[Footnote 122:  op. cit. p. 70.]

[Footnote 123:  Both Berti and Quinet have made similar remarks, which, indeed, force themselves upon a student of the sixteenth century.]

Bruno has to be treated from two distinct but interdependent points of view—­in his relation to contemporary thought and the Renaissance; and in his relation to the evolution of modern philosophy—­as the critic of mediaeval speculation and the champion of sixteenth-century enthusiasm; and also as the precursor of Descartes, Spinoza, Leibnitz, Schelling, Hegel, Darwin.

From the former of these two points of view Bruno appears before us as the man who most vitally and comprehensively grasped the leading tendencies of his age in their intellectual essence.  He left behind him the mediaeval conception of an extra-mundane God, creating a finite world, of which this globe is the center, and the principal episode in the history of which is the series of events from the Fall, through the Incarnation and Crucifixion, to the Last Judgment.[124] He substituted the conception of an ever-living, ever-acting, ever-self-effectuating God, immanent in an infinite universe, to the contemplation of whose attributes the mind of man ascends by study of Nature and interrogation of his conscience.  The rehabilitation of the physical world and of humanity as part of its order, which the Renaissance had already indirectly effected through the medium of arts and literature and modes of life, found in Bruno an impassioned metaphysical supporter.  He divinized Nature, not by degrading the Deity to matter, but by lifting matter to participation in the divine existence.  The Renaissance had proclaimed the dignity of man considered as a mundane creature, and not in his relation to a hypothetical other-world.  It abundantly manifested the beauty and the joy afforded by existence on this planet, and laughingly discarded past theological determinations to the contrary of its new Gospel.  Bruno undertook the systematization of Renaissance intuitions; declared the divine reality of Nature and of man; demonstrated that we cannot speculate God, cannot think ourselves, cannot envisage the universe, except under the form of one living, infinite, eternal, divinely-sustained and soul-penetrated complex.  He repudiated authority of every sort, refusing to acknowledge the decrees of the Church, freely criticising past philosophers, availing himself of all that seemed to him substantial in their speculations, but appealing in the last resort to that inner witness, that light of reason, which corresponds in the mental order to conscience in the moral.  As he deified Nature, so he emancipated man as forming with Nature an integral part of the supreme Being.  He was led upon this path to combat Aristotle and to satirize Christian beliefs, with a subtlety of scholastic argumentation and an acerbity of rhetoric that now pass for antiquated.  Much that is obsolete in his writings must be referred to the polemical necessities of an age enthralled by peripatetic conceptions, and saturated with the ecclesiastical divinity of the schoolmen.