Giordano Bruno | Page 7

such completeness,
never before connected with so large a sense of nature, so large a
promise of the knowledge of it as it really is. The eyes that had not
been wanting to visible humanity turned with equal liveliness on the
natural world in that region of his birth, where all its force and colour is
twofold. Nature is not only a thought in the divine mind; it is also the
perpetual energy of that mind, which, ever identical with itself, puts
forth and absorbs in turn all the successive forms of life, of thought, of
language even. But what seemed like striking transformations of matter
were in truth only a chapter, a clause, in the great volume of the
transformations of the Spirit. To that mystic recognition that all is
divine had succeeded a realisation of the largeness of the field of
concrete knowledge, the infinite extent of all there was actually to
know. Winged, fortified, by this central philosophic faith, the student
proceeds to the reading of nature, led on from point to point by
manifold lights, which will surely strike on him, by the way, from the
intelligence in it, speaking directly, sympathetically, to the intelligence
in him. The earth's wonderful animation, as divined by one who
anticipates by a whole generation the "philosophy of experience:" in
that, the bold, flighty, pantheistic speculation became tangible matter of
fact. Here was the needful book for man to read, the full revelation, the
detailed story of that one universal mind, struggling, emerging, through
shadow, substance, manifest spirit, in various orders of being--the
veritable history of God. And nature, together with the true pedigree
and evolution of man also, his gradual issue from it, was still all to
learn. The delightful tangle of things! it would be the delightful task of
man's thoughts to disentangle that. Already Bruno had measured the
space which Bacon would fill, with room perhaps for Darwin also. That
Deity is everywhere, like all such abstract propositions, is a two-edged
force, depending for its practical effect on the mind which admits it, on
the peculiar perspective of that mind. To Dutch Spinosa, in the next
century, faint, consumptive, with a hold on external things naturally

faint, the theorem that God was in all things whatever, annihilating,
their differences suggested a somewhat chilly withdrawal from the
contact of all alike. In Bruno, eager and impassioned, an Italian of the
Italians, it awoke a constant, inextinguishable appetite for every form
of experience--a fear, as of the one sin possible, of limiting, for oneself
or another, that great stream flowing for thirsty souls, that wide pasture
set ready for the hungry heart. Considered from the point of view of a
minute observation of nature, the Infinite might figure as "the infinitely
little;" no blade [240] of grass being like another, as there was no limit
to the complexities of an atom of earth, cell, sphere, within sphere. But
the earth itself, hitherto seemingly the privileged centre of a very
limited universe, was, after all, itself but an atom in an infinite world of
starry space, then lately displayed to the ingenuous intelligence, which
the telescope was one day to verify to bodily eyes. For if Bruno must
needs look forward to the future, to Bacon, for adequate knowledge of
the earth--the infinitely little; he looked back, gratefully, to another
daring mind, which had already put the earth into its modest place, and
opened the full view of the heavens. If God is eternal, then, the
universe is infinite and worlds innumerable. Yes! one might well have
supposed what reason now demonstrated, indicating those endless
spaces which sidereal science would gradually occupy, an echo of the
creative word of God himself,
"Qui innumero numero innumerorum nomina dicit."
That the stars are suns: that the earth is in motion: that the earth is of
like stuff with the stars: now the familiar knowledge of children,
dawning on Bruno as calm assurance of reason on appeal from the
prejudice of the eye, brought to him an inexpressibly exhilarating sense
of enlargement of the intellectual, nay! the physical atmosphere. And
his consciousness of unfailing unity and order did not desert him in that
larger survey, making the utmost one could ever know of the earth
seem but a very little chapter in that endless history of God the Spirit,
rejoicing so greatly in the admirable spectacle that it never ceases to
evolve from matter new conditions. The immovable earth beneath one's
feet! one almost felt the movement, the respiration of God in it. And
yet how greatly even the physical eye, the sensible imagination (so to

term it) was flattered by the theorem. What joy in that motion, the
prospect, the music, the music of the spheres !--he could listen to it in a
perfection