Sonnets | Page 5

were anticipated by a few obscure thinkers.
It is noticeable that the States of Naples, hitherto comparatively inert in
the intellectual development of Italy, furnished the five writers who

preceded Bacon, Leibnitz, Schelling, and Comte. Telesio of Cosenza,
Bruno of Nola, Campanella of Stilo, Vanini and Vico of Naples are the
chief among these novi homines or pioneers of modern thought. The
characteristic point of this new philosophy was an unconditional return
to Nature as the source of knowledge, combined with a belief in the
intuitive forces of the human reason: so that from the first it showed
two sides or faces to the world--the one positive, scientific, critical, and
analytical; the other mystical, metaphysical, subjective. Modern
materialism and modern idealism were both contained in the audacious
guesses of Bruno and Campanella; nor had the time arrived for clearly
separating the two strains of thought, or for attempting a systematic
synthesis of knowledge under one or the other head.
The men who led this weighty intellectual movement burned with the
passionate ardour of discoverers, the fiery enthusiasm of confessors.
They stood alone, sustained but little by intercourse among themselves,
and wholly misunderstood by the people round them. Italy, sunk in
sloth, priest-ridden, tyrant-ridden, exhausted with the unparalleled
activity of the Renaissance, besotted with the vices of slavery and slow
corruption, had no ears for spirit-thrilling prophecy. The Church,
terrified by the Reformation, when she chanced to hear those strange
voices sounding through 'the blessed mutter of the mass,' burned the
prophets. The State, represented by absolute Spain, if it listened to them
at all, flung them into prison. To both Church and State there was peril
in the new philosophy; for the new philosophy was the first birth-cry of
the modern genius, with all the crudity and clearness, the brutality and
uncompromising sincerity of youth. The Church feared Nature. The
State feared the People. Nature and the People--those watchwords of
modern Science and modern Liberty--were already on the lips of the
philosophers.
It was a philosophy armed, errant, exiled; a philosophy in chains and
solitary; at war with society, authority, opinion; self-sustained by the
prescience of ultimate triumph, and invincible through the sheer force
of passionate conviction. The men of whom I speak were conscious of
Pariahdom, and eager to be martyred in the glorious cause. 'A very
Proteus is the philosopher,' says Pomponazzo: 'seeking to penetrate the

secrets of God, he is consumed with ceaseless cares; he forgets to thirst,
to hunger, to sleep, to eat; he is derided of all men; he is held for a fool
and irreligious person; he is persecuted by inquisitors; he becomes a
gazing-stock to the common folk. These are the gains of the
philosopher; these are his guerdon. Pomponazzo's words were
prophetic. Of the five philosophers whom I mentioned, Vanini was
burned as an atheist, Bruno was burned, and Campanella was
imprisoned for a quarter of a century. Both Bruno and Campanella
were Dominican friars. Bruno was persecuted by the Church, and
burned for heresy. Campanella was persecuted by both Church and
State, and was imprisoned on the double charge of sedition and heresy.
_Dormitantium animarum excubitor_ was the self-given title of Bruno.
Nunquam tacebo was the favourite motto of Campanella.
Giovanni Domenico Campanella was born in the year 1568 at Stilo in
Calabria, one of the most southern townships of all Italy. In his
boyhood he showed a remarkable faculty for acquiring and retaining
knowledge, together with no small dialectical ability. His keen interest
in philosophy and his admiration for the great Dominican doctors,
Thomas Aquinas and Albertus Magnus, induced him at the age of
fifteen to enter the order of S. Dominic, exchanging his secular name
for Tommaso. But the old alliance between philosophy and orthodoxy,
drawn up by scholasticism and approved by the mediaeval Church, had
been succeeded by mutual hostility; and the youthful thinker found no
favour in the cloister of Cosenza, where he now resided. The new
philosophy taught by Telesio placed itself in direct antagonism to the
pseudo-Aristotelian tenets of the theologians, and founded its own
principles upon the Interrogation of Nature. Telesio, says Bacon, was
the prince of the novi homines, or inaugurators of modern thought. It
was natural that Campanella should be drawn towards this great man.
But the superiors of his convent prevented his forming the acquaintance
of Telesio; and though the two men dwelt in the same city of Cosenza,
Campanella never knew the teacher he admired so passionately. Only
when the old man died and his body was exposed in the church before
burial, did the neophyte of his philosophy approach the bier, and pray
beside it, and place poems upon the dead.

From this time forward Campanella became an object of suspicion to
his brethren. They perceived that the fire of the new