ng even
there, amid the university folk, those intellectual bankrupts of the
Latin Quarter, who had so long passed between them gravely a
worthless "parchment and paper" currency. In truth, Aristotle, as
the supplanter of Plato, was still in possession, pretending to
determine heaven and earth by precedent, hiding the proper nature of
things from the eyes of men. Habit--the last word of his practical
philosophy--indolent habit! what would this mean in the intellectual
life, but just that sort of dead judgments which are most opposed to
the essential freedom and quickness of the Spirit, because the mind,
the eye, were no longer really at work in them?

To Bruno, a true son of the Renaissance, in the light of those large,
antique, pagan ideas, the difference between Rome and the Reform
would figure, of course, as but an insignificant variation upon [244]
some deeper, more radical antagonism between two tendencies of men's
minds. But what about an antagonism deeper still? between Christ and
the world, say! Christ and the flesh?--that so very ancient
antagonism between good and evil? Was there any place for
imperfection in a world wherein the minutest atom, the lightest
thought, could not escape from God's presence? Who should note the
crime, the sin, the mistake, in the operation of that eternal spirit,
which could have made no misshapen births? In proportion as man
raised himself to the ampler survey of the divine work around him,
just in that proportion did the very notion of evil disappear. There
were no weeds, no "tares," in the endless field. The truly
illuminated mind, discerning spiritually, might do what it would.
Even under the shadow of monastic walls, that had ever been the
precept, which the larger theory of "inspiration" had bequeathed to
practice. "Of all the trees of the garden thou mayst freely eat! If
you take up any deadly thing, it shall not hurt you! And I think
that I, too, have the spirit of God."

Bruno, the citizen of the world, Bruno at Paris, was careful to warn
off the vulgar from applying the decisions of philosophy beyond its
proper speculative limits. But a kind of secresy, an ambiguous
atmosphere, encompassed, from the first, alike the speaker and the
doctrine; and in that world of fluctuating and ambiguous characters,
the alerter mind certainly, pondering on this novel reign of the
spirit--what it might actually be--would hardly fail to find in
Bruno's theories a method of tu