 In his attack on the Aristotelian tradition, Campanella criticized the doctrines of form and of privation; of the four elements as principles of the sublunary world; of matter as privation; of the derivation of celestial heat from the friction of the spheres; and of the distinction between natural and violent motion. The culmination of his efforts to dismantle the Aristotelian system was a radical critique of traditional cosmology, with regard both to the nature of the heavens and to the trajectories and mechanisms of celestial movements. In parallel to the destructive side of Campanella’s argument, the constructive element consisted of defending the doctrines of Telesio’s philosophy. According to Telesio, all being derived from modifications resulting from the actions of the two principles of hot and cold on matter, which he did not regard as an abstract ens rationis (an entity existing in the mind) but rather as an inert corporeal mass, dark and entirely formless but capable of receiving any form. From the subtle and detailed argumentative structure of the eight weighty disputationes emerges a powerful unitary notion: the centrality, nobility and primacy of solar heat, that connects all beings and confers life on them. It is within this context that the assimilation of solar heat to the World Soul acquires a particular significance, a theme that is at the heart of the third disputation, entitled “De coelo et mundo” (“On the heavens and the world”). Campanella here transcribes verbatim a passage from Ficino’s commentary on Plotinus’s Enneads in which he dwells on the World Soul and its “vital and sensual breath” (Philosophia sensibus demonstrata, pp. 322–23). Ficino associates this hot breath, that penetrates and is infused into the entire world, with a well-known line from Virgil’s Aeneid (VI.726: “spiritus intus alit”; “the spirit nourishes from within”) and also with the divine spirit of Genesis 1:2: “the spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters”. The heavens are composed of this breath and divine word, that vivifies and nourishes everything.