Title Page

GIORDANO BRUNO

To

MY WIFE

[Pg vii]

PREFACE

This volume attempts to do justice to a philosopher who has hardlyreceived in England the consideration he deserves. Apart from the Lifeof Giordano Bruno, by I. Frith (Mrs. Oppenheim), in the English andForeign Philosophical Library, 1887, there has been no complete workin our language upon the poet, teacher, and martyr of Nola, while hisphilosophy has been treated only in occasional articles and reviews.Yet he is recognised by the more liberal-minded among Italians asthe greatest and most daring thinker their country has produced. Thepathos of his life and death has perhaps caused his image to stand outmore strongly in the minds of his countrymen than that of any other oftheir leaders of thought. A movement of popular enthusiasm, begun in1876, resulted, on 9th June 1889, in the unveiling of a statue in Romein the Campo dei Fiori, the place on which Bruno was burned. Both inFrance and in Germany he has been recognised as the prophet, if not asthe actual founder, of modern philosophy, and as one of the earliestapostles of freedom of thought and of speech in modern times.

The first part of the present work—the Lifeof[Pg viii] Bruno—is basedupon the documents published by Berti, Dufour, and others, and on thepersonal references in Bruno’s own works. I have tried to throw somelight on Bruno’s life in England, on his relations with the FrenchAmbassador, Mauvissière, and on his share in some of the literarymovements of the time. I have, however, been no more successful thanothers in finding any documents referring directly to Bruno’s visit toEngland.

In the second part—The Philosophy of Bruno—I have sought to givenot a systematic outline of Bruno’s philosophy as a whole under thevarious familiar headings, which would prove an almost impossibletask, but a sketch, as nearly as possible in Bruno’s own words, of theproblems which interested this mind of the sixteenth century, and ofthe solutions offered. The first chapter points out the sources fromwhich Bruno derived the materials of his thinking. The succeedingchapters are devoted to some of the main works of Bruno,—the Causa