led with ether, in
which an infinite number of worlds, or solar systems resembling our own,
composed of similar materials and inhabited by countless living
creatures, move with freedom. The whole of this infinite and complex
cosmos he conceived to be animated by a single principle of thought and
life. This indwelling force, or God, he described in Platonic
phraseology sometimes as the Anima Mundi, sometimes as the Artificer,
who by working from within molds infinite substance into an infinity of
finite modes. Though we are compelled to think of the world under the
two categories of spirit and matter, these apparently contradictory
constituents are forever reconciled and harmonized in the divine
existence, whereof illimitable activity, illimitable volition, and
illimitable potentiality are correlated and reciprocally necessary
terms. In Aristotelian language, Bruno assumed infinite form and
infinite matter as movements of an eternal process, by which the
infinite unity manifests itself in concrete reality. This being the
case, it follows that nothing exists which has not life, and is not part
of God. The universe itself is one immeasurable animal, or animated
Being. The solar systems are huge animals; the globes are lesser
animals; and so forth down to the monad of molecular cohesion. As the
universe is infinite and eternal, motion, place and time do not qualify
it; these are terms applicable only to the finite parts of which it is
composed. For the same reason nothing in the universe can perish. What
we call birth and death, generation and dissolution, is only the passage
of the infinite, and homogeneous entity through successive phases of
finite and differentiated existence; this continuous process of exchange
and transformation being stimulated and sustained by attraction and
repulsion, properties of the indwelling divine soul aiming at
self-realization.

Having formed this conception, Bruno supported it by metaphysical
demonstration, and deduced conclusions bearing on psychology, religion,
ethics. Much of his polemic was directed against the deeply-rooted
notion of a finite world derived from Aristotle. Much was devoted to the
proof of the Copernican discovery. Orthodox theology was indirectly
combated or plausibly caressed. There are consequently many pages in his
dialogues which do not interest a modern reader, seeing that we have
outlived the conditions of thought that rendered them important. In the
process of h