ii SOUL AND BODY 287 



it impossible to rise, it would prefer death which should 

 put it on the way to that state, to life which held it fast 

 in its present one. So the soul, compelled by its loftier 

 thoughts, as if dead to the body, aspires upwards. 

 Although living in the body, it " vegetates " there as 

 dead is present in it so far as animation is concerned, 

 but absent from it in its proper action. 1 



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, con- 

 sidering 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 claain that binds its hands ; fetters 

 that hold its feet fast ; a veil that bewilders its vision. 

 Yet it is neither slave, nor captive, nor entangled, nor 

 chained, nor held fast, bound nor blind, for the body 

 cannot tyrannise over it further than itself allows. It 

 has spirit allotted to it proportionally to its nearness to 

 divinity, since the corporeal world and matter are subject 

 to divinity and nature. So it may make itself strong j 

 against fortune, magnanimous against injustice, bold in 

 face of poverty, disease, and persecution. 2 



The soul of man, in Bruno's psychology, as in The soul 

 Aristotle's, performs a double function : " the one is 

 to vivify and actuate the body, and the other to con- 

 template the higher world. It has a receptive faculty 

 towards the spiritual, an active faculty towards the 

 corporeal. Body is as dead, a thing privative towards 

 the soul, which is its life and perfection, and the soul is 

 as dead, a thing privative to the higher illuminating 

 intelligence from which its intellect derives Goth its 



1 Lag. 662, 663. 2 701. 30 ff. 



