A Sixteenth Century Psychologist, Bernardino Telesio

A SIXTEENTH CENTURY PSYCHOLOGIST, BERNARDINO TELESIO.

BY J. LEWIS McINTYRE. Anderson Lecturer on Comparative Psychology, University of Aberdeen.

Telesio’s De rerun1 naturb: its design to build up the Science of Xature on a new bmis of empirical knowledge. The human spirit a part of nature, subject to natural laws, and identical in kind with the spirit of animals: its location in the brain and nervous system. Material interpretation of sensation. Empirical theory of space-perception, of memory and association, of reasoning. Sense-knowledge furrdamental, and the source of all certainty. Naturalistic view of morn1 character.

IN1586 was published at Naples a work “De rerum natura,” in nine books, which still forms an interesting monument of patient study, tenacity of purpose, and consistency of thought. Its author, Berriardino Telesio, who at this date was verging upon eighty years of age, had left the University of Padua fifty years before, with a high reputation for scholarship, mathematics, and philosophy. The design was already formed in his mind of placing the philosophy-or science-of nature upon a new basis, and rebuilding the whole. For this end he had devoted himself during thirty years to a close study of the writings of Aristotle, and to an equally patient examination of nature by such methods as were then available. ‘Nature’ for him comprised the whole realm of human as well as of animal life and the inorganic world. In 15G5 the first two books of his work-containing only the more general cosmological theories, although the whole was in fact completed-were published at Rome. In the same year “the good philosopher ” was called to Naples, to expound and defend his theories : there and in his birthplace Cosenza, where he became the guiding mind of the Cosentine Academy, he lived for the remainder of his life, dis- cussing, amending, and teaching the New Philosophy. He died two 62 A Sixteenth Century Psychologist years after the publication of the completed work, and in the year following his death the youthful Campanella gave out his Phdosophia sensibus demonstrata, which contained a defence of Telesio, “ the greatest of philosophers,” against his opponen tsl. Of the new theory of Nature with which the philosopher of Cosenza proposed to dislodge Aristotelianism from its hold upon the universities and the Church it must be admitted that it was greater in design than in actual accomplishment. Telesio’s method was indeed beyond cavil ;- he was to dismiss at one stroke from his mind all the dogmatic teach- ings of the schools, based as they were merely upon verbal authority, and to approach nature by a new path, through the one sure avenue of sense; for human wisdom would have reached its highest goal when it had studied all that sense revealed, and all that might be inferred by direct analogy from the things perceived by sense? Like Bacon, he deprecated the arbitrary use of human conceptions in explanation of the natural world, and described his contemporaries as ‘‘ anticipating nature (veluti naturae praeeuntes) and arrogating to themselves not only the wisdom but even the power of GodS.” Like the school of Bacon, he took as his one principle of inquiry that of the Uniformity of Nature, -“ Nature is always in harmony with itself, is always the same, acts always in the same way, and produces always the same effects4.” His conclusions, however, do not bear the same stamp of modernity upon them: they differ from the vague gropings after truth which were common e&ugh with the innovators of the time only in the more fre- quent appeal to experience and to experiment, by which they are supported, and in the opposition to Aristotle which characterises them throughout. The attack upon Aristotelianism is persistent and thorough, and no one had a better right to criticise the master than one who had spent so many years in the study of his works. Telesio proved, as he in- formed his patron the Duke of Nocera, that Aristotle’s teaching was inconsistent with sense-knowledge, inconsistent with itself, and inconsistent with the Scriptures. In this last connexion his own attitude is curious, but it is one which has frequently been adopted since. In the introduction he psoclaims his absolute acceptance of Holy Scripture

1 For a sketch of Selesio’s work, the hiatory of his school, and au estimate of his influenoe upon modern thought, v. Fioreutino’s Bernardina Teksio, ossia studii storici su l’idea della natura nel Risorgiwnto Italiano, 2 vols., 1874. A full but uncritical account is to be found also in Rixner und Siber’s Beitrage, vol. m. 1820.

