ii LEIBNIZ ON BRUNO 347 



value " Mr. Toland has not spoken to me of the 

 Specchio (i.e. Spaccio, an error that does not show much 

 familiarity with Bruno) della Bestia trionfante of 

 Giordano Bruno. I think I have seen the book at 

 some time, and that it is against the Pope. I have two 

 works of his on the Infinite, one in Latin, the other in 

 Italian. The author is not wanting in genius, but is 

 not very profound (ne manque pas d 1 esprit, mats il nest 

 pas trop profond}." Elsewhere he speaks of Bruno 

 only as believing in " innumerable worlds " with 

 Leucippus and Democritus, and as having been burnt, 

 not, as he believes, on account of his book the De 

 Immenso, but for other opinions. 1 



There is therefore little reason to suppose that 

 Leibniz had great interest in Bruno, or that he had 

 read his works so carefully as to have derived any 

 sustenance or advancement for his philosophy from 

 them. Stein has in any case shown that the term 

 " Monad " came to Leibniz, not from Bruno at all, but 

 from the younger Van Helmont, in whose theory it 

 plays almost as important a part as in Leibniz 

 although the difference between the two <c Monads " 

 was greater than the resemblance. 2 



Meanwhile literature in France and England had 

 not lost sight of Bruno. 3 In 1633 there was published 

 in the former a play, Boniface et le Pedant^ which 



1 In Dutens, v. 385 (June 1712), and v. 369. 



2 It appears that the term Monas Monadum used by Bruno of God does not occur 

 in Leibniz at all. 



3 In Burton's Anatomy of Melancholy (1621) Brunus appears with Copernicus as 

 author of "some prodigious tenent or paradox of the earth's motion, of infinite 

 worlds in an infinite waste" (vol. i. p. n of Shilleto's edition). In the " Digression 

 on Air," the Cena is referred to (ii. p. 46), the changes of sea and land, the fixed 

 stars as suns with planets about them, the air of the heavens as identical with that 

 of the earth, the infinite worlds in an infinite ether (ib. 47, 57, 62). Bruno, infelix 

 Brunus as Kepler had called him, is classed with atheistical writers in a later part of 

 the work (vol. iii. p. 447). 



