Thus the blessed or perfect life for Bruno meant a permanent, continuous absorption of the individual soul in the divine goodness--a permanence or eternity which was also one with the instant of time. There was no greater value at any later moment than at the first union of the soul with its divine object: the soul was thereby removed, once for all, out of the constant flux of things, the incessant renewal and rebirth of the soul throughout the ages, and lifted up into the calm of the eternal and immutable. [Sidenote: Soul and body.] Even the heroic soul, however, is, as other souls, on the border line between corporeal and incorporeal nature; in part it tends to rise towards the upper world, in part inclines towards the lower world. If sense ascends to imagination, imagination to reason, reason to intellect, intellect to mind, then the soul is wholly converted into God, and its dwelling-place is the intelligible world. In the contrary direction it descends through conversion to the sensible world, by way of intellect, reason, imagination, sense, and the vegetative faculty. Mind (the highest faculty in Bruno's psychology:--the intuitive perception of unity with the supreme ideal world) is oppressed by its conjunction with the more material faculties of the soul; knowing of a higher state to which the soul might rise, it despises the present in favour of the future. If a brute had sense of the difference between its condition and that of man, and between the baseness of its state and the nobility of that of man, to which it did not feel it impossible to rise, it would prefer death which should put it on the way to that state, to life which held it fast in its present one. So the soul, compelled by its loftier thoughts, as if dead to the body, aspires upwards. Although living in the body, it "vegetates" there as dead--is present in it so far as animation is concerned, but absent from it in its proper action.[513] Thus the heroic soul, although present in the body, is absent from it with the better part of itself, and unites itself in an indissoluble bond with divine things. It feels neither love nor hatred of mortal things, considering itself too great to be the slave and servant of its body: the latter it regards simply as a prison-house within which its liberty is closed in; a snare that holds its wings entangled; a chain that binds its hands; fetters that hold its feet fast; a veil that bewilders its vision. Yet it is neither slave, nor captive, nor entangled, nor chained, nor held fast, bound nor blind, for the body cannot tyrannise over it further than itself allows. It has spirit allotted to it proportionally to its nearness to divinity, since the corporeal world and matter are subject to divinity and nature. So it may make itself strong against fortune, magnanimous against injustice, bold in face of poverty, disease, and persecution.[514] [Sidenote: The soul.] [Sidenote: Distraction of the body.]