It is, however, on the development of Spinoza's[637] thought that the most direct influence of Bruno can be shown. Sigwart[638] and Avenarius[639] have proved that in preparing the short treatise on "God, Man, and his Blessedness," Spinoza must have had the _Causa_ and _Infinito_ of Bruno almost before his eyes. The treatise consists of several parts which are more or less independent of one another, and which represent tentative approaches towards the finished Ethics; but it differs from the Ethics in the far greater prominence of the mystical, Neoplatonist element. Pollock suggests that it may have been his free-thinking teacher Dr. Van den Ende who introduced Spinoza to Bruno's writings: there is no external evidence of the acquaintanceship, but that, it is needless to say, is of slight importance. Spinoza certainly read Italian, and he practised in other cases the same neglect of authorities, of whose substance he was making use: it was indeed the custom of the time--there were few who followed Burton's example. There are certain general resemblances between the finished philosophies of the two authors, so far as Bruno can be said to have a finished philosophy. The first principle of both is the unity out of which all things spring, to which all return, and in which all have their true nature, or highest reality,--a unity with which both identify nature and spirit alike, and which is for both God. God is accordingly beyond the reach of all human knowledge; determination is negation, limit, by which the infinite is untouched. All attributes in God are one only, or none; thought is one with extension, love with intelligence; yet in strictness God is neither thought nor extension, intelligence nor love, or he is these in another than our human meaning. So far as this central thought is concerned, it is Bruno that is the deeper thinker. In him the _One_ is not a dead negation, in which real things are absorbed to the loss of all their reality and life, as it is with Spinoza: rather it is a living fountain, gushing forth in the infinite streams of living beings: the whole of nature is the expression of its own inward being. The One is in process; the whole, in which this process results, is a harmony every member of which has its own independent reality and worth, over against all others, as a manifestation of divinity. The life of the one is that of its members; all are necessary to it, as it to them. Carrière[640] indeed places Bruno above Spinoza as having found in the one a self-consciousness, a _subject_ infinite in that it knows itself and all things in itself, preserving all things, as necessary to its external enjoyment and love; while Spinoza is still within the bonds of _substance_--in God there is neither understanding nor will, in Him all difference vanishes, the modes are an illusion. So the Spinozistic parallelism between thought and matter finds its counterpart in Bruno,