gy, and all being united in the "Monad," or "the One." Now,
Bruno's philosophy is nothing but the cosmological implication and the
metaphysical justification of the Copernician theory in the conceptual
terms of Nicholas of Cusa.

Liberated from the tyranny of dogma and of the senses, dazzled by the
whirling maze of worlds without end scattered like blazing sparks
throughout space, drunk with the thought of infinity, he poured forth a
paean of breathing thoughts and burning words to celebrate his new
faith, the religion of science. The universe for him was composed of
atoms, tiny "minima" that admit no further division. Each one of these
is a "monad," or unity, comprised in some higher unity until finally
"the monad of monads" was found in God. But this was no tribal
Jehovah, no personal, anthropomorphic deity, but a First Principle;
nearly identical with Natural Law.

{641}

CHAPTER XIII

THE TEMPER OF THE TIMES

SECTION 1. TOLERANCE AND INTOLERANCE

Because religion has in the past protested its own intolerance the most
loudly, it is commonly regarded as the field of persecution _par
excellence_. This is so far from being the case that it is just in the
field of religion that the greatest liberty has been, after a hard
struggle, won. It is as if the son who refused to work in the vineyard
had been forcibly hauled thither, whereas the other son, admitting his
willingness to go, had been left out. Nowadays in most civilized
countries a man would suffer more inconvenience by going bare-foot and
long-haired than by proclaiming novel religious views; he would be in
vastly more danger by opposing the prevalent patriotic or economic
doctrines, or by violating some possibly irrational convention, than he
would by declaring his agnosticism or atheism. The reason of this
state of things is that in the field of religion a tremendous battle
between opposing faiths was once fought, with exhaustion as the result,
and that the rationalists then succeeded in imposing on the two
parties, convinced that neither could exterminate the other, respect
for each other's rights.

[Sidenote: Intolerance, Catholics]

This battle was fought in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.
Almost all religions and almost all statesmen were then equally
intolerant when they had the power to be so. The Catholic church, with
that superb consistency that no new light can alter, has {642} always
asserted that the opinion that ever