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.

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