soul of man in the body; still less did he identify it with God, as Bruno tended more and more to do. Hence he escaped the fantastical consequences of the belief in Universal Animism, which were drawn without reserve by the Renaissance writers--the consequence, _e.g._ that if one soul, one nature, pervades all things, and is the life of all things, then out of each may be produced any other--out of lead, gold, etc. On the other hand, the four elements at least were different forms of the same fundamental being, and might be produced each out of the other; and, in common with Bruno, Cusanus held the pre-Aristotelian belief in Atomism:--there cannot be division of anything, cube or surface, or line--_ad infinitum_; ultimately there must in each kind be a minimum,[233] an atom, beyond which we cannot _in fact_ go, although to _thought_ it may be still further divisible; so there is in every figure, in every kind of thing, a definite _number_ of atoms. It was partly this thought, partly also the mystical value from time immemorial given to the different numbers and geometrical figures, that led both Cusanus and Bruno to look to mathematics and geometry for the true method or organon of natural science. "Number is the natural and fruitful principle of the understanding's activity; irrational beings do not number. But number is nothing but the unfolding of the understanding. Without it the understanding would have none of the results to which it attains.... Nothing can exist before number, for all that goes beyond the simplest unity is in its fashion a composite, and, therefore, without number is unthinkable, for multitude, difference, and relation of parts arise from number."[234] In both again human knowledge proceeds inversely as creation (or emanation) from number, the many, back through successive grades of simplicity to the one highest, most simple, God, in whom are all things complicitly (without number). "What appears to us as after another, successive, is by no means after in Thy Thought, which is eternity itself. The single thought, which is Thy word, embraces (_complicat_) all and each in itself, Thy single word cannot be manifold, opposite, changeable.... In the eternity in which Thou thinkest, coincides all the _after another_ of time, with the _now_ of eternity. There is, therefore, no past nor future where future and past coincide with the present."[235] The merely logical understanding, that which is based upon sense and requires sense-images for its material, is inadequate to this highest knowledge, gives approximation merely, and we are thrown back upon mystical intuition on the one hand, reasoned faith on the other, for our insight into the true nature of the One and the All.[236] [Sidenote: Agrippa of Nettesheim.]