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 Giordano Bruno: philosopher and martyr. 
 
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 3 1924 028 988 967 
 
Giordano Bruno : 
 
 PHILOSOPHER AND MARTYR. 
 
 TWO ADDRESSES. 
 
 DANIEL G. BRINTON, M.D., 
 
 AND 
 
 THOMAS DAVIDSON, M.A. 
 
 PHILADELPHIA: 
 
 DAVID McKAY, PUBLISHER, 
 
 No. 23 South Ninth Street. 
 
 1890. 
 
As America's jnental courage (the thought comes to me to-day) 
 is so indebted, above all current lands and peoples, to the noble 
 army of old-world martyrs past, how incumbent on us that we 
 clear those martyrs' lives and names, and hold them up for 
 reverent admiration as well as beacons. And typical of this, 
 and standing for it and all perhaps, Giordano Bruno may well 
 be put, to-day and to come, in our New World's thankfulest 
 heart and memory. 
 
 WALT WHITMAN. 
 
 February 24ih, l8go. 
 
 Camden, N. J. 
 
PREFATORY NOTE. 
 
 The Contemporary Club, of Philadelphia — an asso- 
 ciation of men and women formed for the discussion 
 of the leading questions of the day — selected the sub- 
 ject of Giordano Bruno for its meeting on January 
 14, 1890. 
 
 The heated controversies which had attended the 
 erection of a statue to Bruno in Rome the year pre- 
 vious, and the numerous articles which had appeared 
 concerning him in the recent magazines and papers, 
 both European and American, signalized his individu- 
 ality and his thought as manifestly present topics of 
 interest to reflective minds. The two addresses printed 
 in this little volume were read before the Club on the 
 date mentioned, and are presented without alteration. 
 Of course, it will be understood that they exhibit the 
 opinions of the writers, and are not an official expres- 
 sion of the sentiments of the Club as a body. 
 
 It appeared the more desirable to print them in 
 their present form on account of the difficulty of 
 
VI PREFATORY NOTE. 
 
 obtaining accurate information about Bruno, or access 
 to bis works. None of tHese has been translated into 
 English, and the Italian and Latin originals are ex- 
 tremely, rarely to be found, even in our largest 
 libraries. 
 
 Of biographies in English, Frith's " Life of Gior- 
 dano Bruno," published by Messrs. Triibner & Co., 
 London, is much the best, and a book to be recom- 
 mended. 
 
 The lines by Walt Whitman will be appreciated by 
 all who are in sympathy with his sterling philosophy 
 of life. They were written after reading the first of 
 the addresses here published, his infirmities prevent- 
 ing him from attending the meeting of the Club, of 
 which he is an honored member. 
 
 The engraving on the title page represents the 
 statue erected to Bruno on the Campo de' Fiori, 
 Rome, and is copied from the medal struck to cele- 
 brate that event. 
 
 D. G. BRINTON. 
 
 Philadelphia, 
 
 March, i8go. 
 
GIORDANO BRUNO: 
 
 HIS LIFE AND HIS PHILOSOPHY, 
 
 BY DANIEL G. BRINTON, M.D. 
 
GIORDANO BRUNO : 
 HIS LIFE AND HIS PHILOSOPHY. 
 
 Mr. President and Fellow Members : — 
 
 Soraething more than five-and-twenty years 
 ago I listened to some lectures at the Sorbonne_ 
 on Giordano Bruno, his life and his philosophy. 
 I remember that a fellow student expressed his 
 opinion that they were a deadly bore — ennu- 
 yeuxs a mourir. I hope that whatever other 
 fault you find with me in treating the same sub- 
 ject I shall not fall under this worst of con- 
 demnations. 
 
 At that time Bruno was but one of a number 
 of obscure philosophers of the Renaissance with 
 whom the lecturer was dealing. Last winter 
 in Italy I found that the name of Giordano 
 Bruno was a war-cry, ringing from Sicily to the 
 
 9 
 
lO GIORDANO BRUNO: 
 
 Alps — yes, far beyond the Alps, all over the 
 Roman Catholic world, with distinct echoes in 
 Protestant lands. At the ancient city of Co- 
 logne I stood in an assembly of a thousand men, 
 gathered to celebrate and defend the erection 
 of Bruno's statue in far off Rome; while the 
 week before, at a very large meeting of Cath- 
 olics on the upper Rhine, the orator of the day, 
 a distinguished delegate to the Rdchskammer, 
 had called Bruno "a hog and an ass," — ein 
 "Schwein und ein Esel, — and had been applauded 
 for the epithets. 
 
 When on the epochal ninth of June last (1889), 
 Bruno's statue was unveiled on the spot of his 
 burning, in full view of the windows of the Vati- 
 can, it is said that Leo Xlllth refused food 
 and spent hours in an agony of prayer at the 
 foot of the statue of St. Peter. Never have I 
 read more bitter denunciations than have been 
 poured forth concerning this act from the Roman 
 Catholic pulpit. Many another man was burned 
 in Rome, and some at Geneva; Savonarola at 
 Florence, and John Huss at Constance; but I 
 
HIS LIFE AND HIS PHILOSOPHY. II 
 
 doubt if the statue of any one of these would 
 have offended the Catholic church so deeply, 
 would have rankled so venomously, as that of 
 Bruno. 
 
 Nor was this feeling confined to the church 
 of Rome. The learned dignitaries of the more 
 conservative Protestant churches, when they 
 knew anything about Bruno and his teachings, 
 evidently shared it This was perfectly mani- 
 fest from the editorials in the London Times 
 and in the official religious press both of Eng- 
 land and North Germany. 
 
 What was the secret of this? What was it 
 in Bruno which so peculiarly excited the ire of 
 the theologians? And why has he, beyond all 
 others, been chosen to represent the new life — 
 la. vita nuova — of independent Italy? These 
 are the questions I shall endeavor to answer 
 this evening. 
 
 And first, who was Bruno ? 
 
 Fihppo Bruno, known in religion as Gior- 
 dano Bruno, was born into life at Nola, near 
 Naples, in 1548, and burned alive at Rome 
 
12 GIORDANO BRUNO: 
 
 in 1600. A precocious lad, he assumed the 
 garb of the Dominicans at fourteen years of 
 age, and two years later made full profes- 
 sion of vows in the Convent of St. Dominic 
 at Naples. Soon promoted to- holy orders 
 he exercised the offices of the priesthood in 
 and around the convent until 1576. In that 
 year the Provincial of his order accused him 
 of heresy on one hundred and thirty counts ! 
 With a just fear of the result of the trial; 
 Bruno cast aside his frock, renounced his 
 vows, and fled first to Rome and then to 
 Northern Italy. For three years he wan- 
 dered from Genoa to Noli, to Turin, to Ven- 
 ice, to Padua, gaining a precarious subsist- 
 ence by teaching and writing. In 1579 we 
 find him in Geneva, then the stronghold of 
 the most uncompromising Calvinism. This 
 was no place for him. In a very few months 
 he was thrown into prison for defamatory 
 libel, and prohibited the sacraments for errors 
 in doctrine. Escaping from the Calvinists, 
 he made his way to Toulouse, at that time 
 
HIS LIFE AND HIS PHILOSOPHY. 1 3 
 
 the literary center of southern France. There 
 he spent a year, lecturing on Aristotle, until 
 wearied, as he tells us, by its " clamors and 
 scholastic frenzy," he was glad to move on 
 to Paris. 
 
 The atmosphere of that great city, then 
 under Italian influence, suited him better. 
 He obtained the position of professor extra- 
 ordinary in the Sorbonne, where he lectured 
 on the divine attributes and on the art of 
 memorizing. Two years later, that is in 1583, 
 he journeyed to London, apparently at the 
 invitation of the French ambassador to the 
 court of Queen Elizabeth. 
 
