large place in the conception of philosophy; and in after days Bruno
was fond of developing, like Plato, like the Christian Platonists,
combining something of the peculiar temper of each, the analogy
between the flights of intellectual enthusiasm and those of physical
love, with an animation which shows clearly enough the reality of his
experience in the latter. The Eroici Furori, his book of books,
dedicated to Philip Sidney, who would be no stranger to such
thoughts, presents a singular blending of verse and prose, after the
manner of Dante's Vita Nuova. The supervening philosophic comment
reconsiders those earlier, physically erotic, impulses which had
prompted the sonnet in voluble Italian, entirely to the advantage of
their abstract, incorporeal, theoretic, equivalents. Yet if it is
after all but a prose comment, it betrays no lack of the natural
stuff out of which such mystic transferences must be made. That
there is no single name of preference, no Beatrice, or Laura, by no
means proves the young man's earlier desires to have been merely
Platonic; and if the colours of love inevitably lose a little of
their force and propriety by such deflexion from their earlier
purpose, their later intellectual purpose as certainly finds its
opportunity thereby, in the [147] matter of borrowed fire and wings.
A kind of old scholastic pedantry creeping back over the ardent youth
who had thrown it off so defiantly (as if love himself went in now
for a University degree), Bruno developes, under the mask of amorous
verse, all the various stages of abstraction, by which, as the last
step of a long ladder, the mind attains actual "union." For, as with
the purely religious mystics, "union," the mystic union of souls with
one another and their Lord, nothing less than union between the
contemplator and the contemplated--the reality, or the sense, or at
least the name of such union--was always at hand. Whence that
instinctive tendency towards union if not from the Creator of things