THE PHILOSOPHY

OF GIAMBATTISTA VICO.

BY

BENEDETTO CROCE

TRANSLATED BY R. G. COLLINGWOOD

FELLOW AND LECTURER OF PEMBROKE COLLEGE, OXFORD

NEW YORK

THE MACMILLAN COMPANY

1913

TO

WILHELM WINDELBAND

[PREFACE]

My reasons for believing that a new exposition of Vico's philosophy is required may easily be inferred from the observations on the effects of his work and the biographical notes which form respectively the second and fourth appendices to this volume.

Here I merely wish to state that my exposition is not meant for a summary of Vico's writings work by work and part by part. It rather presupposes an acquaintance with these writings, and, where that is lacking, is intended to induce the reader to procure them in order to follow better and to check the interpretation and estimate of them here offered.

On this supposition, though I have made free use of my author's actual words, especially in the chapters dealing with history, I have not thought it desirable to mark them as quotations except where it was important to emphasise the precise phrase of the original. I have in general combined such passages from fragments scattered over a wide field, sometimes abbreviating, sometimes amplifying, and always freely adding words and phrases of my own by way of commentary: and the continual use of quotation marks would merely have shown up in a manner more wearisome than valuable the reverse side of my embroidery, which any reader who so desires can study by the help of the references given at the end of the book.

In my anxiety to show in every detail of my work, so far as I could, the veneration due to the great name of Vico, I have endeavoured to be brief with the brevity at which he himself aimed as the hall-mark of sterling scientific thought. With this in view I have refrained even from controversy with his various interpreters, and have either contented myself with mere remarks, or more often left my details to be justified by the coherence of my view as a whole. Some of the interpretations supported by me I believe to be the mature fruit of the investigations and controversies which form the greater part of the literature on Vico: all the rest, for which I am personally responsible, and the general idea of my book, I will defend against alternative and contradictory views when occasion arises, should it ever do so, in the detailed and direct manner which I have not thought it necessary to adopt in the course of my exposition. I hope, in fact, that the present work will rekindle rather than quench the discussion of Vico's philosophy: since in him we have, as Goethe calls him, the Altvater whom a nation is happy to possess, and to him we must hark back for a time in order to imbue our modern philosophy with an Italian feeling, however cosmopolitan it may be in thought.

The dedication of my book, besides being a token of respect to one of the greatest modern teachers of the history of philosophy, is intended to express the expectation and hope that the gap in this history to which I have called attention more than once, especially on page 277 of the present volume, may soon be filled.

B. C.

RAIANO (AQUILA),

September 1910.

[TRANSLATOR'S NOTE]

This volume represents the author's La Filosofia di Giambattista Vico (Bari, 1911) forming vol. ii. of his Saggi filosofici; and also contains a paper read before the Accademia Pontaniana in March 1912 entitled "Le Fonti della gnoseologia vichiana," which figures here as Appendix III. The whole of the translation has been revised by the Author.

R. G. C.

OXFORD, 1913.

[CONTENTS]

[CHAPTER I]

VICO'S THEORY OF KNOWLEDGE: FIRST PHASE

The earliest phase of Vico's theory of knowledge takes the form of a direct criticism of and antithesis to the Cartesianism which had guided European thought for more than half a century, and was to maintain its supremacy over mind and spirit for another hundred years.

Descartes, as is well known, had placed the ideal of perfect science in geometry, and endeavoured to reform philosophy and every other branch of knowledge upon this model. Now the geometrical method proceeds analytically till it reaches a self-evident truth, and thence by synthetic deduction it advances to more and more complex propositions. Accordingly, if philosophy were to adopt a rigorous scientific method, it also (thought Descartes) must look for a solid foundation in the shape of an elementary and self-evident truth from which to deduce all its subsequent statements, whether theological, metaphysical, physical, or ethical. Thus self-evidence—the "clear and distinct perception or idea"—was the supreme test: immediate inference—the intuitive connexion of thought with existence, cogito with sum— provided the elementary truth and the foundation of knowledge. By means of the clear and distinct perception, together with the systematic doubt which led him to the cogito, Descartes persuaded himself that he had once and for all made an end of scepticism.

