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CLASSICAL ESSAY |
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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 |
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