344 GIORDANO BRUNO PART 



for the best : evil is finitude, or again is ignorance, an 

 error of standpoint. In both freedom and necessity 

 are one, because the necessity belongs to God's own 

 nature ; He wills out of Himself, undetermined, unin- 

 fluenced from without, and this is freedom. In both, 

 as we have seen, the principle of sufficient reason is a 

 ground both for the infinite number and infinite 

 variety of the finite beings in the universe, and for the 

 impossibility that two should exist which are exactly 

 identical one with another. Were it known that 

 Leibniz had studied Bruno before his system was 

 formed, we might almost say that he had chosen that 

 aspect of the Nolan philosophy which with Spinoza had 

 been disregarded, viz. the aspect in which all rights 

 are given to the finite individual, and to the world of 

 finite beings, as each representing the infinite, contain- 

 ing the infinite in itself, and, so far as possibility goes, 

 each of infinite divine worth. Whereas just that side 

 which appealed to Spinoza would have failed to touch 

 Leibniz the side in which God appears as one with 

 the universe, not as beyond or outside of it, but as 

 immanent in the whole, and present in the fulness of 

 His nature to each and every member of the whole. 

 Philosophically Leibniz' mission was to develop the 

 Cartesian doctrine of the three substances God, 

 finite spirit, and body in a direction which identi- 

 fied the first and third with the second, broke up the 

 unity of God into the immeasurable many of the 

 monad spirits, and its infinity into indefiniteness. The 

 God of Leibniz, even as the highest of the monads, is 

 separate from, apart from, the other monads a finite 

 along with other finites. So each of the ordinary 

 monads is a world by itself, shut up within itself, with 

 no windows from which it can look out upon the world, 



