that fall within human knowledge."[486] So too Wisdom, _Sophia_, is at once supra-mundane,--when it is one with Providence itself, light and eye in one,--and mundane, inferior, not truth itself, wisdom itself, but participant in truth and in wisdom,--an eye that is illuminated by a foreign light. The first is invisible, infigurable, incomprehensible; the second is figured in the heavens, reflected in finite minds, communicated by words. The earthly or inferior forms, however, as Bruno makes clear, are of value only for the sake of the higher unity, to attain which is the real end of the philosophic life. "He who pretends to know what he does not know, says Wisdom, is a wanton Sophist: he who denies knowing what he knows, is ungrateful to the Active Intelligence, insults truth, and outrages me, as do all those who seek me--not for myself, or for the supreme virtue and love of that divinity which is above every Jupiter and every heaven,--but either to sell me for money, honour, or other gain, or to be known rather than to know, or to detract from and be able to destroy the happiness of others.... They that seek me for love of the supreme and first truth are wise, and therefore blessed."[487] Bruno's _Summum Bonum_ is therefore _knowledge_, an intellectual comprehension of the All of things, as it is in the supreme Unity or source of the world. It is for the sake of this end of the few, the wise, that the many, the vulgar, and foolish, are to be kept at peace, in harmony with one another, following obediently their higher guides in religion or in the state. There is not in Bruno any more than in Spinoza any sense of the infinite worth, or the infinite pitifulness of man as an earth-born creature of hopes and fears, creeping towards the light, with the clogging darkness behind, groping in childish terror and childish trust, for the hand of a loving, human God. Therefore, although he lived in the midst of the Reformation, its true meaning passed him by. CHAPTER VII THE HIGHER LIFE We now turn to the higher moral life, which is at the same time the religious life, of the heroic soul in its struggle towards perfection. This perfection consists in comprehension of the world as infinitely perfect, in the union with God as the source from which the world flows, the spirit in which it lives, and in the Love of God as at once infinite beauty and infinite goodness.