Metaphysics

On Cause, Principle and Unity

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Giordano Bruno

1584

On Cause, Principle and Unity is Bruno's metaphysical masterwork: a dialogue developing his doctrine of the coincidence of opposites and his vision of the infinite One as the ultimate ground of all things. Also written in London in 1584, the dialogue draws heavily on Neoplatonism and on Nicholas of Cusa's concept of the coincidentia oppositorum — the coincidence of maximum and minimum, the finite and the infinite, in the absolute. Bruno argues that all apparent opposites — matter and form, act and potency, the infinite and the finite — coincide in the One, which is the ultimate cause and principle of all things. The Soul of the World, operating through universal intellect and universal matter, produces the infinite variety of the world's forms. The dialogue is Bruno at his most systematic and rigorously philosophical, and it was among the texts most carefully scrutinised at his trial by the Inquisition.