Chapter I: Part 1

MODERN THINKERS
AND
PRESENT PROBLEMS

AN APPROACH TO MODERN PHILOSOPHY
THROUGH ITS HISTORY

BY
EDGAR A. SINGER, Jr., Ph.D.

PROFESSOR OF PHILOSOPHY
IN THE UNIVERSITY OF PENNSYLVANIA

NEW YORK
HENRY HOLT AND COMPANY
1923

Copyright, 1923,
BY
HENRY HOLT AND COMPANY

PRINTED IN
UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

PREFACE

These papers, which had been written from time to time and for various occasions, have been brought together without any attempt to make them tell a smooth unbroken story, yet not without regard to their connectedness. They have sometimes served me to bring before the mind of youth certain problems on which philosophers have thought again and again. But if they have had any interest for youth, if they are to have any for maturity, it can only be because the names that stand over the chapters might, if moments had names, be those of moments in each man’s history.

And as such, unless I have altogether failed to make my characters real, these names will be recognized. Who has not sometime been that Bruno who stepped from his Father’s House, where all had revolved so solicitously about himself, to find without the cold stars gazing down on his atomy from their places in endless emptiness?

Who has not come to feel, with Spinoza, those inviolable laws of mechanism which govern the world about him creeping into his own inmost being, threatening there all that he had so simply and yet so dearly clung to as his freedom and autonomy?

How many reflecting in their maturity on the unquestioning faiths of their childhood have thought to bring these to the test of such experience as natural science depends on, only to find, as Hume found, these faiths unconfirmed?

And of those who have lived through this moment of disillusionment, there will always be some who will have come in their own way to the position severe reasoning forced on Kant: The spiritual aspects of reality are not issues of science and intellection, but belong to that other order of truth grasped by the “practical reason.”

Others, meanwhile, will have refused to let their speculation go beyond the insight experience yields, and of these some at least will have found that experience holds out nothing hopeful for now or forever. They will have seen with Schopenhauer into the “deep abyss” and found at the bottom of it only this counsel: Not-being is better than being.

Or if perhaps they have for a moment thought, with Nietzsche, that evolutionary science had brought to view a goal that gave heart to the pitiless struggle of life by holding before it the vision of the “far future man,” they may in the end have come to see beyond this Superman. But to have seen beyond him nothing but the super-superman is to have seen the goal vanish and the heart lose its hope.

And what then? The pages on “Pragmatism” and on “Progress” may offer suggestions of an answer. They are still historical in their spirit, and like those that had gone before them mean to illustrate, not to demonstrate or affirm. They, too, would stand for moments of any thoughtful life and will have done all they were intended to do if they inform such a life with, and give it a sense of attachment to the world that has gone before and is going on ’round.

But if one would at the outset know something of what the writer suspects to be the outcome of ordered and historically guided reflection on these subjects, let him turn to the closing chapter, if not for encouragement then for warning.

* * * * *

Every one will remember the word to his reader with which Montaigne closes the preface to his Essays. ’Tis but of himself he would write and “it is then no reason thou shouldst employ thy time about so frivolous and vain a subject. Therefore farewell.”

I cannot close _my_ preface without confessing a misgiving that must have beset everyone who ever wrote of the past: that whereas he set out to lose himself in history, he may have found in history nothing but himself. But on the bare chance of this having befallen me, I need not say “farewell” beforehand; for well I know no reader will accompany me far through this past save one who finds _him_self there too.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

CHAPTER PAGE

I. Giordano Bruno, 1548-1600 3

II. Benedict de Spinoza 1632-1677 37

III. A Disciple of Spinoza (An Illustration) 65

IV. David Hume, 1711-1776 97

V. Immanuel Kant, 1724-1804 129

VI. Arthur Schopenhauer, 1788-1860 155

VII. Friedrich Nietzsche, 1844-1900 183

VIII. Pragmatism 213

IX. Progress 249

X. Royce on Love and Loyalty 283

XI. Retrospect and Prospect 303

I

GIORDANO BRUNO

1548-1600

The straightest way to the heart of old matters is an old letter. Here is one written on the twenty-third of May, 1592, by a gentleman of Venice to the Father of the Venetian Inquisition.

“Very Reverend Father and Most-to-be-observed Sir:

“I, Gioanni Mocenigo, son of the Clarissimo Messer Marcoantonio, compelled by my conscience and ordered by my confessor, denounce to Your Very Reverend Paternity Giordano Bruno of Nola, whom I have heard say on various occasions when he was conversing with me in my own house, that Catholics do but blaspheme when they hold the Bread to be transubstantiated into the Flesh; that he is against the Mass; that no religion satisfies him; that Christ was a charlatan who, since he resorted to tricks to fool people, might well enough have foreseen that he would die a criminal’s death; that there is no distinction of Persons in God; ... that the world is eternal and that there are an infinite number of worlds, and that God is continually making an infinity of them because He wants as many as He can have; that Christ performed specious miracles; that he was a magician and the apostles were magicians too.”...

