As Bruno is the personification of martyrdom in the cause of
philosophical speculation, another Neapolitan philosopher of the age,
the Dominican TOMMASO CAMPANELLA (1568-1639) represents martyrdom for
the sake of country. Campanella is not only a less important figure
than Bruno, but less sane and practical. With all his extravagance,
Bruno is no visionary; if he sometimes appears obscure and confused,
the defect is not in the brain, but in the tongue. Campanella, though
endowed with profound ideas, was a visionary who based his hopes
of delivering his country from the Spanish yoke on predictions of
the millennium, to be fulfilled by the advent of the Turks, and was
sufficiently paradoxical to dream of a perfect republic in the kingdom
of Naples. But this alliance of mental unsoundness with extraordinary
intelligence renders him deeply interesting; unlike the frank and
candid Bruno, he is one of the _problematische Naturen_ who, as Goethe
justly says, perpetually attract mankind. The flower of his life
(1599-1625) was spent in prison, and some of it in torture, on account
of a conspiracy which, after all the investigations of Signor Amabile,
remains in many respects obscure, but which was undoubtedly designed to
free Naples from the yoke, not only of Spain, but of Rome.
Released at length, Campanella successively found an asylum at Rome
and at Paris, where he died in 1639. As his captivity became milder,
he had been permitted to write, and to receive visits from friends,
through whom his works found their way to the public. They are mostly
of a political character. The chief, _De Sensu et Magia Naturali_, is
a curious blending of philosophy and occultism; another, a defence of
Galileo, does him honour, even though he afterwards changed his view;
but another, _De Monarchia Universali_, seeks to revive the mediæval
idea of the universal Church and the universal Empire, substituting
Spain for Germany. Until the rediscovery of his poems, his literary
reputation principally rested upon one of his slightest productions,
his _City of the Sun_, an Utopian picture of a perfect community. It
contains a remarkable anticipation of the steamboat: “They possess
rafts and triremes which go over the waters without rowers or the force
of the wind, but by a marvellous contrivance. And other vessels they
have which are moved by the winds.”
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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