Giordano Bruno

This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can usually download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1903 edition. Excerpt: ...and the convex, anger and patience, pride and humility, miserliness and liberality). In conclusion: --" He who would know the greatest secrets or nature, let him regard and contemplate the minima and maxima of contraries and opposites. Profound magic it is to know how to extract the contrary after having found the point of union." Aristotle was striving towards it, but did not attain it, said Bruno; "remaining with his foot in the genus of opposition, he was so fettered that he could not descend to the species of contrariety.... but wandered further from the goal at every step, as when he said that contraries could not co-exist at the same time in the same subject." 1 There is a naive but at the same time a bold realism in this demand of Bruno's that reality shall correspond even to the simpler unities of thought--unities which after all are mere limitations. It is only because we cannot distinguish in imagination between an infinite circle and a straight line that their identity in actual existence is postulated, and so the minimal chord and minimal arc coincide to our limited imagination only. Admittedly in the case of sense-qualities the argument is from oneness of faculty knowing to oneness of things known. These, however, are only, as we have said, " signs " and "verifications" of a metaphysical truth which is arrived at by other methods. A corresponding passage in the De Minimo2 explains more fully the coincidence of contraries in the minimum: --" In the minimum, the simple, the monad, all opposites coincide, odd and even, many and few, finite and 1 Lag. 288, 289. a Of. Lat. i. 3. 147. 1. ii "VERIFICATIONS" OF COINCIDENCE 179 infinite; therefore that which is minimum is also...