The influence of Hegel is to be seen in the _Bruno_, _or on the Divine and Natural Principle of Things_, published in 1802. It is a dialogue, in form closely modelled after the _Timaeus_ of Plato, dealing with the old theme of the relation of art (poesy) and philosophy, and with the eternal creation of the universe. It presents philosophy as a higher than Art; for while Art achieves only an individual truth and beauty, philosophy cognises truth and beauty in its essence and actuality (_an und für sich_). Philosophy itself Bruno (the chief speaker of the dialogue) does not profess to set forth, but 'only the ground and soil on which it must be built up and carried out': and that soil is 'the Idea of something in which all antitheses are not so much combined, as rather one, and not so much superseded, as rather not at all parted,'--'a unity, in which unity and antithesis, the self-similar with the dissimilar, are one[1].' From such a standpoint it is not wonderful that 'in the finite understanding (_Verstand,_) compared with the supreme Idea and the way in which all things are in it, everything seems reversed, and as if standing on its head, exactly like the things we see mirrored on the surface of water[2].'
This supreme Unity is essentially a trinity: an Eternal, embracing infinite and finite; an eternal and invisible father of all things, who, never issuing forth from his eternity, comprehends infinite and finite in one and the same act of divine knowledge. The infinite, again, is the Spirit, who is the unity of all things; while the finite, though potentially equal to the infinite[3], is by its own will a God suffering and made subject to the conditions of time[4]. This trinity in unity (which is the Absolute) is by logic--a mere science of understanding--rent asunder: and the one Subject-object of philosophy becomes for reflection and understanding the three independent objects which such a 'logical' philosophy calls respectively the Soul (erewhile the infinite), the world (once the finite), and God (the eternal unity). 'Opposing and separating the world of intelligence from the world of nature, men have learned to see nature outside God, and God outside nature, and withdrawing nature from the holy necessity, have subordinated it to the unholy which they name mechanical, while by the same act they have made the ideal world the scene of a lawless liberty. At the same time as they defined nature as a merely passive entity, they supposed they had gained the right of defining God, whom they elevated above nature, as pure activity, utter "actuosity," as if the one of these concepts did not stand and fall with the other, and none had truth by itself[5].'