XX

For such coinage, as for illustrations to his theories, references to old authorities, material for his satire on pedants, as well as for more doubtful purposes,—mystical or magical formulæ, or “proofs,”—his prodigious memory never left Bruno at a loss. But if this memory, in its tenacity, supplied him with powerful and ready arguments against his opponents in their appeal to the authority of antiquity, it was also, in its fertility, the source of the chief defects of his writing, and perhaps also of his speaking. His imagination runs riot in the pursuit of allegories, metaphors, similes from mythology. Tiraboschi, the historian of Italian literature, defies “the most acute intelligence to penetrate into his system, the most patient of men to endure the reading of it.”

So far was this enormous mass of material from blocking up the spring of originality in his mind, however, that the ideas in which he may be said to have “anticipated” modern thought are innumerable. No doubt, in many cases, they came from the earlier Greek philosophers whom he chiefly studied; but Bruno invariably gives them a connection with his own theory, such as precludes us from taking his restoration of them for a happy chance. Such ideas, for example, are those of the evolution or gradual transformation of lower organisms into higher (De Umbris, Int. 7), of the part played by the hand in the evolution of the human race (Cabala, L. 586. 35), of the gradual changes brought about on the surface of the earth, its seas, its islands, the configuration of the land, the climate of different countries, by the constant, if imperceptible, operation of natural causes (Cena, L. 190 ff.): of the true nature of mountains, which are only excrescences as compared with the real mountains, the larger continents that slope upwards from the sea (e.g. France): of the true nature of comets, so far at least as that they are perfectly natural bodies allied to planets (Infinit. L. 372; De Imm. iv. 9. 51); of the identity of the matter of heavenly bodies with that of the earth, the universality of movement (even the fixed stars move, cf. Infinit., L. 350, 351, 400), the possibility (he said rather the certainty) of other worlds than our own being inhabited by beings similar to or more highly developed than ourselves (L. 360. 27). He “anticipated” also the idea of Lessing that myths may contain foreshadowings of truth, and that they should be interpreted not by their letter, as matters of fact, but by their spirit, as indications of higher “truths of reason.” The Bible should be interpreted in the same way: as Spinoza afterwards taught, so Bruno held, that the Scriptures inculcated moral and practical truths, to which their seemingly historical statements were entirely subordinate.

Add to this fermenting thought, power of memory, keenness and sureness of glance, and imaginative force, the fact that Bruno had a deeply poetic nature, fiery, vivid, passionate in defence of what seemed to him true, equally passionate in hatred of what seemed to him false, and the sources of his strength and weakness alike become clear. The Italian writings remain, in spite of their occasional obscurity, the most brilliant of philosophical works in that language, while the Latin works are a monument of learning (too often misapplied or useless), of acute reasoning, and of poetic enthusiasm.