 In the English capital he passed some three 
 years. At that day London was far from 
 the imperial city on the Thames of our time. 
 Its streets were filthy, its police a jest, and 
 its inhabitants numbered only twice as many 
 as those of Camden, on the other side of our 
 Delaware. But among those inhabitants were 
 such glorious stars as Shakespeare and Spen- 
 cer, Francis Bacon and Sir Philip Sidney, and 
 
14 GIORDANO BRUNO: 
 
 the galaxy of the Elizabethan age gathered 
 around the throne of the virgin queen, her- 
 self learned and a patron of learning. 
 
 In this incomparable circle Bruno entered as 
 a welcome guest. He became the friend of 
 Sidney, to whom he dedicated two of his books, 
 and the influence of his teaching has been 
 recognized in the philosophy of Bacon and the 
 reflections of Hamlet. The University of Ox- 
 ford, however, received him worse than coldly, 
 and his lectures led to such acrimony that he 
 was forced hastily to depart. 
 
 Returning to the continent in 1586, for five 
 years he roamed from city to city in Germany, 
 leading that life of the vagrant scholar so gen^ 
 eral in his day, but unfortunately always in hot 
 water. 
 
 At Wittenberg, in spite of delivering a pane- 
 gyric on Luther, he was warned summarily to 
 leave the town ; from Marburg he was obliged 
 to flee in order to escape the "malevolence" 
 of the rector of the University; in Helmstedt he 
 was excommunicated from the reformed Church 
 
HIS LIFE AND HIS PHILOSOPHY. 1 5 
 
 (October, 1 589) ; in Frankfort the authorities 
 refused to permit him even to lodge within the 
 gates ; and so the story goes. 
 
 Finally at Zurich he received an invitation 
 from a noble Venetian, Zuane Mocenigo, to 
 visit Venice and teach him the higher and secret 
 learning. He complied, with unsuspecting con- 
 fidence in his patron. 
 
 But Mocenigo was noble in nothing but his 
 birth. The two soon quarreled violently, and 
 with the implacable thirst for vengeance of a 
 mediaeval Italian, Mocenigo quietly collected 
 from the works of Bruno and his conversations 
 a mass of testimony as to his heretical beliefs, 
 and turned them over to the Father Inquisitor 
 in Venice, with a formal' denunciation of their 
 author. 
 
 Bruno was promptly arrested. 
 
 Once in the hands of that merciless tribunal 
 his fate, though it might be deferred, was cer- 
 tain. Tried and convicted in Venice, he was 
 delivered to the Inquisition in Rome. After 
 seven years spent in its dungeons, again he was 
 
I 6 GIORDANO BRUNO: 
 
 tried and again convicted. Eight charges of 
 heresy were proved against him, and he was 
 called upon to recant. 
 
 His reply was firm : " I ought not to recant, 
 and I will not recant ! " 
 
 After further delay, the Inquisition pronounced 
 sentence of death, and, as the custom was, turned 
 him over to the secular power for its execution. 
 Bruno heard the fatal words unflinchingly, and 
 in a menacing tone replied, " It may be that you 
 fear more to* deliver this judgment, than I to 
 hear it." 
 
 Ten days later, on February 1 7th, 1 600, Bruno 
 was led to the stake on the Campo de' Fiori. 
 He scorned the proffered consolations of the 
 priests, and met death with the calmness of a 
 truly great mind. His latest words were, " I die 
 a martyr, and willingly." His ashes were cast 
 into the Tiber and his name placed among the 
 accursed on the rolls of the Church. 
 
 Such, in brief, was the history of this lonely, 
 restless man. The descriptions we have of 
 him tally with his life — a small, thin man, with 
 
HIS LIFE AND HIS PHILOSOPHY. 1 7 
 
 a meagre, dark beard, sovereignly scornful of his 
 attire ; " three buttons off his coat and not a 
 ring on his fingers," says one narrative ; " his 
 hose pieced out from his Dominican gown," 
 says another ; not a presentable man in fine 
 society, and of uncomfortable habits, writing 
 all day long, or " walking up and down, filled 
 with fantastic meditations upon new things, " 
 reported the Prior of the Carmelite Convent in 
 Frankfort ; quick in temper, bitter in debate, 
 violent in language, impatient with ignorance, 
 full of scorn for prejudices ; not a pleasant, 
 easy-going fellow by any means ; given at times 
 to vainglorious boasting, and perhaps also to 
 mystifying intimations of secret knowledge in 
 his reach. Impatient with the pettiness about 
 him, embittered by persecution, what wonder 
 that he fell a long way short of being that pop- 
 ular and affable individual which the common 
 mind admires? 
 
 You will wish me to say something about his 
 personal character.. It has been bitterly at- 
 tacked, not so much, so far as I can find, from 
 
 B 
 
1 8 GIORDANO BRUNO: 
 
 any incidents recorded about his private life, as 
 from the coarseness and ribaldry of some of his 
 dialogues and comedies. This coarseness is 
 undeniable ; it passes sometimes beyond buf- 
 foonery into what to us seems indecency. 
 
 But in judging it, we must take into consider- 
 ation the man's epoch and nationality. You 
 well know that his great contemporary Shake- 
 speare penned many a scene in his dramas, 
 which not the lowest theatre in this country 
 would place unchanged upon its boards. 
 
 Far greater was the admitted license of Ital- 
 ian writers. Matteo Bandello was a contem- 
 porary of Bruno's, a Dominican monk, who died 
 in the odor of sanctity as a Bishop of the 
 Church of Rome ; yet the Novella, or short 
 stories, which he wrote, from which Shakespeare ' 
 drew his plot of Romeo and Juliet, the Taming 
 of the Shrew and others, is a work of monstrous 
 profligacy, and the grossest indecency. We 
 cannot believe that it reflects the character of 
 the author, who seems to have been temperate, 
 studious and self-respecting. It does reflect the 
 
HIS LIFE AND HIS PHILOSOPHY. 1 9 
 
 literary fashion of the time. The whole of Ital- 
 ian sixteenth century literature is licentious, and 
 some of the finest of it is simply revolting in its 
 suggestions. No competent critic therefore, 
 least of all an Italian or a Romanist, will con- 
 demn Bruno on such evidence as this. 
 
 In spite of his vagabondism Bruno published 
 about twenty-five works in the fifteen years of 
 his actual life, and left many others incomplete. 
 Their titles are as eccentric as his own char- 
 acter; such, for instance, as "The Book of the 
 Great Key;" "The Explanation of the Thirty 
 Seals;" "The Expulsion of the Triumphant 
 Beast;" "The Threefold Minimum ;" "The 
 Composition of Images;" "The Innumerable, 
 the Immense and the Unfigurable ; " and others 
 of the same obscurity. 
 
 In these productions, some of which are 
 prose, some poetry, some dialogues, some com- 
 edies, he developed his philosophy; and on 
 them the inquisitors based their charges of 
 heresy. To them, therefore, we must turn to 
 seek those teachings which on the one hand are 
 
20 GIORDANO BRUNO: 
 
 asserted to prove him a venomous social viper, 
 and on the other a glorious martyr to truth. 
 
 Several of his publications are devoted to 
 the Art of Memory. In the thirteenth century 
 the Catalan monk, Raymond Lully, composed a 
 remarkable treatise on this subject, maintaining 
 that by an artificial system of mnemonics the 
 power of recollection and the methods of inves- 
 tigation can be indefinitely expanded. 
 
 There is something in his theory, and it lies 
 at the base of most later schemes of the kind ; 
 but Bruno, Cornelius Agrippa, and other schol- 
 ars of the sixteenth century, imagined that it 
 could be carried far beyond its possible limits, 
 and devoted to it an amount of attention which 
 it did not merit. Like all artificial methods of 
 memorizing, it does not invigorate the memory 
 as a faculty, but merely supplies it with material 
 schemes for associating facts. It is a question 
 whether, like the use of a crutch, all such plans 
 do not perpetuate weakness while they seem- 
 ingly aid the powers. As this portion of Bruno's 
 activity neither received the condemnation of 
 
HIS LIFE AND HIS PHILOSOPHY. 21 
 
 the Church nor the applause of posterity, we 
 may pass it by, merely remarking that his pro- 
 longed attention to it indicates how closely he 
 had studied the rather rationalistic writings of 
 the old Catalan. 
 
