Note 653 — Chapter IX · BRUNO IN THE HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY

In Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy (1621) Brunus appears with Copernicus as author of “some prodigious tenent or paradox of the earth’s motion, of infinite worlds in an infinite waste” (vol. i. p. 11 of Shilleto’s edition). In the “Digression on Air,” the Cena is referred to (ii. p. 46),—the changes of sea and land, the fixed stars as suns with planets about them, the air of the heavens as identical with that of the earth, the infinite worlds in an infinite ether (ib. 47, 57, 62). Bruno, infelix Brunus as Kepler had called him, is classed with atheistical writers in a later part of the work (vol. iii. p. 447).