a Prooemium, p. 1. J Ibid. Ibid. p. 2. J. LEWISMCINTYRE 63 and the decrees of the Catholic Church ; whatever conflicts therewith, even sense-knowledge, is to be rejected at once. Spasmodically, throughout the work, he has occasional lapses into the consciousness that he is a Christian and a Catholic ; we hear of a soul implanted in man directly by God, over and above the natural soul which grows with the seed of man, and lives in his body and there only: we hear again of an eternal life which belongs only to this God-given soul, and which is man’s true end ; but the life which we study in the work is the natural life of man upon the earth, bent, as are all other animals, upon his own self- preservation and perfection in natural gifts. These theological notes are invariably ‘asides’ from the real argument. The actual trend of Telesio’s reasoning is shown by the fact, that in spite of his great popularity, the universal respect in which he was held, the friendship of many Popes and Cardinals which he enjoyed, only a very few years after his death his main work and his smaller tractates were placed upon the Index. In his outward life a model of orthodox humility, in his inward thought and in his works he passed far beyond the narrow circle of the Church. His creed was naturalism, of an extreme but singularly refined type : naturalistic in its analysis of the conditions of mental life, its view of the origin and validity of knowledge, its theory of the moral end and the practical virtues. A modern reader is amazed at the patience, the thoroughness, the calm seriousness with which Telesio works out his argument, and constructs the world, external nature and internal nature alike, on his new plan ; these iualities are explicable only when we remember how many years he spent upon the work, how fully it was discussed and perhaps emended in the meetings of the Academy at Cosenza and of his disciples at Naples. Of his general theory of nature it is only necessary to say that for Aristotle’s abstract principles of form and matter, possibility and actuality, Telesio substitutes two ‘ active ’ principles-heat and cold,- and one passive,the material or substrate, on and through which the former principles act. Heat is the constitutive principle of the sun and the heavens generally, cold that of the earth, and it is by the interaction of the two through the medium of matter, that individual beings, inani- mate and animate, arise. The effect of’ heat is movement and rarefaction, that of cold immobility and condensation. Hence those bodies in which heat is the only or the predominant principle, as the sun or sky, are in constant motion, those in which cold predominates, as the earth itself, are motionless and dense. The action of heat shows itself in. the brightness and whiteness of objects, its absence in darkness or blackness. 64 A Sixteenth Century Psychologbt

(Thus, Telesio enters on a pretty argument to account for the whiteness of snow !) The need of a third principle-matter-lies in the fact that heat and cold are incorporeal principles, and therefore cannot subsist by themselves : so the philosophic heritage from Greece demanded. ThiB substrate (subjecturn) is however wholly inert, and its quantity remains always the same, neither diminishing nor increahg with change of form ; all action whatsoever issues from the active principles which are in unceasing conflict one with another, each striving to expel its oppo- nent and to reproduce and multiply itself The principle of conservation of energy is not so clearly expressed zm that of conservation of matter. It is noticeable, however, that as the work progresses one of the active principles, cold, falls into the background. Either it comes to stand merely as the negation of heat or a minimal degree of heat, or it coin- cides with the inert matter, which it is the function of, heat to inform with life and movement. Thus cold represses movement, and matter is in itself immobile : cold condenses, matter is essentially an inert, dense mass ; cold shows as darkness, and matter, being inert, cannot act upon the senses, and therefore is in itself invisible or black. The ‘ action ’ of cold is thus simply the return of matter towards its primitive form or formlessness, as heat leaves it. Heat is the analogue of the modern force,’ disintegrating, separating, but at the same time building up higher and less stable compounds out of the lower and more stable. We might give either a medisval or a modern turn to one side of Telesio’s teaching in this connexion. On the one hand each of these natures perceives and feels the effect both of its own actions and of those of its opposite ; “ each derives pleasure from actions by which it is enhanced and preserved] and pain from contrary and dissimilar actions by which it is injured and destroyedl.” In other words, heat and cold have sense and feeling, and in them, the fundamental principles of all things, is already present the effort after self-preservation, which, as we shall find, is the keynote of human as of all animal life. This is the doc- trine of “ornnia animata” which we meet invariably in the Renaissance writings. On the other hand we might read in this chapter of Telesio an anticipation of the scientific monism of to-day :-it is argued with some acuteness, that sensoria, the sense-organs of the body, are not necessary to sensation, that they are indeed not organs at all, but merely approaches or paths by which the qualities of external things or the things themselvw secure access to the sentient substance within