The letter runs on in breathless denunciation, but already one begins to make out the image of Bruno reflected in the average mind of his time. The limited intelligence of Mocenigo has honestly misunderstood some of Bruno’s utterances, his malice has distorted others; but the perversity of the whole is not due to these faults of detail. Lost in this jumble of stock heresies lies hidden a great idea, the greatest perhaps that has ever been contributed by a single mind to the cause of our science. “And he says the world is eternal and that there are an infinity of worlds.” This sentence has brought the old world to an end, has shattered the heavens under which Christendom was then living, yet it falls on the ear of its time with no more meaning or portent than a doubt respecting the doctrine of transubstantiation or the authenticity of miracles. Bruno, throughout the course of his driven life and up to the moment of his tragic death, knew most forms of martyrdom. He bore none of these meekly, for his was a lusty soul that did not love to suffer. But neither the hatred nor the cruelty of his world seems to have hurt him so to the quick as did its stupidity. Doubt him and hate if you will; but value him you must! He was master of a great idea and unacquainted with modesty.

Meanwhile Mocenigo has more to say of this sinner: “He has expressed the intention of making himself the founder of a new sect under the name of the new philosophy. He has said that the Virgin could not have brought a child into the world, and that our Catholic faith is full of blasphemies against the majesty of God; that it would be better to suppress the largesses of wrangling friars because they befoul the world; that they are all asses and that our common opinions are the teaching of asses; that we have no proof that our faith has merit with God; that the simple rule of not doing unto others what we would not have done unto us is sufficient for right living.”... Perhaps I may stop here. Evidently one who could be guilty of all these follies would be ingenious in inventing others, and Mocenigo’s letter may run endlessly on.

While this letter was writing, Bruno lay locked in a room of Mocenigo’s house. “I had thought to learn from him,” Mocenigo explains, “not knowing him to be the wicked man he is, and having noted all these things to lay before your Very Reverend Paternity, and fearing that he would take his departure as he said he wished to do, I have locked him in a room at your disposal. As I think him possessed of the devil, I hope you will decide quickly what is to be done with him....”

* * * * *

It has sometimes been wondered how Bruno came to accept the invitation of Mocenigo to take up his residence in Venice. Italy was for him a place of such peril that it seems incredible he should have ventured to set foot in it. “Tell me one thing more,” concludes a letter written in this same year 1592 by a gentleman of Bologna to a friend in Padua, “tell me one thing more. Giordano Bruno, whom you knew at Wittenberg, the Nolan, is said to be living among you just now at Padua. Is it really so? What sort of man is this that he dares to enter Italy, which he left in exile as he himself used to confess? I wonder, I wonder. I cannot yet believe the rumor, although I have it on good authority. You shall tell me whether it is true.” And history has wondered all the more seeing that Bruno himself had long before prophesied the result. “Torches,” he had written, “fifty or a hundred, will not fail me though the march be at noonday should it be my fate to die in a Catholic country.”

So far as documents furnish any answer to this question, it lies suggested in a second letter written by Mocenigo to the Holy Inquisition two days after the denunciation. “In the course of the day that I kept Giordano Bruno locked up, I asked him whether the things that he would not teach me, as he promised to do in return for the many kindnesses I had done him and the many gifts that I had given him, whether he would not consent to teach me them if I abstained from denouncing him for all the criminal things he had uttered to me against our Lord Jesus Christ and against the Holy Catholic Church. He answered that he did not fear the Inquisition, for he had harmed no one by living in his own way, and moreover he could not recall having said anything sinful, but that if he had said such things he had said them only to me, and he need not fear that I would do him harm in the way I suggested.” Those who can may believe that Bruno is here telling the truth about himself. Those who can may believe that he who eight years before and at a safe distance from Italy had so clearly seen the torches that awaited him there, had since grown blind to them or indifferent.

The next document of the trial is brief enough. Under date of the following day--that is, Tuesday, the twenty-sixth of May--is found this entry: “Clarissimo Dom Aloysius Fuscari presiding. Presented himself Dom Matheus de Avantio, Captain of the Constabulary, and reported as follows: Sabbath at three o’clock of the night,[1] I arrested Giordano Bruno of Nola, whom I found in a house over against Saint Samuels, in which dwells the Clarissimo Ser Gioanni Mocenigo, and I have imprisoned him in the Prisons of the Holy Office, and this I have done by order of this Holy Tribunal.”

The doors of the prison closing on Bruno bring to an end the story of his life, but from behind these doors there come to us fragments of the story itself as Bruno retells it to his judges. For on the very day of his arrest he is examined by a tribunal composed of the Apostolic Nuncio, the Patriarch of Venice, the Very Reverend Father Inquisitor. Before these, as the clerk of the tribunal records it, was brought a certain man of ordinary height with a chestnut beard, who, when he had been admonished to speak the truth, and before any question could be put to him, burst out of his own accord: “I will tell the truth. Several times have I been threatened with being brought before this Holy Office, but I have always taken the threat for a joke, because I am ever ready to give account of myself.” Whereupon he tells how, having found himself at Frankfurt the previous year, he received there two letters from Gioanni Mocenigo, inviting him to come to Venice to instruct Mocenigo in the art of memory and the art of invention, for which this Venetian gentleman had promised to pay him well and treat him in a way that should content him. And so Bruno had come to Venice seven or eight months before, living first in lodgings, then for a brief space in Padua, until some two months prior to his arrest he had taken up his residence in Mocenigo’s own house. We already know how, “compelled by his conscience and ordered by his confessor,” Mocenigo finally disposed of his guest.

