i OPTIMISM 1 1 1 



given theory or mood should be attributed, but in 

 his~eIrTier life the mystical, in his later the naturalistic, 

 or rationalist standpoint may be said to have pre- 

 dominated. It is with the more metaphysical attitude 

 that a certain vein of optimism in Bruno's philosophy 

 is connected, the familiar conception of evil, natural 

 or moral, as necessary for the good of the whole, like 

 the discords by which a harmony is heightened. No 

 absolute evil, for the consistent Neoplatonist, can pos- 

 sibly exist in a world which flows from the divine and 

 is an outpouring of His nature. But Bruno had little 

 or nothing of the practical optimist in his own 

 character ; whatever he thought to be evil, he fought 

 against with all his might ; a victim of intolerance, he 

 had himself no toleration for some points of view 

 those, namely, which he felt might weaken the bonds of 

 civil society and of human brotherhood. " Such evil 

 teachers/' he writes in the Sigillus (ii. 2. 182), "succeed- 

 ing time, and a world wise overlate in its own ill 

 condition, will exterminate as the tares, canker-worms, 

 locust plagues of their age nay, as scorpions and vipers." 

 Bruno saw only too clearly the evils of the world, and 

 of his age, from the greatest of which tyranny over 

 the soul, and suppression of mental liberty he suffered 

 in his own person ; and his life, as we have seen, was 

 spent in a ceaseless, and for the time unavailing, 

 struggle against them. But he never lost his faith 

 in the ultimate victory of his own philosophy, based 

 as it was upon his faith in the essential goodness, justice, 

 and truth of the eternal source of things. As all 

 things flow from, so all things tend to return to God. 

 Philosophy goes further than to teach merely that 

 pain and evil are not absolute facts, not grounded in 

 the nature of things ; it also frees the believer from the 



