deep, immeasurable universe, that it appeared to him an inspiration of genius. Therefore he defended it, extended it further than its originator dared extend it, and finally died for it and for all that it meant to him. His belief in natural magic belongs again to this side, or rather to the influence of the one side of his nature upon the other; owing to their essential unity in God, natural things have sympathies with one another and with human life, so that a change in one thing--a stone, a tree--may indirectly cause a corresponding change in another, a human being. It was characteristic of him that he sought to give to these beliefs--which, be it remembered, were universal in his time--a rational basis, a connection with his thought-system as a whole. The two sides or standpoints are never far apart in Bruno: it is often impossible to say to which a given theory or mood should be attributed, but in his earlier life the mystical, in his later the naturalistic, or rationalist standpoint may be said to have predominated. It is with the more metaphysical attitude that a certain vein of optimism in Bruno's philosophy is connected, the familiar conception of evil, natural or moral, as necessary for the good of the whole, like the discords by which a harmony is heightened. No absolute evil, for the consistent Neoplatonist, can possibly exist in a world which flows from the divine and is an outpouring of His nature. But Bruno had little or nothing of the practical optimist in his own character; whatever he thought to be evil, he fought against with all his might; a victim of intolerance, he had himself no toleration for some points of view--those, namely, which he felt might weaken the bonds of civil society and of human brotherhood. "Such evil teachers," he writes in the _Sigillus_ (ii. 2. 182), "succeeding time, and a world wise overlate in its own ill condition, will exterminate as the tares, canker-worms, locust plagues of their age--nay, as scorpions and vipers." Bruno saw only too clearly the evils of the world, and of his age, from the greatest of which--tyranny over the soul, and suppression of mental liberty--he suffered in his own person; and his life, as we have seen, was spent in a ceaseless, and for the time unavailing, struggle against them. But he never lost his faith in the ultimate victory of his own philosophy, based as it was upon his faith in the _essential_ goodness, justice, and truth of the eternal source of things. As all things flow from, so all things tend to return to God. Philosophy goes further than to teach merely that pain and evil are not absolute facts, not grounded in the nature of things; it also frees the believer from the burden they impose:--"the practical test of a perfect philosophy is, when one by the height of his speculation is so far withdrawn from bodily things as hardly to feel pain. And there is greater virtue, as we believe, in one who has come to such a point as