was led to the stake, where, 'silent and
self-sustained,' before the eyes of all nations, he perished in the
flames. That death was the death of a martyr: it was met voluntarily in
attestation of truth. But most noble of all the noble army to which he
belonged, the name of that man is written large in history, as the name
of one who had fortitude to die, not in the cause of religious belief,
but in that of scientific conviction. For why did Bruno suffer? He
suffered, as we all know, because he refused to recant his persuasion of
the truth of the Copernican theory. Why, then, do I adduce the name of
Bruno at the close of this lecture? I do so because, as far as I have
been able to ascertain, he was the first clearly to enunciate the
monistic theory of things to which the consideration of my subject has
conducted us. This theory--or that as to the substantial identity of
mind and motion--was afterwards espoused, in different guises, by sundry
other writers; but to Bruno belongs the merit of its original
publication, and it was partly for his adherence to this publication
that he died. To this day Bruno is ordinarily termed a pantheist, and
his theory, which in the light of much fuller knowledge I am advocating,
Pantheism. I do not care to consider a difference of terms, where the
only distinction resides in so unintelligible an idea as that of the
creation of substance. It is more to the purpose to observe that in the
mind of its first originator--and this a mind which was sufficiently
clear in its thought to die for its perception of astronomical
truth--the theory of Pantheism was but a sublime extension of the then
contracted views of Theism. And I think that we of to-day, when we look
to the teaching of this martyr of science, will find that in his theory
alone do we meet with what I may term a philosophically adequate
conception of Deity. If the advance of natural science is now steadily
leading us to the conclusion that there is no motion without mind, must
we not see how the independent conclusion of mental science is thus
independently confirmed--the conclusion, I mean, that there is no being
without knowing? To me, at least, it does appear that the time has come
when we may begin, as it were in a dawning light, to see that the study
of Nature and the study of Mind are meeting upon this greatest of
possible truths. And if this is the case--if there is no motion without
mind, no being without knowing--shall we infer,