286 GIORDANO BRUNO PART 



that the intellect may go on and on. penetrating more 

 deeply into it. The nectar and the source of living water 

 are infinitely productive ; the soul may quench its thirst 

 in it again and again. 1 



Thus the blessed or perfect life for Bruno meant a 

 permanent, continuous absorption of the individual soul 

 in the divine goodness a permanence or eternity which 

 was also one with the instant of time. There was no 

 greater value at any later moment than at the first 

 union of the soul with its divine object : the soul was 

 thereby removed, once for all, out of the constant flux 

 of things, the incessant renewal and rebirth of the soul 

 throughout the ages, and lifted up into the calm of the 

 eternal and immutable. 



Even the heroic soul, however, is, as other souls, 

 Soul and on the border line between corporeal and incorporeal 

 nature ; in part it tends to rise towards the upper 

 world, in part inclines towards the lower world. If 

 sense ascends to imagination, imagination to reason, 

 reason to intellect, intellect to mind, then the soul is 

 wholly converted into God, and its dwelling-place is 

 the intelligible world. In the contrary direction it 

 descends through conversion to the sensible world, by 

 way of intellect, reason, imagination, sense, and the 

 vegetative faculty. Mind (the highest faculty in Bruno's 

 psychology : the intuitive perception of unity with 

 the supreme ideal world) is oppressed by its conjunc- 

 tion with the more material faculties of the soul ; 

 knowing of a higher state to which the soul might rise, 

 it despises the present in favour of the future. If a 

 brute had sense of the difference between its condition 

 and that of man, and between the baseness of its state 

 and the nobility of that of man, to which it did not feel 



1 Lag. 731. 



