 We arrive, then, at the intriguing conclusion that Nature, in this second sense, was God in his extrinsic aspect. “Nature is either God or the divine virtue manifested in things themselves” (BOL I.4, 101). Given, moreover, that God, despite having an inner and outer aspect, was one being, in some sense he must as a whole be within things. God was separate from us in one respect but, “as the nature of Nature”, was “more intimate” to His effects than Nature itself (BOI II, 363; similarly BOL I.4, 73; III, 41). Or conversely, God was “separate from all things” in the sense that “he was present in them in a more exalted mode”, not in the sense that he was “absent” from them (BOL III, 51). Bruno was, as we have  seen (see Section 4), wary of applying spatial metaphors to intelligibilia, which were by definition dimensionless. Yet, like many a philosopher or theologian before him, he was happy to use them when it suited. God or Mind or Nature was both “outside” and “within” all things, “above” them and “beneath” them, “extrinsic” and “intrinsic”, and so forth (BOL I.2, 342; I.3, 147; III, 40–41, 509).