The 'limits of the forefathers' (_fines quos posuerunt patres nostri_) had been first transgressed by Abelard, and the speculating spirit of Scholasticism disseminated by him overwhelmed Europe with that rage for investigations, so futile yet so laborious, that terrified the theologians of the mediaeval church, and marked the first modern epoch in Philosophy--the beginning of the revolt of Reason against Authority. Next, colossal against the still unrelenting skies, towered what may be called the _Natur-Philosophie_, 'Nature Philosophy' of Giordano Bruno. The echoes of Luther's bugle still pierced the mountain-fastnesses of Northern Italy and the gorges of Spain. In the church, Bruno found only skepticism and licentiousness, ignorance and tyranny. Before him four centuries had been swallowed up in debate on the fruitless question of Nominalism, and others equally insignificant, but were visible to him by the light of a logic so shallow, futile, and despotic, that it was known only to be scorned. With an energy that astonished the feeble and degraded clergy of his time, a fearlessness that exacted the admiration while it aroused the indignation of his contemporaries, and a genius that compelled the attention of those who were most zealous to combat its evidences, Bruno, casting off the shackles of the cloister, that '_prigione angusta e nera_,' boldly advanced a system of Philosophy, startling, in those Inquisitorial times, from its independence, and horrible from its antagonism to Aristotle, the Atlas of the church. This was no less than pure Pantheism,--God in and through all, the infinite Intelligence. _Deus est monadum monas--nempe entium entitas_. This creed, by an incomprehensible metamorphosis, was styled, in the language of the day, Atheism; its promulgation, even its conception, was pronounced a crime whose penalty was death. And Bruno, who, from the depths of infamous superstition, had risen into the pure light of heaven, to a theory whose principles, though they might not satisfy, could not fail to refine, elevate, and encourage the soul long groveling in the mire of ignorance, or languishing in the dark dungeons of Scholasticism,--Bruno died for the truth. More foolish than the savages of whom Montesquieu speaks, who cut down trees to reach their fruit, these judges of Bruno destroyed the tree whose seeds were already strewn broadcast over the world. They hushed forever the voice whose echoes are not yet stilled,--echoes that resound in the cautious _Meditations_ of Descartes, that rise from peak to peak of the majestic method of the great Spinoza, who was no less a martyr because reputation and not life was the forfeit of his earnestness; and that vibrate with thrilling sweetness in the Idealism of Schelling. 'The perfect theory of Nature,' says Schelling, 'is that by virtue of which all Nature is resolved into the intellectual element,' which 'intellectual element' is at once