ABSTRACT
The conception of a world soul and of all substantial existents as ensouled became a prominent feature of Renaissance thought, exemplified in the leading thinkers, such as Paracelsus, Fracastoro, Cardano, Scaliger, Telesio, Patrizzi, Giordano Bruno, and Kepler. Bruno thus embraced all the tendencies which we have noted in Scholastic thought to the enhancement of the status of matter and carried them through. The change from medieval thought was mediated by the re-emergence of Neoplatonism in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. It has been already dealt with Nicolaus Cusanus in different context as a crucial thinker in the new development of thought; in the present context he is of equal significance. For in respect of the issue with which we are here it was the Neoplatonic emanationist theory which was of determinative consequence. The infinite being of God is contracted to the universe; in this contraction, form, which in God is infinite, is contracted to the spiritus mundi, the world soul.
