He has the same cherubic confidence in the renascent age, that charms us in the work of Rabelais.

The slow, painful, often thwarted, ever more dubious elaboration of modern metaphysic in _rapport_ with modern science--that process which, after completing the cycle of all knowledge and sounding the fathomless depth of all ignorance, has left us in grave disillusionment and sturdy patience--swam before Bruno in a rapturous vision.

The Inquisition and the stake put an end abruptly to his dream.
But the dream was so golden, so divine, that it was worth the pangs of martyrdom.

Can we say the same for Hegel's system, or for Schopenhauers or for the encyclopaedic ingenuity of Herbert Spencer?
Bruno imagined the universe as infinite space, filled with ether, in which an infinite number of worlds, or solar systems resembling our own, composed of similar materials and inhabited by countless living creatures, move with freedom.

The whole of this infinite and complex cosmos he conceived to be animated by a single principle of thought and life.