Then Bruno questioned by the tribunal, laid before it a formal account of his life. “My name is Giordano Bruno, of the family of the Bruni, of the city of Nola, twelve miles from Naples. In this place I was born and raised, and my profession was and is letters and the sciences. My father was named Gioanni, and my mother Fraulissa Savolina, and my father’s calling was that of a soldier. He is dead since, and my mother too.

“I am about forty-four years of age, and I was born, so far as I have heard from my people, in the year 1548. I remained in Naples learning the humanities, logic, and dialectics until fourteen years of age ... and then I took the habit of Saint Dominic in the monastery or convent of Saint Dominic in Naples, and was invested by a Padre who was then prior of that convent, called Maestro Ambrosio Pasqua. When the year of probation was passed, I was admitted by him to profession, which was solemnly made in the same convent.... Later I was promoted to holy orders and at the usual season to the priesthood. I sang my first mass in Campagnia, a city of the same state at a distance from Naples, residing the while in a convent of the order, the San Bartholomeo, and continued in the religious habit of Saint Dominic, celebrating masses and the divine offices, obedient to the superior of the Order and to the priors of the monasteries and convents where I was stationed until 1576....”

I have not wanted to interrupt Bruno, nor to hurry him in his story, tedious as it is in the telling. Little event after little event of his secular and of his religious life befalls with the trivial monotony of dropping rain. But is it not just so that these little events and endless others like them must have fallen on the soul of the living Bruno, soaking in, soaking in, unnoticed as rain, until his very humors ran with their humor? Now their humor was the spirit of the old world, the spirit of his Father’s House. Would it not be curious if, having pulled down this ridiculous old dwelling and in the very act of dancing among its ruins, Bruno should suddenly come to see that it was the only house his soul, being such a soul as it was, could dwell in? If something of this kind did not happen at a moment of his life we are fast approaching, then only the gods know what did happen. But I am anticipating, or rather laying up reflections against our hour of need. For the moment we have no more than come to the day in Bruno’s life when he stepped out of his Father’s House to make his way _ins Freie hinaus_.

* * * * *

Fifty years ago, before Berti had unearthed the documents of this trial, it was difficult to trace the life of Bruno. Since then it has become well-nigh impossible. Documents are a great embarrassment to the conscientious historian. They are there, these documents, and have to be put in the text; the truth about the case must be relegated to the foot-notes. Now the text runs in this wise: “In 1576 ... I was in Rome at the Convent of Minerva, obedient to the orders of Maestro Sisto de Luca, Procurator of the Order. Thither I had gone to present myself because at Naples two processes had been instituted against me, the first for having given away certain images of the saints and retaining only a crucifix, it being thought that this showed a lack of respect for the images of the saints; and the other for having said to a novice who was reading a story of the Seven Beatitudes in verse, What did he think he was doing with a book like that?--why didn’t he throw it away and read rather some other book, as the lives of the Holy Fathers? This process was renewed at the time I went to Rome, with other articles added to it which I do not know, for I abandoned the order and threw aside the habit and went to Noli in the region of Genoa, where I supported myself four or five months teaching grammar to young boys.”

This is indeed the text, but is not a comment inevitable? What! Bruno would have us believe that in 1576 he is of such fearful mood and timid temper that, having no more on his conscience than the events recited, he abandons church and country, peace and security at the mere frown of his Order, but that in 1592, having in the meanwhile upset, smashed, and abused the Christian world, he can look upon the Inquisition without fear, bethinking him that he had harmed no man in living in his own way?

However, flee he did. What followed on this flight he recounts to his judges as his trial proceeds. Sixteen years of as hard-driven a life as one could wish for one’s dearest foe, from Italy to Switzerland (to the Geneva of Calvin’s day, where one may imagine that Bruno was as much at home as fire on an iceberg), then across to France, from Lyons to Toulouse, from Toulouse to Paris, from France to England, from London back to Paris, then hastily to Germany, through many German and Bohemian cities! Sixteen years of homeless, friendless poverty, now teaching small boys, now lecturing at great universities, now living with fine gentlemen, received by a king or a queen, now gathering a few curious students about him, who somehow confused the promise of the great idea with old mysteries and the arts we call black. Until at last we find him at Frankfurt receiving Mocenigo’s letters promising him a home in Italy, his native land, and a treatment that should content him.

