9 8 GIORDANO BRUNO PART 



regarded as a heresiarch he is several times so described 

 in the documents the founder of a new sect, the 

 leader of an incipient but dangerous crusade against 

 the Church. It was as the apostle of a new religion, 

 founded on a new intuition, a new conception of the 

 universe, and of its relation to God, that Bruno died. 

 Had he been won over to the side of the Church, his 

 mind conquered and his spirit crushed by the long 

 years of waiting, and possibly the days and nights of 

 physical torture, it would have been a signal triumph 

 for the papacy. But the heart which had trembled 

 at the beginning, when the sudden gulf yawned before 

 it, grew more and more steadfast as its trials increased. 

 We can only re-echo Carriere's words, that in the soul 

 of such a man, who after eight years' confinement in 

 the prisons of the Inquisition remained so firm, " the 

 governing motives must have been an eternal and in- 

 violable impulse towards Truth, an unbending sense 

 of right, an irrepressible and free enthusiasm." That 

 for which he died was not any special cult or any 

 special interpretation of Scripture or history, but a 

 broad freedom of thought with the right of free inter- 

 pretation of history and of nature, which in his own 

 case was founded upon a philosophy, one of the noblest 

 that has been thought out by man. 



The fear of death was no part of this philosophy ; 

 what we call death, it teaches, is a mere change of state, 

 of " accidents " no real substance, such as the human 

 spirit is, can ever die. One of the highest values of 

 his philosophy he thought to be this, that it freed man 

 from the fear of death, " which is worse than death 

 itself." Strikingly apposite to his own fate is a 

 passage from Ovid 1 that he quotes 



1 Metam. xv. 



