tractate. 



340 GIORDANO BRUNO PART 



is Bruno rather than Spinoza who attempted to recon- 

 cile individual liberty with determinism in the uni- 

 verse as a whole, and individual moral responsibility 

 with the necessary goodness of the all. The corre- 

 sponding relativity of evil, the fallacy of " fortune " or 

 c< chance " (as anything but " uncertainty " of the finite 

 mind), were already asserted by Bruno, and his ideas 

 as to the relation between the religion of the Church, 

 or the teaching of the Bible, and the investiga- 

 tions of science, are precisely those which Spinoza 

 adopts. 



The short In the De Deo seu Homine, however, the corre- 

 spondences are much greater and more definite between 

 Spinoza and Bruno, showing that the former passed 

 through a phase of Neoplatonism, in which his pan- 

 theism was much less formal or abstract than it after- 

 wards became. Thus the predicates applied in the 

 Ethics to God are applied here to nature, as by Bruno 

 also ; Nature is infinite in the sense of " without limits 

 or bounds," containing no parts in itself, and therefore 

 not a whole over against other wholes ; there cannot be 

 two infinites, or boundless worlds. 1 The parallelism 

 between outward nature and the thought or under- 

 standing of God is also more after Bruno's mode of 

 expression (ch. ii. n, 19). "Neither substance nor 

 qualities can be in the infinite understanding of God, 

 which are not forma lifer in nature (i) because of the 

 infinite power of God there is no cause or ground 

 in Him why He should create one thing rather than 

 another, hence He creates all ; (2) because of the 

 simplicity of His will ; (3) because He cannot refrain 

 from doing what is good." The thesis, and the first 



1 Short Tractate, ch. i. 9, and Bruno's Causa, Dial. v. Sigwart, Ncuent. Tract., 

 pp. 115, 116. 