But, by the same argument, all knowledge which had not been or could not be reduced to clear and distinct perception and geometrical deduction was bound to lose in his eyes all value and importance. This included history, as founded upon testimony; observation of nature, when not within the sphere of mathematics; practical wisdom and eloquence, which draw their validity from empirical knowledge of human character; and poetry, with its world of imaginary presentations. Such products of the mind were for Descartes illusions, chaotic visions, rather than knowledge: confused ideas, destined either to become clear and distinct and so no longer to exist in their original nature, or else to drag on a miserable existence unworthy of a philosopher's consideration. The daylight of the mathematical method rendered useless the lamps which, while they guide us in the darkness, throw deceptive shadows.

Vico, unlike the other opponents of Descartes, did not confine himself to or waste time in scandalised outcries at the danger to religion entailed by the subjective method. He did not inquire, like the schoolmen, whether the cogito was or was not a syllogism, and if so whether it was or was not defective. He did not join in the protest of outraged common-sense against the Cartesian contempt of history, rhetoric, and poetry. He went straight to the heart of the question, to Descartes' criterion of scientific truth itself, the principle of self-evidence. While the French philosopher believed himself to have satisfied all the demands of the strictest science, Vico saw that as a matter of fact, in view of the need which he set out to meet, his proposed method gave little or no assistance.

Fine knowledge, says Vico, this of the clear and distinct idea! That I think what I think is certainly an indubitable fact; but it has by no means the appearance of a scientific statement. Any idea, however false, may seem self-evident: that I think it so does not give it the force of knowledge. That "he who thinks, exists" was a fact well known to Plautus's Sosia, who expressed this conviction in almost the identical words of the Cartesian philosophy: "but when I think, I certainly exist" (sed quom cogito, equidem certo sum). But the sceptic will always reply to a Sosia or a Descartes that he has no doubt as to thought; he will even strongly maintain that whatever seems to him cogent is certain, and will uphold it against all objections; and that he has no doubt as to existence: in fact, he is seeking after it in the right way by suspending judgment and not adding to the obscurity of facts other obscurities arising from opinions. But while asserting all this he will still maintain that the certitude of his thought and of his existence is the certitude not of science but of consciousness, and of common consciousness at that. Clear and distinct perception is so far from being science that since, owing to Cartesianism, the principle has been applied to physics, our knowledge of nature has become no more certain. Descartes tried to leap from the plane of common consciousness to that of science: he fell back into common consciousness again without having touched his scientific ideal.

But in what does scientific truth consist, if not in immediate consciousness? How does science differ from simple consciousness? What is the criterion, or, in other words, what is the condition which makes science possible? Clearness and distinctness do not take us a step forward. The formulation of an elementary truth does not solve the problem. The question concerns not a primary truth, but the form which truth must have to enable us to recognise it for scientific or real truth.

In meeting this question, Vico justified his criticism of the inadequacy of the Cartesian criterion by appealing to a principle which at first sight may seem trite and obvious. It is trite not because of the historic theory with which Vico associated it, a theory later refuted by himself: not, that is, because it belongs to one of the earliest strata of Italian philosophy; but in the sense that it was common to and practically inseparable from Christian thought. To a Christian who declares every day his belief in a God Almighty, Omniscient, Maker of heaven and earth, nothing is more familiar than the assertion that God alone can fully know all things, because he alone is their creator. The primal truth, Vico repeats, is in God, because God is the primal creator. It is an infinite truth because he is the maker of all things, and absolute because it displays to him the internal and external qualities of things, all of which he contains in himself.

