THE PEDANT 



105 





be kept from them, for it is "with the greatest difficulty 

 that they can be restrained from vice and impelled to 

 virtuous acts through their faith in eternal punishment : 

 what would become of them if they were persuaded of 

 some lighter condition regulating the rewards of heroic 

 and humane deeds, the punishment of wickedness and 

 sin?" 1 He was an "aristocrat of learning," only (/ 

 the wise should have the government of the world ; 

 the people were unfit to judge either of truth or of 

 men. 



Along with this distrust of the vulgar went a far Pedantry 

 more intense dislike of the kind of learning they 

 admired, and of the type of scholar, the pedant, that 

 most appealed to them. The minds of the vulgar, it 

 seemed to him, were more readily turned by sophisms, 

 by the appearances on the surface of things, than by the 

 truth that is hidden in their substance, and is indeed 

 their substance itself; 2 and the man too frequent in the 

 Italian, and generally in the learned world of those days 

 most apt to veil a real ignorance by a pretended 

 knowledge, by a show of externals, by appeal to 

 authorities with whom he had himself no acquaintance, 

 was the pedant. Bruno himself was not without that 

 touch of vanity which led him, like others, to mass 

 together quotations and phrases from Latin and even 

 from Greek writers ; to point an argument by forced 

 analogies from classical mythology ; to heap up refer- 

 ences, in support of his theories, to the Neoplatonists, 

 to the mystics, to the Cabbalah, to the older Greek 

 philosophers: these adornments were quite in the fashion 

 of his time, and looked at in that light they add to, 

 rather than detract from, the peculiar charm and spirit 

 of his writings. The true pedant such as Polihimnio 



1 Lag. 619. 20. Cf. also 700. 25, 717. 39. 2 Lag. 718. 26. 



4, 