Yet these years of travail were those in which his works were written, the Italian dialogues in England, the Latin poems in Germany. The great idea had received full expression, the “Excubitor,” as Bruno called himself, the Awakener of sleeping minds, had blown his trumpet and the walls of the world had fallen. Splendid is the enthusiasm with which Bruno first announces this new vision of the morning: “Lo! here is one who has swept the air, pierced the heavens, sped by the stars and passed beyond the bounds of the world, who has annihilated the fantastic spheres with which foolish mathematicians and vulgar philosophers had closed us in. The key of his diligent curiosity has opened to the view of every sense and every power of reason such closets of truth as can be opened by us. He has stripped nature of her robe and veil. He has given eyes to the mole, vision to the blind.... No longer is our reason imprisoned within the confines of imaginary heavens.... We know that there is but one heaven, one immense ether, where magnificent fires maintain their proper distances by reason of that eternal life in which they have part. These flaming bodies are the ambassadors which announce the excellence of God’s glory and majesty.”

This is indeed the voice of an Awakener. But, alas for awakeners! the vision of the morning is never fair to those just shaken out of their dreams. In an introductory letter to the last of the dialogues we catch an echo of the sleeper’s complaint: “If I shoved a plow, if I kept a flock, if I cultivated a garden, if I mended old clothes, no one would notice me, few would consider me, not many would find fault with me, and I could easily please everybody. But for having been studious of the field of nature, solicitous for the pasture of the soul, enamored of the cultivation of the mind, a very Daedalus fashioning raiment for the intellect, every passer-by threatens me, every one who sees me attacks me, who comes upon me rends me, who lays hold on me devours. It is not one, it is not a few; it is many, it is almost all. If you would know why this is, I will tell you the reason of it--I despise the crowd, I hate the mob, the multitude contents me not. One thing I love, one thing for whose sake I am free in bondage, content in pain, rich in poverty, alive in very death. One thing for whose sake I envy not those who are slaves in their liberty, troubled in their pleasure, poor in their riches, dead in their life. Their body is the chain that binds them, in their mind is the hell that tortures them, in their spirit the falsehood that makes them sick, in their soul the lethargy that kills. Not theirs the greatness of mind which frees, the breadth of view which ennobles. Not theirs the splendor which illumines, nor the science which gives life.” It is a brave, even an over-brave flourish with which Bruno ends this proemial epistle: “And so the gods deliver me from all those who unjustly hate me, and my God be always propitious unto me!... The stars let my sowing fit the field and the field my sowing, that the world be made content with the useful and glorious fruits of my labors!... And if I err, I truly do not believe myself to err; whether speaking or writing, I do not dispute for the love of victory.... For love of true wisdom and desire for true insight I exhaust, I crucify, I torture myself....”

* * * * *

Brave is the flourish, how over-brave we realize with unexpected intensity as we follow this solemn trial to its last scene. Having recounted the episodes of his life, Bruno proceeds to the explanation and defense of his teachings. At first the new philosophy is presented with no little boldness and confidence, its difference from the formal teaching of Christianity admitted and even pointed out. But always with a certain reserve, as of one who would say, “Yes, I have broken the frame and melted the flesh of your religion, but if you will let me, I will show how much more nobly its divine spirit dwells in the new body I have made for it.” Now this new body differs in no important way from the physical universe as we see it today, so that Bruno’s problem has been the problem of all Christian thought since his time. What Aquinas had done in the way of making the spirit of Christianity at home in the finite heaven-enclosed world of Aristotle, that Bruno felt must be done over again, now that the world was no longer finite and the distinction between Heaven and Earth had vanished. This is the thought that pervades the first days of Bruno’s account of himself before the Venetian tribunal, but as one by one the accusations of Mocenigo’s letter fall on him, he seems to lose hope and confidence in himself. He denies, and denies, and denies!

I am not convinced that he is telling the truth in these denials. I am not convinced that Mocenigo’s account of him, barring a few obvious misunderstandings, is false in spirit. No more am I convinced that Bruno has been frightened into lying himself out of danger. He seems to me to say, “Alas! if these matters on which you question me are of the essence of Christianity, then have I been wrong in supposing that the old wine can be put in the new bottle.” Driven and perplexed, he has to decide which lies nearest to his heart, the new bottle or the old wine. Remember him fleeing in his early manhood from his Father’s House, ostensibly in childish fear and unwillingly, but really perhaps because he needed space, endless space, through which to follow the new idea. Remember him coming back to Italy sixteen years later, ostensibly because he realized that his manner of living and thinking had hurt no man and so ought to bring down no judgment on his head, but really perhaps because the craving for the old wine was deeper in him than the enthusiasm for the new bottle. Perhaps then we can understand the closing scene of his trial at Venice. “It may be,” he cries, “in the long time that has passed I have committed other sins and departed from the Church in other ways than those which I have explained, and that I have not cleansed myself of all matters of censure, but although I have thought much over these things, I can recall nothing more. I have confessed, and I now confess anew my errors, and I am here in the hands of Your Most Illustrious Lordships to receive punishment for the saving of my soul. My soul cannot express the depth of its contrition for my fault.” And falling on his knees, he said, “I humbly ask pardon of the Lord God and of Your Most Illustrious Lordships for all the errors which I have committed and which I now stand ready to expiate in such wise as your wisdom may think proper and judge expedient for my soul. And moreover, I beg that you give me a punishment which shall exceed in severity rather than set any public example which may throw dishonor on the sacred religious habit I have worn. And if by God’s mercy and the mercy of Your Most Illustrious Lordships, life shall be spared me, I promise to make such notable reform of my life as shall pay for the scandal I have given with equal and greater edification.”

