ii DIRECT INFLUENCE ON LEIBNIZ 345 



and really be affected by what is passing without it. 

 There is no without each is, in a word, God^ and so far 

 as it is concerned there may be no other being in 

 existence. Bruno, on the contrary, was fully conscious 

 at times of the necessity of holding the balance 

 between the infinite unity of God and the finite units or 

 realities, which are the expression, the manifestation, 

 the self-revelation of the one. Why this revelation ? 

 he does not indeed ask ; but given it as actual, he finds 

 the reconciliation in it at once of the necessity of the 

 whole and the liberty of the unit, the goodness of the 

 all and the moral frailty of the individual. 1 



Interesting as this speculative comparison of the two 

 philosophies may be, there is not, however, even the 

 slightest ground for attributing any direct historical 

 influence of Bruno upon Leibniz. If influence occurred 

 at all which is doubtful it was through Spinoza or 

 some of the minor philosophical writings of the time. 

 Lacroze (in a letter of 1737) accused Leibniz of 

 u having drawn his whole system " from Bruno's book 

 De Maximo et Minimo (sic /) : he added that he had 

 told Leibniz this fact himself, both by word of mouth 

 and in writing, and that the reason why so few had 

 noticed it was that the philosophical writings of Bruno 

 were obscure and repellent. The same suggestion has 

 been repeatedly made since more especially as regards 

 the name u Monad" which Leibniz, after much search- 

 ing and deliberation, gave to his "real unities" from 

 1696 onwards. 2 Brunnhofer goes so far as to see both 

 the ideas and the main formulas of Leibniz in Bruno 



1 Cf. Carriere. Of. at. p. 471 ff. 



2 Thesauri EfUtoKti la Croxiani, 1746 j Hansch, Prin. PAi/os. Leibn., 1728 ; Thes. 

 ix., xxxi., Ixxi. Cf. Steffens, Clemens, Diihring, Brunnhofer, of. cit., and also in 

 G.B.'s Lehre uom Kleinsten, ah die Quelle der pra-establirten Harmonic von Leibniz, 

 1890 5 also Tocco, etc. 



