with whom all that is thought, all that is possible, is also real, or
actual, _i.e._ has extended or material existence. It is true that
this conception is much more precisely expressed in Spinoza, with his
clean-cut distinction between the world of body and the world of mind
or ideas, to which the possible belongs, but it was a distinction
which he could not consistently uphold; on the other hand, the
universal animism, the doctrine that to every material thing or event
there corresponds a spiritual reality or process, which is only the
other side of the parallelism of soul and body, is more clearly and
vigorously defended by the earlier philosopher. The natural and the
spiritual, matter and form, are not two principles, or elements which
combine to produce a given result, or which harmonise with one another:
they are one and the same thing, and their truth is their life, their
soul, their thought. Bruno was in earnest with his animism, as his
confident belief in magical correlations showed.[641]
From their principles both derived a conviction of the necessity[642]
and of the goodness of all things, but it is Bruno rather than Spinoza
who attempted to reconcile individual liberty with determinism in the
universe as a whole, and individual moral responsibility with the
necessary goodness of the all. The corresponding relativity of evil,
the fallacy of "fortune" or "chance" (as anything but "uncertainty" of
the finite mind), were already asserted by Bruno, and his ideas as to
the relation between the religion of the Church, or the teaching of the
Bible, and the investigations of science, are precisely those which
Spinoza adopts.
[Sidenote: The short tractate.]
[Sidenote: Ratio.]
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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