BRUNO 181 



have all the effect that its authors could have desired. His 

 books were forgotten ; Galileo hardly ventures to mention his 

 name. He seems to have found no disciple. 



In the face of the grandeur of his ideas, and his unquestioned 

 powers of exposition, this seems strange. The truth is that 

 Bruno was in advance of his time ; more than that, the parts of 

 his system most original to him, and which to-day make us 

 marvel at the previsions of his genius, were unsusceptible of 

 proof. It is simply amazing now to go back and consider how 

 far beyond the ideas of Coppernicus the marvellous deductions 

 inspired by his powerful and fervid imagination had swept him. 

 Among moderns he is the first to reach again the heights of 

 vision of Democritus and proclaim the infinity of worlds. The 

 spaces of the heavens, he taught, are peopled with other systems 

 resembling our own. The stars are suns ; round them circle 

 other planets, or, as he more vividly put it, other earths, doubt- 

 less like unto ours. The only reason that we cannot see these 

 other systems is due simply to the unthinkable distance at 

 which they lie and to the littleness of their planets. Seen from 

 a similar distance, our earth would be equally invisible, our sun 

 but a twinkling star. 



He divines much more. From Nicholas of Cusa he had 

 learned to see flecks upon the sun, whose veritable existence 

 Galileo was afterwards to prove. From these he imagined the 

 turning of the sun. With increasing astonishment do we read 

 that not merely does the sun revolve upon its own axis, but 

 it has a movement of translation as well ; and, again, that there 

 are probably other planets belonging to our own system which 

 cannot be seen because of their distance. It took one hundred 

 and sixty years of study with the telescope to verify the latter 

 fact, while the truth of the former has only been demonstrated 

 in our own day. 



So far does his vision reach beyond that of his master that 

 we may agree with Riehl in believing that he was the first to 

 conceive the true construction of cosmos. He was a sort of 

 somnambulist of the infinite. More than any other man for 

 two thousand years he had put off the fetters of space and 

 time. He pictured the infinitude of worlds as peopled with an 

 infinitude of created forms, perhaps similar to those upon our 

 earth, perhaps higher than these. Only a fool could believe 

 that in unending space the unlimited creative might of the cosmos 



