enounces that precept, to others, to himself! Recovering, as he
fancies, a certain primeval sense of Deity broadcast on things, a
sense in which Pythagoras and other "inspired" theorists of early
Greece had abounded, in his hands philosophy becomes a poem, a [145]
sacred poem, as it had been with them. That Bruno himself, in "the
enthusiasm of the idea," drew from his axiom of the "indifference of
contraries" the practical consequence which is in very deed latent
there, that he was ready to sacrifice to the antinomianism, which is
certainly a part of its rigid logic, the austerities, the purity of
his own youth, for instance, there is no proof. The service, the
sacrifice, he is ready to bring to the great light that has dawned
for him, occupying his entire conscience with the sense of his
responsibilities to it, is the sacrifice of days and nights spent in
eager study, of plenary, disinterested utterance of the thoughts that
arise in him, at any hazard, at the price, say! of martyrdom. The
work of the divine Spirit, as he conceives it, exalts, inebriates
him, till the scientific apprehension seems to take the place of
prayer, oblation, communion. It would be a mistake, he holds, to
attribute to the human soul capacities merely passive or receptive.
She, too, possesses initiatory power as truly as the divine soul of
the world, to which she responds with the free gift of a light and
heat that seem her own.

Yet a nature so opulently endowed can hardly have been lacking in
purely physical or sensuous ardours. His pantheistic belief that the
Spirit of God is in all things, was not inconsistent with, nay! might
encourage, a keen and restless eye for the dramatic details of life
and character [146] however minute, for humanity in all its visible
attractiveness, since there too, in truth, divinity lurks. From
those first fair days of early Greek speculation, love had occupied a