Let us at once acknowledge that even in the mythological systems of ancient nations-of Indians, Thrakians, Greeks, Teutons, and so forth-ideas about primeval matter are to be found not so very dissimilar to those of Bruno. In some of those mythologies, which are but picturesque renderings of cosmogonic ideas, the very Gods issue from eternal matter, whilst Fate, that is, the causal and inevitable concatenation of things and events, masters them all-the divine circle as well as mankind. Again, when Bruno says: What first was seed becomes grass, then an ear, then bread, chyle, blood, semen, embryo, man, a corpse, then again earth, stone, or some other mass, and so forth,' we are apt to remember an ancient annotation to the Vedas, which says: "The finer part of whey, when shaken, rises and becomes butter. Even so, my child, the finer part of nourishment, when eaten, rises and changes into mind.' Against the Aristotelean view and the Ptolemaic system, Bruno defended the system of Copernicus. He addresses the great astronomer as the most noble one who has recovered the meaning of Pythagoras, of Timæus, of Hegesias, and Niketes. He praises the predecessor of Copernicus, Nicolaus of Cusa, and German mathematicians. in general. In upholding the eternal rotation of all heavenly bodies, Bruno argues in a manner not fully scientific; his strength of intuition being, in these as in other subjects, far greater than his learning, though he felt the warmest admiration for specialist explorers. There is great charm, nevertheless, in his poetical diction, when he speaks of endlessly innumerable worlds being contained in the allencompassing Unity, and of every individual part, every fractional monad of the All, forming a reflex of the soul-animated totality. He assumed a World-Soul absolutely inseparable from Matter; the former constituting the impulsive force of things. The greatest, he averred, is embodied in the smallest; the smallest is a portraiture of the greatest. Everything in existence has, from the beginning, had its inward germ, its preparation, its tendency towards completion. This material infinity of the Eternally One cannot possibly have a centre. Neither our globe nor any other astral body can pretend to such a position. The Universe is both all centre and all periphery at one and the same time. IV. Taking his cue from the Neo-Platonist Plotinus, Bruno laid down as the principle of his ethics the striving for greater beauteousness. In this, again, he comes near to Darwin's principle of natural selection among individuals. Evolutionary maxims are altogether the special characteristic of Bruno's mind. Hence he could not fall in with the ecclesiastical doctrine of a Paradise from which mankind had been driven. At most, he maintains that some races have been happier in their simpler and unsophisticated condition. He launches out bitterly against the devilish works of Spanish would-be civilisers in Peru and Mexico. The descent of the various races of mankind from one pair he denied, whilst holding a firm belief in their capability for greater perfection. There are some passages in which Bruno's idea of a Godhead approaches the deistic doctrine; but in the main he appears richly imbued with mixed notions of a sublimely spiritualised materialism and of a strongly materialised pantheism. He did not believe in personal immortality, but in the indestructibility of a central monad constituting the essence of man. From this point of view he upheld the theory of the transmigration of souls. That doctrine, strange to say, has been half avowed by Leibniz in a private letter, and more openly by even so clear and rationalistic a writer as Lessing, in his treatise on the Education of Mankind. On other planets, Bruno assumed the probable existence of populations of a more highly organised nature. Between men and animals he could only allow a difference of quality as regards mind. His cheerful southern temperament kept him from all pessimistic moods. Hope and joy were the stamp of his whole being. 'He revels,' as Moritz Carrière has it, 'in the vital abundance of nature; he delights in the creative wealth of the mind, whilst his glowing spirit at the same time plunges into the cool and limpid depth of the one basis of all things.' There are some beautiful poetical utterances in De Immenso, in which Bruno castigates the sour and tyrannous sects that would fain 'disfigure the sunniest day with the shadows of hell,' and' by their unnatural nonsense stop the even course of the progressive development of mankind, extinguishing the light of intellect.' Through such successively triumphant sects of zealots, 'nation becomes alienated from nation; children desert their parents; men refuse a greeting to those of different faith; every fanatical wight, intellectually impotent as he is, plays the prophet, if he does not even pretend to enact the part of Omnipotence.' In matters of the State and of political economy, Bruno held reforming opinions. In some sense they might be called socialistic, as opposed to that pseudo-liberty which makes the weak and the disinherited simply the victim of the strong and the rich. At the same time he does not believe in the possibility of doing away with the difference of classes; he protests against a 'bestial equality.' A warm advocate of the rights of the toiling masses, he shows a noble contempt for mere demagogic, self-seeking flatterers of an ignorant and unstable multitude. It is a downright proof of a mean and infamous way of thinking to shape one's sentiments and thoughts in accordance with those of the multitude merely because it is the multitude.' He himself always preserved a proud and straightforward independence. Even when he went much astray in his theo retical views as to a particular point of our social organisation, he spoke out as fearlessly as any classic philosopher of old. Pure in life, wickedly maligned by his pupil, the wretch Mocenigo, who betrayed him into the hands of the Venetian authorities and the Inquisition, Giordano Bruno is a noble martyr's figure. In person he is described as small of stature, of slight delicate build; with thin and pallid face, and meditative physiognomy; the glance both eager and melancholy; the hair and the beard between black and chestnut; in his speech ready, rapid, imaginative, and of lively gestures; in manner urbane and gentle. Sociable, amiable, and gladsome in conversation, as is the character of southern Italians, he easily yielded to the tastes and habits of others. Of open frankness among friends and foes, he was as quickly moved to anger as he was far from rancour and revenge. Deeper investigation, such as is now to be expected after the great Roman commemoration, will probably result in showing that the