ABSTRACT
Nicolaus Cusanus was essentially a medieval thinker, fully accepting the basic position of medieval thought, that of the transcendence of God and the dependence and otherness of the world. The antecedent procedure was one which Christian thought had taken over from Greek philosophy, but it was rendered invalid, Cusanus maintained, by the new conception of being, namely the primacy of infinite being. The conception of the real justification of the study of nature being that it contributes to a knowledge of God is fundamental to the rise of modern science and goes through into the seventeenth century and beyond. The following statement of this conception by G. W. Leibniz epitomizes the attitude of that time: 'The greatest usefulness of theoretical natural science, which deals with the causes and purposes of things, is for the perfection of the mind and the worship of God'.
