to reduce to the dead level of politeness. Neither,' he says, have we stopt his foul mouth where he hath either used ill language toward any of the Protestant Princes, or cast dirt into the faces of the first Reformers, Luther, Calvin, etc. For to what end should we falsifie our original by making ' our author more civil than he has a mind to be? seeing we are never a whit the worse for being so miscalled by him; nor is he himself a jot the wiser for using us so. And to say the truth, we ourselves take the same liberty towards them: and therefore, for ought I see,

Hanc veniam petimusque, damusque, vicissim.'

'We must even be content to allow each other this liberty on 'both sides.'

The City of the Sun' belongs to a class of compositions which may be fairly characterised by applying to them the remark of the Duke of Athens on the lamentable comedy' of Peter Quince: The best in this kind are but shadows, and the worst are no worse, if imagination amend them.' The modes of life described in the Republic,' Utopia, City of 'the Sun,'' New Atlantis,'' Oceana,' et id genus omne, flatter the fancy less, and satisfy the reason no more, than the conditions of existence discovered by Lemuel Gulliver as prevailing in the empire of Lilliput and the kingdom of Laputa. Campanella avowedly imitated Sir Thomas More, as Sir Thomas More had imitated Plato-the prototype of socialist reformers—nor can we say that the ideal of the Italian philosopher was an advance upon that of the English Chancellor. The more repulsive features of communism, which had disappeared from the Utopian commonwealth, were revived in the island of Taprobana; and the sober rule of the Ademus, or Prince of Utopia, which, equally impracticable, seems less intolerable than the metaphysical sway of Hoh, the Pontifex Maximus of the Solar City. Campanella, in his turn, had a host of imitators and successors. Harrington's Oceana' was, in Hume's opinion, the only model republic worth attention. He wrote during the Protectorate of Cromwell-a circumstance which gave occasion to Montesquieu's witty comment, qu'il n'a cherché cette liberté qu'après l'avoir méconnue, et qu'il a bâti Chalcédoine avant le rivage de Byzance devant • les yeux.' Fénelon followed with his Salente,' and Rétif de la Bretonne with the Découverte australe d'un homme volant;' while Morelly in his Basiliade' and 'Code de la

* Esprit des Lois, livre xi. chap. vi.

Nature,' laid down the principles from which sprang Proudhon's famous paradox, and prepared the way for the modern attempts of Robert Owen, St. Simon, and Fourier.

In Campanella may be said to have closed the transition period of philosophy, with its dazzling aspirations, its errors, its inconsequence, its headlong audacity. Modern science was already provided with its vade mecum in the Novum Organum,' and modern thought had already assumed a consistent shape in theDiscours de la Méthode.' Descartes' momentous littlel treatise was printed at Leyden almost simultaneously with the appearance at Paris of the new and elaborate edition of Cam-1 panella's writings, to the preparation of which he devoted the last years of his life. It would have been difficult for him to believe that his labours, represented by so many stately folios, were annulled by the publication of one insignificant quarto. But a voluminous code may be repealed in a single sentence. And Campanella's works were well-nigh obsolete before they saw the light. It would be an unprofitable expenditure of time to attempt anything like a complete analysis of his philosophical opinions. They form a chaos, in the loud misrule' of which anticipation wrestles with reminiscence, credulity with doubt, mysticism with axioms of experimental science. The initial principle of more than one future system revealed itself to him; but his conclusions were vitiated by extravagance, or interrupted by discontinuity. He was a brilliant and impetuous, but not a profound or consistent thinker. He was capable of explicitly denying in one sentence that which he implicitly admitted in the next. His Christian convictions saved him from many errors and absurdities; but they did not, and they could not, mend his logic. A second-rate French encyclopædist honoured him with the flippant remark qu'il n'avait pas assez d'esprit pour être athée;' it would be nearer the truth to say, in the words used by a German writer towards his master Telesius: Um der Wahrheit willen wird er inconsequent.' The conception of an all-wise and omnipotent Creator, speaking to mankind through the twofold channel of Revelation and of Nature, was the one fundamental idea underlying all his thinking, which lent a certain lofty grandeur to his speculations-which corrected his aberrations, and redeemed his self-love. It is true that his theory of cognition led him unawares to the very brink of materialism, and, if he escaped the plunge, it was not

เ

* Moriz Carrière, 'Die philosophische Weltanschauung der Reformationszeit,' p. 762.

6

without paying a price for his safety. Human individuality was virtually sacrificed by his admission of a perceptive, thinking soul, or nerve-spirit '-literally a 'sensitive, warm 'motion-perishing with the extinction of animal life, as an adjunct of the immortal, immaterial principle, infused by Divine power from on high. This doctrine of the duality of the soul was held by the Manichæans, refuted by St. Augustine, rejected on his authority by the schoolmen, revived by Telesius, and borrowed from him by our great English reformer. Pantheistic echoes, too, of Alexandrian and Moorish teachings not unfrequently mingled with the strains of Campanella's philosophy, although he was himself profoundly unconscious of holding views tending in that direction. But, as we have seen, his internal logic was of a very peculiar order. It permitted him to be at once a transcendentalist and an experimentalist; it permitted him to anticipate Descartes' theory of self-consciousness and Locke's theory of sensation; it permitted him to begin at both ends at the same time-to argue downwards from the primalities of being,' and upwards from the evidence of the senses along paths losing themselves equally in trackless metaphysical wildernesses.