1 Bk. I. ch. 6, p. 10. J. LEWISMCINTYRE 65 the body of the animal. (‘But other beings than animals,-since they are not composed of different parts (as body and spirit), or of parts one of which is covered by the other, but are all one and the same (homogeneous), and have throughout the same feeling and sense,-have not been endowed with sensoria.. ..Moreover, unless in heat or cold or both there is sensation, and so in the heavens or the earth or both, neither can there be any in animals, which are constituted of these ; for how can there be, in beings produced from the heavens and the earth, any faculty which is neither in the heavens nor in the earth’? ” It is precisely the argument so familiar in modern I‘ scientific philosophy,” that if there. is consciousness in the product-man- there must be consciousness in the elements of which the product is constituted,-the cell, the atom? The movements of larger bodies are explained by the same principles of sense and desire. There remains, however, a certain inconsistency. For on the one hand motion is to Telesio the action-the outward side, as it were, the expressivn- of heat : heat is a substance, of which the necessary operation is motion, and heat is therefore ‘‘ prior to motion in time, in nature, and in worth.” Hence for example the constant motion of the sky (coelum) ; it cannot but move, and the nearer to it in nature any substance is, as spirit or air, the more mobile and restless that substance is. On the other hand, heat, cold, and the rest are said to move for the sake of an ulterior end. “Fire or any other thing changes its place, not because the place from which it moves is less akin to its own nature than that to which it goes; but because in the former it feels unpleasantness from some neighbouring thing, which is to be avoided; or because in the latter, there are things from contact with which it derives pleasure.” The heat in the iron seeks union with the heat in the magnet, by which it feels it would be strengthened and preserved, therefore the weight of the iron is overcome, and it flies towards the magnet?. The only approach to a solution of the difficulty occurs in the fifth book: where it is said of the spirit or soul of man that it derives pleasure from sensations because they impel it to movement, that this is its proper action, and that by movement it is preserved in its true nature. Self-preservation is the end, motion the means by which the end is secured. But this would not apply to the active principle itself, which

1 Bk. I. oh. 6, pp. 10, 11. a Cf. Haeckel’s Monism, pp. 19 and 41 of the English translation, and his earlier papers on $6 Cell-souls and Soul-cells,” and ‘1 The Development of the Life Particle.” * Bk. IY. ch. 23, p. 166. 4 Ch. 3. J. of Psych. I 5 66 A Sixteenth Century Psychologist is always and of necessity in movement : motion is there an end in itself. The Psychology is contained in the fifth book, on the Spirit or Natural Soul in man, and in the seventh and eighth, on Sense and Intelligence respectively. As has been said, Telesio the theologian be- lieved that there were two souls in man, one of which was evolved with the natural body, the other being introduced by God through a direct act of creation: the one concerned with seen and temporal things, the other with things that are unseen and eternal’. In this man is distinguished from all other creatures. “Even if this (natural) spirit is in man, and has in man the same function as in animals, and acts in the same way: it is yet not the substance of the human soul, nor does it of itself do all that man does; since Holy Scripture and Human Reason both teach us that there is another substance in man wholly divine and implanted by the Creator Himself ’.” The proof or evidence of this divine soul which Telesio offers is that men do in fact inquire into supernatural matters, which have no reference to their bodily needs, that they find real happiness only in the knowledge and pursuit of the divine ; that for these they neglect even those bodily needs which the brutes pursue without deviation”. This divine soul is a concession which Telesio made to his theological contemporaries : the very terms he employs for it are scholastic-it is the form of the body, and especially of the spirit, &c.-and they remain unexplained, while nowhere else do such terms have any value for Telesio. The world beyond nature enters only at this one point into the course of nature. There is hardly any other suggestion of a transcendent principle in the work. Yet even so, the influence of the soul is limited to an extent which Telesio’s friends in the Church could hardly have admitted. The divine soul is that in man which understands (YOSF TOL~TLIC~F),but it does so only tbough the (natural) spirit, and it can understand only those things which the spirit offers to it for under- standing‘. Otherwise, if wholly independent of the natural spirit, “it would have no need to recall the perceptions of sense, nor to employ the reasoning powers, but would intuite not only all other (natural) beings, but itself, and those beings which cannot be perceived by sense,-the divine substance, and God Himself,-without effort, without succession of images, and without possibility of error, as other divine substances understand, including the freed soul itself when it