This same principle of religion and theology had been already invoked in a philosophical context by certain sceptics, as a weapon against the presumptuous claims of human knowledge. Francisco Sanchez, for example, in his Quod nihil scitur (1581), in discussing the difficulty of knowing the nature and powers of the soul, had observed that if man could have this knowledge in a perfect degree he would be like God, or rather he would be God himself: since it is impossible "that one should know perfectly things which he has not created, nor could God have created things of which he had not perfect foreknowledge, nor ruled them when created: he himself therefore, being alone the perfect wisdom, knowledge, and intellect, penetrates all things, is wise concerning all things, knows all things, and understands all things, because he is all things and in all things, and all things are he and in him" (perfecte cognoscere quis quae non creavit, nec Deus creare potuisset nec creata regere quae non perfecte praecognovisset: ipse ergo solus sapientia cognitio intellectus perfectus omnia penetrat omnia sapit omnia cognoscit omnia intelligit, quia ipse omnia est et in omnibus, omniaque ipse sunt et in ipso).[1] But Sanchez appeals to this thought only in passing, and without grasping its philosophical import or realising that his hand was resting upon a treasure; while Vico for the first time drew from the praise of the infinite power and wisdom of God, and from their contrast with the limited faculties of man, the universal principle of his theory of knowledge, that the condition under which a thing can be known is that the knower should have made it, that the true is identical with the created: verum ipsum factum.

This, he explained, is precisely what is meant by saying that science is to know by causes, per causas scire. Since a cause is that which has no need of anything external in order to produce its effect, it is the genus or mode of a thing: to know the cause is to be able to realise the thing, to deduce it from its cause and create it. In other words, it is an ideal repetition of a process which has been or is being practically performed. Cognition and action must be convertible and identical, just as with God intellect and will are convertible and form one single unity.

Now once this connexion of the true with the created is recognised as the ideal, and indeed, since the ideal is the truly real, as the true nature of science, the first consequence of such a recognition must be that science is unattainable to man. If God created the world, he alone knows it per causas, he alone knows its genera or modes, he alone possesses scientific knowledge of it. Did man make the world? Did he make his own soul?

To man is vouchsafed, not science, but only consciousness, which merely traverses objects without being able to show the genus or form whence they proceed. The truth of consciousness is the human side of divine wisdom, related to it as the surface to the solid: rather than truth, we ought to call it certitude. For God, intellegere, understanding; for man only cogitare, thought, the faculty that gleans elements of reality, but can never gather them all. For God, true demonstration; for man, observations undemonstrated and unscientific, but either certain through indubitable evidence, probable through sound reasoning, or convincing because of a plausible guess.

Certitude, the truth of consciousness, is not science; but it is not on that account false. Vico was careful not to call the theories of Descartes false: his intention was only to lower them from complete truth to fragmentary truth, from science to consciousness. Cogito ergo sum is very far from false. That we find it expressed by Plautus's Sosia is an argument not for rejecting it, but for accepting it; only, as a truth of simple consciousness. Thought is not the cause of my existence, and as such is not the ground of scientific knowledge of that existence. If it were, since man, as the Cartesians admitted, consists of body and mind, thought would be the cause of the body: a doctrine which would plunge us into all the mazes of the controversy on the mutual effects of mind and matter. The cogito, then, is a mere sign or indication of my existence, and nothing more. The clear and distinct idea cannot serve as a criterion even of the mind itself, to say nothing of other things; since the mind, though it knows itself, does not create itself, and accordingly is ignorant of the genus or mode by which it has this knowledge. But the clear and distinct idea is all that is granted to human thought, and, as the only wealth it possesses, is beyond price. For Vico, too, metaphysic holds the highest place among the human sciences, and all others depend upon it; but while for Descartes it can proceed by a method of absolute demonstration parallel to that of geometry, for Vico it must be satisfied with probabilities. It is a science not by causes, but of causes. And with probabilities it has been content in its greatest periods, in ancient Greece and in Italy at the Renaissance. Whenever, intoxicated by the arrogance that declares that "a wise man has no opinions" (sapientem nihil opinati), it has sought to abandon the probable, it has set its feet upon the path of confusion and decadence. The existence of God is certain, but not scientifically demonstrable; and any attempt at such a demonstration must be considered a proof not so much of piety as of impiety, since to demonstrate God we must create him: man must become the creator of God. Similarly we must accept as true all that God has revealed; but we must not ask how it comes to be true. That we can never understand. Human science bases itself upon revealed truth and the consciousness of God, and finds there its test of truth; but the foundation itself is not science, but consciousness.

