The articles, with a note of explanation attached to each, and an introduction to the whole--(_Excubitor_, the Awakener)--being the address of Hennequin at the beginning of the disputation, but written by Bruno himself--were published in Paris and again at Wittenberg.[84] They contain a temperate but powerful criticism of the Aristotelians, by the words of Aristotle himself, and of Aristotle from the standpoint of Bruno's own physical theory, which he believed to be that of the Pythagoreans and Platonists. The right to criticise the "divine" Aristotle, Bruno claimed on the same grounds as those on which Aristotle himself enjoyed the right of criticising his predecessors: we are to him as he to them: their truth, which to him seemed error, may be right to us again, for opinion, like other history, moves in cycles. And as to authority, the mass of which was against Bruno, "if we are really sick, it helps us nought that public opinion thinks we are really making for health."[85] "It is a poor mind that will think with the multitude because it _is_ a multitude: truth is not altered by the opinions of the vulgar or the confirmation of the many"--"it is more blessed to be wise in truth in face of opinion than to be wise in opinion in face of truth."[86] The new philosophy gives wings to the mind, to carry it far from the prison cell in which it has been detained by the old system, and from which it could look out upon the orbs of the stars only through chinks and cracks:--to carry it out into infinite space, to behold the innumerable worlds, sisters of the earth, like it in heart and in will, living and life-producing; and returning, to see within itself--"not without, apart, or far from us, but in ourselves, and everywhere one, more intimate, more in the heart of each of us, than we are to ourselves"[87]--the divine cause, source, and centre of things. Aristotle and the sources of the scholastic philosophy were occupying Bruno's leisure almost exclusively at this time: he had begun the great Latin work, the _De Immenso_, which was to see the light in Frankfort; and he published in this year a commentary on the physics of Aristotle as well as an account of a mathematical and cosmometric invention of one _Fabrizio Mordenti_, which seems to be of much less value than Bruno supposed.[88] XI [Sidenote: 1586.] [Sidenote: Mainz.] [Sidenote: Marburg.] [Sidenote: July 25, 1586.] [Sidenote: Wittenberg.] [Sidenote: Aug. 20, 1586.] [Sidenote: Dedication of _De Lampade_.]