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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.
In this contrast of the potential with the actual, modern physics is turning to account the most familiar of Aristotelian distinctions that between dunamis and energeia. That kinetic energy appears to be imparted by impact is a fact of daily and hourly experience: we see bodies set in motion by bodies, already in motion, which seem to come in contact with them.
“The distinction between nominal and real definitions, between definitions of words and what are called definitions of things, though conformable to the ideas of most of the Aristotelian logicians, can not, as it appears to us, be maintained.
Little invention of situation or incident would have been needed, for neither could be imagined more intensely interesting; nor could the most finished artist have constructed a plot more coherent in all its details, or more strictly in accordance with the rules of composition, even to the preservation of the Aristotelian unities of time and place.
But there is no such resemblance between the ancient and modern views of motion and its causes, except in so far as the conception of attractive and repulsive forces may be regarded as the modified descendant of the Aristotelian conception of forms.
Now, these classes, distinguished by unknown multitudes of properties, and not solely by a few determinate ones, are the only classes which, by the Aristotelian logicians, were considered as genera or species.
They are, like so much of the verse of that century, chiefly "good sense put into good metre." That is what Twining, the Aristotelian critic, said of them when Johnson died. He had a much finer sense of poetry than Johnson, and he was perfectly right in this criticism.
Some outlet had to be found for their innate energies and their intense religious enthusiasm; missionary zeal had not yet been invented, and the writing of books would have seemed to them a waste of good parchment, for in their eyes the Scriptures and the Aristotelian writings supplied all the food that the most voracious intellect could crave for.
In this division, which is plainly suggested by the Aristotelian division of Politics in the large sense, the term Monastica not inaptly expresses the reference that Ethics has to the conduct of men as individuals. Albert, however, in commenting on the Nicomachean Ethics, adds exceedingly little to the results of his author beyond the incorporation of a few Scriptural ideas.
Here is an Aristotelian proposition, expressed by Hegel to make lucid a thing nobody comprehends: "Essential being as being that meditates with itself, with itself by the negativity of itself, is relative to itself only as it is relative to another; that is, immediate only as something posited and meditated."
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