Robert Grosseteste Quotes on Nature
Grosseteste's De Luce (On Light, c. 1225–28) gives thirteenth-century natural philosophy one of its most original cosmogonies. The framework treats light (lux) as the first corporeal form, whose self-multiplying expansion from a single point into the surrounding matter produces the spherical structure of the cosmos and supplies the underlying mathematical principle by which the subsequent organization of the heavens and the elemental bodies is intelligibly articulated. The corresponding programme of mathematical natural philosophy — the doctrine that geometric optics and the laws of light are the principal instrument by which the structure of the natural world is to be investigated — anticipates the thirteenth-century scientific tradition that Roger Bacon, Witelo, and John Pecham would develop.
Quotes
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Attributed to Robert Grosseteste:
“Light is the first form of all things.”
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Attributed to Robert Grosseteste:
“Mathematics is the key to natural philosophy.”
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Attributed to Robert Grosseteste:
“All natural things proceed from light.”
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“The consideration of lines, angles and figures is of the greatest utility since it is impossible for natural philosophy to be known without them... All causes of natural effects have to be given through lines, angles and figures, for otherwise it is impossible for the reason why ( propter quid ) to be known in them.”
De Lineas, Anguilis et Figuris ( On Lines, Angles and Figures ) as quoted in Neil Lewis, "Robert Grosseteste" Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (2007, 2013) citing Baur, Ludwig (ed.) Die Philosophischen Werke des Robert Grosseteste, Bischofs von Lincoln (1912) pp.59–60 -
“Power from natural agents may go by a short line, and then in its activity greater ... But if by a straight line then its action is stronger and better, as Aristotle says in Book V of the Physics, because nature operates in the shortest way possible. But the straight line is the shortest of all, as he says in the same place.”
De Lineas, Anguilis et Figuris as quoted by A.C. Crombie , Robert Groseesteste and the Origins of Experimental Science 1100-1700 (1953) citing Baur, Ludwig (ed.) Die Philosophischen Werke des Robert Grosseteste, Bischofs von Lincoln (1912) -
“Every operation in nature is in the shortest, best ordered, briefest, and best possible way.”
De iride published in Beiträge zur Geschichte der Philosophie des Mittelalters , IX (1912) pp.74-75 as quoted in Carl B. Boyer , The Rainbow: From Myth to Mathematics (1959) -
“The diligent investigator of natural phenomena can give the causes of all natural effects... by the rules and roots and foundations given from the power of geometry .”
On the Nature of Places , a continuation of the treatise On Lines, Angles and Figures as quoted by Amelia Carolina Sparavigna, "Translation and discussion of the De Iride , a treatise on optics by Robert Grosseteste" arXiv:1211.5961v1 @arXi -
“In a vacuum which is imagined as infinite there cannot be local differences, both on account of its infinity, and also because of the fact that the vacuum, if it exists, would have no nature but a privation, and therefore it can have no natural differences.”
Commentarius in VIII Libros Physicorum Aristoteles(c. 1230-1235)