Just as Vico depreciated metaphysics, theology, and physics, the sciences upon which Descartes had bestowed honour and attention, so he reinstated those branches of knowledge which Descartes had in turn despised; namely, history, observation of nature, empirical knowledge of man and society, eloquence and poetry. Or rather, he could vindicate them without reinstating them. Once he had shown that the lofty truths of a geometrically deduced philosophy were themselves brought down to mere probability, to statements having the validity of simple consciousness, the other forms of knowledge were ipso facto conclusively vindicated. All now found themselves upon an equality in the position, whether high or low, which we have described. The idea of a perfect human science, holding itself aloof from another science unworthy of the title, as founded not on reason but on authority, was shown to be illusory. The authority of observations and beliefs, whether one's own or others', public opinion, tradition, the consciousness of mankind, were restored to the position which they had always held: a position which they held even for Descartes himself, who, as often happens, despised the resources in which he was richest and of which he made the greatest use. A conspicuously learned man, he depreciated learning and scholarship, as one who has received nourishment from it might give himself the luxury of speaking with contempt of the common food which by now forms the very blood in his veins.

The Cartesian polemic against authority had proved in some respects beneficial. It put an end to the servile attitude, all too common, of continual appeals to authority. But this error was not more prevalent than that of private judgment, which presumed to reorganise knowledge from top to bottom on the strength of the individual consciousness: a tendency which ultimately, as in the case of Malebranche, leads to prophesying the immolation of all the ancient philosophers and poets, and a return to the nakedness of Adam. It is a fallacy, or at least an excess, which should be avoided by adopting a sound middle course. This course consists in following private judgment with due regard to authority; in a true catholic union of faith with a criticism limited by and helpful to faith; bearing in mind the necessary character of mere probability which is proper to human knowledge or science, and avoiding the tendency of the Reformation which elevates each man's inner consciousness into a divine guide in matters of belief.

To another group of the Cartesian sciences, however, Vico seems to grant a privileged position, one, that is, not of consciousness but of science strictly so called, in the sphere not of certitude but of truth; namely, the mathematical sciences. These, according to him, form the only region in which man's knowledge is identical in character with God's, perfect and demonstrative. This is not due, as Descartes supposed, to their self-evident character. Self-evidence, when employed in physical science and in matters of action, does not yield truth of the same conclusiveness as in mathematics. Nor is mathematics in itself self-evident. What clear and distinct idea can lead, for instance, to the conception of a line as composed of points having no parts? But the indivisible point which cannot be conceived in the world of reality, can be nevertheless denned. By defining certain names, man creates the elements of mathematics; by the postulates, he carries them on to infinity; by the axioms, he establishes certain eternal truths; and, disposing these elements with the help of these infinities and this eternity, he creates the truth which he teaches. The validity of mathematics then arises not from the Cartesian principle, but precisely from Vico's other proposition, the conversion of knowledge with creation. "We demonstrate mathematics, because we create their truth" (mathematica demonstramus, quia verum facimus). Man assumes unity and multiplicity, points and figures, and creates numbers and quantities which he knows perfectly because they are his own work. Mathematics is a constructive science; not only in its problems, but even in its theorems, which are commonly supposed to be mere objects of contemplation. For this reason it is a science which demonstrates per causas, in opposition to that other common view which excludes from mathematics the concept of causation. It is in fact the only one among all the human sciences which truly demonstrates by causes. Hence its extraordinary accuracy. The whole secret of the geometrical method lies first in defining the terms, that is, creating the concepts which are to be the subject matter of our reasoning; secondly, in establishing certain common principles by mutual consent of the disputants; and lastly, if required, in making certain postulates of such a nature that they can be granted, to enable us to proceed with our deductions, which without such an agreement could make no progress; then, upon these principles, to advance by degrees from the demonstration of the simplest truths to the most complex, and not to affirm the complex propositions before examining singly their component parts.

