A child might have grasped this idea which brought a world to an end. Do I say a child? It may be that Bruno was that child, for his mind throughout had much of the waywardness, something of the random and tumultuous association of a child’s mind. The past might interest him, might even inspire him; it never had the power of capturing and holding him. But childish as it was, this idea did destroy the old world, for if stars were in no wise different from the sun we know, nor the sun from a star, evidently there was at least one star that was not fixed to the ethereal sphere that contained all things. There could then be no longer any motive for supposing these other suns to be all at the same distance from the center. They might be anywhere, they might even (Bruno had this very modern idea) be moving with respect to each other. Inevitably Bruno must come to look upon the stars as suns sprinkled irregularly throughout the regions of infinite space. Nor was this all. Coming after Copernicus as he did, Bruno had from the first grasped with enthusiasm Copernicus’ idea that not the Earth but the Sun was the center of the sphere. I say the center of the sphere, for we must remember that Copernicus never touched the boundary of the world, but only changed its center from Earth to Sun. In Copernicus’ thought we still lived within a star-spangled heaven. But now that Bruno had shattered this heaven and sprinkled these stars through space, he could not well help surrounding those other suns with planets, until not merely an infinity of suns but an infinity of solar systems spread themselves out before his imagination. But could he stop here? When one has once destroyed the distinction between Heaven and Earth, when one has once begun to think of nature as everywhere alike, it is not easy to stop. Was not one of the planets making its journey around our sun inhabited with manifold forms of life? Then why should they not all be? And is it likely that one solar system should be a scene of life and the infinity of others not? So it was that Bruno, looking out into space, saw as many inhabited globes as there were “hundreds of thousands of stars.” * * * * * These are the matters which Bruno brought back with him from his journey to the stars and beyond the confines of the world. I have told them simply, for eloquence is wasted in describing such feats of the imagination. They are of themselves eloquent. And we recall with what enthusiasm Bruno himself recounted his journey. Is it not possible, however, that when he returned to earth and told his journeyings to men, he came to perceive, as these men at once perceived, that his new vision was not all made of beauty? Is there not in this infinite cosmos that which may depress and even terrify?