own time. Why this was so, can easily be explained. Bruno, first
of all philosophers, adapted science, in the modern sense of that term,
to metaphysic. He was the first to perceive that a revolution in our
conception of the material universe, so momentous as that effected by
Copernicus, necessitated a new theology and a new philosophical method.
Man had ceased to be the center of all things; this globe was no longer
'the hub of the universe,' but a small speck floating on infinity. The
Christian scheme of the Fall and the Redemption, if not absolutely
incompatible with the new cosmology was rendered by it less conceivable
in any literal sense. Some of the main points on which the early
Christians based their faith, and which had hardened into dogmas
through the course of centuries--such, for instance, as the Ascension
and the Second Advent--ceased to have their old significance. In a world
where there was neither up nor down, the translation of a corporeal
Deity to some place above the clouds, whence he would descend to judge
men at the last day, had only a grotesque or a symbolic meaning; whereas
to the first disciples, imbued with theories of a fixed celestial
sphere, it presented a solemn and apparently well-founded expectation.
The fundamental doctrine of the Incarnation, in like manner, lost
intelligibility and value, when God had to be thought no longer as the
Creator of a finite cosmos, but as a Being commensurate with infinity.
It was clear to a mind so acute as Bruno's that the dogmas of the Church
were correlated to a view of the world which had been superseded; and he
drew the logical inference that they were at bottom but poetical and
popular adumbrations of the Deity in terms concordant with erroneous
physical notions. Aristotle and Ptolemy, the masters of philosophy and
cosmography based upon a theory of the universe as finite and
circumscribed within fixed limits, lent admirable aid to the theological
constructions of the Middle Ages. The Church, adopting their science,
gave metaphysical and logical consistency to those earlier poetical and
popular conceptions of the religious sense. The _naif_ hopes and
romantic mythologies of the first Christians stiffened into syllogisms
and ossified in the huge fabric of the _Summa_. But Aristotle and
Ptolemy were now dethroned. Bruno, in a far truer sense than Democritus
before him,

extra
Processit longe flammantia moenia mundi.

B