Returning to this ancient “pantheism,” after so long a reign of a seemingly opposite faith, Bruno unfalteringly asserts “the vision of all things in God” to be the aim of all metaphysical speculation, as of all inquiry into nature:  the Spirit of God, in countless variety of forms, neither above, nor, in any way, without, but intimately within, all things—­really present, with equal integrity, in the sunbeam ninety millions of miles long, and the wandering drop of water as it evaporates therein.  The divine consciousness would have the same relation to the production of things, as the human intelligence to the production of true thoughts concerning them.  Nay! those thoughts are themselves God in man:  a loan, there, too, of his assisting Spirit, who, in truth, creates all things in and by his own contemplation of them.  For Him, as for man in proportion as man thinks truly, thought and, being are identical, and things existent only in so far as they are known.  Delighting in itself, in the sense of its own energy, this sleepless, capacious, fiery intelligence, evokes all the orders of nature, all the revolutions of history, cycle upon cycle, in ever new types.  And God the Spirit, the soul of the world, being really identical with his own soul, Bruno, as the universe shapes itself to his reason, his imagination, ever more and more articulately, shares also the divine joy in that process of the formation of true ideas, which is really parallel to the process of creation, to the evolution of things.  In a certain mystic sense, which some in every age of the world have understood, he, too, is creator, himself actually a participator in the creative function.  And by such a philosophy, he assures us, it was his experience that the soul is greatly expanded:  con questa filosofia l’anima, mi s’aggrandisce:  mi se magnifica l’intelletto!

For, with characteristic largeness of mind, Bruno accepted this theory in the whole range of its consequences.  Its more immediate corollary was the famous axiom of “indifference,” of “the coincidence of contraries.”  To the eye of God, to the philosophic vision through which God sees in man, nothing is really alien from Him.  The differences of things, and above all, those distinctions which schoolmen and priests, old or new, Roman or Reformed, had invented for themselves, would be lost in the length and breadth of the philosophic survey; nothing, in itself, either great or small; and matter, [237] certainly, in all its various forms, not evil but divine.  Could one choose or reject this or that?  If God the Spirit had made, nay! was, all things indifferently, then, matter and spirit, the spirit and the flesh, heaven and earth, freedom and necessity, the first and the last, good and evil, would be superficial rather than substantial differences.  Only, were joy and sorrow also to be added to the list of phenomena really coincident or indifferent, as some intellectual kinsmen of Bruno have claimed they should?