Philosophies that aim at universe-embracing, God-explaining, nature-elucidating, man-illuminating, comprehensiveness, have justly, therefore, become objects of suspicion.

The utmost that man can do, placed as he is at obvious disadvantages for obtaining a complete survey of the whole, is to whet his intelligence upon confessedly insoluble problems, to extend the sphere of his practical experience, to improve his dominion over matter, to study the elevation of his moral nature, and to encourage himself for positive achievements by the indulgence in those glorious dreams from which regenerative creeds and inspiring philosophies have sprung-- Still climbing after knowledge infinite, And ever moving as the restless spheres.
[Footnote 126: Spaventa in his _Saggi di Critica_.] Faith and poetry are the highest regions in which his spirit can profitably move.

The study of government, law, and social ethics, the analysis of physical conditions to which he is subject, and over which he has an undefined, though limited, control, form the practical sphere of his intelligence.

Bruno traversed these regions; and, forasmuch as the outcome of his exploration was no system, but a congeries of poetic visions, shrewd guesses, profound intuitions, and passionate enthusiasms, bound together and sustained by a burning sense of the Divine unity in nature and in man, we may be permitted to regard him as more fortunate than those cloud-castle-builders whose classifications of absolute existences are successively proved by the advance of relative knowledge to be but catalogues of some few objects apprehended by the vision of each partially-instructed age.

We have, indeed, reason to marvel how many of Bruno's intuitions have formed the stuff of later, more elaborated systems, and still remain the best which these contain.
We have reason to wonder how many of his divinations have worked themselves into the common fund of modern beliefs, and have become philosophical truisms.
It is probable that if Bruno's career had not been cut short by the dungeon and the stake at the early age of thirty-four, he might have produced some final work in which his theories would have assumed a formal shape.