In this unhappy posture I leave Bruno the man to take up the story of his great idea. We shall see him once more indeed, at the moment when, eight years later, he calmly dies for the idea he now so abjectly abandons; but no understanding of the alternating enthusiasm and despair that filled this life can afford to neglect the qualities of the gospel it stood for, forsook, then died for in the end.

* * * * *

Like all very great ideas, this one is of the simplest. It begins with the observation that the flame of a candle grows bigger as we approach it, smaller as we recede from it. Nothing very new in this, you say, nor very imposing. No, it is the next step that was so new in Bruno’s day, and of such tremendous destructive and creative power. Yet it is just as simple as the first. What is true of a candle flame must be true of a sun and of a star. Is it not indeed simple? Yes, but in all the long while the world had lasted it had occurred to no one before Bruno to seize upon this simple idea and to follow whither it led. It led far, wonderfully far. It led Bruno to journey in imagination out and out toward those most distant stars that were then called fixed, and were indeed supposed to be fixed in one great sphere that enclosed all things, beyond which was nothing, and not even nothing, for there was no beyond; space ended where matter ended, at the walls of the world. But Bruno as he journeyed saw this great sun of ours growing smaller and smaller as he receded from it, and yonder star growing larger and larger as he approached it, until the most wonderful thing happened. The sun began to look more and more like a star, and the star more and more like a sun. There was now no escaping the conclusion--the stars that had been called fixed are other suns, our sun but a near-lying star.

A child might have grasped this idea which brought a world to an end. Do I say a child? It may be that Bruno was that child, for his mind throughout had much of the waywardness, something of the random and tumultuous association of a child’s mind. The past might interest him, might even inspire him; it never had the power of capturing and holding him. But childish as it was, this idea did destroy the old world, for if stars were in no wise different from the sun we know, nor the sun from a star, evidently there was at least one star that was not fixed to the ethereal sphere that contained all things. There could then be no longer any motive for supposing these other suns to be all at the same distance from the center. They might be anywhere, they might even (Bruno had this very modern idea) be moving with respect to each other. Inevitably Bruno must come to look upon the stars as suns sprinkled irregularly throughout the regions of infinite space.

Nor was this all. Coming after Copernicus as he did, Bruno had from the first grasped with enthusiasm Copernicus’ idea that not the Earth but the Sun was the center of the sphere. I say the center of the sphere, for we must remember that Copernicus never touched the boundary of the world, but only changed its center from Earth to Sun. In Copernicus’ thought we still lived within a star-spangled heaven. But now that Bruno had shattered this heaven and sprinkled these stars through space, he could not well help surrounding those other suns with planets, until not merely an infinity of suns but an infinity of solar systems spread themselves out before his imagination. But could he stop here? When one has once destroyed the distinction between Heaven and Earth, when one has once begun to think of nature as everywhere alike, it is not easy to stop. Was not one of the planets making its journey around our sun inhabited with manifold forms of life? Then why should they not all be? And is it likely that one solar system should be a scene of life and the infinity of others not? So it was that Bruno, looking out into space, saw as many inhabited globes as there were “hundreds of thousands of stars.”

* * * * *

These are the matters which Bruno brought back with him from his journey to the stars and beyond the confines of the world. I have told them simply, for eloquence is wasted in describing such feats of the imagination. They are of themselves eloquent. And we recall with what enthusiasm Bruno himself recounted his journey. Is it not possible, however, that when he returned to earth and told his journeyings to men, he came to perceive, as these men at once perceived, that his new vision was not all made of beauty? Is there not in this infinite cosmos that which may depress and even terrify?

In his “Garden of Epicurus,” Anatole France has put the two worlds side by side. One has only to do this to feel that Bruno, who at first held out his hands to the new vision, may afterwards have snatched them back again to shut it out.

“We have some trouble,” says France, “in imagining the state of mind of a man in olden times who firmly believed that the Earth was the center of the Universe, and that all the stars turned round it. He felt under his feet damned souls writhing in flames, and perhaps he had seen with his own eyes, and smelled with his own nostrils the sulphurous fumes of Hell escaping from some fissures in the rocks. Lifting his head he contemplated the spheres, ... those bearing the Moon, Mercury, Venus--the one that Dante visited on Good Friday of the year 1300--the Sun, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, then the incorruptible firmament from which the stars were suspended like lamps. Beyond, his mind’s eye discerned the Ninth Heaven to which the saints were rapt, the Primum Mobile or Crystalline; and finally Empyrion, dwelling of the blessed, toward which, he firmly hoped, two angels robed in white would bear away, as it were a little child, his soul washed in baptism and perfumed with the oil of the last sacraments. In those days God had no other children than man, and all his creation was ordered in a fashion at once childlike and poetic like an immense cathedral. Thus imagined, the universe was so simple that it was represented in its entirety with its true figure and motions in certain great clocks run by machinery and appropriately painted.”

