antheistic view which points forward to the modern period. Side by side
with the assertion that there is no proportion whatever between the
infinite and the finite, the following naively presents itself, in open
contradiction to the former: God excels the reason just as much as
the latter is superior to the understanding, and the understanding to
sensibility, or he is related to thought as thought to life, and life to
being. Nay, Nicolas makes even bolder statements than these, when he calls
the universe a sensuous and mutable God, man a human God or a humanly
contracted infinity, the creation a created God or a limited infinity; thus
hinting that God and the world are at bottom essentially alike, differing
only in the form of their existence, that it is one and the same being
and action which manifests itself absolutely in God, relatively and in a
limited way in the system of creation. It was chiefly three modern ideas
which led the Cusan on from dualism to pantheism--the boundlessness of the
universe, the connection of all being, and the all-comprehensive richness
of individuality. Endlessness belongs to the universe as well as to God,
only its endlessness is not an absolute one, beyond space and time, but
weakened and concrete, namely unlimited extension in space and unending
duration in time. Similarly, the universe is unity, yet not a unity
absolutely above multiplicity and diversity, but one which is divided into
many members and obscured thereby. Even the individual is infinite in a
certain sense; for, in its own way, it bears in itself all that is, it
mirrors the whole world from its limited point of view, is an abridged,
compressed representation of the universe. As the members of the body, the
eye, the arm, the foot, interact in the closest possible way, and no one
of them can dispense with the rest, so each thing is connected with each,
different from it and yet in harmony with it, so each contains all the
others and is contained by them. All is in all, for all is in the universe
and in God, as the universe and God in all. In a still higher degree man is
a microcosm (_parvus mundus_), a mirror of the All, since he not merely,
like other beings, actually has in himself all that exists, but also has
a knowledge of this richness, is capable of developing it into conscious
images of things. And it is just this which constitutes the perfection of
the whole and of the parts, that the higher is in the lower, the cause i