A light on actual life, or mere barren scholastic subtlety, never before had the pantheistic doctrine been developed with such completeness, never before connected with so large a sense of nature, so large a promise of the knowledge of it as it really is.  The eyes that had not been wanting to visible humanity turned with equal liveliness on the natural world in that region of his birth, where all its force and colour is twofold.  Nature is not only a thought in the divine mind; it is also the perpetual energy of that mind, which, ever identical with itself, puts forth and absorbs in turn all the successive forms of life, of thought, of language even.  But what seemed like striking transformations of matter were in truth only a chapter, a clause, in the great volume of the transformations of the Spirit.  To that mystic recognition that all is divine had succeeded a realisation of the largeness of the field of concrete knowledge, the infinite extent of all there was actually to know.  Winged, fortified, by this central philosophic faith, the student proceeds to the reading of nature, led on from point to point by manifold lights, which will surely strike on him, by the way, from the intelligence in it, speaking directly, sympathetically, to the intelligence in him.  The earth’s wonderful animation, as divined by one who anticipates by a whole generation the “philosophy of experience:”  in that, the bold, flighty, pantheistic speculation became tangible matter of fact.  Here was the needful book for man to read, the full revelation, the detailed story of that one universal mind, struggling, emerging, through shadow, substance, manifest spirit, in various orders of being—­the veritable history of God.  And nature, together with the true pedigree and evolution of man also, his gradual issue from it, was still all to learn.  The delightful tangle of things! it would be the delightful task of man’s thoughts to disentangle that.  Already Bruno had measured the space which Bacon would fill, with room perhaps for Darwin also.  That Deity is everywhere, like all such abstract propositions, is a two-edged force, depending for its practical effect on the mind which admits it, on the peculiar perspective of that mind.  To Dutch Spinosa, in the next century, faint, consumptive, with a hold on external things naturally faint, the theorem that God was in all things whatever, annihilating, their differences suggested a somewhat chilly withdrawal from the contact of all alike.  In Bruno, eager and impassioned, an Italian of the Italians, it awoke a constant, inextinguishable appetite for every form of experience—­a fear, as of the one sin possible, of limiting, for oneself or another, that great stream flowing for thirsty souls, that wide pasture set ready for the hungry heart.  Considered from the point of view of a minute observation of nature, the Infinite might figure as “the infinitely little;” no blade [240] of grass being like another, as there was no limit to the complexities