abounded in mockery; though it was by way of protest. So much of a
Platonist, for Plato's genial humour he had nevertheless substituted
the harsh laughter of Aristophanes. Paris, teeming, beneath a [158]
very courtly exterior, with mordant words, in unabashed criticism of
all real or suspected evil, provoked his utmost powers of scorn for
the "Triumphant Beast," the "installation of the ass," shining even
there amid the university folk,--those intellectual bankrupts of the
Latin Quarter, who had so long passed between them, however gravely,
a worthless "parchment and paper" currency. In truth, Aristotle, the
supplanter of Plato, was still in possession, pretending, as Bruno
conceived, to determine heaven and earth by precedent, hiding the
proper nature of things from the eyes of men. "Habit"--the last word
of his practical philosophy--indolent habit! what would this mean, in
the intellectual life, but just that sort of dead judgments which,
because the mind, the eye, were no longer really at work in them, are
most opposed to the essential quickness and freedom of the spirit?

The Shadows of Ideas: De Umbris Idearum: such, in set terms, have
been the subject of Bruno's discourse, appropriately to the still
only half emancipated intellect of his audience:--on approximations
to truth: the divine imaginations, as seen, darkly, more bearably by
weaker faculties, in words, in visible facts, in their shadows
merely. According to the doctrine of "Indifference," indeed, there
would be no real distinction between substance and shadow. In regard
to man's feeble wit, however, varying degrees of knowledge
constituted such a distinction. [159] "Ideas, and Shadows of Ideas":
the phrase recurred often; and, as such mystic phrases will, fixed
itself in Gaston's fancy, though not quite according to the mind of
the speaker; accommodated rather to the thoughts which just then
preoccupied his own. As already in his life there had been the