220 GIORDANO BRUNO PART 



to think and act. They have perfect freedom, since 

 their life and soul are their own, not borrowed, as ours. 

 " Thus as we breathe, see, sleep, without labour or 

 anxiety, and while our soul performs the function of 

 life, the vital humours and spirits continually circulate, 

 so these, the chief members of the world, divine animals, 

 have no need to undergo any anxious toil, for all things 

 with them are done for the best. 7 ' Their fixed aim of 

 life defines for them certain determinate orbits, " in 

 which they move freely by the force of that soul which 

 is much more certainly present in these high, perfect, 

 divine bodies than in us, of more ignoble condition, 

 who draw from them spirit and body, come forth living 

 out of their bosom, are nourished by them, and at 

 length are dissolved and received back into them." 1 



It is to the internal spirit also that the spherical form 

 of the worlds is due. The so-called mountains of the 

 earth do not in the least detract from its spherical form. 

 Bruno anticipated modern science in his discovery or 

 intuition that the real mountains are not those we are 

 accustomed to call such, but immense tracts of country, 

 the whole of France, for example. " I find the whole 

 country of France to be one mountain, which rises 

 gradually from the North Sea to Auvergne, where is 

 its summit, marked on the west by the Pyrenees, where 

 the Garonne flows, on the east by the Rhone, on the 

 south by the Mediterranean Sea/' 2 The whole earth 

 is, however, as smooth in reality as is to us the pumice 

 stone, which to the ant seems furrowed with mountains 



1 On movements of suns and earths, as determined by the soul, and the need of 

 mutual sustenance, cf. Acrot. Arts. 65, 66, 67, 72. 



2 Cf. Cena, Lag. 166. 32, where it is suggested that the Alps and Pyrenees once 

 formed the summit of a very high mountain, gradually broken up, through con- 

 tinuous geological changes, into the lesser forms we now call mountains. So the 

 whole of Britain is a mountain, rising up out of the sea $ its summit is the highest 

 point, Scotland. 



