312 GIORDANO BRUNO PART 



to the earth alone, but has the infinite worlds before it, 

 for its dwelling-place. It is owing to this individual 

 (indivisible, therefore unchanging) substance the soul 

 that we are what we are ; about it as a centre there 

 occur in each life continuous " massing and unmassing " 

 of corporeal atoms, through which the changes of form 

 are brought about. " By birth and growth the spirit- 

 architect expands into this mass of which we consist, 

 spreading outwards from the heart. Thither again it 

 withdraws, winding up the threads of its web, retiring 

 by the same path along which it advanced, passing out 

 by the same gate through which it entered. Birth is 

 expansion of the centre, life consistency of the sphere, 

 death contraction to the centre." It is the soul that 

 gathers about it, groups and vivifies the atom-mass ; 

 and the strongest argument for its immortality is that 

 it cannot be of less value, of inferior condition, than the 

 atoms themselves of which it avails itself to its own 

 ends, and which are in their nature imperishable. 1 

 Each soul exists apart in its own unity and individu- 

 ality ; the soul of the universe does not impart any- 

 thing of itself to the souls of its members. 2 The 

 hierarchy of souls is not a scale of beings within 

 beings, but a multitude of realities, co-existent to all 

 eternity, the Monas Monadum at their head, represent- 

 ing perfectly, completely, at every moment (i.e. time- 

 lessly), the reality of all the others, yet separable from 

 them. Of the others that is higher which knows more 

 perfectly, and in closer unity that is, more adequately 

 the universe to which it belongs. Thus there is the 



1 De Minima, bk. i. (i. 3. 143). There also it is said that the transformations 

 are not fortuitous, but depend on the character of the life that has been lived, as 

 Pythagoras and the Platonists taught. 



2 Bruno " inclines " to this view only in one of his latest works, the Lamfas 

 (vol. iii. 59), but it is clearly implied in the De Minima. 



