Routledge History of Philosophy Volume IV

RENAISSANCE AND SEVENTEENTH-CENTURY RATIONALISM 147
(Delia Causa, principio ed uno, III, in Dialoghi Metafisici, ed. Giovanni Gentile, 2
vols (Florence, 1985), i, 280ff. Compare especially this passage from Lo Spaccio
della Bestia Trionfante, vol. i:
The gods have given [man] intellect and hands and have made him similar
to them, giving him power over other animals. This consists in his being able
not only to operate according to Nature and to what is usual, but also to
operate outside the normal course of Nature [poter operare secondo la
Natura ed ordinario ma ed oltre, fuor le leggi di quella], in order that by
forming new or being able to form other natures, other paths and other
categories with his intelligence [ingegno] by means of that liberty…he
would succeed in preserving himself as god of the Earth…. And for that
reason Providence has determined that he will be occupied in action by
means of his hands and in contemplation by means of his intellect, so that he
will not contemplate without act and will not act without contemplation.
(The Expulsion of the Triumphant Beast, trans. A.D.Imerti (New York,
1964), p. 205)
I have slightly modified the translation.
27 ‘Die Natur dahin gebracht werden [muss], daß Sie selbst erweist’, Opus Paramirum
(c. 1530), apud Werner Kutscher, Der Wissenschaftler und sein Körper (Frankfurtam-Main,
1986), p. 111.
28 Giuseppe Ceredi, Tre discorsi sopra il modo d’alzar acque da luoghi bassi (Parma,
1567), pp. 5–7, apud A.C.Crombie, ‘Expectation, Modelling and Assent in the
History of Optics: Part I. Alhazen and the Medieval Tradition’, Studies in the
History and Philosophy of Science 21 (1990) 605–33, at p. 605.
29 Hans Blumenberg, work cited in note 20, ad finem, and, more generally, Die
Legitimität der Neuzeit (Frankfurt-am-Main, 1983; English translation, Cambridge,
Mass., MIT Press, 1986), Part 3, and Robert Lenoble, Histoire de l’idée de Nature
(Paris, A.Michel, 1969), esp. pp. 311ff. As Lenoble stresses, in the perception of
Nature one should never ignore or undervalue the pathos that usually presupposes
and/or conveys a ‘scientific style’. In the words of F. Anderson, for Bacon
all statements of observation and experiment are to be written in truth and
with religious care, as if the writer were under oath and devoid of reservation
of doubt and question. The record is the book of God’s works and—so far as
there may be an analogy between the majesty of divine things and the
humbleness of earthly things—is a kind of second Scripture.
(Anderson [4.17], 264)
30 A.Funkenstein, Theology and the Scientific Imagination (Princeton, N.J., Princeton
University Press, 1986), esp. pp. 29off.; and my essay on this book ‘And Justify the
Ways of God to Men’, Studies in the History and Philosophy of Science 21 (1990)
323–39.