ness of the world, and, finally, the
religious relation to the universe or the extravagant deification of nature
(nature and the world are entirely synonymous, the All, the world-soul,
and God nearly so, while even matter is called a divine being).[2]

[Footnote 1: Nicolaus Copernicus (Koppernik; 1473-1543) was born at Thorn;
studied astronomy, law, and medicine at Cracow, Bologna, and Padua; and
died a Canon of Frauenberg. His treatise, _De Revolutionibus Orbium
Caelestium_, which was dedicated to Pope Paul III., appeared at Nuremberg
in 1543, with a preface added to it by the preacher, Andreas Osiander,
which calls the heliocentric system merely an hypothesis advanced as a
basis for astronomical calculations. Copernicus reached his theory rather
by speculation than by observation; its first suggestion came from the
Pythagorean doctrine of the motion of the earth. On Copernicus cf. Leop.
Prowe, vol. i. _Copernicus Leben_, vol. ii. (_Urkunden_), Berlin, 1883-84;
and K. Lohmeyer in Sybel's _Historische Zeitschrift_, vol. lvii., 1887.]

[Footnote 2: Cf. on Bruno, H. Brunnhofer (somewhat too enthusiastic),
Leipsic, 1882; also Sigwart, _Kleine Schriften_, vol. i. p. 49 _seq_.]

Bruno completes the Copernican picture of the world by doing away with the
motionless circle of fixed stars with which Copernicus, and even Kepler,
had thought our solar system surrounded, and by opening up the view into
the immeasurability of the world. With this the Aristotelian antithesis of
the terrestrial and the celestial is destroyed. The infinite space (filled
with the aether) is traversed by numberless bodies, no one of which
constitutes the center of the world. The fixed stars are suns, and, like
our own, surrounded by planets. The stars are formed of the same materials
as the earth, and are moved by their own souls or forms, each a living
being, each also the residence of infinitely numerous living beings of
various degrees of perfection, in whose ranks man by no means takes the
first place. All organisms are composed of minute elements, called _minima_
or monads; each monad is a mirror of the All; each at once corporeal and
soul-like, matter and form, each eternal; their combinations alone being
in constant change. The universe is boundless in time, as in space;
development never ceases, for the fullness of forms which slumber in the
womb of matter is inexhaustible. The Absolute is the primal unity, exalted
above all antitheses, from whic