seeming "vocation" of his youth, yet would
remain always, and under all circumstances, unmistakably a monk in
some predominant qualities of temper. At first it only by way of
thought that he asserted his liberty--delightful, late-found
privilege!--traversing, in mental journeys, that spacious circuit, as
it broke away before him at every moment into ever-new horizons.
Kindling thought and imagination at once, the prospect draws from him
cries of joy, a kind of religious joy, as in some new "canticle of
the creatures," a new monkish hymnal or antiphonary. "Nature"
becomes for him a sacred term. "Conform thyself to Nature"--with
what sincerity, what enthusiasm, what religious fervour, he enounces
the precept to others, to himself! Recovering, as he fancies, a
certain primeval sense of Deity broadcast on things, in which
Pythagoras and other inspired theorists of early Greece had abounded,
in his hands philosophy becomes a poem, a sacred poem, as it had been
with them. That Bruno himself, in "the enthusiasm of the idea," drew
from his axiom of the "indifference of contraries" the practical
consequence which is in very deed latent there, that he was ready to
sacrifice to the antinomianism, which is certainly a part of its
rigid logic, the purities of his youth for instance, there is no
proof. The service, the sacrifice, he is ready to bring to the great
light that has dawned for him, which occupies his entire conscience
with the sense of his responsibilities to it, is that of days and
nights spent in eager study, of a plenary, disinterested utterance of
the thoughts that arise in him, at any hazard, at the price, say! of
martyrdom. The work of the divine Spirit, as he conceives it,
exalts, inebriates him, till the scientific apprehension seems to
take the place of prayer, sacrifice, communion. It would be a
mistake, he holds, to attribute to the human soul capacities merely
passive or receptive. She, too, possesses, not less than the soul of
the world, initiatory power, responding with the free gift of a light
and heat that seem her own.

Yet a nature so opulently endowed can hardly have been lacking in
purely physical ardours. His pantheistic belief that the Spirit of
God was in all things, was not inconsistent with, might encourage, a
keen and restless eye for the dramatic details of life and character
for humanity in all its visible attractiveness, since there, too, in
[238] truth, divinity lurks. From those