The philosophic
need to try all things had given reasonable justification to the
stirring desire for travel common to youth, in which, if in nothing
else, that whole age of the [242] later Renaissance was invincibly
young. The theoretic recognition of that mobile spirit of the world,
ever renewing its youth, became, sympathetically, the motive of a
life as mobile, as ardent, as itself; of a continual journey, the
venture and stimulus of which would be the occasion of ever new
discoveries, of renewed conviction.
The unity, the spiritual unity, of the world :--that must involve the
alliance, the congruity, of all things with each other, great
reinforcement of sympathy, of the teacher's personality with the
doctrine he had to deliver, the spirit of that doctrine with the
fashion of his utterance. In his own case, certainly, as Bruno
confronted his audience at Paris, himself, his theme, his language,
were the fuel of one clear spiritual flame, which soon had hold of
his audience also; alien, strangely alien, as it might seem from the
speaker. It was intimate discourse, in magnetic touch with every one
present, with his special point of impressibility; the sort of speech
which, consolidated into literary form as a book, would be a dialogue
according to the true Attic genius, full of those diversions, passing
irritations, unlooked-for appeals, in which a solicitous missionary
finds his largest range of opportunity, and takes even dull wits
unaware.
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