ABSTRACT
The mathematical things are the cause of the physical because God from the beginning of
time carried within himself in simple and divine abstraction the things as prototypes of
12.1 EMPATHIC AND ABSTRACT TENDENCIES
Two contrasting directions can be discerned in Renaissance cosmology, both of which led
eventually to the scientific revolution of the seventeenth century: to Galileo, Descartes
and Newton. The first direction was inspired chiefly by mathematics, and it was
principally the work of Nicolas Copernicus (1473-1543) and Johannes Kepler
(1571-1630). The second, represented by the thought of Nicholas Cusanus (c. 1400-64)
and Giordano Bruno (1548-1600), was more speculative and philosophical in nature. The
first, which in Kepler’s words regarded ‘the mathematical things as the cause of the
physical’, may be described as tending towards empathy; the second, towards abstraction.
