ABSTRACT
José de Acosta, S.J. (1540–1600) became famous in a richly human way, for writing about a shiver and a laugh. Early in Book Two of his Natural and Moral History of the Indies, which appeared in 1590, he described how his experiences on the way to the New World had taught him to see even the greatest ancient writers as fallible human beings:
I shall tell you what happened to me when I went to the Indies. As I had read the exaggerations of the philosophers and poets, I was convinced that when I reached the equator I would not be able to bear the dreadful heat; but the reality was so different that at the very time I was crossing it I felt such cold that at times I went out into the sun to keep warm, and it was the time of year when the sun is directly overhead, which is in the sign of Aries, in March. I will confess here that I laughed and jeered at Aristotle’s meteorological theories and his philosophy, seeing that in the very place where, according to his rules, everything must be burning and on fire, I and all my companions were cold. 1
Acosta’s declaration of independence from Aristotle made his work a favorite of such quintessentially modern readers as Francis Bacon, who learned from him to see that the Greeks had been far less cosmopolitan than modern Europeans.