Page:Mind (Old Series) Volume 12.djvu/473

 460 CRITICAL NOTICES : identified with God himself. The idea of personality, or of " self- consciousness " in the special sense, is no more present, however, in Bruno's doctrine than in Spinoza's. The doctrine of absolute thought as the unity from which all things proceed and to which they aspire according to the degree of their perfection, is the spiritualistic side of Bruno's pantheism. On the other side, he also identifies Nature, in one of its meanings, with God. " Natura est Deus in rebus." Nature, again, is sometimes identified with matter, and from matter all forms of things are said to proceed ; nature, as an " internal artist," producing the more perfect from the less perfect. By " matter " is not to be understood here the matter of the Epicureans, but matter as coinciding in the absolute with " form," or matter to each element of which is joined an element of spirit, so that the world is animated as a whole and in every part. It is to express this side of his doctrine and not the properly spiritualistic or intellectualistic side that he quotes the well-known lines of Virgil, ending " Mens agitat molem et magno se corpore miscet ". By the substitution of ' toto ' for ' magno ' a variation which always occurs in his quotation of this line the idea of the universal animation of the world, rather than of its direction by intelligence, is still more accentuated. The notion of intelligence as directing things finds its expression in the identification of Fate with Providence ; but the perfection of the world which is said to be its final cause is not an ultimate state, but is simply " that in different parts of matter all forms shall have actual existence " (Wagner, i. 237). In the theory of particular things, of the life of animals, for example, this doctrine becomes what is now known as the doctrine of " internal teleo- logy ". All things seek their own preservation according to the knowledge they have of that which is conformable or opposed to their nature. The actions of ants and spiders, for example, are not directed from without by " unerring divine intelligences," but from within " by their own prudence and artifice ". HaeckePs suggestion that some animals have senses which man has not is made by Bruno. In what relates to the souls of individual things, Prof. Carriere has noticed especially resemblances to Leibniz. As the terms ' mode ' and ' attribute ' are used incidentally by Bruno in the Spinozistic sense, so the terms ' monas ' and ' Monas monadum ' are used by him in the Leibnizian sense. He also puts forth the Leibnizian doctrine that no two individual things in the universe are absolutely alike. His doctrine of the perfection of all things in relation to the whole and from the point of view of intellect is Spinozistic rather than Leibnizian. The principle of " the coincidence of contraries," derived immediately from Nicholas of Cusa, by which he combines the opposite terms of his pantheism the indivisible intellectual unity to which the mind aspires and the infinite multiplicity of a universally animated nature, has obvious resemblances to the dialectic of Hegel. As with Heraclitus and Hegel, it is made