1 E.g. Bk. I. ch. 8, p. 36 and Bk. 11. ch. 25, p. 71. 2 Bk. v. ch. 2. * Of. Bk. VIII. ohs. 7 and 15. 4 Bk. v~n.ch. 28, p. 349. J. LEWISMCINTPRE 67 has returned to God’.’’ This intuitive knowledge, or creative intelligence, is that which all scholastic philosophy attributed to God, and other pure spirits, and Telesio was at one with it in this regard. But on that account he placed an impassable gulf between human and divine knowledge: the difference was not of degree, but of kind’. The supernatural soul was only added in man when the natural soul or spirit was already formed and perfected, and it had a separate sphere. Though it is with the latter alone that Telesio’s philosophy is really concerned; there can be no question however of the genuineness of his belief in the supernatural: his was too honoiirable a character to profess a creed which he did not hold. Theology and science he kept rigidly asunder, and his psychology is as purely naturalistic as his theory of the universe is mechanical. Reasoning itself, as we shall find, he reduces to a ‘mode of motion.’ The spirit to which Telesio constantly refers as the natural soul, is thought of as wholly corporeal,-a very delicate, rarefied substance, enclosed within the nervous system, and therefore eluding our senses. Its place, the seat of the soul, is chiefly the brain, but extends also to the spinal cord, the nerves, arteries, veins, and the covering membranes of the internal organs. Similar cavities to those visible in the brain (ix. the ventricles), the spinal cord and optic nerves, are present in all these organs, and it is there that the spirit is enclosed, so that it is accessible to any movement from without, and is able to transmit its own movement to these parts, and thence to the limbs’. The extreme mobility of the spirit, and its continuity throughout all the nervous system, are the qualities which fit it to play the part of the soul. By the contraction and expansion of the bodily parts (through heat or cold) the spirit is also contracted or expanded: this movement is transmitted to all other portions of it, and especially to the main portion of the spirit, in the cerebral ventricles : there sensation takes place. Telesio had followed closely the advances made since Aristotle in anatomy, and had studied in that science for himself, as his careful descriptions of the human eye and the human ear show. Certainly to locate the spirit in the ventricles of the brain was a step considerably in advance of the Peripatetic view that the heart, as the centre of’ the body, was the source of life and passion and desire. Recognising that the nervous system is in close connexion with soul-life, he frankly acknowledged that the soul

1 Bk. vnx. oh. 6, p. 319. a Bk. IT. oh. 25, p. 171. a Bk. v. oh. 5, p. 181 ff. 5-2 A Sixteenth Centzcry Pqchologist in meii differs only in degree from the soul of animals-that animals resemble man in structure, in functions, in their mode of nutrition and reproduction, but above all in nervous structure, SO their spirit mud, be the same in kind and in faculty‘. The alleged absence of memory and therefore of ability to learn by experience, in young infants, and in such animals as flies and worms-the moven~ents of which appeared no more rational to the mediaevals than those of the ant to Mark Twain-Telesio explained much as we should explain them to-day, as arising from inability to attend, distraction by bodily needs, &c., the sense-images not having sufficient intensity to be retained. And he argued that they do learn by experience, if the experience is vivid enough, and repeated often enough; a burnt child does learn to dread the fire, and a fly or worm will return to a place in which it has previously found food9. Moreover animals have some kind of universal knowledge, or reason, for they know “man, lion, animal, plant, and the difference between this and that, and that fire warms, and that air and water yield to the body8.” In other words, they “remember the single objects they have perceived in their sense-experience, with the form and action of each, compare them with each other, connect or make into one those of them which are similar, and separate those that are different.” And this is to form general ideas. They are observed to deliberate, to weigh means to ends, and to select the most fitting; animals can be trained to do unusual acts, tamed to come to the hand of their feeder, and can learn to distinguish one person from another: these and other instances show that Telesio in the middle of the 16th century had the same conception of animal intelligence as Hume, basing it upon as careful an analysis of the facts, and that he had an infinitely more adequate conception of it than Descartes. It is true that he shunned as others have the use of the word ‘intelligence’ for the animal facnlty, and preferred others-existimatio or comniemoratio,-but these terms he also applies to the purely natural reasoning faculty in man4. The basis of all mental life, according to Telesio, is sensation, and all sensation, with the exception of sound, is reduced to one type- tactual sensation,-while on the side of the subject sensation is identified with movement. The stimuli also are ultimately of one and the same type, heat or cold: in fact, however, tu already said,

1 Bk. v. oh. 3, p. 179. a Bk. vm. ch. 10, p. 324. a Bid. ah. 11, p. 329. 4 Bk. VIII. ah. 14, p. 331. J. LEWISMCINTYRE 69 cold is almost entirely neglected by Telesio, and it is heat, of higher or lower intensity, that becomes the external cause of sensation.