 When he was at Frankfort, Bruno registered 
 himself as a student of natural history — philo- 
 sophies naturalis studiosus — and well did he de- 
 serve the title. There is something marvelous in 
 the precocity of his insight into both the methods 
 and the results of natural science. In physics 
 the theories of the center of gravity of the 
 planets, the orbits of the comets, and the imper- 
 fect sphericity of the earth are due to him. He 
 was one of the first to espouse the modern or 
 Copernican theory of astronomy. 
 
 The doctrine of Evolution, the progressive 
 development of nature, an idea absolutely un- 
 known to ancient philosophy, was first pro- 
 pounded in his works, not vaguely or partially, 
 but to the full extent of the most advanced evo- 
 lutionist of to-day. "The mind of man," he 
 says, " differs from that of lower animals and of 
 
22 GIORDANO BRUNO : 
 
 plants, not in quality, but only in quantity." 
 " Each individual," he adds, " is the resultant of 
 innumerable individuals. Each species is the 
 starting point for the next." Change is unceas- 
 ing. " No individual is the same to-day as yes- 
 terday." He extended these laws to the inor- 
 ganic as well as the organic world, maintaining 
 that unbroken line of evolution from matter to 
 man which the severest studies of modern 
 science are beginning to recognize. 
 
 This eternal change, he taught, is not pur- 
 poseless. It is ever toward the elimination of 
 defects, and the acquisition of higher powers. 
 Hence, he laid down the doctrine of "optim- 
 ism," which Leibnitz notoriously borrowed from 
 him ; and the theory of the perfectibility of 
 man advanced by Herbert Spencer is but one 
 of several prominent ideas defended by that 
 doctrinaire, which Bruno was the first to express, 
 and did so clearly. 
 
 This has been pointed out before ; but there 
 is a remarkable passage in a work of his called 
 "The Shadows of Ideas," which seems to me to 
 
HIS LIFE AND HIS PHILOSOPHY. 23 
 
 forestall one of the most extraordinary sugges- 
 tions of modern science. I refer to Pasteur's 
 doctrine of symmetry and non-symmetry (asym- 
 metry), in things as the fundamental physical 
 explanation of material changes. 
 
 Some of you doubtless are aware of the 
 almost romantic nature of Pasteur's researches 
 on this subject, and his expressed regret that 
 he has not devoted to it the whole of his life. 
 Well, it was evidently present to Bruno's 
 thoughts also as the ultimate physical explana- 
 tion of phenomena. "It is necessary," he says, 
 "that the universe shall in its various parts be 
 unequal. Progress toward accord is only con- 
 ceivable through the cancellation of inequali- 
 ties." 
 
 Such were some of the results attained in 
 natural science by this wonderful man. What 
 were his methods ? 
 
 They were those which to-day govern every 
 trained scientific mind. Bruno constantly re- 
 peats that the investigation of nature in the un- 
 biased light of reason is our only guide to truth; 
 
24 GIORDANO BRUNO : 
 
 and if you apply to him for the criterion of 
 truth, his answer comes with no uncertain 
 sound, rather with ceaseless iteration — evidence, 
 evidence, observation, observation. Trust to 
 your own senses; they will not deceive you, 
 though they may not tell you the whole truth. 
 Hold your mind ever open to new truths. 
 Never believe you have attained final certainty. 
 Doubt ever, doubt all things. 
 
 " Let us reject," he cries, " antiquity, tradi- 
 tion, faith and authority. The truth is not in 
 the Past, nor in the Present, but in the Future." 
 " Let us begin by doubt. Let us doubt till 
 we know." He frequently admonished his 
 hearers not to yield to the habit of faith, but to 
 doubt what others hold as established truth. 
 
 Especially did he apply this to religious dog- 
 mas. He declared that they blind and stunt 
 the intellect and lower the moral nature be- 
 yond all else. " A hundred warring sects," he 
 writes, "claim each for itself the exclusive truth, 
 and despise the worship of others. Each for- 
 bids its votaries to question its own dogmatic 
 
HIS LIFE AND HIS PHILOSOPHY, 25 
 
 utterances, while arraigning and condemning 
 those of its rivals." Hence the disastrous ef- 
 fect of such religions on the moral nature. 
 
 Bruno affirmed that the greatest obstacle to 
 ethical progress has been the preference given 
 to sectarian belief over the practice of disinter- 
 ested philanthropy. " The God of the philoso- 
 pher," he writes, "is not a jealous God. He 
 is truth and goodness, he reveals himself in all 
 nature, to all men, and in all religions." Hence 
 the philosopher, he adds, will study the myths, 
 prayers and hymns of all races and all religions 
 with equal reverence. 
 
 I appeal to you if such an expression is not 
 consonant with the loftiest moral sense of this 
 our day ? With that " science of religion " 
 which Professor Max Miiller in England, Re- 
 ville in France, and many other eminent teach- 
 ers have made us acquainted with ? 
 
 This breadth of view he extended to all sub- 
 jects of thought. "I have sworn," he cries, 
 " to no philosophy, and I despise no means 
 of learning. I do despise the ignorant crew 
 c 
 
26 GIORDANO BRUNO: 
 
 who have gained, their opinions, not by occu- 
 pation with philosophy, but by accepting the 
 words of others." 
 
 Thought, free, clear, earnest thought, he 
 proclaimed, will at last be victorious and will 
 lead to the highest knowledge and the broadest 
 good. "A time shall come," he exclaims in 
 a moment of rapturous foresight, " a new 
 and desired age, when the Gods shall lie in 
 Orcus, and the dread of everlasting punish- 
 ment shall vanish from the world." 
 
 Having reached the pure air of this lofty 
 eminence, he did not rest, but took a yet 
 more aerial flight. 
 
 Thought itself, he teaches, is divine, because 
 it is sealed with the seal of an infinite origin, 
 and is born of the mind's direct relations to 
 the Infinite. It is forever moving between 
 the inconceivably small and the immeasurably 
 great, between the atom and the universe, 
 both illimitable, incomprehensible ; and that 
 this was no barren scholastic theorem to him, 
 but a pregnant truth, is shown by a sentence 
 
HIS LIFE AND HIS PHILOSOPHY. 27 
 
 than which I know none grander in the whole of 
 philosophy. It occurs in the work he dedicated 
 to Sir Philip Sidney, appropriately named, " The 
 Heroic Rapture," and is as follows : " The 
 intellectual faculty is appeased by compre- 
 hensible truth only when it feels it is thereby 
 advancing nearer to incomprehensible truth." 
 
 The intellectual faculty, he continues to argue, 
 thus forever seeks the unsearchable, passion- 
 ately yearns for the unattainable. But this 
 very passion and yearning prove its title to 
 the noblest destiny. " Love," he cries, " is 
 more than knowledge, and only the love of 
 the Divine can satisfy the infinite nature of 
 the soul." He who drinks of this Elysian 
 nectar burns with an ardor that the ocean 
 cannot quench, nor the cold of the arctic tem- 
 per. Elsewhere he writes : " Love, if it be 
 finite, is fixed and of a certain measure; but 
 to behold it rising ever and ever higher is to 
 know that it turns toward the Infinite." 
 
 This reasoning led him to the doctrine of 
 personal immortality, which he taught with clear 
 
28 GIORDANO BRUNO: 
 
 conviction. To him, this was the final purpose 
 of evolution. "The perfecting of the individual 
 soul," he writes, "is the aim of all progress." 
 
 I would ask you tc* pause and reflect a mo- 
 ment on this surprising sentence. If you con- 
 sider it well, perhaps you will find in it the key 
 to all history, the hidden secret of nature, 
 the final purpose of the phenomenal world and 
 its countless changes. Perhaps all this endless 
 conflict of forces is a somehow necessary pro- 
 cess, by which the Individual is set over against 
 the All, the Self against the Other, to the end 
 that each soul shall attain a perfected plenitude 
 of power, shall acquire infinity without forfeiting 
 individuality. 
 
