no GIORDANO BRUNO PART 



like brutes or barbarians, but be transformed into the 

 likeness of Him who makes His sun to rise upon 

 the good and the bad, and pours the rain of His 

 mercies upon the just and the unjust. This is the 

 religion above controversy or dispute, which I observe 

 from the belief of my own mind, and from the custom 

 of my fatherland and my race." 1 ;?; On the other side, 

 he had inherited the mysticism of the Neoplatonist 

 school, or at least it called out a responsive echo from 

 his mind so soon as he came under its influence. Jde. 

 was full of enthusiasm, as we shall find, for the divine 

 in things, in us, in the world, in the universe a 

 " God-intoxicated man " far more strikingly than the 

 impassive Spinoza. It was because the Copernican 

 theory fitted into his mystical thought of the One, 

 as an identity of the infinitely small, the point, and 

 the infinitely great, the broad, deep, immeasurable 

 universe, that it appeared to him an inspiration of 

 genius. Therefore he defended it, extended it further 

 than its originator dared extend it, and finally died 

 for it and for all that it meant to him. His belief 

 in natural magic belongs again to this side, or rather 

 to the influence of the one side of his nature upon 

 the other ; owing to their essential unity in God, 

 natural things have sympathies with one another and 

 with human life, so that a change in one thing a stone, 

 a tree may indirectly cause a corresponding change in 

 another, a human being. It was characteristic of him 

 that he sought to give to these beliefs which, be it 

 remembered, were universal in his time a rational 

 basis, a connection with his thought- system as a whole. 

 The two sides or standpoints are never far apart 

 in Bruno : it is often impossible to say to which a 



1 Art. Adi}. Math. Efist. Ded. (i. 3. 4). 



