ead, the hymns they sang, above all, as it
happened, every word that referred to the Spirit, the reign of the
Spirit, its excellent freedom. He would soon pass beyond the utmost
limits of his brethren's sympathy, beyond the largest and freest
interpretation those words would bear, to thoughts and words on an
altogether different plane, of which the full scope was only to be
felt in certain old pagan writers, though approached, perhaps, at
first, as having a kind of natural, preparatory kinship with
Scripture itself. The Dominicans would seem to have had
well-stocked, liberally-selected, libraries; and this curious youth, in
that age of restored letters, read eagerly, easily, and very soon
came to the kernel of a difficult old author--Plotinus or Plato; to
the purpose of thinkers older still, surviving by glimpses only in
the books of others--Empedocles, Pythagoras, who had enjoyed the
original divine sense of things, above all, Parmenides, that most
ancient assertor of God's identity with the world. The affinities,
the unity, of the visible and the invisible, of earth and heaven, of
all things whatever, with each other, through the consciousness, the
person, of God the Spirit, who was at every moment of infinite time,
in every atom of matter, at every [236] point of infinite space, ay!
was everything in turn: that doctrine--l'antica filosofia Italiana--was
in all its vigour there, a hardy growth out of the very heart of
nature, interpreting itself to congenial minds with all the fulness
of primitive utterance. A big thought! yet suggesting, perhaps, from
the first, in still, small, immediately practical, voice, some
possible modification of, a freer way of taking, certain moral
precepts: say! a primitive morality, congruous with those larger
primitive ideas, the larger survey, the earlier, more liberal air.

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 p