The soul expanded in more exhilarating regions than the old theologies had offered.  The sense of the Divine in Nature, instead of dwindling down to atheism, received fresh stimulus from the immeasurable prospect of an infinite and living universe.  Bruno, even more than Spinoza, was a God-intoxicated man.  The inebriation of the Renaissance, inspired by golden visions of truth and knowledge close within man’s grasp, inflamed with joy at escaping from out-worn wearying formula into what appeared to be the simple intuition of an everlasting verity, pulses through all his utterances.  He has the same cherubic confidence in the renascent age, that charms us in the work of Rabelais.  The slow, painful, often thwarted, ever more dubious elaboration of modern metaphysic in rapport with modern science—­that process which, after completing the cycle of all knowledge and sounding the fathomless depth of all ignorance, has left us in grave disillusionment and sturdy patience—­swam before Bruno in a rapturous vision.  The Inquisition and the stake put an end abruptly to his dream.  But the dream was so golden, so divine, that it was worth the pangs of martyrdom.  Can we say the same for Hegel’s system, or for Schopenhauers or for the encyclopaedic ingenuity of Herbert Spencer?

Bruno imagined the universe as infinite space, filled with ether, in which an infinite number of worlds, or solar systems resembling our own, composed of similar materials and inhabited by countless living creatures, move with freedom.  The whole of this infinite and complex cosmos he conceived to be animated by a single principle of thought and life.  This indwelling force, or God, he described in Platonic phraseology sometimes as the Anima Mundi, sometimes as the Artificer, who by working from within molds infinite substance into an infinity of finite modes.  Though we are compelled to think of the world under the two categories of spirit and matter, these apparently contradictory constituents are forever reconciled and harmonized in the divine existence, whereof illimitable activity, illimitable volition, and illimitable potentiality are correlated and reciprocally necessary terms.  In Aristotelian language, Bruno assumed infinite form and infinite matter as movements of an eternal process, by which the infinite unity manifests itself in concrete reality.  This being the case, it follows that nothing exists which has not life, and is not part of God.  The universe itself is one immeasurable animal, or animated Being.  The solar systems are huge animals; the globes are lesser animals; and so forth down to the monad of molecular cohesion.  As the universe is infinite and eternal, motion, place and time do not qualify it; these are terms applicable only to the finite parts of which it is composed.  For the same reason nothing in the universe can perish.  What we call birth and death, generation and dissolution, is only the passage of the infinite, and homogeneous entity through successive phases of finite and differentiated existence; this continuous process of exchange and transformation being stimulated and sustained by attraction and repulsion, properties of the indwelling divine soul aiming at self-realization.