47

3

Species and the Birth

of Modern Science

NICHOLAS OF CUSA: CONTRACTED SPECIES

Nicholas of Cusa (1401–1464) in his On learned ignorance represents a bridge
between the medievals, who were rediscovering Aristotle but using the categories
bequeathed to them by the neo-Platonists, and the Renaissance era.^1 Cusa was an
eclectic, and his comments on categories show an inuence from Pythagorean as
well as neo-Platonic sources, and he was an early proponent of the universal charac-
ter or language that we consider below.^2 He held, for example, that ten is the supreme
number, and that all unity is found in it.^3 He thus justies the Aristotelian ten topoi
(topics), and says,

the universe is contracted in each particular through three grades. Therefore, the uni-

verse is, as it were, all of the ten categories [generalissima], then the genera, and then

the species. And so, these are universal according to their respective degrees; they

exist with degrees and prior, by a certain order of nature, to the thing which actually

contracts them. And since the universe is contracted, it is not found except as unfolded

in genera; and genera are found only in species.^4

He proposes that the universe is not discretely differentiated, but that species

exist, though they vary by degrees. Cusa is naturally aware of the nominalist debate,

and takes a pretty standard Aristotelian view of the matter:

But individuals exist actually; in them all things exist contractedly. Through these con-

siderations we see that universals exist actually only in a contracted manner. And in

this way the Peripatetics [Aristotelians] speak the truth [when they say that] universals

do not actually exist independently of things. For only what is particular exists actu-

ally. In the particular, universals are contractedly the particular.^5

In effect, he is saying that species are particulars (individuals), ignoring the

fourteenth-century discussions. All general things, such as universals, and indeed

the entire universe, only actually exist “in a contracted way,”^6 as particulars, although

things of the same species share in a specic nature:

(^1) Hopkins 1981.
(^2) Rossi 2000.
(^3) Hopkins 1981, Book II, chapter 6, §123.
(^4) Hopkins 1981, §124.
(^5) Loc. cit.
(^6) Hopkins 1981, §125.