(From Hearnshaw’s _Mediaeval Contributions to Modern Civilization_.)]

But now! “We are done with the spheres and the planets under which one was born lucky or unlucky, jovial or saturnine. The solid vault of the firmament is shattered. Our eye and our thought plunge into infinite abysses of heaven. Beyond the planets we discover no longer the Empyrion of the elect and of the angels, but a hundred millions of rolling suns escorted by their cortège of obscure satellites invisible to us. In the midst of this infinity of worlds our own Sun is but a bubble of gas and our Earth but a fleck of mud.”

The contrast speaks for itself and needs no comment. It is enough to point out the effect it must have had upon the ethical and religious notions of him who first realized it. What in such a world are we to make of the central episode of Christianity? Bruno’s imagination that had swept through space and sped by the stars had found these worlds inhabited by beings “perhaps better, perhaps worse than we are.” If there was no evidence that these dwellers in distant solar systems were so much better than we as to need no saving, neither was there any evidence that they were so much worse as to deserve none. We were no longer the only children of God. What then? Are we to suppose that the drama of Redemption is being enacted over and over again throughout the infinity of worlds? Is the Son of God being sacrificed over and over again for the sake of His other children? Is He at this moment perhaps redeeming with His life the dwellers on some star in the night yonder?

But destruction did not stop here. Not only the gentler aspects which Christianity had given to the sterner religion of pagandom were threatened. That older religion itself, with its well-thought-out theory of the relation between God and man, must either be rejected or remodeled. For Aristotle as well as for Aquinas, God and man had formed the real plot of the universe. God, revealing himself most clearly in the turning of the enclosing heaven, set thereby the rest of nature in motion and stirred things down to their very center. So that in the region of earth, water, air and fire there came to be composed bodies mixed of all these. They were the living beings we know, which, holding their ingredients in proper proportion for a while, fell apart again and passed away.

These living beings differed in power. As we pass from the vegetable through the animal to the human they show themselves increasingly able to control the matter in which and of which they are. Highest of all is the human male. It is for the sake of producing him that the mechanism which fills the region between Heaven and Earth exists and is operated. One might almost say that Nature is God’s workshop for producing man. But why should God be thus interested in producing this particular kind of animal? Aristotle’s answer comes less clearly than one could wish, yet it comes. It is because man differs from the animals not only in degree but in kind. He is not altogether animal. In his superior body there is contained a soul which is not only of God’s making, but of God’s very substance. That is why man alone can know God. It is as though God needed to be known, recognized, reflected as in a mirror. As for man, he is a bit of divinity momentarily estranged from his home and dwelling, but with the privilege of returning thither can he but free his soul from earthly and sensuous entanglements and interest himself in knowing his Father which is in Heaven.

And now that Bruno has destroyed this difference between Heaven and Earth, has he not destroyed along with it the distinction between God and man? Has not his infinite homogenous world left man a mere mite shivering on his fleck of mud as it rolls around its bubble of gas? Man is no longer the center of interest; he no longer plays an important part in any thinkable plot. “Man is no more than an ant in the presence of the infinite,” cries Bruno. “A star is no more than a man.”

We can understand that Bruno’s awakening, with however great an enthusiasm it may have been heralded, can be no pleasant awakening for the sleeper. The world of his dreams was infinitely fairer and warmer than that reality to whose garish light his eyes have been opened. It cannot be expected that the awakened should feel any gratitude, and he did not. But what is less obvious is the matter of Bruno’s own feeling as the consequences of his new idea gradually unfold themselves to him. Can that first enthusiasm be sustained to the end, or must he too shrink before the fuller vision of what he has done?

* * * * *

If we were to classify men in terms of their reactions to new ideas, I think we should all hit upon these three types. Let me call the first the radical. He is easy to initiate into a new truth, bold to accept it at all costs, loses at once all perspective and sees in the past only a bundle of errors without beauty and with no other interest than to furnish matter for jest. And then there is the conservative. The hold that the past has on such a mind is sometimes enormous. He is capable of clinging to it at the expense of all the rest of his science and experience. If it has enthralled his heart and imagination, he falls into a mood which the Renaissance called the acceptance of “two-fold truth.” He believes against all evidence. He believes as Tertullian had it, just because the thing is absurd. He insists with Pascal, that the heart has its reasons which the reason cannot understand. He is a creature of faiths and of mysticisms. Finally there is the philosopher, the only one of the three completely made for unhappiness. He gets no thrill from novelty. He has followed human thought through too many revolutions to expect the most violent of cataclysms to change things much. He struggles to keep his perspective as he would keep his reason, and the views of older humanity do not lose their beauty because their expression has been proved wrong. Required to readjust his thought of yesterday to the new fact of today, he undertakes the task cheerfully enough as part of the day’s work. That is what yesterdays, todays, and if it may be, tomorrows are given to him for. He measures his success by the extent to which he can mold new thought to the satisfaction of old desire, to old desire newly instructed.