 This, at any rate, was Bruno's opinion, and 
 he undertook to support it further by his doc- 
 trine of Form, which is one of the most difficult 
 branches of his philosophy of nature. With 
 him. Form seems to stand for the ultimate law 
 of the objective universe. " Forms," he writes, 
 " are the true objects of knowledge ; " yet he 
 adds that matter is not complete in its forms, 
 
- HIS LIFE AND HIS PHILOSOPHY. 29 
 
 because these are constantly changing. Beyond 
 and behind all these changes is the intangible 
 abstract energy which incites them and directs 
 them. This, in the individual, is the Soul; in 
 the universe, it is God. The reality of both he 
 considered demonstrated by rigid naturalistic 
 reasoning. 
 
 Yet this is the man whom some theologians 
 have called an atheist and a materialist ! Not 
 that he would have been the less commendable 
 had he been both. An atheist through con- 
 scientious conviction is a nobler character than 
 a zealot through blind faith; but Bruno does 
 not happen to have been an atheist, and it is a 
 misstatement to apply the term to him. Noth- 
 ing but wilful ignorance or dishonest prejudice 
 could have laid such a charge to his account. 
 
 Recognizing everywhere around him the 
 manifestation of the divine in nature, he ex- 
 horted his hearers to turn away from creeds 
 and dogmas, and to study themselves and the 
 world about them. 
 
 "The truth," he writes, "like the Kingdom of 
 
30 GIORDANO BRUNO : 
 
 God, is within every one of us ; " and in another 
 passage, "To attain the truth, it is only neces- 
 sary to hold fast to Nature. He is truly impi- 
 ous, who seeks to impede this quest." 
 
 Again, with a noble sense of the sure results 
 of a sound science, he writes, "The truth, if it 
 is such, will show itself in conformity with the 
 will of a beneficent God and the observed laws 
 of Nature." 
 
 Some historians of philosophy, Kuno Fischer 
 for instance, have called Bruno a pantheist, and 
 stated that his system is a deification of nature. 
 They are in error. He does indeed lay down 
 the metaphysical thesis that "The act of divine 
 cognition is the substance of things ; " but this 
 is effectively the same as the English idealist 
 Bishop Berkeley taught ; and therefore those 
 are more correct, who, like Professor Carriere, 
 have classed Bruno among the idealists. 
 
 In fact, however, here, as in so many directions, 
 he reached the modern, scientific standpoint, 
 and regarded matter and form, thought and ex- 
 tension, as merely different aspects of the same 
 
HIS LIFE AND HIS PHILOSOPHY. 3 1 
 
 reality — just as Alexander Bain teaches in our 
 own day. 
 
 This is that philosophic doctrine called monism, 
 and it is clearly enunciated in many passages of 
 Bruno's writings. Thus he says: "The Forms 
 of Nature cannot exist without matter and a 
 certain subject." The subject and the object 
 were to him convertible terms, or, as Bain ex- 
 presses it, merely the two sides of the same 
 arc, altogether convex, as you look at it from 
 one aspect, altogether concave from the other : 
 yet, in fact, one and the same line. 
 
 You appreciate at once that in this monistic 
 philosophy, which teaches that matter and spirit 
 -are but different aspects of the same, and that 
 their antagonism is merely owing to the way 
 we look at them, and does not in reality exist, 
 the one is as sacred and as true as the other. 
 The whole universe may be read in terms of 
 either with equal completeness; the blankest 
 materialism and the purest idealism are equally 
 correct, though equally inadequate. 
 
 Appreciating this, Bruno occasionally de- 
 
32 GIORDANO BRUNO: 
 
 lighted to dwell on the indestructibility, the eter- 
 nity of matter, and to speak of the soul as 
 matter under certain forms. This sounded 
 most materialistic, and we are not surprised 
 that, as one writer tells us, " he paralyzed his 
 audience at Oxford with astonishment and in- 
 dignation." 
 
 When we study such elements of Bruno's 
 philosophy as this, we may find an explanation 
 of some of the critical judgments which have 
 been passed upon it by learned historians. 
 When, for instance, Kuno Fischer writes that 
 Bruno's teaching " belonged to the philosophical 
 Renaissance, not to modern philosophy," we may 
 accept such words as the dictum of a metaphy- 
 sician who is not in touch with modern scientific 
 thought, nor acquainted with that conception of 
 the Universe which is gradually unfolding itself 
 to our ken through the irresistible logic of the 
 abstract sciences, a conception which asks no 
 ex cathedra deliverance to support it, but comes 
 with the cogency of evidential proof itself. 
 Neither this philosopher of the Renaissance, nor 
 
HIS LIFE AND HIS PHILOSOPHY. 33 
 
 any philosopher of modern science asks his 
 pupil to believe anything that the enlightened 
 intellect can help believing. That alone is true 
 which can bear constant reinvestigation. 
 
 As intelligent belief, belief founded upon suf- 
 ficient evidence, is in Bruno's scheme the only 
 faith for the philosopher, so morality, he taught, to 
 be really such, must also be intelligent, that is, 
 the action must be directed by knowledge 
 toward a clearly understood purpose, greater, 
 nobler, more enlightening than the action itself 
 This, of course, excludes all merely religious 
 rites and formulas ; to Bruno these were not 
 only non-moral, but immoral, as they are ob- 
 stacles to ethical advancement, blind the soul to 
 its higher aims, and satisfy its longings with 
 lower standards of excellence, and with me- 
 chanical formalisms. 
 
 In many passages he expresses himself se- 
 verely on what he considered this demoralizing 
 effect of dogmatic teaching. He fully appre- 
 ciated the inevitable conflict between dogma 
 and evidential truth. There cannot but be con- 
 
34 GIORDANO BRUNO: 
 
 flict, and it is as sharply defined now as in his 
 age. There is not, to-day, a professor in any 
 sectarian college in this free land, who dares to 
 teach the elementary facts of science in their 
 theological applications. 
 
 Let me illustrate this by two points on which 
 Bruno was emphatic, and modern, science is 
 conclusive — the nature of sin and of death. 
 
 Sin, Bruno explains as something wholly _ 
 negative, an incompleteness of good ; just as in 
 thermophysics, cold is regarded merely as the 
 deficiency of heat. The Christian dogmatic 
 notion of sin as a positive entity he rejected. 
 In accord with him in this opinion are the 
 noblest thinkers of our century, those great 
 souls who look before and after, the mighty 
 bards, Goethe, Browning, Tennyson, Whitman, 
 and many another; in accord with him are a.11 
 ethnologists and scientific students of human 
 development. 
 
 Death he regarded merely as a somewhat 
 greater change than is taking place every day 
 in our bodies, and as in nowise a cessation or 
 
HIS LIFE AND HIS PHILOSOPHY. 35 
 
 diminution of life — rather an exaltation of it. 
 "They are fools," he exclaims, "who dread the 
 menace of death; for this your body is con- 
 stantly passing away and being renewed." 
 Elsewhere he writes, " The wise man fears not 
 death; yea, there may be times when he puts 
 himself in its way ; " and that this was no vain 
 boast his own end proved. 
 
 Dogmatic Christianity, Roman, Greek and 
 Reformed, teaches that " death came into the 
 world by sin;" that sin is a curse inherited from 
 Adam, the first man ; and that there is no es- 
 cape from the curse but by believing certain 
 creeds and performing certain rites. Yet every 
 schoolboy knows or ought to know that Adam 
 was not the first man, and that death has been 
 in the world from the earliest geologic ages. 
 
 Fn conflict with the Churches on these 
 points, Bruno was not less so on the dogma 
 of the Trinity. " From my eighteenth year," 
 he writes, " I doubted within myself regarding 
 the Son and the Holy Spirit." Not only did he 
 assert that this, dogma is incompatible with 
 
2,6 GIORDANO BRUNO : 
 
 reason, but he pointed out that it is nowhere 
 mentioned in either the Old or New Testa- 
 ment, and did not belong, therefore, to Apos- 
 tolic Christianity. He urged that as the theory 
 of Christ suffering for the sin of Adam is no- 
 where intimated in the words of Christ himself, 
 so the theory of the Triune divinity was not 
 acknowledged by his disciples. 
 
