roduction 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?

The Dominican brother was at no distant day to break far enough away
from the election, the