IV.  Though the material seat of the mind is so insignificant, the mind itself is infinite, analogous to God in its capacity.  Aristarchus and Metrodorus symbolise, perhaps, the spheres of literature and mathematics.  This infinitude of the intellect is our real proof of God, our inner witness of the Deity.  We may arrive at God by reasoning; we may trust authority; but it is only by impregnating our minds with God in Nature that we come into immediate contact with Him.  Cp.  Sonnet VI., last line.

V. The theme of this sonnet is the well-known Baconian principle of the interrogation of Nature.  The true philosopher must go straight to the universe, and not confine himself to books.  Cp.  Sonnets I., LV., LVI.

VI.  A further development of the same thought.  Tyrants, hypocrites, sophists are the three plagues of humanity, standing between our intellect and God, who is the source of freedom, goodness, and true wisdom.  In the last line Campanella expresses his opinion that God is knowable by an immediate act of perception analogous to the sense of taste:  Se tutti al Senno non rendiamo il gusto.  Compare Sonnet IV., last line.

VII.  Ignorance is the parent of tyranny, sophistry, hypocrisy; and the arms against this trinity of error are power, wisdom, love, the three main attributes of God.

VIII.  Human egotism inclines men to deny the spiritual life of the universe, to favour their own nation, to love their individual selves exclusively, to eliminate the true God from the world, to worship false gods fashioned from them selves, and at last to fancy themselves central and creative in the Cosmos.  Adami calls this sonnet scoprimento stupendo.

IX.  The quatrains set forth the condition of the soul besotted with self love.  We may see in this picture a critique of Machiavelli’s Principe, which was for Campanella the very ideal portrait of a tyrant.  The love of God, rightly understood, places man en rapport with all created things.  S. Francis, for example, loved not only his fellow men, but recognised the brotherhood of birds and fishes.

X. Ignorance, the source of all our miseries, blinds us to celestial beauty and makes us follow carnal lust.  Yet what is best in sexual love is the radiance of heavenly beauty shining through the form of flesh.  This sonnet receives abundant illustration in Michael Angelo’s poems.

XI, XII.  Two sonnets on the condition of the philosopher in a world that understands him not.  The first expresses that sense of inborn royalty which sustained Campanella through his long martyrdom.  The second expands the picture drawn of the philosopher in Plato’s Republic after his return to the cave from the region of truth.

XIII.  Campanella frequently expressed his theological fatalism by this metaphor of a comedy.  God wrote the drama which men have to play.  In this life we cannot understand our parts.  We act what is appointed for us, and it is only when the comedy is finished, that we shall see how good and evil, happiness and misery, were all needed by the great life of the universe.  The following stanza from one of his Canzoni may be cited in illustration: