without any distinction of persons. They behold in the sun the
reflection of His glory; mere graven images they reject, refusing to
fall under the ‘tyranny’ of idolatry.
Many details are given about their customs of eating and drinking,
about their mode of dressing, their employments, their wars. Campanella
looks forward to a new mode of education, which is to be a study of
nature, and not of Aristotle. He would not have his citizens waste
their time in the consideration of what he calls ‘the dead signs of
things.’ He remarks that he who knows one science only, does not really
know that one any more than the rest, and insists strongly on the
necessity of a variety of knowledge. More scholars are turned out in
the City of the Sun in one year than by contemporary methods in ten or
fifteen. He evidently believes, like Bacon, that henceforward natural
science will play a great part in education, a hope which seems hardly
to have been realized, either in our own or in any former age; at any
rate the fulfilment of it has been long deferred.
There is a good deal of ingenuity and even originality in this work,
and a most enlightened spirit pervades it. But it has little or no
charm of style, and falls very far short of the ‘New Atlantis’ of
Bacon, and still more of the ‘Utopia’ of Sir Thomas More. It is full of
inconsistencies, and though borrowed from Plato, shows but a
superficial acquaintance with his writings. It is a work such as one
might expect to have been written by a philosopher and man of genius
who was also a friar, and who had spent twenty-seven years of his life
in a prison of the Inquisition. The most interesting feature of the
book, common to Plato and Sir Thomas More, is the deep feeling which is
shown by the writer, of the misery and ignorance prevailing among the
lower classes in his own time. Campanella takes note of Aristotle’s
answer to Plato’s community of property, that in a society where all
things are common, no individual would have any motive to work (Arist.
Pol.): he replies, that his citizens being happy and contented in
themselves (they are required to work only four hours a day), will have
greater regard for their fellows than exists among men at present. He
thinks, like Plato, that if he abolishes private feelings and
interests, a great public feeling will take their place.