And Bruno--to which of these classes does he belong? Is he the radical who would light-heartedly take his place on the fleck of mud and watch it roll around its bubble of gas, while he laughs at his neighbors, who in the face of such a universe charm themselves into a continued faith that they are somehow divine souls in whom a God of Heaven is interested? Or will he, on the other hand, become one of those thus held by the past? Will the awakener, now himself fully awakened, try to snatch at the fading dream and somehow manage to keep his faith in what he knows can’t be true? Or will he set laboriously to work, as a philosopher should, to find that interpretation of the new facts which lies closest to the meaning, though it may differ from the verbal expression of world-old desires and longings?

Alas! if Bruno would but make up his mind to be any one of these three, the task of his biographer would be easy. But the real Bruno, the Bruno who mocked, who thought, who recanted, and who died, was not a type. He was a man, and as he was the most human of men, he gathered the greatest possible number of inconsistencies to his heart. Yes, he was a radical who mocked and jeered. Yes, he was a philosopher who labored and thought. And yes, finally, he was a mystic who could hold as a splendid if inexplicable possession of his faith, all the things his reason showed to be impossible. I have shown you Bruno’s mockery reflected in the somewhat muddy and turbid medium of Mocenigo’s denunciation. I have shown you Bruno the mystic, kneeling before the Inquisition, completely abandoning the great idea. It remains for me to show Bruno the philosopher, Bruno the Pantheist, Bruno the unacknowledged inspiration of much that is recognized as great in Spinoza and Leibnitz, the acknowledged and highly honored forerunner of much we take to be greatest in the German Idealism that centers about 1800.

* * * * *

We left the great idea at the moment, when, having pierced the heavens, it had come to realize the consequences of its act. The gentle meaning of Christ, the sterner pagan wisdom of God and man had been lost in an infinity that knew no enclosing heaven, in a dreary waste of sameness that knew no distinction, not even that between man and God. Bruno the philosopher was not one to let this work of scientific devastation go on unchallenged. What if there were a God who could dwell just as clearly in a heaven that was everywhere as in a Heaven that was above? What if man could have an interest for and could serve this God, not because he was different in kind from the ant, but because he was, or rather in proportion as he was, different in degree? Does not the life that quickens an animate thing pervade that thing? Is it not the same life which in me beckons with my finger, beats with my heart, thinks with my brain? What then if this infinite world of ours were one great living thing made up of other living things, as our body is made up of finger, and heart, and brain, each of which in doing its own work does consciously or unconsciously the work of the whole? “Natura est Deus in rebus.” This is one of the phrases Bruno found in trying to express his philosophy. Nature is God in things, or let us put it--God is the life; suns and planets, men and ants, falling rain and mounting mist are but the gestures of this life. Each thinks it does what it does for its own sake, but those who think clearest realize that the joy of their doing as well as the solace of their undoing is the part they play in working out the ideal of the whole. “And He lives in me as I live in my hand”--the phrase is Von Hofmannsthal’s, the thought is Bruno’s, and it is the whole thought of Bruno the Pantheist.

* * * * *

The end of this life is told in a letter written by one Gaspard Schopp (a converted Lutheran) to his friend Rittershausen, rector of the University of Altdorf:

“If I write to you now, it is because this very day Giordano Bruno was publicly burned for heresy in the Field of Flowers in front of the theater of Pompey.... If you were in Rome, you would learn from each and every Italian that a Lutheran was burned, and so you would be not a little strengthened in your opinion of our savage hatred. But you must know, my Rittershausen, that our Italians do not draw a sharp line between heretics and heretics, nor do they know fine distinctions, but if any one is a heretic they take him for a Lutheran, in which simplicity I pray that God may continue them....

“Now Bruno was that Nolan ... a professed Dominican who some twenty-three years agone began to doubt of Transubstantiation ... then forthright to deny it, and likewise the virginity of the Blessed Mary. He migrated to Geneva, ... whence, not approving himself altogether sound in his Calvinism (than which, nevertheless, nothing leads straighter to atheism), he was driven to Lyons, whence to Toulouse, from whence he passed on to Paris, where he was a professor, but extraordinarius, as he found that the professor ordinarius was obliged to attend Mass. Thence to London, where he published a little book called the ‘Beast Triumphant,’ meaning thereby the Pope, whom your party is wont to honor with the name of beast.[2] From here to Wittenberg, where, if I am not mistaken, he lectured publicly for two years. Having gone on to Prague, he published there the works, ‘On the Boundless,’ ‘On the Innumerable Worlds,’ and yet one other, ‘On the Shadows of Ideas,’ in which he taught horrible and moreover most absurd things, as that there are innumerable worlds, that the soul passes from one body into another, ... that magic is a good thing and permissible, the Holy Spirit is nothing but the soul of the world, and that this was what Moses meant when he wrote, ‘The spirit of God moved on the face of the waters,’ that the world is eternal.... In a word, whatever is asserted by the Pagan philosophers, whatever by our older or newer heretics he (Bruno) maintained.