 You will readily understand that a man with 
 these views in the sixteenth century, when the 
 fires of theological controversy were at white 
 heat, was no more welcome to one camp than 
 to the other. He was burned at Rome ; but 
 do not imagine that we should pour forth 
 all our reproaches on the Roman Church 
 for that act. Swinburne's recent fiery invec- 
 tive is out of place. The Calvinists of Geneva 
 would have burned Bruno just as cheerfully 
 as they did Servetus only twenty-five years 
 before Bruno visited their city; the bigots 
 of England would have hanged him quite as 
 readily as their descendants hanged the Quak- 
 ers on Boston Common; and he himself be- 
 
HIS LIFE AND HIS PHILOSOPHY. 37 
 
 lieved that it was to save his life that he fled 
 from the Lutherans of Marburg and Helm- 
 stedt. The instincts of dogmatic belief are 
 everywhere the same, and logically force men 
 to the same extremes, in all times and in all 
 climes. 
 
 Flatter not yourselves that the fires of fanati- 
 cism are extinguished. They smoulder and glow 
 in every exclusive dogma, only waiting their 
 chance to re-illume the torch of the Campo de' 
 Fiori or the pyre of Servetus, and to sweep into 
 one vast auio da fe the hard-won victories of 
 free thought and untrammelled research, of lib- 
 eral art and secular culture. What Bruno 
 called "the Wolf of Rome" has merely had 
 the greater power and the more frequent op- 
 portunity. 
 
 Yet there was deliberate purpose in new 
 Italy in the selection of Bruno as its champion 
 in its conflict with the papacy and with the ad- 
 vocates of the temporal power. Not the bitter- 
 est Covenanter ever arraigned the head of the 
 Roman Church in more violent language than 
 
38 GIORDANO BRUNO: 
 
 this ex-monk. "Who is he," he exclaims in 
 his Oration on Luther, "who pretends to be 
 the vicar of Christ on earth ? He is the vicar 
 of the tyrant of hell, armed with keys and 
 sword, at once fox and lion, steeped in fraud 
 and hypocrisy, triple crowned with cruelty and 
 deceit," etc. 
 
 What wonder that Pope Leo wept and the 
 bishops cursed when this apostate monk and 
 impenitent philosopher, who had jeered at the 
 Church and satirized its mysteries, came to be 
 the chosen ideal of victorious young Italy ? 
 
 Startling, indeed, was the admonition, loud 
 was the warning, thus heralded to the Roman 
 Church and to every branch of obscurant relig- 
 ion. No half-measures, no temporizing, no com- 
 promises ; the intellect must be free and wholly 
 free ; the pursuit of truth must be unimpeded 
 by any creed ; the individual must answer to 
 his conscience and not to a priest; no more 
 education which begins with falsities and ends 
 with fanaticism ; these are the mottoes of young 
 Italy, these the maxims of la vita nuova. The 
 
HIS LIFE AND HIS PHILOSOPHY. 39 
 
 churches have ever cried, " Believe, and ye shall 
 be saved;" Bruno taught, f" Doubt, and ye 
 shall know ; " \and young Italy along with 
 modern science has chosen the latter teaching. 
 
 But you would err if you suppose that the 
 skepticism inculcated by this philosopher of the 
 Renaissance was the sterile uncertainty of the 
 Greek sophists. He rested his teachings on 
 the broadest principles. The aim of all phi- 
 losophy, he urged, is to recognize the unity of 
 contraries, the form in the matter, the spiritual 
 in the corporeal, the good in the evil, the in- 
 finite in the finite, and vice versa. To accom- 
 plish this, every proposition must be considered 
 in its contraries, the affirmative and the nega- 
 tive, until the reconciliation of both is discovered 
 in some higher proposition. 
 
 You will recognize in this principle the doc- 
 trine of antitheses uniting in a synthesis, which 
 is at the basis of the Hegelian logic. But 
 Bruno applied it more practically than did the 
 German metaphysician. It appears to me that 
 there is no gainsaying it as the law of progres- 
 
40 GIORDANO BRUNO : 
 
 sive thought in the sciences. Every investiga- 
 tor must begin by reviewing the evidence for 
 the facts in his branch, and the more critical, 
 the more skeptical his scrutiny, the more cer- 
 tain is he to turn out good work./ Doubt, not 
 belief, must be his guide. | ^ 
 
 What is thus true in the sciences is not less 
 so in religious thought. Every reformer must 
 begin by doubting the faith of his fathers. 
 Take the noble army of leaders in ethical pro- 
 gress, Buddha, Socrates, Christ, Paul, Abelard, 
 Arnold of Brescia, John Huss, Martin Luther, 
 George Fox — I cannot call the long roll — every 
 one of them was in his own day accounted a 
 sceptic and an infidel ; every one of them re- 
 jected the words of authority, spurned the, belief 
 of the orthodox, denied the claims of dogmatic 
 doctrine. What right have we to suppose that 
 this unvarying record of history will not hold 
 good in this last decade of the nineteenth 
 century? 
 
 The mention of George Fox brings to my 
 mind how strangely similar the religious aspect 
 
HIS LIFE AND HIS PHILOSOPHY. 4 1 
 
 of Bruno's philosophy is to that of the primi- 
 tive Quakers. They also rejected all dogmas 
 and creeds, all edicts of councils and ancient 
 writings, finding the sufficient rule of faith in 
 the heart of every man, be he Christian or 
 Jew, Mahometan or heathen. They looked 
 less for the Christ or the Church without, 
 than for the resurrection and the light within ; 
 to these they turned for guidance, not to a 
 book nor a man. All rites and ceremonies, 
 all priests and professed teachers of dogma, 
 they rejected as obstructions in the pursuit of 
 truth and genuine holiness. 
 
 From what I have now told you, you will 
 appreciate the significance of the selection of 
 Giordano Bruno by new Italy as its represe"hta- 
 tive man. It means an open war on dogmatic 
 belief of every kind, a declaration of the in- 
 dependence of the intellect, an announcement 
 that philanthropic working is better than grossly 
 beheving, a proclamation that truth as attested by 
 evidence and virtue as shown by actions are the 
 only sacred things and alone merit reverence. 
 
 D 
 
The following brief paper was written without my having 
 seen or heard that of Dr. Brinton. A short synopsis of the 
 latter had been sent to me, and from this I gleaned that what 
 little was left far m.e to say by way of supplement lay in the 
 direction which I then followed. I was happy to learn from 
 Dr. Brinton that my surmise had not been wrong. 
 
BRUNO'S THOUGHT. 
 
 AH conflicts in human history are conflicts 
 between ideas, of which men are, so to speak, 
 only the instruments or weapons. The sacrifice 
 of a marfyr means the temporary defeat of an 
 idea ; the canonization of that martyr, the tem- 
 porary or, it may be, the permanent triumph of 
 the same. This idea is the only thing of real 
 interest about the martyr, the only fact that gives 
 him historic significance. All the rest is mere 
 personal detail, not differing essentially from 
 newspaper gossip. 
 
 With respect to Giordano Bruno, the only 
 questions that really concern the serious his- 
 torian and philosopher are: (i) What idea 
 was that which succumbed at his execution in 
 1600, and triumphed at his canonization in 
 1 889 ? (2) How did this idea stand related to 
 -the current thought of the time? (3) Whence 
 
 45 
 
46 Bruno's thought: 
 
 did Bruno derive the data enabling him to con- 
 ceive such an idea? (4) How has that idea 
 affected subsequent thought? (5) What is its 
 permanent value ? 
 
