corollary was the famous axiom of "indifference," of "the coincidence
of contraries." To the eye of God, to the philosophic vision through
which God sees in man, nothing is really alien from Him. The
differences of things, those distinctions, above all, which schoolmen
and priests, old or new, Roman or Reformed, had invented for
themselves, would be lost in the length and breadth of the
philosophic survey: nothing, in itself, being really either great or
small; and matter certainly, in all its various forms, not evil but
divine. Dare one choose or reject this or that? If God the Spirit
had made, nay! was, all things indifferently, then, matter and
spirit, the spirit and the flesh, heaven and earth, freedom [144] and
necessity, the first and the last, good and evil, would be
superficial rather than substantial differences. Only, were joy and
sorrow also, together with another distinction, always of emphatic
reality to Gaston, for instance, to be added to the list of phenomena
really "coincident," or "indifferent," as some intellectual kinsmen
of Bruno have claimed they should?

The Dominican brother was at no distant day to break far enough away
from the election, the seeming "vocation," of his youth, yet would
remain always, and under all circumstances, unmistakably a monk in
some predominant qualities of temper. At first it was only by way of
thought that he asserted his liberty--delightful, late-found,
privilege!--traversing, in strictly mental journeys, that spacious
circuit, as it broke away before him at every moment upon ever-new
horizons. Kindling thought and imagination at once, the prospect
draws from him cries of joy, of a kind of religious joy, as in some
new "canticle of the creatures," some new hymnal, or antiphonary.
"Nature" becomes for him a sacred term.--"Conform thyself to Nature!
"with what sincerity, what enthusiasm, what religious fervour, he