expression of all those contending apprehensions, out of which his
written works would afterwards be compacted, with much loss of heat
in the process. Satiric or hybrid growths, things due to hybris,+
insolence, insult, all that those fabled satyrs embodied--the
volcanic South is kindly prolific of this, and Bruno abounded in
mockeries: it was by way of protest. So much of a Platonist, for
Plato's genial humour he had nevertheless substituted the harsh
laughter of Aristophanes. Paris, teeming, beneath a very courtly
exterior, with mordent words, in unabashed criticism of all real or
suspected evil, provoked his utmost powers of scorn for the
"triumphant beast," the "constellation of the Ass," shining even
there, amid the university folk, those intellectual bankrupts of the
Latin Quarter, who had so long passed between them gravely a
worthless "parchment and paper" currency. In truth, Aristotle, as
the supplanter of Plato, was still in possession, pretending to
determine heaven and earth by precedent, hiding the proper nature of
things from the eyes of men. Habit--the last word of his practical
philosophy--indolent habit! what would this mean in the intellectual
life, but just that sort of dead judgments which are most opposed to
the essential freedom and quickness of the Spirit, because the mind,
the eye, were no longer really at work in them?

To Bruno, a true son of the Renaissance, in the light of those large,
antique, pagan ideas, the difference between Rome and the Reform
would figure, of course, as but an insignificant variation upon [244]
some deeper, more radical antagonism between two tendencies of men's
minds. But what about an antagonism deeper still? between Christ and
the world, say! Christ and the flesh?--that so very ancient
antagonism between good and evil? Was there any place for
imperfection in a world wherein the minutest atom, the lightest