true pedigree and evolution of man also, his gradual issue from it,
was still all to learn. The delightful tangle of things! it would be
the delightful task of man's thoughts to disentangle that. Already
Bruno had measured the space which Bacon would fill, with room
perhaps for Darwin also. That Deity is everywhere, like all such
abstract propositions, is a two-edged force, depending for its
practical effect on the mind which admits it, on the peculiar
perspective of that mind. To Dutch Spinosa, in the next century,
faint, consumptive, with a hold on external things naturally faint,
the theorem that God was in all things whatever, annihilating, their
differences suggested a somewhat chilly withdrawal from the contact
of all alike. In Bruno, eager and impassioned, an Italian of the
Italians, it awoke a constant, inextinguishable appetite for every
form of experience--a fear, as of the one sin possible, of limiting,
for oneself or another, that great stream flowing for thirsty souls,
that wide pasture set ready for the hungry heart. Considered from
the point of view of a minute observation of nature, the Infinite
might figure as "the infinitely little;" no blade [240] of grass
being like another, as there was no limit to the complexities of an
atom of earth, cell, sphere, within sphere. But the earth itself,
hitherto seemingly the privileged centre of a very limited universe,
was, after all, itself but an atom in an infinite world of starry
space, then lately displayed to the ingenuous intelligence, which
the telescope was one day to verify to bodily eyes. For if Bruno
must needs look forward to the future, to Bacon, for adequate
knowledge of the earth--the infinitely little; he looked back,
gratefully, to another daring mind, which had already put the earth
into its modest place, and opened the full view of the heavens.
If God is eternal, then, the universe is infinite and worlds
innumerable. Yes! one might well have supposed what reason now
demonstrated, indicating those endless spaces which sidereal science
would gradually occupy, an echo of the creative word of God himself,

"Qui innumero numero innumerorum nomina dicit."

That the stars are suns: that the earth is in motion: that the earth
is of like stuff with the stars: now the familiar knowledge of
children, dawning on Bruno as calm assurance of reason on appeal from
the prejudice of the eye, brought to him an inexpressibly
exhilarating sense of enlarg