We have seen that there are to Bruno, as to Plato and to Aristotle, two classes of men, the "vulgar" and the "heroic,"[488] the lower or subject, and the upper or ruling classes: as in each of us there are two principles, a higher, intellect or reason or mind, and a lower, sense and sensual passion. The danger is as great to the world when the lower class attempts to usurp the place of the higher, as it is to the individual soul when passion overwhelms reason. The spread of pedantry, in the universities and in the churches, greater in his time and more menacing to human progress than it had ever been, was an illustration to Bruno's eye of the results ensuing when lower minds tampered with divine knowledge.[489] The heroic soul is raised by the divine spirit within it out of the turmoil of the constant change and vicissitude, to which the vulgar soul is, in common with all living things, subjected. "The beginning, middle, and end, birth, growth, and perfection of all earthly things are from contraries, through contraries, in contraries, and to contraries; and where there is contrariety, there is also action, reaction, movement, diversity, multitude, order, degrees, succession, change." "There is never any pleasure," we read elsewhere, "without some bitterness;--nay, if there were not the bitter in things, there would not be the pleasurable, for fatigue makes us to find pleasure in repose, separation causes us to find joy in union, and so everywhere we find that one contrary is the reason of another being desired and pleasing:"[490] and so it is with pain. None, therefore, are ever satisfied with their state, except the unfeeling or the foolish who have no knowledge of their own ill, but enjoy the present without fear of the future, can find rest in what is, and have no feeling or desire for what might be: "in short have no sense of contrariety, which is figured by the tree of the knowledge of good and evil.[491]" Ignorance is the mother of sensual happiness and joy; hence "the heroic love (in its beginning) is a torment, for it does not rest in the present, as does sensual love, but feels ambition, emulation, suspicious fear for the future, the absent, the contrary." Yet the wise man is neither happy nor miserable,--knowing that good and evil are alike relative, alike fading and temporary things, he is neither dismayed nor elated, but becomes continent in his inclinations, and temperate in his pleasures. Pleasure is not really pleasure to him, for he has present to him its ceasing; pain is not pain, for he has by force of thought its termination before him: all mutable things therefore are to him as things that are not.[492]