God as springing from the knowledge of God; the correspondence between the degrees or stages of love and those of knowledge; the inability of our minds to rest in a finite object or finite good, the constant pressure onwards towards other and other objects; the contrast between sensible love and intellectual love; God as the highest, most complete object, the knowledge of Him above and embracing in itself all other knowledge, making the knower one with his object, transforming him into God himself; the divine Harmony in the soul which ensues; the love of God which is man's highest blessedness, which is wholly disinterested, and blind to all earthly good or beautiful things; love which is unlimited in its possibility, as its object is infinite: with this limitless possibility of Love is the idea of immortality connected; but "Bruno deduces from the immortality of man the possibility of a love which increases infinitely; while for Spinoza, on the contrary, the infinitely increasing love of God is a ground of proof for immortality."[646] When there is added to these many instances of doctrines in Spinoza's earlier work which were later modified in the direction of greater rigidity and mechanical systematisation, the fact that the _Tractate_ embraces two tentative dialogues, in one of which Spinoza is represented by a Theophilus (as Bruno in so many of his dialogues is represented), it is impossible not to feel convinced that Spinoza for a period of his life at least was a follower of Bruno. It is true that many of these ideas are not the property of Bruno alone, but of the school of Neoplatonism of which he like Spinoza was at any rate a partial adherent, but nowhere else than in Bruno is to be found the same "collocation" of these ideas as occur in this tractate of Spinoza. It is an open question whether the movement of the latter away from the Italian's philosophy was entirely a progressive, and not in some respects a retrograde movement. [Sidenote: Leibniz.]