Thus taste is described as " the sense of the action of the inner nature (i.e. the degree of heat) of the tasted object, or rather that of the affection or change which the spirit in the tongue undergoes, and which is invariably expansion or contraction. For the spirit can only be expanded or contracted: it cannot be otherwise affected by objects of taste'." Odour in the same way is explained by the action through the nostrils of air and vapours upon the spirit in the brain; vision by the direct action of the heat in light, which rather than colour is the primitive or immediate object of sight'. The pleasure or pain felt in sensation depends wholly upon the degree of expansion or contraction which the spirit undergoes. In proportion as the action of the stimulus is moderate and gentle is pleasure felt: when it exceeds this golden mean pain ensues8. Both the sensation and the pleasure or pain arise from the fact that the spirit itself is set in motion, dilated or contracted, by the movement imposed upon the part of the body in which it lies. And all motions and changes which occur in different parts of the body are communicated, as we have seen, to the central spirit, hence its power to distinguish different sensations in different parts of the body, arising, that is, in different portions of itself4. Telesio knew that sentience was closely bound up with the nervous substance, that only in those parts was an animal sentient in which was some portion of this nerve-substance: but he saw in it rather a covering or organ of the spirit than the material basis of the soul itself. He knew also that wherever greater and more delicate discrimination was necessary, as at the ends of the fingers, and the tongue, the nerves were more numerons, and that the more mobile parts of the body were the more sensitive. The functions of the brain as a central organ of consciousness Telesio found to be precisely those which modern physiological psychology attributes to it5: (1) Discrimination :-" Unless what each individual portion of the spirit perceives is communicated to one and the same (central) portion, it will not be possible to distinguish between the different sensations, nor to decide which is to be accepted, which

Bk. III. ch. 25, p. 106. Cf. Bk. v. ch. 8, p. 186. On Telesio'a Theory of Sound v. injra, p. 72. Cf. Bk. v. ch. 9, p. 187. Bk. v. oh. 10, p. 189. Bk. v. ch. 12. 70 A Sixteenth Century Psychologist rejected: as Aristotle rightly saw, that which discriminates must be a unity.” (2) Retention: the knowledge of what has been perceived by the different parts must be retained, otherwise we should “be injured again and again by the same thing, or abstain from things which are pleasant and good; being for ever ignorant and in doubt as to what kind of thing each one is, we should have to make trial of each continually, to our great disadvantage.” (3) Intelligence : to recognise the qualities of distant objects, and infer those of objects only partly known to us, of which some of the conditions are hidden, although necessary to our knowledge of the good or evil they may bring upon us : foresight of the future, comparison of means to a given end, the invention of instruments; all these are impossible without memory to preserve and recall at will what the spirit has once perceived. (4) Organisation of movements: for this also there is required a central spirit, hence it is placed in the brain, where it enjoys comparative rest from direct disturbance or stimulation. As motion is transmitted from the part to the whole, from the periphery to the centre, so it is transmitted again from the centre to the periphery. Only those parts of the body move which have some nerve-matter in them, and if this be severed in any limb the spirit. loses power over movement in that limb. The body itself is immobile, as we have seen, it is the spirit that moves1. (5) Nutrition: in the sixth book it is to the spirit acting from the brain that all the processes are ascribed which make for the growth and renovation of the body and of itself. Corporeal, however, though the spirit be-and here Telesio joins issue with Ariutotle, who, making the soul the principle of bodily movement, had insisted that it must itself be incorporeal and immobile-yet it is different from the ordinary parts of the body. It is invisible, is akin to the nature of the sun and the sky ; hence the heaviness of a body from which the spirit has fled, for it was the upward-striving soul that lightened it through life : hence also the soul that has left its body cannot return, for it flies upward towards its own element, like fire or air. The withdrawal of the spirit from a limb causes it to relax and fall-hence the various expressions of the emotions, of which Telesio

gives a characteristic account. For example, in fear, ‘I when we see an oncoming evil, or even imagine a past or distant one, we are seized

