The Italian philosophy of nature culminates in Bruno and Campanella, of
whom the former, although he is the earlier, appears the more advanced
because of his freer attitude toward the Church. Giordano Bruno was born
in 1548 at Nola, and educated at Naples; abandoning his membership in the
Dominican Order, he lived, with various changes of residence, in France,
England, and Germany. Returning to his native land, he was arrested in
Venice and imprisoned for seven years at Rome, where, on February 17, 1600,
he suffered death at the stake, refusing to recant. (The same fate overtook
his fellow-countryman, Vanini, in 1619, at Toulouse.) Besides three
didactic poems in Latin (Frankfort, 1591), the Italian dialogues, _Della
Causa, Principio ed Uno_, Venice, 1584 (German translation by Lasson,
1872), are of chief importance. The Italian treatises have been edited by
Wagner, Leipsic, 1829, and by De Lagarde, 2 vols., Göttingen, 1888; the
Latin appeared at Naples, in 3 vols., 1880, 1886, and 1891. Of a passionate
and imaginative nature, Bruno was not an essentially creative thinker, but
borrowed the ideas which he proclaimed with burning enthusiasm and lofty
eloquence, and through which he has exercised great influence on later
philosophy, from Telesius and Nicolas, complaining the while that the
priestly garb of the latter sometimes hindered the free movement of his
thought. Beside these thinkers he has a high regard for Pythagoras, Plato,
Lucretius, Raymundus Lullus, and Copernicus (died 1543).[1] He forms the
transition link between Nicolas of Cusa and Leibnitz, as also the link
between Cardanus and Spinoza. To Spinoza Bruno offered the naturalistic
conception of God (God is the "first cause" immanent in the universe, to
which self-manifestation or self-revelation is essential; He is _natura
naturans_, the numberless worlds are _natura naturata_); Leibnitz he
anticipated by his doctrine of the "monads," the individual, imperishable
elements of the existent, in which matter and form, incorrectly divorced by
Aristotle as though two antithetical principles, constitute one unity.