J. Lewis McIntyre

“ Aristotelians, Platonists, and other sophists have not understood what the substance of things is. In natural things that which they call substance, apart from matter, is pure accident. When we know what form really is, we know what is life and what is death; and, the vain and puerile fear of the latter passing from us, we experience some of that blessedness which our philosophy brings with it, inasmuch as it lifts the dark veil of foolish sentiment concerning Orcus and the insatiable Charon, that wrests from us or empoisons all that is sweetest in our lives. ”

“ Given a man endowed with all human perfections, the existence of other men subordinate to him is not excluded, but rather demanded in order that he may fulfil the harmony of his being. So the best, the first, of the monads,—which comprises all particular things in itself,—embraces, in spite of its unity, innumerable worlds, without limit, under its corporeal aspect. One does not suffice, for the productive mind diffuses itself throughout the whole universe, wholly in every part, in equal goodness and power, and fills the void in order that its great image may be presented throughout the whole. ”

“ He who pretends to know what he does not know, says Wisdom, is a wanton Sophist: he who denies knowing what he knows, is ungrateful to the Active Intelligence, insults truth, and outrages me, as do all those who seek me—not for myself, or for the supreme virtue and love of that divinity which is above every Jupiter and every heaven,—but either to sell me for money, honour, or other gain, or to be known rather than to know, or to detract from and be able to destroy the happiness of others.... ”

“ But Kepler, fearless before men, shrank from the thought of the infinite world in which Bruno found a glorious freedom for the play of his mind. Kepler could not, and did not, give up his enclosing sphere of fixed stars, shutting in the solar system as comfortably as the orange-skin its seeds, not accepting the giddy hypothesis of Bruno that each of the stars is itself a sun, with a solar system of its own, and that beyond and beyond, in endless series, are other suns and other worlds. ”

“ Beauty, harmony, permanence of nature.Thus all things are in the universe, the universe in all things; we in it, it in us; and so all concurs in a perfect unity. Therefore, cries Bruno, we need not be troubled in spirit, nor be afraid; for this unity is one, stable, and always abides; this one is eternal; every aspect, every face, every other thing, is vanity, is as nought; all that is outside of this One is nought. These philosophers have found the wisdom that they love, who have found this unity. Wisdom, truth, unity, are the same. ”

“ The individual, finite as it is, must realise in itself the whole nature of the universe to which it belongs; each thing, each substance or monad, realises in the course of its life all other possible existences. Each takes on successively all possible forms, just as at every moment all possible forms are actually realised in the universe as a whole. Each thing, and every part of each, present to us the “similitude,” the image of the universe. It is precisely the thought which afterwards loomed so largely in the philosophy of Leibniz, that each monad is a mirror of the universe. ”

“ Solicitude concludes, “generous, heroic, anxious Fear, stimulate me that I do not perish from the number of the illustrious before I perish from that of the living. Before torpor or death take from me my hands, grant that the glory of my works may not be in their power to take. Anxiety, grant that the roof be finished before the rain come: that the windows be whole before the winds of treacherous and unquiet winter blow. Memory of a well-spent life, thou shalt make old age and death destroy my soul before they disturb it. ”

“ The most complete absorption is that of the heroic mind in its infinite and all-comprehensive object. That is not perfect divine heroic love which feels the spur or the bridle, or regret or grief for any other love; but that which is entirely without sense or feeling of other passions. It is so deep in its delight that nothing can displease or divert it or cause it to stumble in the least, and this is to reach the highest blessedness in our present state—to have pleasure without any sense of pain. ”

“ It is no frivolous or futile contemplation, but one most weighty and worthy of the perfect man, which we pursue, when we seek the splendour, the fusion, and the intercommunication of divinity and of nature not in an Egyptian, Syrian, Greek or Roman individual, not in food, drink, or any ignoble matter, with the gaping many, but in the august palace of the all-powerful, in the immeasurable space of the Ether, in the infinite potency of twofold nature, all-becoming and all-creating. ”

“ To see God is to be seen by God; to be heard by divinity is to hear the voice of divinity; to be favoured by its grace is the same thing as offering oneself to it. The divine potency that is wholly in everything does not offer nor withdraw itself except through the conversion of the other, its object, to it, or aversion from it. [527] To love God is to be loved by God. It is only through love, again, that we can approach the inmost nature of God; we cannot reason or even think of the divine without detracting from it rather than adding to its glory. ”

“ The first-born before all creatures, sprung from the head of Jove—for she is a breath from the virtue of God, an emanation of omnipotent brightness, sincere and pure, clear and inviolate, honourable, powerful, and kind beyond words, well pleasing to God, incomparable:—pure, because nothing of defilement can touch her; clear, because she is the brightness of eternal light; inviolate, because she is the spotless mirror of the majesty of God; honourable, because the image of goodness itself; powerful, because being one she can do all things, being permanent in herself, she renews all things ”

“ The whole of the Cabala is a satire on the quietistic attitude, the standpoint of ignorant and ignoring faith, which regards sense and reason as alike misleading and unnecessary guides, for which science and philosophy are mere troublings of the still waters of life. “Oh, holy asinity”! one of the sonnets begins, “oh, holy ignorance, holy folly and pious devotion, which alone makest souls so good that human wit and zeal can no further go; strenuous watchfulness, in whatsoever art, or invention, or contemplation of the wise, arrives not to the heaven wherein thou buildest thy mansion. ”

“ Elizabeth, a Queen in title and in dignity, inferior to no King in all the world. For her judgment, counsel, and government, not easily second to any other that bears a sceptre in the earth. In her familiarity with the arts, knowledge of the sciences, understanding and practice of all languages spoken in Europe by the people or by the learned, I leave the whole world to judge what rank she should hold among princes. ”

