Renaissance Cosmology: First stage

The theory of nature, in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries, passes through two main stages. These are alike in their hostility to Aristotle and their rejection of teleology and insistence on the immanence in nature of formal and efficient causes; they are alike in a kind of neo-Platonism or neo-Pythagoreanism, we mean in their insistence on mathematical structure as the basis of qualitative differences. The difference between the two stages lies in their view of the relation between body and mind. In the early phase, the world of nature, which is now called natura naturata, is still conceived as a living organism whose immanent energies and forces are vital psychical in character. The naturalistic philosophies of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries attributed to nature reason and sense, love and hate, pleasure and pain, and found in these faculties and passions the causes of natural process. So far their cosmology resembled that of Plato and Aristotle; and even more that of pre-Socratics. But this animism hylozoism was a recessive factor even in the early Renaissance cosmologies, whereas it had been a dominant one in Greek thought; as time went on it was submerged by the mathematical tendency which from the first had accompanied it; and as this tendency got the upper hand the idea of nature as an organism was replaced by the idea of nature as a machine. The change from the earlier or organic to the later or mechanical view was chiefly the work of Copernicus. But even the earlier view differed sharply from the Greek theory of the world as an organism, because of its insistence on the conception of immanence. Formal and efficient causes were regarded as being in the world of nature instead of being (as they were for Aristotle) outside nature. This immanence lent a new dignity to the natural world itself. From an early date in the history of the movement it lead people to think of nature as self-creative and in that sense divine, and therefore induced them to look at natural phenomenon with a respectful, attentive, and observant eye; that is to say, it lead to a habit of detailed and accurate observation, based on the postulate that everything in nature, however minute and apparently accidental, is permeated by rationality and therefore significant and valuable. The Aristotelian tradition, regarding nature as a material imitation of a transcendent immaterial model, implied that some things in nature were accidental. Aristotle himself had said that matter, that is, the element of unintelligibility, was the source of the accidental element in nature; and it was not until the Aristotelian cosmology was swept clean away that scientists could begin to take nature seriously and, so to speak, treat her lightest word as deserving of attention and respect. This new attitude was firmly established by the time of Leonardo da Vinci at the end of the fifteenth century.

But at this early date nature was still regarded as a living organism, and the relation between nature and man was conceived in terms of astrology and magic; for man’s mastery over nature was conceived not as the mastery of mind over mechanism but as the mastery of one soul over another soul, which implied magic; and the outmost or stellar sphere was still conceived in Aristotelian fashion as the purest and most eminently living or active or influential part of the organism, and therefore as the source of all events happening in the other parts; hence astrology. This magical and astrological conception had powerful enemies from the beginning, notably Pico della Mirandola, who attacked it in the late fifteenth century and was followed by several religious reformers such as Savonarola and Calvin; but in spite of this, the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries were predominantly given over to these occult sciences, which only died out by degrees, and died very hard, in the popular witchcraft of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.