the monad spirits, and its infinity into indefiniteness. The God of Leibniz, even as the highest of the monads, is separate from, apart from, the other monads--a finite along with other finites. So each of the ordinary monads is a world by itself, shut up within itself, with no windows from which it can look out upon the world, and _really_ be affected by what is passing without it. There is _no_ without--each is, in a word, _God_, and so far as it is concerned there may be no other being in existence. Bruno, on the contrary, was fully conscious--at times--of the necessity of holding the balance between the infinite unity of God and the finite units or realities, which are the expression, the manifestation, the self-revelation of the one. Why this revelation? he does not indeed ask; but given it as actual, he finds the reconciliation in it at once of the necessity of the whole and the liberty of the unit, the goodness of the all and the moral frailty of the individual.[647] Interesting as this speculative comparison of the two philosophies may be, there is not, however, even the slightest ground for attributing any direct historical influence of Bruno upon Leibniz. If influence occurred at all--which is doubtful--it was through Spinoza or some of the minor philosophical writings of the time. Lacroze (in a letter of 1737) accused Leibniz of "having drawn his whole system" from Bruno's book _De Maximo et Minimo_ (_sic!_): he added that he had told Leibniz this fact himself, both by word of mouth and in writing, and that the reason why so few had noticed it was that the philosophical writings of Bruno were obscure and repellent. The same suggestion has been repeatedly made since--more especially as regards the name "_Monad_," which Leibniz, after much searching and deliberation, gave to his "real unities" from 1696 onwards.[648] Brunnhofer goes so far as to see both the ideas and the main formulas of Leibniz in Bruno--the monad-doctrines, monads as living mirrors of the universe, as fulgurations of God, the Pre-established Harmony--the future as involved in the present, "the present is pregnant with the future,"--the phenomenality of sense-objects--God as the highest monad, etc. He argues that Leibniz derived his idea that "the monads have no windows by which anything can enter or depart" from casual remarks by Bruno as to the "windows of the soul," "the gates of the senses" by which images enter in, or "the chinks and holes" by which we gaze outwards upon the world. The _coup de grâce_ was given to this legend, for so we must call it, by Ludwig Stein in his _Leibniz und Spinoza_.[649] He showed that Leibniz was already in full possession of the _idea_ of the monad at least ten years before he found the most fitting expression for it, and that after 1696 he used the word "Monad" always as the distinctive badge or typical name for his substances or forces; that before 1700 he knew of Bruno only one of the Lullian