[Sidenote: Optimism.] It follows also from this aspect of Bruno's philosophy, that as all things are divine, so all are good. The forms of all living things--men, animals, metals, even those of deformed creatures--are beautiful and perfect in heaven (_i.e. sub specie aeternitatis_).[573] All things being subordinated to the will of the best, everything is good, and tends towards good; the contrary is only apparent when we refuse to look beyond the present, as the beauty of a building is not manifest to one who sees only a part of it, a stone, a piece of cement, a partition wall, but is clearest to one who can see the whole, and is able to compare part with part.[574] [Sidenote: The worth of the finite individual.] But there is another aspect of Bruno's theory of the relation of the finite individual soul to the universal spirit, according to which every finite thing has an infinite worth from the very fact of its existence as a member, or part of the universe. It is in this phase, later in time than the other, but never completely dissociated from it, that the real contribution of Bruno to the history of philosophy appears. It is foreshadowed in the _Heroici Furori_,[575] where the pursuit of an infinite object by a finite intelligence is justified from the infinite potentiality of the latter, as eternal and unlimited in its capacity for delight and blessedness. The infinite desire is itself a pledge of its fulfilment in an eternal life.[576] The individual, finite as it is, must realise in itself the whole nature of the universe to which it belongs; each thing, each substance or monad, realises in the course of its life all other possible existences. Each takes on successively all possible forms, just as at every moment all possible forms are actually realised in the universe as a whole. Each thing, and every part of each, present to us the "similitude," the image of the universe. It is precisely the thought which afterwards loomed so largely in the philosophy of Leibniz, that each monad is a mirror of the universe. The _transmigration_ of the earlier philosophy appears in a far nobler light in this phase. The soul of man does not change in itself as it passes through its innumerable forms; now it is endowed with the "instruments" or members of the human body; anon it will take up the members of another body; "for the soul which has now the bodily organs of a horse there await the bodily members of a man and of all other kinds of being, in regular series, or in confused order; the death of the present members has no bearing upon the future life and its innumerable forms. The soul would not suffer if this were known to it; the wise soul does not fear death, sometimes desires it, and goes to meet it. Before every substance lies eternity for duration, immensity for place, omniformity for realisation."[577] The soul is not limited to the earth alone, but has the infinite worlds before it, for its dwelling-place. It is owing to this individual