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Thinking about Giordano Bruno again, and about how many of his ideas were hundreds of years ahead of their time (e.g. the infinity of worlds), and how many were just plain nuts (e.g. God living inside atoms).
I guess he had to close his universe somehow, complete the circle. I am reminded of the similar circle drawn by Annie Dillard in "Holy the Firm", between the immanent and the emanent:
"...the world creates itself, by the gradual positing of, and belief in, a series of bright ideas. Time and space are in touch with Absolute at base . . . Matter and spirit are ‘of a piece’ but distinguishable"
Dillard's ideas are very much like Bruno's.
It occurs to me that this necessity for a theoretical framework to be totalizing is characteristic of the sort of pre- or proto-scientific natural philosophy that Bruno represents.
If your theory doesn't explain everything, then it's not a theory. I have noticed that a lot of philosophers still think this way, and you can almost feel Bruno straining to transcend it.
Modern science finally took off once this requirement of totality was abandoned, and it became acceptable to focus on explanations of specific phenomena in relative isolation. Because it works better.
It is interesting in this regard that there are segments of theoretical physics which are straining to return to this idea of a totalizing philosophy, just as much as Bruno was straining, without fully realizing, to escape it.
