hole man,
not his soul merely--the world of sense, which has been created only for
the conservation of man (his procreation and probation), must disappear;
above this world, however, a higher rears its walls to subserve man's
eternal happiness.

[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 eleme