The New Encyclopedia of Knowledge

Abstract

Having overcome the most difficult period of imprisonment (a period that surprisingly gave rise to remarkable texts such as the Senso delle cose, the Poesie, and the Ateismo trionfato), Campanella dedicated himself to the systematic refoundation of the sciences in the years that followed. As he would emphasize in a beautiful passage in the dedicatory letter addressed to Chancellor Pierre Séguier that precedes the Philosophia realis, even the long years in jail could be reread as elements in a providential design: Spending my life in the prisons of ungrateful masters, God, through whose wisdom all things are made and ordered, wanted that I be shut up for the time required to refound all of the sciences, a refounding that (always following his divine inspiration) I have conceived in my mind. This was a feat that I would not have been able to complete in a condition of ordinary happiness or without solitude. Deprived of the world of the body, I travelled through the world of the mind which is a great deal more vast and is therefore the infinitude of that Archetype that rules over every thing with the word of its virtue.1