IMAGINATION : ORIGINALITY 107 



XX 



For such coinage, as for illustrations to his theories, 

 references to old authorities, material for his satire on 

 pedants, as well as for more doubtful purposes, 

 mystical or magical formulas, or " proofs," his pro- 

 digious memory never left Bruno at a loss. But if this 

 memory, in its tenacity, supplied him with powerful 

 and ready arguments against his opponents in their 

 appeal to the authority of antiquity, it was also, in its 

 fertility, the source of the chief defects of his writing, 

 and perhaps also of his speaking. His imagination 

 runs riot in the pursuit of allegories, metaphors, similes 

 from mythology. Tiraboschi, the historian of Italian 

 literature, defies <c the most acute intelligence to 

 penetrate into his system, the most patient of men to 

 endure the reading of it." 



So far was this enormous mass of material from 

 blocking up the spring of originality in his mind, 

 however, that the ideas in which he may be said to 

 have a anticipated " modern thought are innumerable. 

 No doubt, in many cases, they came from the earlier 

 Greek philosophers whom he chiefly studied ; but Bruno 

 invariably gives them a connection with his own theory, 

 such as precludes us from taking his restoration of 

 them for a happy chance. Such ideas, for example, are/ 

 those of the evolution or gradual transformation of 

 lower organisms into higher (De Umbris, Int. 7), of 

 the part played by the hand in the evolution of the ^^p 

 human race (Cabala, L. 586. 35), of the gradual / v 

 changes brought about on the surface of the earth, its 

 seas, its islands, the configuration of the land, the 