It might be said that, as to the validity of mathematics, Vico is in agreement with Descartes; he differs from him only in his reason for this validity. And, admitting that Vico's reason must be thought the more profound, this would only enhance and strengthen the mathematical ideal which Descartes had set before science. If mathematics is the one perfect form of knowledge attained by the human mind, obviously we must found the others upon it, and either remodel or condemn them according to its pattern. Vico, in short, was hasty in declaring Descartes wrong: he had found a better argument whose existence the latter had not suspected. But, however strongly this may appear at first sight (and so it has appeared to some commentators), on a closer examination it is seen that the high perfection attributed by Vico to mathematics is more apparent than real; that the vaunted conclusiveness of its method is by his own confession gained at the expense of truth: in a word, that the stress of his theory falls less on the truth of mathematics than on its arbitrary nature.

The fact is, that man, while occupying himself with the investigation of the nature of things, and ultimately realising his total inability to attain it, not having in himself the elements of which they are composed, which are indeed all external to his nature, is led by degrees to the intention of profiting by this very fault of his mind. By means of abstraction—not, be it remembered, abstraction from material things, for Vico is opposed to the empirical origin of mathematics, but abstraction brought to bear on metaphysical entities—he creates two fictions, duo sibi confingit: the point in geometrical figures, and unity in multiplication. Each is a fiction, utrumque fictum, because the point when drawn is no longer a point, and the unit when multiplied is no longer one. Then, from these fictions, by his own arbitrary fiat, proprio iure, he assumes an infinite process, so that lines may be produced or the unit multiplied ad infinitum. Thus he constructs for his own purposes a world of forms and numbers, all of which he embraces within himself; and by lengthening, shortening, and combining the lines and adding and subtracting the numbers, he performs infinite operations and learns infinite truths. Since he cannot define things, he defines names; since he cannot reach the elements of reality he satisfies himself with imaginary elements, the ideas arising from which admit of no dispute. Like God, ad Dei instar, from no material substrate and, as it were, out of nothing he creates the point, the line, and the surface; the point, assumed as that which has no parts; the line, as the locus of a point, or as length without breadth or depth; and the surface, as the meeting of two different lines in one point, that is, length and breadth without depth. Thus mathematics overcomes the failing of human knowledge, that its objects are always external to itself, and that the mind which endeavours to know them has not created them. Mathematics creates what it knows; it contains in itself its own elements, and thus forms a perfect copy of the divine knowledge (scientiae divinae similes evadunt).

The reader of these and other similar descriptions and praises by Vico of the processes of mathematics seems to observe in them something like a tinge of irony; which, if not actually intentional, certainly results from the facts of the case. The brilliant truth of mathematics arises, it appears, from despair of attaining truth; its tremendous power from the knowledge of impotence. The similarity of the mathematician to God is not altogether unlike that of the imitator of an object to its creator. What God is in the universe of reality, man is in the universe of quantity and number,—a universe indeed, but one peopled by abstractions and fictions. The divinity which has been conferred upon man is only, so to speak, a Twelfth-night Godhead.

The different origin assigned by Vico to mathematics results in a correspondingly profound change in the validity of its truth. Mathematics no longer, as with Descartes, stands at the summit of human knowledge, an aristocratic science, destined to reclaim and to rule over the inferior sciences. It occupies a field as strictly limited as it is unique, beyond which if it ever attempts to pass it loses in a moment its magical virtue.

The power of mathematics is met by obstacles both a parte ante and a parte post, in its foundations and in the superstructure which in its turn it is to support. In its foundations, because if it creates its own elements, that is to say, the initial fictions, it does not create the matter of which they are formed, which is given to it no less than to the other human sciences by metaphysics, which while it cannot supply it with its true subject matter, supplies it with definite images of it. From metaphysics, geometry takes the point by drawing it, that is by annihilating it as a point, and arithmetic the unit by multiplying it, that is by destroying it qua unit. But since metaphysical truth, however certain it may seem to consciousness, is indemonstrable, mathematics itself rests in the last resort upon authority and probability. This is enough to expose the fallaciousness of any mathematical treatise which makes use of metaphysics. Vico seems to be involved in a kind of circle between geometry and metaphysics, of which the former, according to him, owes its truth to the latter, and after receiving it gives it back again to metaphysics, thus in turn supporting the human science by the divine. But this conception, the truth of which is more than doubtful, indeed we may frankly call it inconsistent and contradictory, recalls, whatever its value, the metaphysical or rather poetical or symbolic use made of mathematics by Pythagoras and other philosophers of antiquity and the Renaissance, and has no resemblance to a mathematically-treated philosophy like the Cartesian. Geometry in Vico's opinion is the one hypothesis by which metaphysics passes over into physical science. But while making this advance it remains a hypothesis, a probability, something intermediate between faith and criticism, imagination and reason; which indeed is the eternal character of metaphysics and human science in general according to Vico's point of view in this first phase of his theory of knowledge.

