The Dominican brother was at no distant day to break far enough away from the election, the seeming “vocation” of his youth, yet would remain always, and under all circumstances, unmistakably a monk in some predominant qualities of temper.  At first it only by way of thought that he asserted his liberty—­delightful, late-found privilege!—­traversing, in mental journeys, that spacious circuit, as it broke away before him at every moment into ever-new horizons.  Kindling thought and imagination at once, the prospect draws from him cries of joy, a kind of religious joy, as in some new “canticle of the creatures,” a new monkish hymnal or antiphonary.  “Nature” becomes for him a sacred term.  “Conform thyself to Nature”—­with what sincerity, what enthusiasm, what religious fervour, he enounces the precept to others, to himself!  Recovering. as he fancies, a certain primeval sense of Deity broadcast on things, in which Pythagoras and other inspired theorists of early Greece had abounded, in his hands philosophy becomes a poem, a sacred poem, as it had been with them.  That Bruno himself, in “the enthusiasm of the idea,” drew from his axiom of the “indifference of contraries” the practical consequence which is in very deed latent there, that he was ready to sacrifice to the antinomianism, which is certainly a part of its rigid logic, the purities of his youth for instance, there is no proof.  The service, the sacrifice, he is ready to bring to the great light that has dawned for him, which occupies his entire conscience with the sense of his responsibilities to it, is that of days and nights spent in eager study, of a plenary, disinterested utterance of the thoughts that arise in him, at any hazard, at the price, say! of martyrdom.  The work of the divine Spirit, as he conceives it, exalts, inebriates him, till the scientific apprehension seems to take the place of prayer, sacrifice, communion.  It would be a mistake, he holds, to attribute to the human soul capacities merely passive or receptive.  She, too, possesses, not less than the soul of the world, initiatory power, responding with the free gift of a light and heat that seem her own.

Yet a nature so opulently endowed can hardly have been lacking in purely physical ardours.  His pantheistic belief that the Spirit of God was in all things, was not inconsistent with, might encourage, a keen and restless eye for the dramatic details of life and character for humanity in all its visible attractiveness, since there, too, in [238] truth, divinity lurks.  From those first fair days of early Greek speculation, love had occupied a large place in the conception of philosophy; and in after days Bruno was fond of developing, like Plato, like the Christian platonist, combining something of the peculiar temper of each, the analogy between intellectual enthusiasm and the flights of physical love, with an animation which shows clearly enough the reality of his experience in the latter.  The Eroici