 Bruno’s Platonic interpretation of God’s exitus accounts for his celebrated dictum “Nature is God in things” (BOI II, 354; BOL I.2, 151; I.4, 101). Nicholas of Cusa probably inspired the formula. In a work that Bruno knew, Nicholas identified Plato’s World Soul with Aristotle’s concept of Nature, before concluding that “the World Soul or Nature was no less than God operating in all things” (The Layman: On the Mind, XIII.145). Bruno’s comments on God and Nature independently of the dictum agree with this sense. “God determined and ordered; Nature executed and produced” (BOL I.3, 136; similarly BOI II, 660). Nature was the Universal Soul/Intellect acting as the efficient cause (see  Section 4) “within natural things” (BOI I, 598; BOL II.2, 176). It was the act of generation that “divided” matter (BOI II, 147), operating within it non-discursively, unlike art, as Ficino (Platonic Theology, IV.1) had observed, which operated discursively on material from without (BOI I, 680–682: BOL I.2, 312). The idea that plants and animals were the “living effects of Nature”, that “Nature was God in things”, had led the ancient Egyptians to worship images of the gods in the form of animals. Each living thing, in addition to its intrinsic being, incorporated something divine from the gods “according to its capacity and measure” (BOI II, 354–355). The “Egyptian” inspiration for Bruno’s comments in this instance was a passage in Ficino’s paraphrase of On the Mysteries of the Egyptians (VII.1-3) in which Iamblichus distinguished God as the cause of generation, Nature, from God in himself.