288 GIORDANO BRUNO PART 



tendency or nature, and its actual form, its realisation." l 

 The soul is not locally in the body, but is related to 

 it as intrinsic form, and as extrinsic giver of form : 

 moulding the members, and giving shape to the 

 composite result from within and from without. Body 

 is in soul, soul in mind, and mind either /V, or is in 

 God, as Plotinus said." : The dualism of nature and 

 divinity, of corporeal and spiritual, intellect and sense, 

 permeates the ethical as it permeates the earlier philo- 

 sophical thought of Bruno : nowhere is the Neoplatonist 

 effort to overcome the dualism inherent both in Plato 

 and in Aristotle less effective than here. Thus the 



Distraction ^gdy remains in spite of the continuity seemingly 



of the body. -" . , , ,1-1 . r i 



maintained between the highest and the lowest or the 

 emanations from the supreme, or the identity asserted 

 between sense, imagination, reason, intellect, the chief 

 hindrance to the aspiration of the soul. For the body 

 is in continual movement, change, alteration, and its 

 faculties are conditioned by its inherent nature, its 

 operations by its faculties. " How then can immobility, 

 subsistence, entity, truth, be understood by that which 

 is always different from itself, always acting and 

 becoming in different ways ? What truth, what 

 representation can be depicted or impressed when the 

 pupils of the ejes are dispersed into water, the water 

 into vapour, the vapour into flame, the flame into air 

 that into other things and again other, the object of 

 sense and sense-knowledge passing endlessly through 

 the infinite cycle of changes ? " Thought and passion 

 take their character from their object, or the sense-data 

 on which they are based : but <c that which has always 

 before it now one thing now another, now in one way 





1 Lag. 732. 23 j the terms correspond to 56vafju$ and frtpyeia, or VXij and 

 respectively. 2 647. 7. 



