[Footnote 1:  On Ramus cf.  Waddington’s treatises, one in Latin, Paris, 1849, the other in French, Paris, 1855.]

[Footnote 2:  Schmid Schwarzenburg has written on Taurellus, 1860, 2d ed., 1864.]

The high regard which Leibnitz expressed for Taurellus may be in part explained by the many anticipations of his own thoughts to be found in the earlier writer.  The intimate relation into which sensibility and understanding are brought is an instance of this from the theory of knowledge.  Receptivity is not passivity, but activity arrested (through the body).  All knowledge is inborn; all men are potential philosophers (and, so far as they are loyal to conscience, Christians); the spirit is a thinking and a thinkable universe.  Taurellus’s philosophy of nature, recognizing the relative truth of atomism, makes the world consist of manifold simple substances combined into formal unity:  he calls it a well constructed system of wholes.  A discussion of the origin of evil is also given, with a solution based on the existence and misuse of freedom.  Finally, it is to be mentioned to the great credit of Taurellus, that, like his younger contemporaries, Galileo and Kepler, he vigorously opposed the Aristotelian and Scholastic animation of the material world and the anthropomorphic conception of its forces, thus preparing the way for the modern view of nature to be perfected by Newton.

%3.  The Italian Philosophy of Nature%.

We turn now from the restorers of ancient doctrines and their opponents to the men who, continuing the opposition to the authority of Aristotle, point out new paths for the study of nature.  The physician, Hieronymus Cardanus of Milan (1501-76), whose inclinations toward the fanciful were restrained, though not suppressed, by his mathematical training, may be considered the forerunner of the school.  While the people should accept the dogmas of the Church with submissive faith, the thinker may and should subordinate all things to the truth.  The wise man belongs to that rare class who neither deceive nor are deceived; others are either deceivers or deceived, or both.  In his theory of nature, Cardanus advances two principles:  one passive, matter (the three cold and moist elements), and an active, formative one, the world-soul, which, pervading the All and bringing it into unity, appears as warmth and light.  The causes of motion are attraction and repulsion, which in higher beings become love and hate.  Even superhuman spirits, the demons, are subject to the mechanical laws of nature.

The standard bearer of the Italian philosophy of nature was Bernardinus Telesius[1] of Cosenza (1508-88; De Rerum Natura juxta Propria Principia, 1565, enlarged 1586), the founder of a scientific society in Naples called the Telesian, or after the name of his birthplace, the Cosentian Academy.  Telesius maintained that the Aristotelian doctrine must be replaced by an unprejudiced empiricism; that nature must be explained from itself,