other founders of religion, that they had been mortal human beings. What men adored was not Jupiter, as a divine being, but divinity, as expressed in Jupiter: in this or that man were worshipped the name and symbol of a divinity which in their birth communicated itself to men, and with their death was thought to have completed its work and to have returned to heaven.[562] But divinity is communicated not only through these divinely chosen human vessels, but through earth, and sun, and moon, the planets, the stars, and all that is in them: one divinity under innumerable names, according to the innumerable modes in which it is diffused. Endlessly varied also are the methods by which it must be sought, under conditions appropriate to each thing, while it must be honoured and worshipped with endlessly different rites, because the kinds of favour we seek to obtain from it are beyond number. Later religions had transformed for the worse what to the Egyptians was merely a fable or metaphor, by which a mystery above the reach of sense was expressed, or presented to the mind in a sign or symbol.[563] [Sidenote: The finite and the infinite.] How Bruno understood the relation of the finite human soul to the divine mind, or to the soul of the universe, it is not easy to determine, and it is doubtful whether he ever made it clear to himself. Men, as natural beings, enter into the determinate order of _Nature_, which, as we have seen, is the divine power that moves matter to life. This divine power is the soul in all things, everywhere "one mundane spirit, wholly in the whole and in every part of it, producing all things in each according to the conditions of matter, time, and place." Men, for example, are not descended from one parent only, but have come to life in the ordinary course of nature, in different places and at different times; hence the difference between the races.[564] We have seen that Bruno also reverts repeatedly to the idea that various men present in their expressions various animal characters, which are an index to their inward nature, and at the same time point to a transition from a previous or towards a future state.[565] And again it was shown how animals differed from men not necessarily in degree or quality of mind, but only in the outward organism through which alone the mind could express itself. It is clear then that man should have no higher place than any other animal, should stand no nearer God than they; yet in a sense he does, for the human state appears to be the only one from which the soul may raise itself out of the incessant flow of earthly vicissitude, and enjoy the calm of eternal intellectual union with God.[566] The soul of any animal (or plant?) may in time, however, take the body of a man, when this outlet is given to it, just as that of a man, should he refuse his opportunity, may sink back, and indeed must sink back, to the animal state, in the never-ceasing cycle of change.