On the Threefold Minimum and Measure

CHAPTER III.

From what has just been said, it is concluded that death does not pertain to the substance of the body, and much less to the soul.

I Now, foolish one, fear the threats of death and fate.
(They say the sacred words of the Samian parent original: "Samii... parentis"; a reference to Pythagoras of Samos, who taught the immortality and transmigration of the soul go unheard)
Go, tremble at the voices of fools, and let the dreams of the common crowd
strike a fatal terror into you, as if you were truly
nothing more than a composite thing consisting of these physical parts.
Does not the very mass of your body flow rapidly through changing time,
coming to you continually altered by parts newly
acquired from without, while the first parts pass away?
Is the matter of your body now the same,
10 in its parts or as a whole, as it was just a little while ago?
Did the same blood, flesh, and bone of the boy persist
into his youth? Are not all things different and foreign
to the grown man? Do not the limbs flow, and being renewed, cast off
their consumed appearance (just as the growth of nails and hair
is plain to the senses), while a single nature continues
at the center, in the middle of the heart; Bruno identifies the "center" or "monad" of the person as being located in the heart, acting as the unchanging governor of the shifting physical body
to which you refer all your governance, and in which you are one and the same,
no matter how many countless crowds of people and
arising accidents are constantly present around you with varying effect?
20 Know that that center is you yourself; it holds the middle,
the end, and all the parts, without having any parts itself;
its substance is a body either minimal, or no body at all, Here Bruno describes the soul/mind as a "minimum," an indivisible point of reality that acts as the anchor for the physical form
which no power of nature shall tear apart,
which lightning bolts do not reach: an atom that the point
of a flame cannot violate, just like the first-principles by which [all things exist]