His physical notions were those of Telesius, developed in the forcing-house of his imagination, from an extravagant hypothesis into a fantastic mythology.

The opinions of Telesius,' Bacon wrote,†' might indeed have some appearance of probability, if man were taken out of 'nature together with the mechanical arts which try matter, and if we simply looked to the fabric of the world. For it is a kind of pastoral philosophy which placidly, and as it were ' at ease, contemplates the world.'

A very few words will suffice to sketch broadly the ideas entertained by Campanella as to the fundamental constitution of the universe. An unformed mass of matter was, he held, created in the beginning, and delivered over to the antagonistic operations of two rival forces-heat and cold-which, obedient to the primeval mandate of the Creator, evolved out of chaos, in the process of their contention, all the existing variety of visible objects. The sun, the focus of heat and love, continually draws nearer to the earth, the central seat of cold and hatred, and will eventually vanquish and consume it. The

* De Augmentis, iv. 3. See also Mr. Ellis's General Preface to Bacon's Philosophical Works,' pp. 49–56, vol, i. of Spedding's edition. De Principiis atque Originibus secundum Fabulas Cupidinis et

Cœli.

planets, too, seek by various strategical evolutions to circumvent and destroy their common Tellurian enemy-now approaching, now receding, now advancing, now retrograding. Bacon complains that Telesius (whom he nevertheless qualifies as the best of the innovators') instituted a fanciful and • evidently unequal contest between his elements in action, whether as regards their forces or their kind of war. For, as to their forces, the earth is alone, but the heaven has a great army; the earth is as a little speck, the heaven hath its im'mense and unlimited regions.'

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Not the least singular of Campanella's literary adventures was that he, to whom the physical universe thus presented itself under the aspect of a vast pantomime, should have composed an Apology for Galileo.' The treatise in question, written, at the request of Cardinal Gaetani, during his imprisonment, defends the new opinions against theological objections in a very methodical and convincing style. Veritas,' he says, 'veritati non contradicet.' Nevertheless, he himself remained unconvinced. After a considerable period of hesitation, he recurred, on Galileo's retractation, with evident satisfaction, to his original views. He was, however, no blind contemner of new lights. In his old age he sought an interview with Descartes at the cost of a journey to Holland, where the Breton philosopher looked for a life in harmony with his favourite maxim, Qui bene latuit, bene vixit.' Gilbert's treatise, De Magnete,' was the object of his careful study, and he qualified its author as sagax explorator;' while his fifth rule for rightly philosophising' runs as follows:- Should any proposition appear to you impossible, such as that the sun remains fixed in the centre, while the earth rotates, do not instantly qualify and hold it as inadmissible; but rather reserve your assent until you shall have extracted the truth from evidence gathered in every direction.' (De Libris propriis.)

But his glimpses of a sound method were rendered nugatory by his fundamental inability to form a right conception of physical cause. Sympathy and antipathy were for him the governing powers of the universe. Without the mutual love and hate of its component parts, the world would, he maintained, revert to its original chaos. From the maxim, Nihil in effectibus, quod non in causis,' he drew a conclusion diametrically opposite to that reached by Descartes. The French thinker supposed the animal creation to be as inanimate as the elements from which it seemed to be derived. The Italian, on the contrary, argued that all matter must to some extent par

VOL. CXLIX. NO. CCCV.

M

take of the sensibility evident in the living creatures formed from it. Nor can we see that this great problem of life is much nearer to a solution now than when men's thoughts first began to be busy with it. Campanella's theory of universal animation was, on different grounds, held by a philosopher of some eminence in the present century, the Abate Rosmini; while a well-known German biologist, Dr. Ernst Haeckel, does not shrink from proclaiming that the opposition formerly 'established between the vital and non-vital worlds can,' in the light of the philosophy of evolution, no longer be maintained; that the flash of an idea and the thrill of imagination are processes equally mechanical with the fall of a stone; and that all natural substances are, as we may please to view it, similarly living or similarly dead.* Such views are best left to refute themselves.

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The unreasoning credulity which formed, so to speak, the wrong side of Campanella's mental fabric, becomes strikingly apparent as he dwells upon and exemplifies his favourite thesis of elemental vitality. Not even space itself, he argues ( De 'Sensu rerum,' cap. xii.), can be considered inanimate, since we see it draw to itself substances, and abhor a vacuum; and the whole universe formed in his eyes an organic whole-' a great and perfect animal'-sensitive in all its parts, rejoicing in the life of its various members, and shunning their separation. This vast organism he provided with a soul-the Platonic world-soul-the 'active intelligence' of Plotinusand he conceived every human being to be endowed with at power of natural prophecy or divination, due to participation in this cosmical essence. This singular opinion, it may be added, by no means hindered his belief in a higher source of revelation.

We cannot better illustrate the value of experience in his hands than by detailing a few of the facts or fables by which he sought to confirm his views as to the mutual attractions and repulsions of natural objects. A drum covered with sheep's skin resounds, he informs us, when one composed of a wolf's hide is struck in its neighbourhood. It was on this principle that a dying Hussite commanded that his skin should be formed into a drum, in order that what remained of him after death might still serve to intimidate his enemies. The old adage (which, however, had not then, so far as we know, attained its proverbial status), Hair of the dog good for the bite,' was found by Campanella to be not only literally true,

Natürliche Schöpfungsgeschichte, p. 21.