a conflict between the mediaeval and the modern view of the world, of which our philosopher is himself unconscious, becomes evident to the student. It is impossible to follow out the details of this interesting opposition, so we shall only attempt to distinguish in a rough way the beginnings of the new from the remnants of the old. Modern is his interest in the ancient philosophers, of whom Pythagoras, Plato, and the Neoplatonists especially attract him; modern, again, his interest in natural science[1] (he teaches not only the boundlessness of the world, but also the motion of the earth); his high estimation of mathematics, although he often utilizes this merely in a fanciful symbolism of numbers; his optimism (the world an image of the divine, everything perfect of its kind, the bad simply a halt on the way to the good); his intellectualism (knowing the primal function and chief mission of the spirit; faith an undeveloped knowledge; volition and emotion, as is self-evident, incidental results of thought; knowledge a leading back of the creature to God as its source, hence the counterpart of creation); modern, finally, the form and application given to the Stoic-Neoplatonic concept of individuality, and the idealistic view which resolves the objects of thought into products thereof.[2] This last position, indeed, is limited by the lingering influence of nominalism, which holds the concepts of the mind to be merely abstract copies, and not archetypes of things. Moreover, explicatio, evolutio, unfolding, as yet does not always have the meaning of development to-day, of progressive advance. It denotes, quite neutrally, the production of a multiplicity from a unity, in which the former has lain confined, no matter whether this multiplicity and its procession signify enhancement or attenuation. For the most part, in fact, involution, complicatio (which, moreover, always means merely a primal, germinal condition, never, as in Leibnitz, the return thereto)
- ↑ The attention of our philosopher was called to the natural sciences, and thus also to geography, which at this time was springing into new life, by his friend Paul Toscanelli, the Florentine. Nicolas was the first to have the map of Germany engraved (cf. S. Ruge in Globus, vol. lx., No. I, 1891), which, however, was not completed until long after his death, and issued in 1491.
- ↑ On the modern elements in his theory of the state and of right, cf. Gierke, Das deutsche Genossenschaftsrecht, vol. iii. § II, 1881.
