Page:Mind (Old Series) Volume 9.djvu/274

262 THOMAS WHITTAKEB : Sometimes, however, the end of the aspiration of the eroico furioso is spoken of as if its attainment were possible. It is then called " beatitude," and is said to consist in trans- formation or absorption into the object contemplated. Beati- tude is also represented, in at least one place, as accompanying complete virtue. The doctrine of Epicurus is interpreted in the sense that virtue and the divine or heroic love are imper- fect unless a feeling of happiness has been joined to them which no evil is able to take away. 1 It is to be observed that the use of the word ' matter ' in the dialogues that have just been considered differs from the use of the same word in Delia Causa. Matter, in the Eroici Furori, instead of being described as that which produces from itself forms which it contains implicitly, is described in the manner of the Platonists, as that which impedes the ascent of the spirit. Bruno was not unconscious of this difference. He suggests the explanation of it himself in the dedication of the Eroici Furori, and in other places. It is a difference of expression that is explained by his doctrine of " the circle of ascent and descent ". The forms that are emerging from " all-productive matter " seem to themselves to be impeded by it, because of the necessity they are under of passing through intermediate forms before reaching those that are highest. And the forms that are descending in the scale of being seem to themselves to be obeying an attraction towards " a less good," when they lose in the multiplicity of " the imagination " the unity of " the mind ". If, on the other hand, the process of change is looked at as it were from the outside, it is seen that both the ascent and the descent of beings are deter- mined by " the necessity of an internal law ". Not only does the idea of two kinds of change undergone in perpetual alternation by all forms of things supply the explanation of differences of expression as regards ' matter ' that are met with in Bruno's works, but, as has been already indicated, the doctrines of the ' soul of the world ' and of the absolute mind or intellect, which have been supposed by some to belong to different stages of his thought, are united by this idea. The theory of metempsychosis which is de- veloped chiefly in the Eroici Furori, but which appears also in the Spaccio and in the Cabala del Cavallo pegaseo, is in part an expression of this idea in the form of a kind of philo- sophic myth. At the same time a concrete form is given to 1 Wagner, ii., pp. 366-7.