Treatises on logic. 7. Logic had never been more studied, according to a writer who has given a sort of history of the science about the beginning of this period, than in the preceding age; and in fact he enumerates above fifty treatises on the subject, between the time of Ramus and his own.[149] The Ramists, though of little importance in Italy, in Spain, and even in France, had much influence in Germany, England, and Scotland.[150] None however of the logical works of the sixteenth century obtained such reputation as those by Smiglecius, Burgersdicius, and our countryman Crakanthorp, all of whom flourished, if we may use such a word for those who bore no flowers, in the earlier part of the next age. As these men were famous in their generation, we may presume that they at least wrote better than their predecessors. But it is time to leave so jejune a subject, though we may not yet be able to produce what is much more valuable.
[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.
[152] In hac corporea mole tantæ materia statuæ, dixit Deus, ut nascerentur fabri duo incorporei, sed non potentes nisi a corpore subsistere, nullarum physicarum formarum organa, sed formatoris tantummodo. Id circo nati calor et frigus, principia activa principalia, ideoque suæ virtutis diffusiva. Statim inimici fuerunt mutuo, dum uterque cupit totam substantiam materialem occupare. Hinc contra se invicem pugnare cœperunt providente Deo ex hujusmodi discordia ingens bonum. Philosophia Realis Epilogistica (Frankfort, 1623), sect. 4.
[153] This is in the Compendium de Rerum Natura pro Philosophia humana, published by Adami in 1617. In his Apology for Galileo, in 1632, Campanella defends the Copernican system, and says that the modern astronomers think they cannot construct good ephemerides without it.
Notion of universal sensibility. 10. He united to this physical theory another not wholly original, but enforced in all his writings with singular confidence and pertinacity, the sensibility of all created beings. All things, he says, feel; else would the world be a chaos. For neither would fire tend upwards, nor stones downwards, nor waters to the sea; but everything would remain where it was, were it not conscious that destruction awaits it by remaining amidst that which is contrary to itself, and that it can only be preserved by seeking that which is of a similar nature. Contrariety is necessary for the decay and reproduction of nature; but all things strive against their contraries, which they could not do, if they did not perceive what is their contrary.[154] God, who is primal power, wisdom, and love, has bestowed on all things the power of existence, and so much wisdom and love as is necessary for their conversation during that time only for which his providence has determined that they shall be. Heat, therefore, has power, and sense, and desire of its own being; so have all other things seeking to be eternal like God, and in God they are eternal, for nothing dies before him, but is only changed.[155] Even to the world, as a sentient being, the death of its parts is no evil, since the death of one is the birth of many. Bread that is swallowed dies to revive as blood, and blood dies, that it may live again in our flesh and bones; and thus as the life of man is compounded out of the deaths and lives of all his parts, so is it with the whole universe.[156] God said, Let all things feel, some more, some less, as they have more or less necessity to imitate my being. And let them desire to live in that which they understand to be good for them, lest my creation should come to nought.[157]
[154] Omnia ergo sentiunt; alias mundus esset chaos. Ignis enim non sursum tenderet, nec aquæ in mare, nec lapides deorsum; sed res omnis ubi primo reperiretur, permaneret, cum non sentiret sui destructionem inter contraria nec sui conservationem inter similia. Non esset in mundo generatio et corruptio nisi esset contrarietas, sicut omnes physiologi affirmant. At si alteram contrarium non sentiret alterum sibi esse contrarium, contra ipsum non pugnaret. Sentiunt ergo singula. De Sensu Rerum, l. i. c. 4.