| Chapter 1: | The New Astronomy |
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a circumference nowhere. It would be within the bounds of reason if Digges thought that a leap to infinite physical space was thereby justified. In fact, he asserts that the stellar distribution extends infinitely up to the very court of the celestial angels and the “habitacle for the elect.” He included God as an essential part of the quest to understand the natural World (Koyré, Closed 38–39) and criticized those who rely strictly on their senses without proper regard for the role of reason, the latter being a gift from God “to lighten the darkness of our understanding.” Digges knew that humans have cognitive abilities superior to those in animals (whose primary activities are sleeping and eating) and advised us to put God's gift of brains to use in order to read the Book of Nature.
Copernicus and his predecessors placed a sharp division between natural and supernatural space, whereas Digges conflated the two. In 1953 Koyré posited that Digges introduces a radical new semiempirical form that shifts ignorance from the mysteries of the Empyrean to those at the outskirts of infinite space (Closed 38–39). Digges reconciled what he saw telescopically and posited theoretically with what he believed theologically. His real world is like Shakespeare's, which extends beyond human sensibility and ultimately embraces something supernatural (Beauregard 54). Digges reached an accommodation between natural and supernatural space and thereby designed a new frame of creation that preserves both the divine abode and an inconceivably, incalculably large physical space.
Like Copernicus, Digges subscribed to the Pythagorean and Platonic view that the Universe adheres to rules that are capable of aesthetically pleasing mathematical expression. His model combines the spiritual essence of Plato's Universal Form with a model of physical reality, and as such follows the ontological trajectory of Plato's Divided Line. Digges proceeded from Image (appearances) to the new Form (a model of reality) by way of Objects and their mathematical representation, while at the same time adhering to the spirituality of his personal Puritanical worldview. Through correlative reasoning, he ascends Plato's ladder of knowledge from Imagination to Hypotheses and thence to Theories