 Though every idea may be said to be born at 
 first in the mind of some one man, yet every 
 new idea has a long prenatal history in the con- 
 sciousness of the race or some part of it. We 
 can, for example, follow with great ease the 
 course of every element in Mr. Spencer's Evo- 
 lutionary, Aggregational Agnosticism. These 
 elements are Kant's Critical Philosophy, Hartley 
 and Mill's association theory, and Darwin's evo- 
 lutionism, of all of which it is easy enough to 
 trace the_history. 
 
 I. Bruno's idea. 
 Bruno's philosophy is Rational Semi-panthe- 
 istic Evolutionism. I say " rational " to distin- 
 guish it from agnostic evolutionism. According 
 to him, the universe is the explication (i. e., evo- 
 lution) of a single principle. This principle is 
 intelligent, and includes two perfectly correlated 
 
ITS SOURCES, CHARACTER AND VALUE. 47 
 
 elements — 'an active element capable of doing 
 all things, and a passive or receptive element 
 capable of becoming all things. Without these 
 two elements no action could be conceivable. 
 Being intelligent, this first principle draws out 
 from its passive element all the endless forms 
 which that implicitly contains, and, in doing so, 
 evolves or explicates the universe. 
 
 Calling the passive element matter, Bruno 
 holds that it is composed of innumerable monads 
 (not atoms), every one of which is necessarily 
 eternal, and every one capable of manifesting all 
 possible forms. Each is, therefore, potentially, 
 either a minimum or a maximum. When its 
 forms are unexplicated, it is a minimum ; when 
 they are explicated, it is a maximum. Each 
 monad, therefore, has the power of becoming 
 all that the primal monad is, though only in 
 succession and by a process of evolution ; nay, 
 it may even, by mystic union with this primal 
 monad, become identical with it. 
 
 The primal monad Bruno calls the anima 
 'i, or world-soul, and this he holds to be 
 
48 Bruno's thought: 
 
 at all times completely active in animating the 
 world, and to be the only first principle acces- 
 sible to science or philosophy. If there be any 
 principle transcending this — and Bruno's views 
 on this subject differed somewhat at different 
 periods of his life — it is not accessible to phi- 
 losophy, but only to faith, a faculty which he 
 does not define. Philosophy arrives at the 
 world-soul by retracing the process of evolution 
 in the reverse direction. Monads being eternal; 
 and the human soul being one of them (in a 
 high state of explication), it is necessarily eter- 
 nal. Its end is the realization of the universe 
 in itself. 
 
 In order to show Bruno's exact view, we may 
 -quote a few sentences from the Confession of 
 Faith which he pronounced before the Inqui- 
 sition, and which may, therefore, be regarded 
 as an authentic expression of his latest and 
 ripest views. 
 
 " I believe," he says, " in an infinite universe 
 as the (necessary) effect of the infinite divine 
 power. The reason of this is that I have always 
 
ITS SOURCES, CHARACTER AND VALUE. 49 
 
 regarded it as something unworthy of the divine 
 power and goodness, that, being able to produce 
 another world, nay, infinite other worlds besides 
 this one, it should produce only a finite world ; 
 whence I have maintained that there are infinite 
 particular worlds, similar to this of the earth, 
 which, in accordance with Pythagoras, I consider 
 to be an orb, similar to the moon, to other 
 planets and other stars, which are infinite, and 
 that all these bodies are worlds, and innumer- 
 able, constituting the infinite universeness, in 
 an infinite space, and this is called infinite uni- 
 verse, in which are innumerable worlds, so that 
 there are two sorts of infinity, an infinity of 
 magnitude in the universe, and an infinity of 
 multitude in the worlds, a belief understood to be 
 indirectly hostile to the truth according to faith. 
 " Moreover, in this universe I place a universal 
 providence, by virtue whereof everything lives, 
 grows, moves and remains in its perfection, and 
 I mean this in two senses, first, in the mode in 
 which the soul is present in the body, the whole 
 in the whole, and the whole in each part, and 
 
50 BRUNO s thought: 
 
 this I call nature, shadow and vestige of the 
 Divinity ; second, in the ineffable mode, in which 
 God, by essence, presence and power, is in all, 
 and above all, not as part, not as soul, but in an 
 inexplicable way. 
 
 " Further, I understand that in the Divinity all 
 attributes are one and the same thing, and 
 herein I agree with theologians and several great 
 philosophers — I mean three attributes, power, 
 wisdom and goodness, otherwise mind, intel- 
 lect, love, whereby things \\2m&, first, being, due 
 to rn^d ; second, ordered and distinguished 
 being, due to intellect ; third, harmony and sym- 
 metry, due to love. This I understand to be 
 in all and over all. As nothing is beautiful 
 without the presence of beauty, so nothing can 
 exist without the divine presence ; and thus, 
 with respect to reason, and not with respect to 
 substantial truth, I attribute distinction to the 
 Divinity. 
 
 " Again, in affirming the world to be caused 
 and produced, I meant that, in respect to its 
 whole being, it is dependent upon the First 
 
ITS SOURCES, CHARACTER AND VALUE. 5 1 
 
 Cause, so that I had no objection to the term 
 'creation,' which I beHeve that even Aristotle 
 signified, when he said that God is that on which 
 the world and all nature depend ; whence, ac- 
 cording to the interpretation of St. Thomas, 
 whether the world be eternal or in time, it is 
 with its whole being dependent on the First 
 Cause, and nothing is in it independently." 
 
 This passage shows what I meant in saying 
 that Bruno's system was semi-pantheistic. God 
 is totally present in the world, but only in one. 
 mode ; in another mode he is totally transcen- 
 dent. This latter mode is ineffable, beyond the 
 reach of knowledge, but not beyond that of 
 some higher mode of apprehension possible for 
 human nature. It also shows us that Bruno 
 had no objection to calling his evolution crea- 
 tion, since he recognized the absolute depend- 
 ence of the world upon the First Cause. He 
 differed with the Church, however, in regarding 
 it as a necessary and eternal correlate of divine 
 power and goodness, and not a temporal pro- 
 duct. And this brings us to 
 
52 BRUNO S THOUGHT : 
 
 II. THE RELATION OF BRUNO's IDEA TO THE 
 CURRENT THOUGHT OF HIS TIME. 
 
 Bruno's thought stands related to the thought 
 of his time as Evolutionism to Creationism ; as 
 Gnosticism to Agnosticism ; as Theosophy to 
 Theology ; as Semi- Pantheism to Theism ; as 
 Mysticism to Scholasticism. 
 
 According to the Christian teaching of the 
 sixteenth and previous centuries, the universe 
 is a creation out of nothing, a creation effected 
 in time by a fiat of God's free and inscrutable 
 will. The plastic, passive matter of the world 
 is not an eternal correlate of his activity, and a 
 presupposition of it, but a product of it. God 
 altogether transcends the world ; no part of his 
 substance enters into it. It, therefore, reveals 
 only, so to speak, his footprints and image, the 
 former in the physical world, the latter in the 
 human mind. Only by being lifted above the 
 world and himself, by an act of divine grace, 
 can man in any way attain to God. This is 
 the view that underlies the " Divine Comedy," 
 the view set forth so clearly in St. Bona- 
 
ITS SOURCES, CHARACTER AND VALUE. 53 
 
 Ventura's well-known tract, "The Soul's Pro- 
 gress to God." The appointed channel and 
 depositary of this grace is the Church. We can 
 thus easily see the reason why the Church should 
 at all times have so jealously watched, and so, 
 carefully, ,nay, ruthlessly, condemned, any doc- 
 trine maintaining that God was immanent in, 
 and, therefore, revealed through, the world. 
 Every such doctrine strikes at her very reason 
 for being. It is on this account that she has 
 steadily condemned all forms of Gnosticism, 
 Pantheism, Theosophy, all forms of Mysticism 
 claiming for the soul any inherent power of 
 rising to, or comprehending, God, and all that 
 portion of Aristotle's doctrine which maintains 
 the eternity of the world, as the necessary cor- 
 relate of God. The Church is founded upon 
 God's transcendence and man's incapacity to 
 reach him through any faculty of his own, upon 
 the entire and essential separation of God and 
 man. 
 
