magazine of matter: so that Democritus and Epicurus, who
asserted the infinity of things with their perpetual variableness
and restoration were so far more in the right than he who endeavored
to account for the eternally same appearance of the Universe, by
making homogeneous particles of matter ever and numerically to
succeed one another.
Thus the excellency of God is magnified, and the grandeur of his
Empire made manifest; he is not glorified in one, hut in numberless
suns, not in one earth nor in one world, but in ten hundred
thousand, of infinite globes: so that this faculty of the intellect
is not vain or arbitrary, that ever will or can add space to space,
quantity to quantity, unity to unity, member to member. By this
science we are loosened from the chains of a most narrow dungeon,
and set at liberty to rove in a most august empire; we are removed
from conceited boundaries and poverty, to the innumerable riches of
an infinite space, of so worthy a field, and of such beautiful
worlds: this science does not, in a word, make a horizontal circle
feigned by the eye on earth, and imagined by the fancy in the
spacious sky.
Excerpted from A Philosophy of the Infinite
Universe, by Giordano Bruno |
The Pope and the
Heretic: The True Story of Giordano
Bruno, the Man Who Dared to Defy the
Roman Inquisition, by Michael White
|