Bruno extols the greatness of this discovery--"Considering it physically, mathematically, morally, one sees that the philosopher who saw into the coincidence of contraries made a discovery of the highest importance, and that the magician who knows to seek it where it is is no feeble practician."[227] Yet, although he made use of the same geometrical illustrations, and believed himself to be substantially following Cusanus, his theory was widely different. The coincidence springs in Bruno, not from the limitations of the human mind, but from the fulness of the Divine nature. It is not in God as the transcendent unknowable Being that the coincidence inheres, but in the infinite universe as one with God, which is in itself at once the greatest and the least, the maximum and the minimum. Since nature is permeated by God, in everything, in the least of things, is God the greatest; the least _is_ the greatest, has in it the nature of the whole, and so, too, the greatest is the least. In Bruno it is a _pantheistic_, in the Cusan a _theistic_, doctrine. The same conception occurs again in its different meanings, when both compare God to an infinite circle in which centre and circumference are one; in Cusanus it is to our knowledge that He so appears, in Bruno He really _is_ infinite, and is with His whole nature at any point or centre, as well as in the whole, the circumference. [Sidenote: The Trinity.] With the Cusan the threefold nature of the Highest Being is deduced as a necessity of Reason: it is (1) _unity_ eternal; (2) _sameness_ or _equality_ eternal; and (3) the _union_ of unity and equality. As there cannot be three eternal and highest beings, these three are necessarily one--the Unity (the Father) produces or begets from itself the _same_ (the Son), and out of both springs their union (the Holy Ghost), yet each of these in the One is one and the same.[228] In the universe, the created world, there is also a Trinity, since it is a copy or reflection of the Divine. (1) _Possibility_ or _Matter_, the unlimited, indeterminate, but capable of being limited and determined, corresponds to the unity of the eternal; (2) _Actuality_, or _Form_, the limiting or determining something, that which limits, corresponds to the sameness or equality of the Eternal; and (3) the unifying _movement_ by which the possible receives actuality, matter receives form, implying a spirit of union, of Love, corresponds to the Absolute Union, the Holy Ghost.[229] At a later stage of his philosophy, however, the Cusan gave a second deduction of the Trinity.[230] God is both Absolute Possibility, Absolute Power or Potency (the Creative Word, the Son), and the union of both in Absolute Reality; yet these are merely different aspects or points of view of the Eternal Being. Again, God is the identity of knowing, or intellect, the knowable or intelligible (the Word), and love, as the inter-relation of each with each, the