Page:Mind (Old Series) Volume 9.djvu/257

 GIORDANO BRUNO. 245 This doctrine is the philosophical basis of the theory of the origin of life described above. The power of the earth to produce all forms of life from all parts of itself is inferred from the presence of the soul of the world in the whole and in every part. In Bruno's system God, the absolute intellect, is at once the beginning of things and the end to which they aspire according to the degree of their perfection. The divine in- tellect manifested in nature is " the soul of the world" ; in the human mind it expresses itself as the desire to compre- hend all things in relation to the unity from which they proceed. All particular things, so far as they are outside the divine intellect, are in truth vanity, nothingness ; they have being onlv so far as they participate in the being of God. It has been disputed whether Bruno's doctrine is theistic or pantheistic. Carriere, in his book on the philosophers of the Reformation, takes the view that there is a transition in Bruno's writings from pantheism to theism; that the Italian dialogues are more pantheistic, the later Latin works more theistic. E. B. Hartung, in an exposition of Bruno's ethical ideas and of their relation to his metaphysics, admits to a certain extent the truth of this view ; but he points out that Bruno's definitions exclude the ideas of the personality of God and of his separateness from the world ; since these ideas must be regarded as essential to theism, he concludes that Bruno's doctrine is, strictly speaking, pantheistic. Xow both these ideas are just as much excluded from Bruno's later as from his earlier works. It might even be maintained that some definitions in the later works are more distinctly pantheistic than those of the earlier works. The ground of Carriere's view seems to be this. In the dialogues Delia Causa and Dell' Infinite the unity in which all things have their origin is described as manifesting itself in nature. The other aspect of this unity, its aspect as an end which the human intellect seeks to attain, is indicated and is placed in relation with the first. It is said, for example, in Delia Causa that the process by which nature descends to the production of things and the process by which the intellect ascends to the knowledge of them are one and the same, that both the intellect and nature proceed from unity to unit}' through multiplicity. But this other side of Bruno's doctrine is more obvious in the later Latin works than in these particular dialogues. These dialogues, therefore, ap- pear more " pantheistic," in one sense of the term, and the Latin poems more " theistic ". But the view that has been