 The Jesuits, who are most zealous for the 
 Church's existence, in their efforts to exaggerate 
 
54 BRUNO s thought: 
 
 man's incapacity to reach God, have usually- 
 been materialists in philosophy. Only a couple 
 of years ago they caused the condemnation of 
 forty propositions from the writings of Rosmini, 
 the greatest thinker of the century, because 
 they seemed to imply that human reason con- 
 tained a divine element, and that something of 
 God was immanent in the world. The insist- 
 ance of the Church upon the doctrines of crea- 
 tion and the transcendence of God is, in my 
 opinion, a pure matter of policy, and has noth- 
 ing whatsoever to do with truth. 
 
 III. THE SOURCES OF BRUNO's PHILOSOPHY. 
 
 Alongside the philosophic agnosticism of the 
 Church, there existed at all times a species of 
 gnosticism, regarded as unorthodox, a philoso-' 
 phy which maintained that the human powers 
 were capable of discovering all divine truth, or, at 
 least, of comprehending it fully after it was re- 
 vealed ; in other words, that the content of 
 faith could be fully analyzed in terms of reason. 
 This doctrine is due to the Greek element in 
 
, ITS SOURCES, CHARACTER AND VALUE. 55 
 
 Christian thought. We can trace it as far 
 back as Parmenides and Herakleitos. It runs 
 through the whole philosophy of Plato and 
 Aristotle, although in different forms. In Plato, 
 God and the divine ideas are transcendent to 
 the world, and man attains them by mere remi- 
 niscence. In Aristotle, on the contrary, man 
 arrives at them by a simple pious use of his 
 natural powers, and, indeed, it is the true aim 
 of his existence so to do. Os^copia, or the vision 
 of divine things, is his ultimate end. That this 
 vision is mystical and above human nature, he 
 fully admits. "It would not," he says, "be 
 the expression of man's nature, but of some 
 divine element in that nature," a statement 
 which shows that, according to Aristotle, human 
 nature contains a divine element. 
 
 Here we must carefully distinguish between 
 two kinds of mysticism, that of nature and that 
 of grace. The former claims that man can 
 reach God through his own powers, or, at 
 least, through the divine element which forms 
 the very core of his being ; the latter holds 
 
56 Bruno's thought: 
 
 that he can reach him only by an act of divine 
 grace, performed through the Church. The 
 latter form of mysticism 'the Church has always 
 approved ; the former it has always condemned. 
 It has had considerable difficulty, however, in 
 distinguishing the two. It is easy enough to 
 see that the one belongs together with the doc- 
 trine of divine transcendence and creation ; the 
 other with that of divine immanence and evolu- 
 tion. It is clear enough that, if God is immanent 
 in the human soul, a consciousness of him may be 
 evolved in it, whereas if he is transcendent, he 
 must enter, if at all, by an act of grace. 
 
 The Aristotelian doctrine of the immanence 
 of God in the world was shared by the Stoics, 
 and by certain sects among the early Chris- 
 tians ; but, so long as the Church doctrines were 
 under the influence of Platonism, Aristotle 
 did not exert any very extensive or enduring 
 influence. But when, in the twelfth, thirteenth 
 and fourteenth centuries, his philosophy rose 
 into prominence and became the favorite of the 
 Church, his doctrine of the eternity of matter 
 
ITS SOURCES, CHARACTER AND VALUE. 57 
 
 and of the divine immanence came again into 
 vogue, and natural mysticism in a thousand 
 forms, some good and some evil, began to 
 crop up. Almost all the heresies which the 
 Church persecuted in those centuries take this 
 form, and all naturally tend to make men inde- 
 pendent of the Church. Even some of the 
 greatest doctors of the Church failed to keep 
 themselves entirely free from this taint, e. g., St. 
 Bonaventura, the Seraphic Doctor, the great 
 light of the Franciscans, and the most attractive 
 of all the mediaeval saints. 
 
 This tendency assumed two forms, owing to 
 two well-defined causes, infidelity and dogmatic 
 rigor. Among the Latin nations, in which the 
 currency of Arab thought had led to a wide- 
 spread infidelity, there sprang up, naturally 
 enough, a tendency to offer purely rational 
 demonstrations of Christian dogmas, and this 
 necessarily implied the immanence of God in 
 reason. The chief representative of this ten- 
 dency was Raimondo Lulli, a native of Ma- 
 jorca, a man of strong, fervent character, who 
 
58 Bruno's thought: 
 
 led a most romantic life. He was born in 1235 
 and died at the age of 80, in 131 5, being" thus 
 contemporary with Thomas Aquinas, Bona- 
 ventura, and Dante. He closes the palmy 
 period of Scholasticism. 
 
 Among the Germanic nations, on the contrary, 
 the cold rigidity and externality of dogma caused 
 a pioiis reaction of the heart, and this, on the 
 theoretical side, took the form of an enthusias- 
 tic mysticism, which claimed for man the direct 
 vision of God. To this movement belong the 
 speculative mystics of Germany, Meister Eck- 
 hardt, Suso, and Tauler, and what is familiarly 
 known as the " Deutsche Theologie ; " also the 
 practical mysticism of Ruysbroek, Geert de 
 Groot and Thomas a Kempis, the author of the 
 "Imitation of Christ." The two famous societies 
 which did so much for true religious life in the 
 fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, the Friends 
 of God and the Brothers of Common Life, were 
 both deeply tainted with natural mysticism. 
 This is the chief reason why such desperate 
 and persistent attempts have been, and still 
 
ITS SOURCES, CHARACTER AND VALUE. 59 
 
 are, made to deprive Thomas a Kempis of the 
 authorship of the Imitation. 
 
 The German mystical tendency found its 
 highest philosophical expression in Nicholas 
 Cusanus, born near Treves in 1401, later a car- 
 dinal of the Roman Church, and a man of great 
 eminence, nobility, liberality and tolerance, in 
 reality, one of the great men of the Church. It 
 is a curious enough fact that he received his early 
 education at Deventer, in the house of the 
 Brothers of Common Life, the very house in 
 ■.which Thomas a Kempis had been educated 
 but a few years before. It is a prime article 
 in the system of this wonderful man that God 
 is immanent in the world, and can be reached 
 by the human faculties, of which faith is one. 
 Indeed, the universe is but the explication or 
 evolution of God. But God is not only imma- 
 nent in the world ; he is also transcendent. By 
 emphasizing this, Nicholas steers clear of Pan- 
 theism, one does not always see clearly how, 
 although the thing is entirely possible. He 
 closes the last great period of Scholasticism, 
 
6o Bruno's thought: 
 
 a system which he combats, paving the way for 
 the modern world-view. 
 
 The rationalist Raimondo Lulli, who closes 
 the second period of Scholasticism, and the 
 mystic Nicholas Cusanus, who closes the third, 
 were the two men who did most to form the 
 mind of Giordano Bruno. From the works of 
 the second were borrowed all his main ideas 
 and expressions ; from the first his rationalistic 
 tendency and his method. As both these men 
 were able to remain in the Church (although a 
 hundred of Lulli's propositions were con- 
 demned), Bruno, if he had formed his thought 
 upon these alone, might have done the same. 
 But other tendencies antagonistic to the Church 
 entered into it. Among these were (i) that of 
 the pagan, Epicurean, nature-adoring atomist 
 Lucretius, from whom he derived his doctrine 
 of atoms and his enthusiasm for Nature; (2) that 
 of his own countryman Telesio, from whom, ap- 
 parently, he derived his fondness for observa- 
 tion, his dislike of Aristotle and the element 
 which enabled him to convert Lucretius' atoms 
 
ITS SOURCES, CHARACTER AND VALUE. 6 1 
 
 into monads, and (3) Copernicus, with his helio- 
 centric system of astronomy. Though these 
 last two never broke openly with the church, 
 they carried on their thinking without regard to 
 her, and arrived at results which she was bound, 
 sooner or later, to condemn. 
 
