ii TIMELESS REALITY OF THINGS 321 



were not, and the world itself, as is believed, was pro- 

 duced out of nothing a new thing, yet from this 

 change and novelty of effects, no change in His action 

 or power can be inferred, for He exists above all motion 

 and all vicissitude, an unchanging agent in eternity ; 

 not as artificers, or material principles, moved by 

 changing dispositions to new willing, new faculty, new 

 effects, but from the instant of eternity, above time and 

 above change, He creates all that which becomes in 

 time, in change, in motion, in vicissitude. Before and 

 above time and motion there is not always time and 

 motion, but there we find divinity, immutable and in- 

 variable. He has from eternity willed that to be which 

 now is." " There liberty makes necessity, necessity 

 attests liberty." 1 <c Past is not past to it (the First In- 

 telligence), nor future future, but the whole of eternity is 

 present to it as one whole, all together, in its complete- 

 ness." 2 Seldom, even in recent idealist philosophy, has 

 the World of Ideas maintained its hold so powerfully 

 over a mind whose whole trend was towards a natural- 

 istic interpretation of things. The religious instinct 

 dominates to the last Bruno's thought ; these passages 

 are from the very latest of his works. Each and all of 

 his speculations on nature, on its elements, its indi- 

 viduals, its general laws, bring him back to the all- 

 embracing Mind, in which nature has its source, but 

 which nature by no means exhausts. So his specula- 

 tions on the nature of man, on the moral life, on the 

 inspiration of the artist and of the generous human 

 soul, the hunter after truth, point again to a thought, a 

 world above nature, revealed neither capriciously nor 

 yet to the natural faculties of the seeker, but to a 

 divinely implanted power of intuitive insight. It was 



1 Summa, Op. Lat. i. 4.. 93, 95. 2 Lamfas, Op. Lat. iii. 45. 



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