[Footnote 124:  This theological conception of history inspired the sacred drama of the Middle Ages, known to us as Cyclical Miracle Plays.]

These forces of the philosophy he sought to supersede, had to be attacked with their own weapons and by methods adapted to the spirit of his age.  Similar judgment may be passed upon his championship of the Copernican system.  That system was the pivot of his metaphysic, the revelation to which he owed his own conception of the universe.  His strenuous and ingenious endeavors to prove its veracity, his elaborate and often-repeated refutations of the Ptolemaic theory, appear to modern minds superfluous.  But we must remember what a deeply-penetrating, widely-working revolution Copernicus effected in cosmology, how he dislocated the whole fabric upon which Catholic theology rested, how new and unintelligible his doctrine then seemed, and what vast horizons he opened for speculation on the destinies of man.  Bruno was the first fully to grasp the importance of the Copernican hypothesis, to perceive its issues and to adapt it to the formation of a new ontology.  Copernicus, though he proclaimed the central position of the sun in our system, had not ventured to maintain the infinity of the universe.  For him, as for the elder physicists, there remained a sphere of fixed stars inclosing the world perceived by our senses within walls of crystal.  Bruno broke those walls, and boldly asserted the now recognized existence of numberless worlds in space illimitable.  His originality lies in the clear and comprehensive notion he formed of the Copernican discovery, and in his application of its corollaries to the Renaissance apocalypse of deified nature and emancipated man.  The deductions he drew were so manifold and so acute that they enabled him to forecast the course which human thought has followed in all provinces of speculation.

This leads us to consider how Bruno is related to modern science and philosophy.  The main point seems to be that he obtained a vivid mental picture (Vorstellung) of the physical universe, differing but little in essentials from that which has now come to be generally accepted.  In reasoning from this concept as a starting-point, he formed opinions upon problems of theology, ontology, biology and psychology, which placed him out of harmony with medaeival thought, and in agreement with the thought of our own time.  Why this was so, can easily be explained.  Bruno, first of all philosophers, adapted science, in the modern sense of that term, to metaphysic.  He was the first to perceive that a revolution in our conception of the material universe, so momentous as that effected by Copernicus, necessitated a new theology and a new philosophical method.  Man had ceased to be the center of all things; this globe was no longer ‘the hub of the universe,’ but a small speck floating on infinity.  The Christian scheme of the Fall and the Redemption, if not absolutely incompatible with the new cosmology was rendered by