all things in God" to be the aim of all metaphysical speculation, as
of all enquiry into nature. The Spirit of God, in countless variety
of forms, neither above, nor in any way without, but intimately
within, all things, is really present, with equal integrity and
fulness, in the sunbeam ninety millions of miles long, and the
wandering drop of water as it evaporates therein. The divine
consciousness has the same relation to the production of things as
the human intelligence to the production of true thoughts concerning
them. Nay! those thoughts are themselves actually God in man: a loan
to man also of His assisting Spirit, who, in truth, is the Creator of
things, in and by His contemplation of them. For Him, as for man in
proportion as man thinks truly, thought and being are identical, and
things existent only in so far as they are known. Delighting in
itself, in the sense of its own energy, this sleepless, capacious,
fiery intelligence, evokes all the orders of nature, all the
revolutions of history, cycle upon cycle, in ever new types. And God
the Spirit, the soul of the world, being therefore really identical
with the [143] soul of Bruno also, as the universe shapes itself to
Bruno's reason, to his imagination, ever more and more articulately,
he too becomes a sharer of the divine joy in that process of the
formation of true ideas, which is really parallel to the process of
creation, to the evolution of things. In a certain mystic sense,
which some in every age of the world have understood, he, too, is the
creator; himself actually a participator in the creative function.
And by such a philosophy, Bruno assures us, it was his experience
that the soul is greatly expanded: con questa filosofia l'anima mi
s'aggrandisce: mi se magnifica l'intelletto!

For, with characteristic largeness of mind, Bruno accepted this
theory in the whole range of its consequences. Its more immediate