[Sidenote: Method.] [Sidenote: _Omnia animata._] The false straining after simplicity of explanation, the tendency to seek for similarities rather than differences, to expect order on the surface rather than at the root of things, is condemned as vigorously by Bruno as by Bacon, although not placed in the forefront of the theory of method, as it is by the latter writer. One of the Idols of the Tribe was--"the tendency to suppose greater order and equality in things than is actually to be found; although in nature many things are _monodica_ (_i.e. monadica_, unique), and full of imparity, yet the mind feigns parallels, correspondences, relations which are not. Hence the erroneous idea, _e.g._ that 'in the heavens all things move in perfect circles,' rejecting utterly spiral lines and _dracones_ (except for the name): hence the element of fire and its sphere were introduced to constitute a _quaternio_ with the other three that were actually perceived by sense," etc.[618] These things were condemned also, and for the same reason, by Bruno, who, however, went further, and insisted on the uniqueness of every individual existence in the universe. Again Bacon retained (without, however, giving it a place in his philosophy) the scholastic distinction between divine or angelic, _intuitive_, knowledge, and the acquired piecemeal knowledge of man. "God, the inditer and worker of forms, and perhaps angels and (higher) intelligences, know forms immediately by affirmation, and from the beginning of their contemplation. But that is certainly above men to whom it is conceded only to advance in the beginning by negatives, to come to rest in the last place only, in affirmatives, after exclusion of every kind."[619] In Bruno the same distinction is drawn, but it is made also _within_ human knowledge, the intuitive knowledge of the heroic mind being the same in kind as that of the higher intelligences, and only different from that of God in that it does not _create_ what it intuits. So the scholastic distinction of _natura naturans_ as the form or immanent principle of things, and _natura naturata_ as the sum of things actually existing, the outward expression in matter of the activity of the form--a distinction which, in Bruno, is transcended by the identification of one with the other, as two aspects of a higher unity--also reappears in Bacon's theory of form. However different the "form" of Bacon may have seemed to himself from the scholastic "form," it is still the immanent cause of the properties of the body to which it belongs, or in which it adheres, and as such is actually named by Bacon the _natura naturans_.[620] So with Bacon, as with Bruno, Campanella, and Telesius, all things are endowed with life, with sensation, with soul, which is the inward principle of their external movements. He ridiculed Gilbert, who first suggested a scientific explanation of magnetism and electricity, and put forward on his own account as a theory of electrical attraction