Just as mathematics cannot be the basis of metaphysics, the science from which it is itself derived, so it cannot provide a foundation for the other sciences, although they follow it in order of derivation. All objects other than number and size are beyond the reach of the geometrical method. Physical science is indemonstrable: if we could demonstrate the physical world, we should be creating it (si physica demonstrare possemus, faceremus): but we do not create it, and are accordingly unable to demonstrate it. The introduction of the mathematical method into natural science has not helped it. Without the mathematical method, science makes great discoveries; by its means it has made none, whether great or small. The physical science of to-day is in fact like a house, sumptuously furnished by former owners, to which their heirs have added nothing, but have occupied themselves merely in moving and rearranging the furniture. Accordingly, we must reintroduce and maintain the experimental method in physical science, as opposed to this mathematical method; the English tendency as opposed to the French; the cautious use made of mathematics by Galileo and his school, as against the Cartesians' reckless and presumptuous employment of it. The English are right in not allowing physical science to be taught in the mathematical style. Such a style admits of progress only when the terms are defined, the axioms established, and the postulates granted. In physical science we have to define not terms but things: we can make no unchallenged statements; and the complexity of nature forbids our forming any postulates. Thus in the more favourable instances this method results in a mere harmless verbalism. Observations of nature are expounded with the phrases: "By definition IV.," "By postulate II.," "By axiom III.," and concluded with the pompous abbreviation "Q.E.D." But all this carries no demonstrative conviction. The mind retains as much freedom of opinion as it had before listening to such noisy methods. In these circumstances Vico could not refrain from satirical comparisons. The geometrical method, he says, in its proper sphere works unnoticed; when it makes a noise, it shows that it is doing no work; just as a coward's attack consists of much shouting and no blows, while a brave man holds his tongue and strikes home. Again, the man who upholds the geometrical method in subjects where it fails to carry conviction, when he pronounces this to be an axiom, or that to be a demonstrated truth, is like a man who draws amorphous pictures, quite unrecognisable without assistance, and then writes underneath "This is a man," or "This is a satyr," or "This is a lion," or the like. Hence it happens that the very same geometrical method served Proclus to demonstrate the principles of Aristotelian science, and Descartes to demonstrate his own, though totally distinct from, if not diametrically opposed to them. Yet each was a great geometrician, whom no one could accuse of inability to use the method. What ought to be introduced into natural science is not the method of geometry, but its conclusiveness; which is precisely what can never be done. Still less is it possible in other sciences, in proportion as they are more material and concrete; least of all in ethical science. For this reason, where the reality cannot be used, the name is misused instead; till, just as the title "Master," which Tiberius once refused as too haughty, is given to-day to the humblest man, so the name "demonstration," applied as it is to arguments at best probable, sometimes patently fallacious, has impaired the respect due to truth.

Even for mathematics itself Vico apprehends danger from the substitution of analytic for geometrical or synthetic methods. He doubts whether modern mechanics is really a product of analysis; for analysis blunts the inventive faculty or talent, and though infallible in, its results (opere) is confused in its processes (opera); while the synthetic method is turn opere cum opera infallible. Analysis presents its grounds by inquiring whether the equations of which it is in search happen to be present; it appears to be an art of guessing, a kind of mechanism rather than thought. For similar reasons Vico attached no value, to the more or less mechanical topics and arts of discovery and memory invented by Lulle and Kircher.

