456 CEITICAL NOTICES :

Incarnation, as well as the mysteries special to Catholicism, may not by itself be sufficient to prove that Bruno does not hold the doctrine of transcendence in common with the Christian mystics. Even a passage such as this is perhaps not decisive, though the very idea of miracle in the sense in which its possibility at least must be admitted by a theist, is rejected precisely in the spirit of Spinoza. Referring to comets, of which he gives a naturalistic explanation, Bruno says : " Some fly to a virtue above and beyond the natural, saying that a God who is above nature creates those appearances in heaven in order to signify something to us : as if those things are not better and the best signs of the divinity which come to pass in the ordinary course, among which those appearances also are not disorderly ; although their order may be concealed from us : but with prophets of this kind we do not speak, nor shall we be careful to answer them where it is not necessary to speak without sense and reason." (De Immenso, iv. 9.) In the last book of the De Immenso, however, there is still more unambiguous evidence of Bruno's position. For a great part of this book is a polemic against the doctrine of transcendence as it was held by Palingenius and other Platonists. There is no "super- nal," "intelligible," "immaterial" light, Bruno tells the Platonists, such as they imagine outside the world, no light except that which shines within the mind and outside us in nature " Quse importunissima pulsat Pectora, quaeque intus nobis splendescit et extra". 1 Nature ' is the name for a principle that is within things ; and the law by which all things accomplish their course (lex qua peragunt proprium cuncta entia cursum) is nothing but a logical abstraction (abstractum quiddam logica ratione). The whole is summed up thus : " God is infinite in the infinite, everywhere in all things, not above, not without, but most present, as entity is not outside and above beings, as nature is not outside natural things, as there is no goodness outside that which is good. But essence is distinguished from being only logically, and as reason from that of which it is the reason." Passages such as these throw light on the distinction, which in various forms is sufficiently frequent in Bruno, between God as absolute intellect and the manifestation of God in nature and in the human mind. When, for example, he distinguishes truth "before things," "in things" and "after things," he is applying in the sense of his own philosophy a traditional logical distinction recognised by him as no more than logical. By the distinction of God as absolute from the knowledge of God is expressed the imperfection of all actual conceptions of the divinity as compared with their ideal completion. Thus in the Eroici Furori the mind is represented as striving to identify itself with the absolute unity of the divine intellect, and as constantly baffled in this desire of unattainable knowledge. Nature or the infinite universe as dis- tinguished from the divinity itself is variously called the " image,"