leaven of Bruno's master-mind has operated more powerfully even than had been hitherto known. This much is already clear, that not upon Spinoza and Leibniz only has he had a stirring effect, but that in some of Goethe's profoundest poems also are his vestiges strongly traceable. The great German poet himself mentions that his own intellect had been uplifted by the writings of Jordanus Brunous of Nola.' He adds, however, that it requires almost superhuman efforts to extract the pure gold and silver from the unequal lodes, and that every one born with a similar bent of mind had better. turn to Nature itself than fatigue himself among gangues, perhaps among heaps of dross and slag, of bygone centuries.' This scarcely does proper justice to Bruno. The truth is that Goethe, who personally felt magnetically attracted towards the secrets of nature, and who in the susurration of a sea of bulrushes heard the stirring motion of growing worlds, owed to the Italian poet-philosopher more than appears from this passage. Some of the loftiest ideas in 'Faust' have their manifest prototype in Bruno. In the same way Goethe's famous Was wär' ein Gott, der nur von Aussen stiesse, So dass, was in ihm lebt und webt und ist, has its almost literal counterpart in Bruno's 'Non est Deus vel intelligentia exterior circumrotans et circumducens ; dignius enim illi debet esse internum principium motus, quod est natura propria, species propria, anima propria,' and so forth. It is within the last few years only that Dr. L. Jacoby, Hermann Brunnhofer, and others have given the full evidence of this influence of Bruno upon Goethe. Well, therefore, may be said of the Italian poet-philosopher what Goethe makes Faust say, that 'the trace of his earthly days will not perish for ages to come.' ས. Both moderate Church reformers and independent thinkers were subjected to the fiery doom. It has been brought to recollection, during the Bruno commemoration, that another progressive theologian and philosophical thinker, a native of Nola, like himself, Pomponio Algieri, was burnt, at the age of twenty-five, at Rome, in a cauldron of boiling oil, pitch, and turpentine, his head and hands. standing out in the midst of the flames, and his torments lasting a quarter of an hour. Few know that in Luther's days, even in Germany-at Köln, at Passau, and at Munich, wherever the Papal power still was strong-Adolf Klarenbach and Peter Flystedt, Leonhard Kaiser and Georg Wagner were burnt at the stake. To the memory of the two first-named, Luther dedicated a hymn of praise. The martyrdom of Leonhard Kaiser also he sang, by way of alluding to the meaning of his names, as the death of a strong and fearless lion, who bore his family name, too, with good right as the first and foremost of his race.' But can we compare these with a philosophical genius like Bruno, a knight of intellect of towering greatness, the ardour of whose poetical vein has its counterpart in the mighty grasp of his intuition and the profundity of his reason? What were his sufferings in the darkness of the dungeon in which the Inquisition kept him? What ferocious attempts were made to bend and break the energy of the highly cultured, unfrocked friar whose mind was nourished with the love of antiquity? If, as a prisoner, he had a moment of faltering, the answer has been given in the words: How can you expect that torture, even though applied for hours, should prevail against a whole life of study and inquiry?' Campanella, who after Bruno was kept in prison for twentyseven years, said of his own sufferings:-"The last time I was tortured, it was for forty hours. I was fettered with cords which cut to the very bones; I was hung up with hands tied back, a most sharp piece of wood being used, which cut out large parts of my flesh and produced a vast loss of blood.' Perhaps some day, when the archives of the Vatican become fully accessible, we shall learn a little more of Bruno's last years of torment. On being informed of his doom, he, in the face of a horrible death, heroically said to his inhuman judges:- Perhaps you pronounce your sentence with greater fear than that with which I receive it!' Among those who formed the tribunal was Cardinal Bellarmin, the same who later on forced Galilei to an apparent recantation, and Cardinal Sanseverina, who had called the massacre of the night of St. Bartholomew 'a splendid day, most pleasant to Catholics.' The sentence against Bruno was, as usual, to be carried out without the spilling of blood.' In the bandit-language of the Inquisition, as Hermann Brunnhofer expresses it, this signified burning at the stake. Before the victim of priestcraft was sacrificed, his tongue was torn with pincers. But it still speaks to posterity in powerful accents. More and more it is seen that a great deal of that which, in this country, Darwin, Huxley, Tyndall, Lyell, Lubbock, and others, have by their masterly and successful researches made the common intellectual property of all educated people, had been divined, in some measure, by the prescient genius of Bruno. Unaided by exact science, he anticipated in a general way the scientific results of ages to come. The struggle against Obscurantism has still to be carried on. Whilst I am writing this, numerous voices of the ultramontane Press come in from abroad which speak in tones of inquisitorial fury of the Bruno scandal,' urging a crusade for the restoration of the temporal power of the Papacy. Some of these papers go the length of justifying the burning of the Italian thinker by the necessity of guarding the Church against dangerous heresies.' The Salzburger Chronik says:-'He that will not listen and obey, must be made to feel. In order to save the good, the evil must be annihilated. This doctrine is the very basis of the penal law and of the divine command, which punish murder, and which therefore must all the more punish the murder of souls. This is in accordance with human conscience and with justice.' Bruno himself foresaw an age of enlightenment, a coming century of progress, when the powers of darkness would sink down to the nether world, and the hearts of men be filled with truth and justice. To this prediction refers the proud inscription on his monument :'To Giordano Bruno this memorial has been raised by the century prophesied by him, on the very spot where his pile burnt.' It may be open to doubt whether this nineteenth century has fulfilled yet all that which Bruno foretold. But whether Galilei's often-quoted word was spoken or not on the famous occasion when the Papal Church fancied it could stop the rotation of the world by bringing him down on his knees, the truth of his saying, in more than one sense, becomes ever apparent: 'Eppur si muove!' 'And yet it moves!' KARL BLIND. |