Page:A History of Italian Literature - Garnett (1898).djvu/278

260 centuries belonged to the kingdom of Naples. (1509–85) has missed the posthumous celebrity of the others by escaping their tragic fate; but his reputation in his own day was greater than theirs. Campanella wept at his tomb, and Bacon calls him the first experimental observer of nature. He led the way in the revolt against the authority of Aristotle which became general in the seventeenth century, and his sensationalism helped to mould the thought of Hobbes and Gassendi.

A fiery martyrdom, a sublimely poetical mind, and an intuition of modern views and discoveries have made a more celebrated and interesting figure than Telesio, although too far in advance of his contemporaries and too late recognised by posterity to be influential with either. "The most faithful and pithily condensed abstract of Bruno's philosophy," says Symonds, "is contained in Goethe's poem, Prôömium zu Gott und Welt. Yet this poem expresses Goethe's thought, and it is doubtful whether Goethe had studied Bruno except in the work of his disciple, Spinoza." "Disciple," it may be added, is much too strong a word to express the Hebrew thinker's relation to the Neapolitan. It would be difficult to conceive two men more dissimilar, except in intellectual intrepidity and in love of truth. Spinoza is the closest of reasoners, without a particle of poetry in his composition. Bruno has magnificent divinations, with little reasoning power. If Spinoza did read him, he must have been greatly annoyed by him. On the other hand, the celebrated definition, "A God-intoxicated man," which seems so inappropriate to the intellectual geometer of Amsterdam, absolutely fits the rapt Neapolitan prophet of the