Establishment and Extension of the New World Scheme: Giordano Bruno

Abstract

Giordano is one of the first thinkers to realise clearly that the great thoughts are due to a long successive series of experiences. He believed himself to have uttered great thoughts, but, at the same time, he is very well aware of how much he owes to his predecessors, especially to the astronomers, on whose observations he relied. While, in the age of the Renaissance, men were still inclined to look back to antiquity as the source of all truth, just as the Church looked back to the time when the revelation took place, Bruno asserts that the men of the present time are older than “the ancients,” since they have a richer experience on which to build than the latter. Eudoxus did not know so much as Hipparchus, nor Hipparchus as Copernicus. And he commends Copernicus, not only for having carried on the work of his predecessors, but more especially for his strong and magnanimous spirit, which raised him above the prejudices of the many, and the illusions of the senses, and enabled him to establish a new world-scheme. In his Latin didactic poem, ‘On the Immeasurable and the Countless Worlds’, he breaks out into a hymn of praise in honour of Copernicus. He reproaches him, however, for having halted too soon, i.e. before he had deduced all the consequences of his ideas. He therefore needed a commentator, able “to think out all that was involved in his discovery,” and this office Bruno claims for himself.