The soul of man, in Bruno's psychology, as in Aristotle's, performs a double function:--"the one is to vivify and actuate the body, and the other to contemplate the higher world. It has a receptive faculty towards the spiritual, an active faculty towards the corporeal. Body is as dead, a thing privative towards the soul, which is its life and perfection, and the soul is as dead, a thing privative to the higher illuminating intelligence from which its intellect derives both its tendency or nature, and its actual form, its realisation."[515] The soul is not locally in the body, but is related to it as intrinsic form, and as extrinsic giver of form: moulding the members, and giving shape to the composite result from within and from without. "Body is in soul, soul in mind, and mind either _is_, or is _in_ God, as Plotinus said."[516] The dualism of nature and divinity, of corporeal and spiritual, intellect and sense, permeates the ethical as it permeates the earlier philosophical thought of Bruno: nowhere is the Neoplatonist effort to overcome the dualism inherent both in Plato and in Aristotle less effective than here. Thus the body remains--in spite of the continuity seemingly maintained between the highest and the lowest of the emanations from the supreme, or the identity asserted between sense, imagination, reason, intellect,--the chief hindrance to the aspiration of the soul. For the body is in continual movement, change, alteration, and its faculties are conditioned by its inherent nature, its operations by its faculties. "How then can immobility, subsistence, entity, truth, be understood by that which is always different from itself, always acting and becoming in different ways? What truth, what representation can be depicted or impressed when the pupils of the eyes are dispersed into water, the water into vapour, the vapour into flame, the flame into air--that into other things and again other, the object of sense and sense-knowledge passing endlessly through the infinite cycle of changes?" Thought and passion take their character from their object, or the sense-data on which they are based: but "that which has always before it now one thing now another, now in one way now in another, must necessarily be quite blind in regard to that beauty which is always one, and in one manner, which is unity itself, entity, identity."[517]