What shall be said of Bruno as a philosopher? He, first of all men in the middle ages, taught that Nature was lovable and worthy of study. Loving her, trusting, confiding in her, he found himself at outs with all the mental processes of his fellow scholars. In this way the natural method was brought into direct opposition with the ponderously artificial and strained methods of his day. He held that our eyes were given us that we might open and look upward. "Seeing, I do not pretend not to see, nor fear to profess it openly," he says. His philosophy was rather a product of intuition than of ratiocination, which became his real religion, for which Catholicism was a cloak, because in those days one was compelled to wear a cloak or live but a short life, and that within prison walls. What the medieval church, Catholic and even Protestant, has to answer for, as to the suppression of truth and provocation of hypocrisy, is beyond the mensuration of man. For the argument from authority he had the greatest contempt, and herein he set the world of thinkers a valuable lesson. "To believe with the many because they were many, was the mark of a slave," (McIntyre). Before Bacon, before Descrates, he saw the necessity of "first clearing the mind of all prejudice, all traditional beliefs that rest on authority." He thus begins one of his sonnets:-- "Oh, holy assinity! Oh, holy ignorance, holy folly and pious devotion; which alone makest souls so good that human wit and zeal can go no further," etc. By the independence of his mental processes he was thrown quite upon his own resources, and his nature, already dignified and reserved, was made more introspective and self-conscious. In this way he developed strains of vanity and egotism which led him at times to the bombastic self-laudation of a Paracelsus. He had nothing but disgust for the common people and the sort of scholars (pedants) whom they admired. The vulgar mind was more influenced by sophisms, by appearance, by failure to distinguish between the shadow and the substance. Take but two or three of Bruno's conceptions:--