“From Prague he went on to Brunswick and Helmstadt, and there for a time is said to have taught. Then to Frankfurt for the publishing of certain books, and later fell into the hands of the Inquisition at Venice, whence when they had had enough of him, he was sent to Rome. Frequently examined by the Holy Office ... of the Inquisition, convicted by the highest theologians, he now besought eighty days that he might consider, now promised recantation, now defended his point anew, now obtained another eighty days; but was really doing nothing but make a fool of the Pontiff and the Inquisition.

“So that, nearly eight years after he had come before the Inquisition here, on the ninth of February in the Palace of the Grand Inquisitor, there being present the Most Illustrious Cardinals of the Holy Office of the Inquisition, ... theologians of counsel, and the secular magistrate, governor of the city, Bruno was brought in, and on bended knees heard sentence pronounced against him. And it was in this way: the story of his life was told, of his studies and teachings, and with what diligence and fraternal admonishment the Inquisition had sought to effect his conversion, and what obduracy and impiety he had shown. Then they defrocked him, as we say, and straightway excommunicated him and handed him over to the secular arm to be punished, asking that this be done with clemency and without the shedding of blood.

“While this was passing he answered nothing, except this word: ‘In greater fear, perhaps, do you impose sentence upon me than I do receive it.’ So, taken away to prison by the governor’s lictors, he was allowed a fortnight in case he should wish to recant his errors; but in vain. Today he was led to the stake. When the image of our Saviour on the Cross was shown to him as he was about to die, he turned away his head and sullenly rejected it. In great misery he thus died, and is gone, I think, to tell in those other worlds of his imagining after what manner the men of Rome are wont to treat impious blasphemers....”

* * * * *

Surely, he came to that other world of his imagining. It is our world and he dwells among us. Little does he remember of the men of Rome, of their Illustrious Lordships of Venice, of all the toil and travail of that old life of his--hardly enough to fill an idle hour in the telling. But we know him easily for the unchanged soul he was. He is that one who came to us of a day and opened our eyes to new and troubling visions. “Now you are free,” he said, “be glad!” He is that same one who stole back another day and whispered, “But you are afraid! Remember your Father’s House, how safe it was and warm.” He may be there to close the eyes that have seen enough, with what counsel then, who can tell? But once he was fond of saying, “Not only he who wins deserves the laurels; but also he who dies no coward.”

II

BENEDICT DE SPINOZA

1632-1677

“All things excellent are as difficult as they are rare.” These words which bring to a close Spinoza’s masterpiece “Ethics, after the manner of Geometry,” sum up the experience of a life as rare as it was difficult.

But then, the things that make life difficult are so much a question of the nature that accepts or invites them! We may be sure that few, brought to the lap of Lachesis, would have the courage to pick therefrom Spinoza’s lot. To be born of exiled Jews, to be cast off by family and race as an offender against holy traditions, to live then in loneliness among Christians whose faith one does not accept, to die by inches at the age of forty-five,--even as lives go this would hardly be called an easy one. How seriously then must we take the sustaining power of a philosophy which enabled Spinoza, partly accepting, partly inviting his destiny, to lend it an aspect of calm beauty that touches our wonder!

One is tempted to recall the unhappy Bruno; without, tossed and hunted; within, torn by a conflict between a new science at once grand and desolate, and a memory of things lovable but untrue. In him a lofty philosophy was to have quieted this struggle and consoled this isolation but did not, unless indeed it did at that last moment when he stood at his stake in the Field of Flowers.

There is much likeness but an all-important difference between Bruno and Spinoza, whose names a curious fate linked together first in general condemnation, then in general praise. The two were alike in this, that if anything more lonely can be conceived than the fugitive existence of Bruno, it is the monk-like reclusion of Spinoza; if anything more desolate than the infinite wind-swept universe of Bruno, it is this same universe bereft of the quivering life and all-inspiring purpose that Bruno found in it, this world left on our hands a rolling mechanism fatal and purposeless. But the difference is profound. The philosophy, yes, one may boldly say the religion of Spinoza, sustained him from day to day, from hour to hour. Bruno’s was rather the poet’s vision, vivid enough while it lasted, but dispelled by the shock of reality to return only at such moments as that in which his life went out. Is it in the power of a thought, is it in the temperament of a man that this difference lies explained?

Spinoza’s thought, whatever its worth, owned a distinguished lineage. When in 1658 he was excommunicated by the Jews at Amsterdam, he turned with eager curiosity to the learning if not to the faith of the Christians. In particular the Dutch physician, Francis Van den Ende, himself a freethinker, became his teacher and friend. From him Spinoza acquired his knowledge of Latin and German, by him was initiated into the sciences and introduced to the works of Giordano Bruno and of one other destined to play a determining part in his thought, René Descartes--“the father of modern philosophy” as he is sometimes called.