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How clearly Cusanus anticipated another phase of our modern views may be judged from what he has to say in "De Docta Ignorantia" with regard to the constitution of the sun.
We accuse him of a negligence and an ignorance analogous to that crassa negligentia, and that crassa ignorantia, on which the law animadverts in magistrates and surgeons, even when malice and corruption are not imputed.
Ignorantia, as I said, is your date an' superscription; an' when you die, you ought to go an' engage a stone-cutter to carve you a headstone, an' make him write on it, Hic jacet Ignorantius Redivicus. An' the translation of that is, accordin' to Publius Virgilius Maro 'here lies a quadruped who didn't know the differ atween black an' white."
All the logic and erudition that has been expended to prove, by the example of gold and silver, that value is essentially indeterminable, is a mass of paralogisms, arising from a false idea of the question, ab ignorantia elenchi.
"Ignorantia eorum,, quae quis scire tenetur non excusat." Doctor and Student, Dialog. 2, ch. 46. But this is giving no reason at all for the doctrine, since saying that a man "is bound to know the law," is only saying, in another form, that "ignorance of the law does not excuse him." There is no difference at all in the two ideas.
It is the ignorantia purae negationis, comparatively speaking, in some of the islands; yet, generally, there is a settled system of some kind observed among them, and in the Banks Islands, an extraordinarily developed religion, which enters into every detail of social and domestic life, and is mixed up with the daily life of every person in the archipelago.
Hobbes did not consider that the same cause, which hinders savages from making use of their reason, as our jurisconsults pretend, hinders them at the same time from making an ill use of their faculties, as he himself pretends; so that we may say that savages are not bad, precisely because they don't know what it is to be good; for it is neither the development of the understanding, nor the curb of the law, but the calmness of their passions and their ignorance of vice that hinders them from doing ill: tantus plus in illis proficit vitiorum ignorantia, quam in his cognito virtutis.
But it is just this insight into the incomprehensibility of the infinite which gives us a true knowledge of God; this is the meaning of the "learned ignorance," the docta ignorantia. The distinctions between these several stages of cognition are not, however, to be understood in any rigid sense, for each higher function comprehends the lower, and is active therein.
The first man, seemingly, to hark back to the Aristarchian conception in the new scientific era that was now dawning was the noted cardinal, Nikolaus of Cusa, who lived in the first half of the fifteenth century, and was distinguished as a philosophical writer and mathematician. His De Docta Ignorantia expressly propounds the doctrine of the earth's motion.
You're a disgrace to the human sex by your superciliousness of knowledge, an' your various quotations of ignorance. Ignorantia, Phadrick, is your date an' superscription. Now, stretch out your ears, till I probate, or probe to you the differ atween black an' white." "Phadrick!!" said the father. "I'm listenin'." "Now, Phadrick, here's the griddle, an' here's a clane plate.
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