distinguishing, defining, separating from other things, but He is above all difference, otherness, diversity, multitude[603]; or again, all names, all predicates, attributes, are equally true of Him, because He comprises all in Himself. It is in this sense that He is _Monad_ of _Monads_, _entity_ of _entities_, "in whom are all things, who is in none, not even in Himself, because He is indivisible, and is simplicity itself."[604] Bruno's philosophical religion is in the end a theism, but theism of a purely intellectual or rationalist type. The natural world is after all nothing over against God who subsists in absolute simplicity--as Mind; in absolute immobility, changelessness--as Intellect (the World of Ideas); in absolute perfection, self-sufficiency, and self-satisfaction--as Love, or Holy Spirit. Over against this self-contained Trinity, the changing and passing world is a _non-ens_: as _it_ changes not, neither can it know change: to know change would be a change in itself--its knowledge is as immutable, as simple as itself. "Although we see things come into being that before were not, and the world itself, as is believed, was produced out of nothing--a new thing, yet from this change and novelty of effects, no change in His action or power can be inferred, for He exists above all motion and all vicissitude, an unchanging agent in eternity; not as artificers, or material principles, moved by changing dispositions to new willing, new faculty, new effects, but from the instant of eternity, above time and above change, He creates all that which becomes in time, in change, in motion, in vicissitude. Before and above time and motion there is not always time and motion, but there we find divinity, immutable and invariable. He has from eternity willed that to be which now is." "There liberty makes necessity, necessity attests liberty."[605] "Past is not past to it (the First Intelligence), nor future future, but the whole of eternity is present to it as one whole, all together, in its completeness."[606] Seldom, even in recent idealist philosophy, has the World of Ideas maintained its hold so powerfully over a mind whose whole trend was towards a naturalistic interpretation of things. The religious instinct dominates to the last Bruno's thought; these passages are from the very latest of his works. Each and all of his speculations on nature, on its elements, its individuals, its general laws, bring him back to the all-embracing Mind, in which nature has its source, but which nature by no means exhausts. So his speculations on the nature of man, on the moral life, on the inspiration of the artist and of the generous human soul, the hunter after truth, point again to a thought, a world above nature, revealed neither capriciously nor yet to the natural faculties of the seeker, but to a divinely implanted power of intuitive insight. It was an attempt, more consistent perhaps and more thorough than any other has been, to combine the independence