[149] Keckermann, Præcognita Logica, p. 110 (edit 1606.) [150] Id. p. 147. |Campanella.| 8. The first name, in an opposite class, that we find in descending from the sixteenth century, is that of Thomas Campanella, whose earliest writings belong to it. His philosophy being wholly dogmatical, must be classed with that of the paradoxical innovators whom he followed and eclipsed. Campanella, a Dominican friar, and like his master Telesio, a native of Cosenza, having been accused, it is uncertain how far with truth, of a conspiracy against the Spanish government of his country, underwent an imprisonment of twenty-seven years; during which almost all his philosophical treatises were composed and given to the world. Ardent and rapid in his mind, and, as has just been seen, not destitute of leisure, he wrote on logic, physics, metaphysics, morals, politics, and grammar. Upon all these subjects his aim seems to have been to recede as far as possible from Aristotle. He had early begun to distrust this guide, and had formed a noble resolution to study all schemes of philosophy, comparing them with their archetype, the world itself, that he might distinguish how much exactness was to be found in those several copies, as they ought to be, from one autograph of nature.[151] [151] Cypriani Vita Campanellæ, p. 7. |His theory taken from Telesio.| 9. Campanella borrowed his primary theorems from Telesio, but enlarged that Parmenidean philosophy by the invention of his own fertile and imaginative genius. He lays down the fundamental principle, that the perfectly wise and good Being has created certain signs and types (statuas atque imagines) of himself, all of which, severally as well as collectively, represent power, wisdom, and love, and the objects of these namely, existence, truth, and excellence, with more or less evidence. God first created space, the basis of existence, the primal substance, an immovable and incorporeal capacity of receiving body. Next he created matter without form or figure. In this corporeal mass God called to being two workmen, incorporeal themselves, but incapable of subsisting apart from body, the organs of no physical forms, but of their maker alone. These are heat and cold, the active principles diffused through all things. They were enemies from the beginning, each striving to occupy all material substances itself; each, therefore, always contending with the other, while God foresaw the great good that their discord would produce.[152] The heavens, he says in another passage, were formed by heat out of attenuated matter, the earth by cold out of condensed matter; the sun, being a body of heat, as he rolls round the earth, attacks the colder substance, and converts part of it into air and vapour.[153] This last part of his theory Campanella must have afterwards changed in words, when he embraced the Copernican system.