1 Bk. v. ohs. 13 end 14. J. LEWISMCINTYRE 71 with fear, and the eyes become very small and dull, and tremulous; this is because the whole spirit, being terrified, calls back all its out- lying portions, to strengthen itself: and these when they feel its disturbance and contraction, fly of their own accord to it, and thus the portion of it left in each part being small can with difficulty sustain its burden, and sometimes succumbs. Being now raised up by the spirit, now drawn downwards by their own weight, the parts give the appearance of tremblingl.” The differences between men in degree of intelligence are explained also by purely corporeal differences: e.g. the nature, size and figure of the whole body, but especially of the head and brain, and of the spirit contained in the ventricles of the brain. The brain, or the spirit within it, has, however, another group of functions, we are reminded, which is connected with the nutrition of the body, and of itself. In what precisely sense and intelligence consist is explained in the seventh and eighth books. We have seen that the spirit perceives only certain degrees of heat and cold, which are both present and directly acting upon it, and that moderate degrees excite pleasare, excessive degrees pain‘. ‘In the second place, the spirit is dilated or contracted by the action of these qualities upon it, and is therefore ‘affected’ or altered by them. From its extreme mobility it is set in motion by every impulse from without. Telesio takes for granted that it must also have sense, must perceive the affections, the changes it undergoes, the movements it makes, and indirectly the things which act upon it and produce its changes. Sense is either (a) the action and impulsion of external things upon the spirit, or (b) the affection and responsive movement (conzmotio) of the spirit, or (c) the perception of one or other of these. Telesio finds the essence of sense in the third process, since both affection and movement may occur without sense. “Sense is thus the perception of the action of things and of the impulses of the air, and also the perception of the spirit’s own affections and changes and inovements-but especially the latter. For the spirit perceives the former (the action of things) only because it perceives itself to be affected, changed, or set in motion by themS.” The difficulty, as to how a corporeal substance, however subtle and delicate, could become aware of its own movement; and the equally great difficulty as to how it could even with this consciousness translate

Bk. v. chs. 31 (Fear, Anger, Shame) and 32 (Sadness and Joy). a Cf. Bk. VII. oh. 2, pp. 275, 276. 3 ma. 72 A Sixteenth Century Psychologist the changes of itself into actions of foreign bodies upon it, did not suggest themselves to Telesio’s mind. Sense is merely the correlative of motion, its subjective side: the spirit is an organ of sense because of its mobility, which it derives from the high degree of heat of which it is constituted, just as ‘heat’ also, being an active nature, has a sense of its own actions and of those of its contrary upon it. On the other hand, sensation is also a passive affection of the spirit. It was Campanella, within Telesio’s own school, who first saw that sensation was more than affection,-was also an inward activity of the subject; hence its two sides as a revelation at once of the subject, and of the object affecting the subject. In reducing all sensation to that of contact’ Telesio does not imply more than that there is no perception without direct action of the stimulating object or medium (heat or cold) upon the spirit in the sense-organs: only in the case of sound there is a more priniitive mode of sensation still, for the moving air acts by impulsion: i.e. the motion which it causes in the spirit of the brain is not preceded by a change of temperature, ou which the contraction or expansion follows. Except in sound, no other qualities of objects than the primitive and essential ones of’ heat and cold are directly sensed: ail others, as the thickness, position, weight, &c., of bodies are known only ex accidente. In audition the sensation of sound corresponds directly with the movement of the spirit within the ventricles of the brain:--“Hearing is the perception of motions of this kind,” while ‘ subjective hearing ’ is explained in the same way as due to the movement of a foreign spirit in the brain--“perhaps seeking an outlet.” Telesio was aware of the great influence of sound upon human feeling and action, and accounted for it by this theory of hearing. There is a tendency “to move and agitate the whole body when we hear certain sounds; in the same manner also, and with the same movement as that by which the sound is made,i.e. that which is impressed upon the spirit by the external air.” The motion is transmitted directly from the brain to the limbs*. Perhaps the most Btriking feature of this seventh book of Telesio is the empirical theory of space-perception which is clearly and em- phatically expressed in it. In his answer to the question as to how the true position of objects is seen by us, his ideas are indeed somewhat crude, although corisiderably in advance of the prevalent psychology, that of Galen. He supposed the light-rays from the object

