er, that
'_prigione angusta e nera_,' boldly advanced a system of Philosophy,
startling, in those Inquisitorial times, from its independence, and
horrible from its antagonism to Aristotle, the Atlas of the church. This
was no less than pure Pantheism,--God in and through all, the infinite
Intelligence. _Deus est monadum monas--nempe entium entitas_. This
creed, by an incomprehensible metamorphosis, was styled, in the language
of the day, Atheism; its promulgation, even its conception, was
pronounced a crime whose penalty was death. And Bruno, who, from the
depths of infamous superstition, had risen into the pure light of
heaven, to a theory whose principles, though they might not satisfy,
could not fail to refine, elevate, and encourage the soul long groveling
in the mire of ignorance, or languishing in the dark dungeons of
Scholasticism,--Bruno died for the truth. More foolish than the savages
of whom Montesquieu speaks, who cut down trees to reach their fruit,
these judges of Bruno destroyed the tree whose seeds were already strewn
broadcast over the world. They hushed forever the voice whose echoes are
not yet stilled,--echoes that resound in the cautious _Meditations_ of
Descartes, that rise from peak to peak of the majestic method of the
great Spinoza, who was no less a martyr because reputation and not life
was the forfeit of his earnestness; and that vibrate with thrilling
sweetness in the Idealism of Schelling. 'The perfect theory of Nature,'
says Schelling, 'is that by virtue of which all Nature is resolved into
the intellectual element,' which 'intellectual element' is at once
composed of intuitions and is the source of intuitions,--the _Deus in
nobis_ of Giordano Bruno. 'It is evident,' he continues, 'that Nature is
originally identical with that which in us is recognized as the subject
and the object.'

Thus the empirical school, in its representative, Aristotle, met in the
martyr of Nola an opponent vigilant, earnest, powerful. And while the
legitimate prosecution of the former mode of philosophizing has led to
deism, skepticism, atheism, and materialism, it is to those who have
retained in methods, more mathematically clear and more perfectly
developed than that which Bruno disseminated, but still bearing, as
their key-note, the one great idea of his bold crusade,--to those we
must look for all that is most pure, most noble, in Philosophy: a system
or succession of systems whose primitive idea--substance a