Many other
discoveries might have been added to these, had not his widow submitted
the sage's MSS. to her confessor, who ruthlessly destroyed all that he
considered unfit for publication. Possibly he was not the best judge of
such matters!
Italy also produced another unhappy philosophic writer, Jordano Bruno, who
lived about the same time as Galileo, and was born at Nole in 1550, being
fourteen years his senior. At an early age he acquired a great love of
study and a thirst for knowledge. The Renaissance and the revival of
learning had opened wide the gates of knowledge, and there were many eager
faces crowding around the doors, many longing to enter the fair Paradise
and explore the far-extending vistas which met their gaze. It was an age
of anxious and eager inquiry; the torpor of the last centuries had passed
away; and a new world of discovery, with spring-like freshness, dawned
upon the sight. Jordano Bruno was one of these zealous students of the
sixteenth century. We see him first in a Dominican convent, but the old-
world scholasticism had no charms for him. The narrow groove of the
cloister was irksome to his freedom-loving soul. He cast off his monkish
garb, and wandered through Europe as a knight-errant of philosophy,
_multum ille et terris jactatus et alto_, teaching letters. In 1580 we
find him at Geneva conferring with Calvin and Beza, but Calvinism did not
commend itself to his philosophic mind.
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