Seite 645 von 1391

There is a good deal of ingenuity and even originality in this

work, and a most enlightened spirit pervades it. But it has

little or no charm of style, and falls very far short of the 'New

Atlantis' of Bacon, and still more of the 'Utopia' of Sir Thomas

More. It is full of inconsistencies, and though borrowed from

Plato, shows but a superficial acquaintance with his writings. It

is a work such as one might expect to have been written by a

philosopher and man of genius who was also a friar, and who had

spent twenty-seven years of his life in a prison of the

Inquisition. The most interesting feature of the book, common to

Plato and Sir Thomas More, is the deep feeling which is shown by

the writer, of the misery and ignorance prevailing among the

lower classes in his own time. Campanella takes note of

Aristotle's answer to Plato's community of property, that in a

society where all things are common, no individual would have any

motive to work (Arist.