strength, and held out successfully against sieges in 1428 by the Hussites, in 14G7 by King George of Bohemia, in 1645 by the Swedish general Torstenson, and in 1742 by the Prussians. In 1805 it was the headquarters of Napo leon before the battle of Austerlitz. Its population in 18G9
was 73,771.BRUNO, St, the founder of the Carthusian order of monks, was born at Cologne about the year 1030. He was educated at Cologne, and afterwards at llheims, where he was appointed to superintend the studies in all the chief schools of the diocese. Many of his pupils afterwards became distinguished, and in the number was Pope Urban It. In 1084, after some disputes with Manasses, the archbishop of llheims, he retired with six companions into the desert of Chartreuse, where he built an oratory, with cells at a little distance from each other. Six years after wards he went to Rome, where Urban II. pressed him to accept the archbishopric of Reggio. He declined the honour, and withdrew into the solitudes of Calabra, where he died October 6, 1101. He wrote treatises on the Psalms and on some of the Epistles, but none of his works are extant. His canonization took place in 1514. (See Mrs Jameson s Legends of the Monastic Orders, 124-134; Butler s Lives of the Saints, vol. ii. 592.) This saint is not to be confounded with others of the same name, the bishop and apostle of the Prussians (970-1008), and the great archbishop of Cologne (925-968).
BRUNO, Giordano, the most genial and interesting of the Italian philosophers of the Renaissance, was born at Nola about the year 1548. Little is known of the life of this knight-errant of philosophy ; the very date of his birth rests in obscurity. "What we do know is attractive enough to render it matter of regret that the materials should be so scanty. In his fifteenth year he entered the order of the Dominicans at Naples, and is said to have composed a treatise on the ark of Noah. Why he should have submitted to the bonds of a discipline palpably unsuited to his fiery and vehement spirit, we cannot tell. He soon found the restraints intolerable, and became an outcast from his church and a wanderer on the face of the earth. His opinions with regard to some of the Romish mysteries seem to have been too liberal to find toleration with so strict an order as that of St Dominic. He was accused of impiety, and after enduring persecution for some years, he fled from Rome about 1576, and wandered through various cities, reaching Geneva in 1577. The home of Calvinism was no resting-place for him, and he tra velled on through Lyons, Toulouse, and Montpellier, arriving at Paris in 1579. Everywhere he bent his irre pressible energies to the exposition of the new thoughts which were beginning to effect a revolution in the thinking world. He had drunk deeply of the very spirit of the Renaissance, the determination to open his eyes and see for himself this noble universe, unclouded by the mists of authoritative philosophy and church tradition. The discoveries of Copernicus, which were unhinging men s minds and teaching them to look upon their little world in a new light, were eagerly accepted by him, and he used them as the lever by which to push aside the antiquated system that had come down from Aristotle, and which was loaded with the weight of that great thinker s name. For Aristotle, indeed, he had a perfect hatred. Like Bacon and Telesius he infinitely preferred the older Greek philosophers, who had looked at nature for themselves, and whose specula tions had more of reality in them. He had read widely and deeply, and in his own writings we come across many ex pressions familiar to us in earlier systems. Yet his philosophy is no eclecticism. He owed something to Lucretius, some thing to the Stoic nature-pantheism, something to Anaxa- goras, to Heraclitus, to the Pythagoreans, and to the Neo- platonists, who were partially known to him ; above all, he bad studied deeply and profoundly the great German thinker Nicolas of Cusa, who was indeed a speculative Copernicus. But his own system has a distinct unity and originality ; it breathes throughout the fiery spirit of Bruno himself.
Bruno had been well received at Toulouse, where he had lectured on astronomy ; even better fortune awaited him at Paris. He was offered a chair of philosophy, provided he would receive the Mass. He at once refused, but was permitted to deliver lectures. These seem to have been altogether devoted to expositions of a certain logical system which Bruno had taken up with great eagerness, the Ars Magna of Raymond Lully. With the exception of a comedy, II Candelajo, all the works of this period are devoted to this logic. The most important of them is the treatise De Umbris Idearum. It has seemed to many a curious freak of Bruno s that he should have so eagerly adopted a view of thought like that of Lully, but in reality it is in strict accordance with the principles of his philosophy. Like the Arabian logicians, and some of the scholastics, who held that ideas existed in a threefold form, ante res, in rebus, and post res, he laid down the principle that the archetypal ideas existed metaphysically in the ultimate unity or intelligence, physically in the world of things, and logically in signs, symbols, or notions. These notions were the shadows of the ideas, and the Ars Magna furnished him with a general scheme, according to which their rela tions and correspondences should be exhibited. It supplied not only a memoria technica, but an organon, or method by which the genesis of all ideas from unity might be represented intelligibly and easily. It provided also a substitute for either the Aristotelian or the Ramist logic, which was an additional element in its favour.
sador, Michel da Castelnau, Bruno passed over in 1583 to England, where he resided for about two years. He was much disgusted with the brutality of the English manners, which he paints in no flattering colours, and he found in Oxford pedantry and superstition as rampant as at Geneva. But he indulges in extravagant eulogies of Elizabeth, and he formed the acquaintance at London of Sir Philip Sidney, Fulke Greville, and other eminent Englishmen. At Oxford he was allowed to hold a disputation with some learned doctors on the rival merits of the Copernican and so-called Aristotelian systems of the universe, and, according to his own report, had an easy victory. The best of his works were written in the freedom of English social life. The Cena de le Ceneri, or Ash Wednesday conversation, devoted to an exposition of the Copernican theory, was printed in 1584. In the same year appeared his two great metaphy sical works, De la Causa, Principio, ed Uno, and De V Infinite, Univcrso, e Mondi ^ in the year following the Eroici Purori and Cabala del Cavallo Peyaseo. In 1584 also appeared the strange dialogue, Spaccio della Bestia Trionfante, or Expulsion of the Triumphant Beast, an allegory treating chiefly of moral philosophy, but giving at the same time the very essence and spirit of Bruno s philosophy. The gods are represented as resolving to banish from the heavens the constellations, which served to remind them of their evil deeds. In their places are put the moral virtues. The first of the three dialogues contains the substance of the allegory, which, under the disguise of an assault on heathen mythology, is a direct attack on all forms of anthropomorphic religion. But in a philosophical point of view the first part of the second dialogue is the most important. Among the moral virtues which take the place of the beasts are Truth, Pru dence, Wisdom, Law. and Universal Judgment, and in the explanation of what these mean Bruno unfolds the very
inner essence of his system. Truth is the unity and