The sympathy with experimental methods which as we have seen estranged Vico from the French tendency of thought, that is from Cartesianism, and directed him towards the Italian and English schools of Galileo and Bacon, led him on the other hand to a hostile attitude towards Aristotelianism and scholasticism. Inculcating as he did the pursuit of the particular and the use of inductive methods, asserting that man possessed an inexhaustible wealth of physical knowledge which, thanks to fire, machinery, and tools, was able to issue in the creation of objects resembling the special products of nature, and praising his own metaphysic as one subservient to (ancillantem) the ends of experimental science, he was bound to realise how well deserved was the too universal discredit, as he calls it, into which Aristotelian science had fallen. If he disapproved of the introduction by Descartes of physical forms into metaphysics, and of his resulting materialistic tendencies, he accused Aristotle and the schoolmen of the opposite error of introducing metaphysical forms into natural science. Like Bacon he held that the syllogism and sorites produce nothing new, and only repeat what was already contained in their premisses. He emphasised the many ill effects of the Aristotelian universal in every department of knowledge; in jurisprudence, where empty generalities crush legislative wisdom; in medicine, which aims rather at propping up systems than at healing the sick; and in practical life, in which he describes the abusers of universals by the mocking title of "Thematists." The use of universals results in homonymies or equivocations which cause all kinds of errors. As against this distrust of universals in the sense of general or abstract conceptions, Vico showed a corresponding reverence for the Platonic ideas, the metaphysical forms, or as he also called them, kinds; the eternal and infinitely perfect patterns of things. A nominalist in mathematics, Vico was suspicious of nominalism in all other fields of knowledge. He asserts the reality of the forms or ideas, and tells how from his youth up he was attracted by this doctrine, which he learnt from a teacher of his, who as a Scotist was a follower of the scholastic system most akin to Plato's.

Taken as a whole Vico's first theory of knowledge is neither intellectualistic, sensationalistic, nor truly speculative. It contains all these three elements, harmonised to a certain extent, not by a hierarchical subordination of any two to the third, but by the subjection of all three to a recognition of the inadequacy of human knowledge. Its intention may have been to meet by a tactical manoeuvre dogmatics and sceptics at once, the former by denying that we can know everything, the latter by denying that we can know nothing at all. But its actual outcome is an assertion of scepticism or agnosticism, tinged, however, with a trace of mysticism. God's knowledge is the complete sphere of knowledge, the unity of which man's is but a series of fragments. God knows all things because he contains in himself all the elements of which he makes them: man tries to understand them by taking them to pieces. Human science is a sort of anatomy of the world of nature; it divides man into body and soul, and soul into intellect and will: from body it abstracts figure and motion, and from these existence and unity. Of these metaphysics studies existence, arithmetic unity and multiplication, geometry figure and its measurements, mechanics the motion of the circumference, physical science the motion of the centre, medicine the body, logic the reason, and ethics the will. But this anatomy meets with the same fate as that of the human body. In the latter case, the greatest physiologists doubt whether, owing to the effects of death and of dissection itself, it is possible at all to discover the true position, structure, and function of the organs. Existence, unity, figure, motion, body, intellect, and will are one thing for God, for whom they coalesce into one, and another for man, to whom they remain distinct. For God they live, for man they are dead. The clear and distinct perception is a proof not of the strength but of the weakness of the human understanding. Physical laws appear self-evident just until they are subjected to comparison with metaphysical. The Cogito ergo sum is absolutely conclusive when man considers himself as a finite being; but when he includes himself in God, the one true being, he realises that in truth he does not exist at all. By means of extension and its three dimensions we believe ourselves to establish eternal truths; but in fact coelum ipsum petimus stultitia, since the eternal truths exist in God alone. The axiom that the whole is greater than the part may seem eternal, but if we go back to the beginning, we find that it is false: we see that the centre of the circle contains in itself as much capacity for extension as the whole circumference. Wherefore, Vico concludes, "he has advanced in metaphysics who in the study of this science has lost himself."

