The mediæval scholastic philosophy had outlived itself, even in the pre-Reformation age; yet it maintained a lingering existence side by side with those new forms which the modern spirit in philosophy was preparing for itself. We hear an echo of the philosophical ferment of the sixteenth century in the Italian Dominican Campanella, and in the Englishman Bacon of Verulam we meet the pioneer of that modern philosophy which had its proper founder in Descartes. Spinoza, Locke, and Leibnitz were in succession the leaders of this philosophical development. Alongside of this philosophy, and deriving its weapons from it for attack upon theology and the church, a number of freethinkers also make their appearance. These, like their more radical disciples in the following century, regarded Scripture as delusive, and nature and reason as alone trustworthy sources of religious knowledge. § 164.1. =Philosophy.=--=Campanella= of Stilo in Calabria entered the Dominican order, but soon lost taste for Aristotelian philosophy and scholastic theology, and gave himself to the study of Plato, the Cabbala, astrology, magic, etc. Suspected of republican tendencies, the Spanish government put him in prison in A.D. 1599. Seven times was he put upon the rack for twenty-four hours, and then confined for twenty-seven years in close confinement. Finally, in A.D. 1626, Urban VIII. had him transferred to the prison of the papal Inquisition. He was set free in A.D. 1629, and received a papal pension; but further persecutions by the Spaniards obliged him to fly to his protector Richelieu in France, where in A.D. 1639 he died. He composed eighty-two treatises, mostly in prison, the most complete being “_Philosophia Rationalis_,” in five vols. In his “_Atheismus Triumphatus_” he appears as an apologist of the Romish system, but so insufficiently, that many said _Atheismus Triumphans_ was the more fitting title. His “_Monarchia Messiæ_” too appeared, even to the Catholics, an abortive apology for the Papacy. In his “_Civitas Solis_,” an imitation of the “Republic” of Plato, he proceeded upon communistic principles.--=Francis Bacon of Verulam=, long chancellor of England, died A.D. 1626, the great spiritual heir of his mediæval namesake (§ 103, 8), was the first successful reformer of the plan of study followed by the schoolmen. With a prophet’s marvellous grasp of mind he organized the whole range of science, and gave a forecast of its future development in his “_De Augmentis_” and “_Novum Organon_.” He rigidly separated the domain of _knowledge_, as that of philosophy and nature, grasped only by experience, from the domain of _faith_, as that of theology and the church, reached only through revelation. Yet he maintained the position: _Philosophia obiter libata a Deo abducit, plene hausta ad Deum reducit_. He is the real author of empiricism in philosophy and the realistic methods of modern times.