These misgivings turned out, however, to be ill-founded. Certain advantages, no doubt, of simplicity and definiteness, which had belonged to the old notions, had been irrecoverably lost; but thinkers like Giordano Bruno showed that the conception of an infinite universe was by no means hostile to religion; but that, on the contrary, it might be a conception of the highest spiritual value. Such are the sentiments expressed in some sonnets which precede Bruno's dialogue "On the Infinite Universe." "It seemed to Bruno as if he had never breathed freely until the limits of the universe had been extended to infinity, and the fixed spheres had disappeared. No longer now was there a limit to the flight of the spirit, no 'so far and no further'; the narrow prison in which the old beliefs had confined men's spirits had now to open its gates and let in the pure air of a new life."[78] The scientific did not seem to him incompatible with a fundamentally religious conception of the world, at least for those who were not afraid "to take ship upon the seas of the infinite." DANGERS OF THE "MECHANICAL VIEW."--Thus it was not _science_ that was hostile to religion. This was not the case until science began to be associated with a certain fairly definite philosophy of a mechanistic, and later of a materialist, description. Religion could not have survived the final establishment of such a philosophy as this, for the indispensable element in a religious attitude of life is the idea that _somehow there lies behind things a power or essence that has something in common with our own natures_--something that can, without an abuse of language, be called personal. Any philosophy that rules out this idea creates an atmosphere in which religion cannot breathe. And it was just this atmosphere that the mechanistic view, unless amplified by considerations of another kind (as it was e.g. in the case of Spinoza) tended to create. THE "MECHANICAL VIEW" NEVER UNCHALLENGED.--And with regard to this mechanistic philosophy, we have to observe that it never seems to have commended itself, as a final and complete solution, to the best minds. In the seventeenth century, it will be remembered, the mechanical conception was transcended (though in entirely different ways) by Spinoza and by Leibniz, and the religious consciousness of the age, in the person of Pascal, protested against it.