 To explain how God, in his external aspect, articulated these differentiations, Bruno used Platonic concepts and themes. Ficino’s Christian Platonism was especially influential. God was a unity or undifferentiated plenitude of Ideas existing in him virtually. In this sense he was Mind. Dependent on him as Mind were: (a) the discrete Ideas unified in the Universal Intellect (see  Section 4);  and (b) the vestiges of the Ideas, that is, forms, which, in combination with sensible matter, produced corporeal things. Further, as Mind, he was also the supersubstantial principle of intelligence, contemplating the undifferentiated plenitude of Ideas within him in one timeless act. Dependent on him in this respect were intelligences of various kinds: (a) the Universal Intellect, which contemplated the discrete Ideas simultaneously as a unity; (b) disembodied intelligences, known conventionally as “separate intelligences”, which contemplated just one Idea absolutely; (c) embodied intelligences, a category that included the “principal bodies”, which, though embodied, contemplated God intellectively without the use of sense data and ratiocination, demons and human beings, both of whom used sense data and reason to attain intellection, and all other animals, even the simplest. Proof of this were animal instincts, as Ficino, too, had noted. Instincts were the presence of God as Mind working within them rather than, as scholastics typically held, powers that the stars instilled in them extraneously.