maintained, for it would follow that one infinite is greater than another, and that an infinite is used up, and declines into a finite. Similar is the subtlety about lines always divisible (however small parts we take), from the impotency of thought."[624] But the conclusion drawn is simply the positivist one, that such endless questioning after the unknowable is profitless and absurd. The one sees in it a metaphysical or cosmological argument--infinite capacity for knowing implies an infinite to be known, as infinite or endless desire implies an infinite or limitless good: the other a methodological argument against attempting to fly when we are born to creep. In two other cases Bacon rejected the work of Bruno, and rightly, viz. in regard to the Art of Lully, and the Art of Memory; and it is possible that he may have had Bruno in his mind in writing both passages. "Some men, rather ostentatious than learned, have laboured about a certain method not deserving the name of a true method, as being rather a kind of imposture, which may nevertheless have proved acceptable to some triflers. Such was the Art of Lully, simply a massed collection of technical terms. This kind of collection resembles an old broker's shop, where many fragments of things are to be found, but nothing of any value."[625] Again, "there exists certainly some kind of art (of memory), but we are convinced that better precepts for confirming and extending the memory might be laid down than are contained in this art, and also that the practice of the art might be made better than as it has been received. As now managed, it is but barren and useless."[626] [Sidenote: Kepler.] On the Continent it was rather the cosmological theories of Bruno that attracted attention; and there, no less than in England, every suspicion of sympathy with the heretic was avoided. Only Kepler had the courage to complain (as a letter of Martin Hasdal to Galilei tells) that Galilei had omitted to make praiseful mention of Bruno in his _Nuntius Sidereus_.[627] Galilei, a thorough diplomatist, would hardly have gone so far:[628] yet in the metaphysical basis of his theory of the universe, and in his theory of knowledge, he only elaborates ideas already suggested by Bruno.[629] But Kepler, fearless before men, shrank from the thought of the infinite world in which Bruno found a glorious freedom for the play of his mind. Kepler could not, and did not, give up his enclosing sphere of fixed stars, shutting in the solar system as comfortably as the orange-skin its seeds, not accepting the giddy hypothesis of Bruno that each of the stars is itself a sun, with a solar system of its own, and that beyond and beyond, in endless series, are other suns and other worlds.[630]