Bk. VII. ch. 8. Bk. vn. che. 34-36. J. LEWISMCINTYRE 73 to come to a point at the pupil of the eye, from which they spread out again in the form of an inverted pyramid, so that the right side of the object is thrown on the left side of the eye, and vice versd; but that in the lens these rays are again brought to a focus, and again thrown in an inverted pyramid upon the vitreous humour at the back of the eye, so that the right side of the image is now on the right side of the eye, the left on the left'. But when he discusses how visual size and distance are perceived we seem to be reading a follower of Mill. The eyes can see even the largest ob.jects, at com- paratively short distances, " because they move about with great facility and rapidity, without being sensible of the fact that as they move successive different rays of light enter the eye, so that what appears as one glance is really many glances; but these take place instan- taneously, and without effort; so that objects of greatest size, which cannot be seen without many acts of visual perception, appear to be comprised in one ; the spirit unites all the separately seen magnitudes into one, and thus comprehends the whole figure even of the largest objectsP." Distance also is indirectly seen, or rather inferred, (1) from temporal signs ;-the image of the more distant object falls later upon the eye than that of the nearer object: (2) from ' aerial perspective,'- the brighter-culoured objects appear nearer, the duller more distant, because (as we learn from experience) the colours of near objects affect the eye more intensely than those of far objects: (3) from relative size,-of two equal objects at a distance from one another, the nearer appears larger, the more remote smaller : and vice versa, of two spaces contained by lines and differing in size, the smaller will appear more remote, although they may actually be at the same distance'. What is true of size and distance is true also of number and$gure and motion, the perception of the last of which is relative to that of distance. Telesio illustrates this relativity by an acute observation-anticipating the Weber law for motion-that in a small confined space the least movement is easily perceptible, whereas in a wide open space it is only with difficulty that a slight movement can be detected4. Still more marked is the empiricism of the eighth book,-on Intelli- gence. It is self-evident to Telesio that we directly sense the resemblances and differences between objects of sense : those which affect us differently we regard as different, those which affect us in the same

Bk. vn. ah. 23. a Ibid. oh. 24, p. 298. Bk. vn. oh. 25, p. 299. 4 Ibid. p. 300. 74 A Sixteenth Century Psychologist way, i.e. which cause the same movement in the spirit, are perceived as the same. The basis of this common-sense' is accordingly memory, and the basis of memory is the continuity of the spirit. The conditions of the former are with Telesio as with the moderns,-the intensity, the frequency, and the duration of the affection and of the stiniulus : the memory-image is the same in kind and in effect with the sensation to which it corresponds; some men suffer nausea at the recollection as well as at the actual experience of a sea voyage, others tremble at the memory as at the sight of a fear-inspiring object. What is retained however, and what is directly recalled, is not the irpage itself, but the movement of the spirit. Telesio compares this retention to that of the movements made in learning an art, dancing, singing, playing, or any other : " for neither is the substance ditrerent in the two cases, nor is it moved in a different fashion, the spirit is the same everywhere and is moved always in the same way." He recognises also a more active form of memory :-" In what is called recollection, when perhaps only a very slight and partial knowledge of an object has been preserved, the spirit can image the whole again, and visualise it, although no memory of it seem to survive. For by frequently and diligently repeating the motion of which the knowledge is preserved, the spirit is stimulated and directed to the other motions which it was accustomed to make along with the former1." There coiild be no clearer statement than this of the associationist standpoint in regard to memory. Teleeio is not less clear in regard to intelligence itself, as the following shows :-" Where some one condition of an object (or ' phenomenon ') is known, the others being unknown, the spirit may discover the latter by seeking them in other objects in which the former condition is also present, and which are wholly known to it: this is what is commonly called intelligence !?." In this regard he draws a distinction, which passed into the philosophy of Bacon, and, in a somewhat different fashion, into that of Spinoza and of Leibniz, between objects endowed with whole natures '' (inteyrae naturae) and those with unfinished or imperfect natures (imminutae naturae). One of the former type is constituted by a single nature, or force, as fire by heat, from which all its qualities and powers are derived, so that all hang together, and all differ from the qualities of other things: thus from any oue of them all the others may be known or inferred. It is to these whole-natured things especially that the theory of reasoning refers. Like Mill, how-

1 Bk. VIII. oh. 2. 2 Ibid. ch. 3, p. 314. J. LEWISMCTNTYRE 75 ever, Telesio found the first principle of reasoning in the law of the Uniformity of Nature. “We cannot doubt that a given condition is united and conjoined with those with which it has always been found together, and apart from which it has never been found ; nor that it is always present in an object of the same kind as that in which it has always been found, and apart from which it has never been found.” Thus if the appearance of any object is known, but its nature and action unknown, we must find some object which has the same form, and of which not only the foim, but the action and nature are wholly known : from these we infer the same nature and action in our given object, provided the known form has been found only in objects of this kind and in no others. Thus the scientific method with Telesio is induction, based however not only on the principle of the uniformity of nature, but also on that of the permanence of type, both principles being admittedly assumptions or pre-conditions of knowledge. Telesio insists also on the uncertainty of human reasoning as compared with sense.