“ The new philosophy gives wings to the mind, to carry it far from the prison cell in which it has been detained by the old system, and from which it could look out upon the orbs of the stars only through chinks and cracks:—to carry it out into infinite space, to behold the innumerable worlds, sisters of the earth, like it in heart and in will, living and life-producing ”

“ The danger is as great to the world when the lower class attempts to usurp the place of the higher, as it is to the individual soul when passion overwhelms reason. The spread of pedantry, in the universities and in the churches, greater in his time and more menacing to human progress than it had ever been, was an illustration to Bruno’s eye of the results ensuing when lower minds tampered with divine knowledge. ”

“ His dogs are the thoughts that issue outwards in search of goodness, wisdom, beauty beyond himself. The fate of Acteon—his death under the fangs of his own hounds—represents how the generous spirit, coming into the presence of that highest beauty, is ravished out of itself, is converted into the very prey which it pursued: itself is now the prey of its own thoughts, for it has contracted divinity into itself, has no longer to seek it outside of itself: as love converts into the thing loved. ”

“ God as the highest, most complete object, the knowledge of Him above and embracing in itself all other knowledge, making the knower one with his object, transforming him into God himself; the divine Harmony in the soul which ensues; the love of God which is man’s highest blessedness, which is wholly disinterested, and blind to all earthly good or beautiful things; love which is unlimited in its possibility, as its object is infinite: with this limitless possibility of Love is the idea of immortality connected ”

“ There is no abstract that subsists in logical reason but not in reality, no justice by which things are just, no goodness through which they are good, wisdom through which they are wise, nor are deitas and feritas the ground of existence of gods and beasts: nor is it light by which shining bodies shine, nor shadow by which folly, darkness, fictions, nonsense come to exist.” The student of nature must not suppose form and matter, light and colour and motion, to exist separately by themselves because they may be conceived or defined by themselves. ”

“ Coincidence of all things in the One.Thus the One is the only ultimate reality; it is neither matter nor form, yet both together,—implicitly. And it has no parts, or all parts, for all parts coincide in it, the smallest with the greatest, in it all particular things coincide with one another, and all differences. It has all possible existence and is therefore unchangeable, it has all perfections and therefore is infinitely perfect.
“The universe is one, infinite, immovable. One is the absolute possibility, one the reality. One the form or soul, one matter or body. ”

“ But each thing has in itself the nature of the whole—is therefore in its inmost nature perfect. It is imperfect only in its explicit nature—on its outward side. The striving after new life is due to the felt conflict, or want of harmony, between what it has in it to become—its inner self—and what it has actually become, the limited form in which it appears. On the one hand evil is necessary for good, for were the imperfections not felt, there would be no striving after perfection; all defect and sin consist merely in privation, in the non-realisation of possible qualities. ”

“ In place of Spinoza’s dead world, we find in Leibniz, as in Bruno, finite things in constant flow, constant change, each passing necessarily through every phase through which any other has passed—representing the universe as it is in time, as well as the universe as it is at any moment in actual existence; each experiencing, in other words, the life, the process, as well as the quality, the being of the all. ”

“ Matter pours forth all things from its own lap, Nature itself is the inward workman, a living art, a wondrous virtue which is endowed with mind, giving realisation to a matter which is its own, not foreign to itself; not hesitating, but producing all things easily out of itself, as fire shines and burns, as light spreads without effort through space.... ”

“ Thus the heroic soul, although present in the body, is absent from it with the better part of itself, and unites itself in an indissoluble bond with divine things. It feels neither love nor hatred of mortal things, considering itself too great to be the slave and servant of its body: the latter it regards simply as a prison-house within which its liberty is closed in; a snare that holds its wings entangled; a chain that binds its hands; fetters that hold its feet fast; a veil that bewilders its vision. ”

“ The individual human and animal souls would be merely modes of the one earth-soul, just as the different star-souls would be merely modes of the one soul of the universe, the first and highest emanation of divinity. The immortality of the individual soul would mean accordingly its reabsorption, at the close of its bodily life, into the eternal; but it would be impossible then to ascribe any continuity or identity to the souls of two beings which succeed each other in nature. ”

“ Had men, instead of bending so long over the books of Aristotle and his commentators, the nebulosa volumina, but turned their eyes to the book and light of nature, they would have formed a far different conception of the constitution of the heavens than that of the eight, nine, ten, or more spheres and innumerable epicycles of the Ptolemaic system. Bruno showed how as we rise from the surface of the earth our horizon becomes wider, while in detail less vivid, and he supposed himself to continue the ascension upwards to the surface of the moon. ”

“ Before we act we stand between the two ways and deliberate, and at last determine, but in uncertainty and perturbedness of spirit; while God, as in nature most perfect, acts in the one of two ways that is the most fitting. Nor is it an imperfection of nature to be determined in one direction only, away from that which may lead to error. Thus we may not refer the will and action of God to a liberty of this kind, of being equally or unequally disposed to two contradictory volitions or acts—a liberty of indifference—but his liberty is of the kind which is identical with necessity. ”

“ The two kinds of matter, or potentiality, the lower and the higher, are thus essentially one; so we reach the notion, not indeed of “the highest and best principle,” as Bruno is again careful to remind us, but of the soul of the world, as reality of all, and potency of all, and all in all. Thus in the end, although individuals are innumerable, all things are one; and the knowledge of this unity is the goal and limit of all philosophy of nature. ”