144 GIORDANO BRUNO PART 



sidering it physically, mathematically, morally, one sees 

 that the philosopher who saw into the coincidence of 

 contraries made a discovery of the highest importance, 

 and that the magician who knows to seek it where it is 

 is no feeble practician." l Yet, although he made use of 

 the same geometrical illustrations, and believed himself 

 to be substantially following Cusanus, his theory was 

 widely different. The coincidence'springs in Bruno, not 

 from the limitations of the human mind, but from the 

 fulness of the Divine nature. It is not in God as the 

 transcendent unknowable Being that the coincidence 

 inheres, but in the infinite universe as one with God, 

 which is in itself at once the greatest and the least, the 

 maximum and the minimum. Since nature is per- 

 meated by God, in everything, in the least of things, is 

 God the greatest ; the least is the greatest, has in it 

 the nature of the whole, and so, too, the greatest is the 

 least. In Bruno it is a pantheistic, in the Cusan a 

 theistic, doctrine. The same conception occurs again 

 in its different meanings, when both compare God to 

 an infinite circle in which centre and circumference are 

 one ; in Cusanus it is to our knowledge that He so 

 appears, in Bruno He really is infinite, and is with His 

 whole nature at any point or centre, as well as in the 

 whole, the circumference. 



The With the Cusan the threefold nature of the Highest 



^ Being is deduced as a necessity of Reason : it is (i) 

 unity eternal ; (2) sameness or equality eternal ; and 

 (3) the union of unity and equality. As there 

 cannot be three eternal and highest beings, these three 

 are necessarily one the Unity (the Father) produces 

 or begets from itself the same (the Son), and out of 

 both springs their union (the Holy Ghost), yet each of 



1 Spaccio, Lag. 420. 