 Raimondo Lulli's acute rationalism ; Nicholas 
 Cusanus' genial, anti-scholastic, natural mysti- 
 cism ; Lucretius' fiery love of the material and 
 his atomism ; Telesio's devotion to natural ob- 
 servation and his animism ; and Copernicus' 
 heliocentric theory (anticipated, indeed, by Cu- 
 sanus) : take these and add to them Bruno's 
 fervid, impatient, restless disposition, and it is not 
 difficult to account for either his system, his life 
 or his death. Rationalism, naturalism, mysti- 
 cism, these are the components of his thought. 
 This thought necessarily brought him into con- 
 flict with the Church, whose thought was, and 
 is, founded on dogmatism, supernaturalism, and 
 scholasticism. There is very little that can be 
 called original in Bruno. 
 
 His great importance consists in the fact that 
 
62 Bruno's thought: 
 
 he united and carried to their proper conclu- 
 sions all the anti-dogmatic tendencies of his 
 time, broke definitely with the Church, and even 
 with Christianity as a system of thought, and 
 asserted the rights of reason, and its capacity to 
 attain to all truth and to endure forever. In 
 saying that he broke with Christianity, I ought 
 " to add that he did not break with what is valu- 
 able in Christianity, its deep humanity, its earn- 
 estness, its infinite hope and promise. Nay, 
 despite the reports that have been circulated 
 respecting his private life, I believe he never 
 broke with Christianity's ideal of personal purity. 
 That, in a coarse age, and in a spirit of reaction 
 against an exaggerated asceticism, he may have 
 at times fallen below that ideal, is possible. If 
 he did, then let him that is without sin cast a 
 stone at him; let him that is ready to face his 
 death for conviction's sake revile him. I can- 
 not. Whatever weakness he may have shown 
 in his life is redeemed by his heroic death ; and, 
 even if it were not, I am not appointed his 
 judge. 
 
ITS SOURCES, CHARACTER AND VALUE. 63 
 
 IV. HOW HAS Bruno's idea affected subsequent 
 
 THOUGHT ? 
 
 When the Church undertakes to destroy an 
 adversary, she is not content with taking his 
 life in the most painful, ignominious and public 
 way ; she generally tries at the same time and 
 long after to ruin his reputation, both as a 
 thinker and as a man. 
 
 This was recently exemplified in a most shock- 
 ing way in the papal allocution called forth by 
 impotent fury over the erection of a statile to 
 Bruno, two hundred and eighty-nine years after 
 his martyrdom. Such moral barbarities have 
 now, fortunately, no effect save on the author 
 of them, his character, and the cause he repre- 
 sents ; but in times past, it was otherwise. For 
 more than two hundred years, such was Bruno's 
 reputation for atheism, impiety and misconduct 
 that his writings were completely tabooed, not 
 only among Catholics, but even among Pro- 
 testants. They were burned or kept secret, 
 like obscenities. Hegel tells us that as late as 
 the year 1830 they were forbidden to be shown 
 
64 Bruno's thought: 
 
 in the public library at Dresden. Many of 
 them are lost, or buried in the archives of the 
 Inquisition. Of those known to exist no com- 
 plete or reasonably accurate edition has ever 
 been published. The Italian works were col- 
 lected and edited by a German. In spite of 
 this, Bruno's thought has exerted a determining 
 influence upon many great minds, upon Des- 
 cartes, Spinoza, Leibnitz, Kant and Hegel, and 
 through them upon Goethe, Coleridge, Emer- 
 son and the whole body of modern evolutionists 
 and monists. As we shall see, these last have 
 risen to but one side of his thought, 
 
 V. THE PERMANENT WORTH OF BRUNO'S THOUGHT. 
 
 In the last resort, man's interest in a thing 
 is measured by its permanent worth. What 
 then is the worth of Bruno's thought? To 
 my thinking, it lies in two things: (i) that it 
 maintains the universe to be infinite, one, and 
 essentially intelligible, (2) that it makes the 
 first principle of the universe transcendent as 
 well as immanent. 
 
ITS SOURCES, CHARACTER AND VALUE. 65 
 
 By the former of these affirmations, it ex- 
 cludes both the forms of Agnosticism, the 
 mediaeval which was eked out with revela- 
 tion, and the modern which is embalmed in 
 sentimentality. It is equally the foe of the 
 Inscrutable and the Unknowable. It inspires 
 man with reverence in presence of the uni- 
 verse, and with enthusiasm to study it. No 
 scientific movement will ever be permanent, 
 or in any true way beneficial, that is not 
 inspired with the conviction that it is on the 
 way to absolute truth. 
 
 By the latter of its affirmations, Bruno's 
 thought leaves a place for the future evolution 
 of mind. If there be any truth in evolution, 
 it is surely the height of absurdity to maintain 
 that the evolution of mind has ceased, and 
 that new mental faculties can never be pro- 
 duced, or to set limits to the possibilities of mind 
 in any direction. It would be well for us, 
 before we sit down to construct philosophies 
 of the universe, to reflect that our minds are 
 in a comparatively low state of development. 
 
66 Bruno's thought : 
 
 and that, as Aristotle says, the crown of per- 
 fection does not belong to the imperfect ; but, 
 at the same time, to realize that we, for this 
 very reason, can fix no pillars to bound the 
 reach of thought. 
 
 While Bruno maintains that human intelli- 
 gence can rise to God only as immanent in 
 the universe and as animating it, he does not 
 dream of denying that there is in God a 
 transcendent mode, which may be attained by 
 man when he shall have developed a form 
 of consciousness higher than the human — 
 in fact, a God-consciousness, as much higher 
 than the self-consciousness belonging to man 
 as that is higher than the mere consciousness 
 which belongs to the brutes. And, indeed, 
 what else is faith, about which men, for well- 
 nigh two thousand years, have been disputing, 
 fighting and dying, but the dawning of the 
 new God-consciousness in man ? What is 
 Christianity in its deepest essence but the 
 embodiment and trainer of this conscious- 
 ness? And for what other reason is Christi- 
 
ITS SOURCES, CHARACTER AND VALUE. 67 
 
 anity sinking into disrepute, and making way 
 for mere physical science, but because it has 
 been unfaithful to its task of developing the 
 God-consciousness, and has become a mere 
 matter of dogmas; churches and Pharisaic 
 respectability ? 
 
 The truth is that, when Bruno broke with the 
 Church, and with the Christianity of all the 
 churches, he did so in favor of pure religion 
 and the very essence of Christianity. That 
 Bruno should have been called an atheist only 
 shows to what vile uses human language is 
 liable to be put by the ignorant slaves of creeds. 
 Bruno was, in truth, a god-intoxicated man, in 
 whom faith was a glowing life of " heroic fury," 
 not a mere belief maintained by anathemas and 
 the fear of hell. 
 
 To sum up: 
 
 Bruno's fundamental idea was that of a God- 
 informed, God-governed universe, a universe 
 embodying power, wisdom and love, a universe 
 essentially accessible to the human conscious- 
 ness, partially now and progressively with the ' 
 
68 Bruno's thought. 
 
 progress of that consciousness. This, as op- 
 posed to the notion of a God-bereft universe, in 
 disfavor -vfrith an inscrutable God, was the 
 thought which temporarily succumbed in the 
 Campo de' Fiori in 1 600, and rose again, let us 
 hope, to everlasting triumph on the same spot 
 in 1889. No wonder that this resurrection 
 called forth all the malignant hostility of the 
 Church. Bruno's thought is of infinite value. 
 Strange, nay fantastic, as its expression may 
 sometimes sound, it is the loftiest yet attained. 
 It is, in truth, the very thing that we need to lift 
 us out of all forms of blind agnosticism, dog- 
 matism and materialism, into true, seeing science, 
 and to pave the way for the development of a 
 higher consciousness in us, a God-consciousness, 
 which alone can satisfy the human soul. 
 
 PRESS OF WM. r. FELL & 00., 1220-24 SANSOM ST., PHILADELPHIA.