The earth's wonderful animation, as divined by one who anticipates by
a whole generation the "philosophy of experience:" in that, the bold,
flighty, pantheistic speculation became tangible matter of fact.
Here was the needful book for man to read, the full revelation,
the detailed story of that one universal mind, struggling, emerging,
through shadow, substance, manifest spirit, in various orders of
being--the veritable history of God. And nature, together with the
true pedigree and evolution of man also, his gradual issue from it,
was still all to learn. The delightful tangle of things! it would be
the delightful task of man's thoughts to disentangle that. Already
Bruno had measured the space which Bacon would fill, with room
perhaps for Darwin also. That Deity is everywhere, like all such
abstract propositions, is a two-edged force, depending for its
practical effect on the mind which admits it, on the peculiar
perspective of that mind. To Dutch Spinosa, in the next century,
faint, consumptive, with a hold on external things naturally faint,
the theorem that God was in all things whatever, annihilating, their
differences suggested a somewhat chilly withdrawal from the contact
of all alike. In Bruno, eager and impassioned, an Italian of the
Italians, it awoke a constant, inextinguishable appetite for every
form of experience--a fear, as of the one sin possible, of limiting,
for oneself or another, that great stream flowing for thirsty souls,
that wide pasture set ready for the hungry heart.
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