are. 26 Conversely finite things in their contracted or concrete way have whatever the Greatest has in its greatest way. Only the Absolute Greatest is infinite; the Universe, the world of concrete things is not the Absolute Greatest, which is God. The Universe therefore is not infinite; but neither is it finite, for it has no limit. Since there is nothing absolute and self-existent save God, the Universe is obviously from Him. Through the Universe as a whole the absolute Unity of God transfuses itself into the plurality of created things. Matter, which is the potentiality of the Universe, could not exist without the form in which it shall reach a non-absolute actuality. Nor could that form exist but for the potentiality which is matter. That form is the soul of the world. Matter is predisposed toward it, is impregnated with desire for actualization in it. Reciprocally that form, which is the World-soul, is drawn to its potentiality which is matter, without which it could not be. This desire for each other, this living bond uniting them, is as the Holy Spirit uniting Father and Son: and the Universe of concrete things is the reflex, the explicatio, of the Tri-une God. The microcosm, man, is constituted as the macrocosm. The union between matter and the World-soul is reproduced in the union between the human body and the human soul. The life of man on earth hangs on the mutual drawing together and realization of the two in this union. Cusa was deeply interested in physical speculation, even in observation and experiment; but his thoughts upon natural phenomena always trailed his metaphysics. There was metaphysics, if not mysticism, in his explanation of the movement of bodies. It was affected by his conception of the union of the World-soul with matter, and the relationship of one and both to God. Soul, spirit, is the universal motor. 26 Lib. II, cap. 3 has the title plicet omnia intellectibiliter. Involved in matter, it im Quomodo maximum complicet et ex Maximum autem est, cui nihil potest opponi, ubi et minimum est maximum. Unitas igitur infinita est omnium complicatio. Hoc quidem dicitur unitas, quae omnia unit. . . . scias Deum omnium rerum complicationem et explicationem, et, ut est complicatio, omnia in ipso esse ipsum, et, ut est explicatio, ipsum in omnibus esse id quod sunt. Cf. Uebinger, Die Gotteslehre des Nikolaus Cușanus (Munster, 1888). parts ceaseless motion, which thus becomes an attribute of the visible Universe. God is omnipresent in all that is. He moves it all. Matter, impregnate with the World-soul, moves. Through the human soul, the human body moves. All things move; nothing is at rest. The earth is not the center of the Universe (centrum Mundi), neither can it ever lack manifold movement. Although Cusa did not discard the theory of the spheres, the earth is not for him the centre of the sphere of the fixed stars, but moves like the planets. Nor can either sun or moon or earth in its motion describe a true circle, cum non moveantur super fixo.27 Cusa's thoughtful interest did not merely follow the grand lines of physical speculation; it was also turned upon an indefinite number of the problems of physics or mechanics.28 The quite sufficiently original mind of Cusa was also stored with learning. He had read and assimilated so very much and from such diverse sources. He had read, for instance, the famous Lully, and taken from him certain thoughts built round the phrase quodlibet in quolibet, everything in everything; he was filled with Neoplatonism, drawn from Plotinus, from the Hierarchies of Pseudo-Dionysius, and from a certain later Neoplatonic Theologia Aristotelis; he had also borrowed from many others much physical speculation.29 In turn he influenced many and diverse men, among whom probably Leonardo da Vinci, and certainly the restless Bruno a century later. It suggests the continuity between mediaeval thought and that of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, to find Leonardo working with ideas which were close to those of Cusa's own fashioning and with others which Cusa had drawn from mediaeval men; or to find Leonardo making use of ideas which he might, or even may, have taken from such a fourteenth century Occamist and physicist as Albertus of Saxonia.30 Appar 27 De doc. ig. II, 11. See Max Jacobi, Das Universum, etc., in den Lehren des Nicolaus von Cusa. (Berlin, 1904.) 28 See generally Duhem's articles in Bulletin Italien. 29 This is shown at length by Duhem, "Nicolas de Cues et Leonardo da Vinci," Bulletin Italien, VII (1907), pp. 87-134; ib. pp. 181-220. 30 See Duhem, Bulletin Italien, VII (1907), pp. 314-329; ib. VIII, pp. ently the thoughts of Cusa and Albertus affected Keppler and even the Copernican theory in general, for which Cusa's reasonings were suited to prepare men's minds.31 212 sqq.; 312 sqq., where Leonardo's direct indebtedness to Cusa is asserted positively. 31 Duhem, Bulletin Italien, VIII, pp. 18-55. CHAPTER XXXI LEONARDO DA VINCI THE philosophy of Cusa exemplifies how the mediaeval and antique past furnished much of the thought of even so constructive mind as his. The same will be true of the most original philosophies and physical investigations of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. But though that period drew masterfully upon its ancient sources, men had become restive under the authority of the past, and greater numbers than before were turning their thoughts directly to the world of nature. Criticism became more audacious, and novel shapings of opinion more in vogue. If the training of the past made possible these novelties, still the breath of life, which always is of the present, was in the latter. Many ideas drawn probably from the writings of previous men were made good use of in the eminently living and original works of the mind and hands of Leonardo da Vinci, who was twelve years old when Nicholas of Cusa died. Leonardo's personality was complex beyond the verge of mystery. It seems possible to discern the master motives of his nature; but to name the chief among them were perilous; and perilous the attempt to find a unity of effort, of purpose, in his life. Perhaps no single motive unified those energies which pursued a confederacy of intellectual interests, or dispersed themselves through different provinces of investigation. Yet it was one Leonardo who became absorbed in science and in art. He, and not a part of him, was at the same time or successively, artist and engineer, investigator and writer, his faculties co-operating in the accomplishment of what might be a means or an end according to the purpose in his mind. Constantly, in his earlier life at least, he studied nature for the purpose of art, as when he dis sected horses for the Sforza monument. Or he might use his draftsmanship to draw the human organs or the wings of birds for the ends of natural science, or of engineering. Leonardo may have been a precocious boy in ways not noticed by his parents. His father did observe his gift for drawing, and placed him in the studio of Verocchio. Assuredly, then, from the first he was an artist,painter, draftsman, carver,- fascinated by the appearances of men and things about him, impressed by their beauty, as it struck his eye. Opening his eyes to the world, he was caught by the surfaces, the fascinating appearances of things, and gave himself over to reproducing those visible forms. But, as every painter knows, the endeavor to reproduce the surfaces of things as the eye sees them, leads quickly to the study of their contours and substances, and the lights and shadows which, with substance and contour, contribute to the visible appearance, and must be considered by the artist who would reproduce that. This artist was led to investigate what seemed to him the natures of things, and the relationship of their appearances to their substance, with its color and form-giving envelope of light and darkness. But even commonplace men have curiosity as to what things are, and how they come to be; and with Leonardo this curiosity amounted to insatiate genius. Just as he was born with a love of the beauty which filled his eyes, so was he from his youth inspired with an effective desire to know and understand the actualities surrounding him. Soon conviction may have come (befitting his benevolent and intellectual nature) that, in order to love, one must understand, and the more one understands, the more will be his love. So it could not be otherwise than that Leonardo's curiosity should have passed beneath the visible surfaces of things, to their mechanism, the manner of their production and destruction. One motive, as his considerations upon painting testify, was to gain help in this art, that he might paint more truly, and do justice to the subtle beauty of the world. Nevertheless, it would be |