13. It is almost a descent in Campanella from these visions of the separate sensibility of nature in each particle, when he seizes hold of some physical fact or analogy to establish a subordinate and less paradoxical part of his theory. He was much pleased with Gilbert’s treatise on the magnet, and thought it of course a proof of the animation of the earth. The world is an animal, he says, sentient as a whole, and enjoying life in all its parts.[161] It is not surprising that he ascribes intelligence to plants; but he here remarks that we find the male and female sexes in them, and that the latter cannot fructify without the former. This is manifest in siliquose plants and in palms (which on this account he calls in another place the wiser plants, plantæ sapientiores), in which the two kinds incline towards each other for the purpose of fructification.[162] [161] Mundum esse animal, totum sentiens, omnesque portiones ejus communi gaudere vita, l. i. c. 9. [162] Inveniemus in plantis sexum masculinum et fœmininum, ut in animalibus, et fœminam non fructificare sine masculi congressu. Hoc patet in siliquis et in palmis, quarum mas fœminaque inclinantur mutuo alter in alterum et sese osculantur, et fœmina impregnatur, nec fructificat sine mare; immo conspicitur dolens, squalida mortuaque, et pulvere illius et odore reviviscit. |His works published by Adami.| 14. Campanella, when he uttered from his Neapolitan prison these dulcet sounds of fantasy, had the advantage of finding a pious disciple who spread them over other parts of Europe. This was Tobias Adami, initiated, as he tells us, in the same mysteries as himself (nostræ philosophiæ symmysta), who dedicated to the philosophers of Germany his own Prodromus Philosophiæ Instauratio, prefixed to his edition of Campanella’s Compendium de Rerum Natura, published at Frankfort in 1617. Most of the other writings of the master seem to have preceded this edition; for Adami enumerates them in his Prodromus. Campanella did not fully obtain his liberty till 1629, and died some years afterwards in France, where he had experienced the kindness of Peiresc, and the patronage of Richelieu. His philosophy made no very deep impression; it was too fanciful, too arbitrary, too much tinctured with marks of an imagination rendered morbid by solitude, to gain many proselytes in an age that was advancing in severe science. Gassendi, whose good nature led him to receive Campanella, oppressed by poverty and ill usage, with every courteous attention, was of all men the last to be seduced by his theories. No one, probably, since Campanella, aspiring to be reckoned among philosophers, has ventured to assert so much on matters of high speculative importance and to prove so little. Yet he seems worthy of the notice we have taken of him, if it were only as the last of the mere dogmatists in philosophy. He is doubtless much superior to