“ All reasoniug is based upon resemblances perceived by sense : it affirms what it does affirm because of a likeness perceived between sensible objects, rejects what it does reject because that is opposed to or contrary to what sense has perceived. Every conclusion rests upon something, depends upon something, or is contained in something,- which the spirit has admitted or at once admits. Intelligence is thus a kind of sense although imperfect, and based on resemblance ....Its objects are always sensible things, which however are too remote or too latent or too weak to effect a change in us, and therefore a perception of themselves,-and it is from sense-objects tliat we start, and on their analogy we forin our conclusions.’’ No one would seek to inquire by reason into any object that is perceptible to the senses. The principles of science, the axioms of geometry, these also are shown to depend upon sense-analogy, and therefore to have no higher validity than the sense- knowledge from which they are derived? And like other naturalists, Telesio placed the more concrete sciences before the more abstract, the

natural before the mathematical. “ Natural conclusions derive from a closer analogy, a nearer cause, a truer nature and substance of the thing, than mathematical. Nor should those that are true be any less certain than mathematical truths on this account ’.” In’other words, natural conclusions are closer to sense-knowledge, and therefore of higher value.

Bk. vm. ch. 4, p. 317. 1 Zbid. oh. 6, p. 318. 76 A Sixteenth Century Psychologist There are, however, two kinds or rather degrees of knowledge. General truths, such as that “ man is a biped,” require no search for a resemblance or analogy between one object and another ; the intuition of a single object is sufficient to give us the knowledge of such an universal nature,--“ by an analogy that is nearest and clearest of all, certain and singular.” Such propositions have the same validity as sense-perceptions, and this is shared by all truths which may be derived from them, or are contained in them. Ordinarily, however, we seek to know wholly some object that is only partly known, and the method of this pursuit is always the same:-we endeavour to reinstate in ourselves the movements which formerly accompanied a movement such as that excited in us by the known part of the object before us. Thus intelligence is, in conscious opposition to Aristotle, described by Telesio as corporeal’ : rather he means that it has a corporeal basis, viz. the spirit which is also the basis of sense, of which the ‘I proper action ” is movement, and which seeks to know itself and its organs and external things as a means to its self-preservation and perfection. The theory is supported by a natural history of intelligence, an account of its dis- tribution in men, of the differences of mental character in different races and in different individuals, and their physical causes, and by LL ‘ dietetics ’ of intelligence, all of which are extremely modern in tone. Telesio’s naturalism is carried also into the sphere of ethics%;the natural end and highest good of man is his self-preservation, or rather that of the spirit or soul ; and indeed this is the only end he cun pursue, or that is within his reach :-other things are and can be desired only as means to it. Virtue and vice accordingly are intellectual merely:-vice is the failure, from lack of memory or other mental defect, to put a just measure upon the passion of the moment. On this basis the individual virtues are discussed ; it is argued that they are not founded upon necessary laws, but are relative to the end of desire. Nor can virtue be acquired, as Aristotle had maintained. We cannot change the quality of our spirit; we can only husband or squander its forces. Our judgment as to an action is determined always by a weighing of the good it promises to us against the evil, and this is almost wholly a matter of intelligence, therefore beyond our control. The virtue of the child changes with its age, different races of men have different virtues and difierent vices, all of which shows that these are not dispositions, but faculties, not acquired, but

1 Bk. =I. ah. 20, p. 339. Bk. IX. J. LEWISMCINTYRE 77

‘natural’ and irrevocable. The theory as a whole is singularly com- plete, and singularly consistent, and this very thoroughness accounts for its wide influence upon Italian thought at the close of the 16th and beginning of the 17th centuries. Campanella must be regarded as Telesio’s direct descendant, and through him the Telesian philosophy influenced the flow of thought towards sensationalism in France : while through Bacon, who placed Telesio highest among his predecessors1, the spirit at least of his method and of his theory of knowledge passed into English philosophy.

“Telesius, who hath renewed the philosophy of Parmenides, and is the best of the novellists.” Nat. Hist. Century, I. art. 69, Ellis and Spedding, Vol. 11. p. 370.