ii AVICEBRON 135 



bron or Avencebrol was the author of the famous Fons 

 Vitae, " the Source of Life," which gained a quite 

 undeserved notoriety for its supposed materialism. Bruno 

 did not know it at first hand, but through quotations 

 in the translated Arabian writings, 1 and criticisms in the 

 Scholastics. Accordingly his idea of it is by no means 

 accurate. 2 He knew that Avicebron had spoken of 

 matter as divine, that he had reduced even the " sub- 

 stantial forms'* of Aristotle to transitory phases of 

 matter " the stable, the eternal, progenetrix, mother 

 of all things/' 3 and had shown the logical necessity of 

 assuming a matter, or ground, out of which corporeal 

 nature on the one hand, incorporeal or spiritual on the 

 other, are differentiated. 4 It is clear that this under- 

 lying matter was not material in the ordinary sense, but 

 a unity which in itself was neither corporeal nor spiritual, 

 yet in its different aspects was both at once. That is a 

 conception which formed one of the main theses in 

 Bruno's philosophy. Directly or indirectly, he drew 

 from the Fons Vitae the thought of a common some- 

 thing which runs through all differences, which is their 

 basis, and gives them reality, which stands to them in 

 the relation of Aristotle's matter to forms : under the 

 differences of bodily objects there lies one common 

 matter, under the differences of spiritual beings another, 

 and under the differences of these two secondary 

 " matters " lies a primary matter in which both are one. 

 So too the progress of thought is from the most com- 

 plex, or composite, material bodies, through the less 

 complex, the spiritual, to the highest and simplest, the 



1 Cf. Op. Lat. iii. 696. 



2 Vide Wittman, Giord. Bruno's Beziehungen zu Avenctbrol in the Archi-v fur 

 Geschichte der Phil. 13. 2 (1900). 



3 Causa, Lag. 253 ; cf. 246, and Op. Lat. iii. 696. 4 Causa, Lag. 265. 



