 Bruno’s next step was Presocratic rather than Platonic. All cognitive acts, in whatever animal or indeed separate intelligence, were instantiations of a single cognitive power deriving from the Universal Intellect and ultimately, therefore, from God as Mind. Bruno cited Presocratic philosophers to support this idea and related it to Parmenides’s concept of the One Being and the accidental nature of all things dependent on it. Two unconventional conclusions followed. First, the form that this single cognitive power took depended on the bodily shape that it inhabited. For example, contradicting Aristotle (On the Parts of Animals, IV.10, 687a7–23), Bruno observed that the hands determined the kind of intelligence that human beings enjoyed. Second, no particular bodily shape, human, demonic or otherwise, was a privileged outlet for the expression of the single cognitive power. Just as some animals had a better sense of smell or sight than others, so, too, some were more intelligent than others in certain respects. Ants were more intelligent than human beings in the way in which they organized their communal lives (BOL I.4, 119). By means of their individual cognitive powers all things identified how best to preserve themselves and acted accordingly. Even supposedly inanimate things observed this principle and so showed traces of intelligence. “Whatever exists in some way knows in some way” (BOL I.4, 112, 118). A stone held aloft sought to return downwards to the earth because that was where it was in its optimal condition. It observed the law of gravity (see  Section 3). Collectively the individual cognitive acts of the infinite number of things were the means whereby the Universal Soul/Intellect bound the universe to its source, God. This impulse to adhere to him—Love on a cosmic scale—ensured that the universe, having gone forth from God (his exitus), preserved themselves by their impulse to return to him (his reditus).