, following Paracelsus and anticipating Leibnitz, was that of
Edward Digby, based on the notion of the active correspondence between
mind and matter.

[Sidenote: The ultimate reality]

To the thinker of the sixteenth century the solution of the question of
the ultimate reality seemed to demand some form of identification of
the world-soul with matter. Paracelsus and Gilbert both felt in the
direction of hylozoism, or the theory of the animation of all things.
If logically carried out, as it was not by them, this would have meant
that everything was God. The other alternative, that God was
everything, was developed by a remarkable man, who felt for the new
science the enthusiasm of a religious convert, Giordano Bruno.

[Sidenote: Bruno, 1548-1600]

Born at Nola near Naples, he entered in his fifteenth year the
Dominican friary. This step he soon regretted, and, after being
disciplined for disobedience, fled, first to Rome and then to Geneva.
Thence he wandered to France, to England, and to Wittenberg [Sidenote:
1569] and Prague, lecturing at several universities, including Oxford.
In 1593 he was lured back to Italy, was imprisoned by the Inquisition,
and after long years was finally burnt at the stake in Rome.
[Sidenote: February 17, 1600]

In religion Bruno was an eclectic, if not a skeptic. At Wittenberg he
spoke of Luther as "a second Hercules who bound the three-headed and
triply-crowned hound of hell and forced him to vomit forth his poison."
But in Italy he wrote that he despised the Reformers as more ignorant
than himself. His _Expulsion of the Triumphant Beast_, in the disguise
of an {640} attack on the heathen mythology, is in reality an assault
on revealed religion. His treatise _On the Heroic Passions_ aims to
show that moral virtues are not founded on religion but on reason.

[Sidenote: The new astronomy]

The enthusiasm that Bruno lacked for religion he felt in almost
boundless measure for the new astronomy, "by which," as he himself
wrote, "we are moved to discover the infinite cause of an infinite
effect, and are led to contemplate the deity not as though outside,
apart, and distant from us, but in ourselves. For, as deity is
situated wholly everywhere, so it is as near us as we can be to
ourselves." From Nicholos of Cusa Bruno had learned that God may be
found in the smallest as in the greatest things in the world; the
smallest being as endless in power as the greatest is infinite in
ener