idea of God in us, which can have been derived from no other than an infinite source.  It would be impossible for so small a part of the universe as man to produce from himself the idea of a being incomparably greater than the whole universe.  I attain a knowledge of God’s nature from my own by thinking away from the latter, in which, as in everything finite, being and non-being are intermingled, every limitation and negation, by raising to infinity my positive fundamental powers, posse, cognoscere, and velle, or potentia, sapientia, and amor, and by transferring them to him, who is pure affirmation, ens entirely without non-ens.  Thus I reach as the three pro-principles or primalities of the existent or the Godhead, omnipotence, omniscience, and infinite love.  But the infrahuman world may also be judged after the analogy of our fundamental faculties.  The universe and all its parts possess souls; there is naught without sensation; consciousness, it is true, is lacking in the lower creatures, but they do not lack life, feeling, and desire, for it is impossible for the animate to come from the inanimate.  Everything loves and hates, desires and avoids.  Plants are motionless animals, and their roots, mouths.  Corporeal motion springs from an obscure, unconscious impulse of self-preservation; the heavenly bodies circle about the sun as the center of sympathy; space itself seeks a content (horror vacui).

[Footnote 1:  Campanella’s works have been edited by Al. d’Ancona, Turin, 1854, Cf.  Sigwart, Kleine Schriften, vol. i. p. 125 seq.]

The more imperfect a thing is, the more weakened is the divine being in it by non-being and contingency.  The entrance of the naught into the divine reality takes place by degrees.  First God projects from himself the ideal or archetypal world (mundus archetypus), i.e., the totality of the possible.  From this ideal world proceeds the metaphysical world of eternal intelligences (mundus mentalis), including the angels, the world-soul, and human spirits.  The third product is the mathematical world of space (mundus sempiternus), the object of geometry; the fourth, the temporal or corporeal world; the fifth, and last, the empirical world (mundus situalis), in which everything appears at a definite point in space and time.  All things not only love themselves and seek the conservation of their own being, but strive back toward the original source of their being, to God; i.e., they possess religion.  In man, natural and animal religion are completed by rational religion, the limitations of which render a revelation necessary.  A religion can be considered divine only when it is adapted to all, when it gains acceptance through miracles and virtue, and when it contradicts neither natural ethics nor the reason.  Religion is union with God through knowledge, purity of will, and love.  It is inborn, a law of nature, not, as Machiavelli teaches, a political invention.