To hold, as some have done, that these words show Vico a simple Platonist or a follower of the traditional Christian philosophy, would entail denying any importance whatever to his first theory of knowledge. It would be a confession of adherence to the fallacious method of philosophical criticism and history which looks only at the general conclusions of a system and ignores the particular content which alone gives it its true individuality. No doubt, any philosophy must always in its ultimate conclusions be either agnostic, mystical, materialistic, spiritualistic, or the like: in other words, it must have its place in one or other of the eternal categories in which thought and philosophical inquiry move. But to expound philosophers in this one-sided manner can only serve to perpetuate the mistakes repeated over and over again in the history of thought, when it passes fruitlessly from one error to another, leaving the old only to adopt the new, itself perhaps an old one born again or painted with the colours of youth. The Platonismi agnosticism, or mysticism of Vico is in the fullest sense of the word original, because it forms the accompaniment of doctrines not only not inferior to the average of contemporary thought, but greatly in advance of it.

The first of these doctrines is the theory of knowledge as the conversion of the true with the created, Vico's substitute for the otiose criterion of the clear and distinct perception. Though this conversion represents for Vico an ideal unattainable to man, it yet does not bring with it an exact definition of the condition and character of knowledge, the identity of thought and being, without which knowledge is inconceivable.

The second is the revelation of the nature of mathematics, as unique among the forms of human knowledge in origin, rigorous because arbitrary, wonderful but unfit to rule over and transform the rest of our knowledge.

Finally, the third doctrine is the vindication of the world of intuition, empirical knowledge, probability, and authority, all those forms of experience which intellectualism ignored or denied.

In these points Vico the agnostic, the Platonist, the mystic, was neither agnostic nor mystic nor Platonist. He achieved a threefold advance upon Descartes, and upon all these three heads criticised him conclusively.

The one thing in which Descartes was still in advance of Vico was precisely that dogmatism of which Vico would have none. Descartes, whether he succeeded or not, projected a perfect human science deduced from the internal consciousness. Vico, on the other hand, considering the French philosopher too confident and despairing of the success of his project, proclaimed the transcendent nature of truth, took his stand upon revelation, and contented himself with producing a metaphysic worthy of man's weakness, humana imbecillitate dignam. His was a philosophy of humility, as the Cartesian was one of self-confidence.

Now Vico could not advance even to this position without relaxing to some extent part of his humility, and taking over something of Descartes's confidence: without introducing into his Catholic turn of mind some trace of the leaven of that Protestantism he thought so dangerous, and venturing to conceive a philosophy rather less worthy of man's weakness and correspondingly more worthy of man, a creature at once strong and weak, at once man and God. This advance is to be seen in the next phase of his thought.

[1] In the appendix to his Opera Medica (Tolosae Tectosagum, 1636, p. 110). Windelband draws attention to this thought, Gesch. der neueren Philosophie, 3rd ed. i. p. 23.

[CHAPTER II]

VICO'S THEORY OF KNOWLEDGE: SECOND PHASE

The will to believe, which in Vico's case was very strong, and the complete sway which the Catholicism of his country and age held over his mind, bound him firmly down to the Christian Platonic metaphysic and theory of knowledge; a theory whose inherent contradictions were prevented by the above psychological facts from coming explicitly before his mind. The idea of God at once dominated and supported him; he neither had the audacity nor realised the necessity to probe to the bottom such problems as the validity of revelation, the conceivability of a God apart from the world, or the possibility of affirming the existence of God without in some sense demonstrating and therefore creating him. For Vico to open up and partially traverse a new path, which should lead the human mind to transcend that of the Christian Platonists, providence—to use for the moment an idea of his own which we shall explain later on—had perforce to deceive him; to lead him by a long and circuitous way to the commencement of the new path without letting him suspect where it would end.

The writings in which Vico expounds his first theory of knowledge, De ratione studiorum and De antiquissima Italorum sapientia, together with the polemical works bearing upon them, belong to the four years from 1708 to 1712. In the following decade Vico was gradually led to devote himself more and more to research in the history of law and of the State. He read Grotius as a preparation for writing the life of Antonio Carafa, and plunged into the controversy on Natural Rights. He pursued his studies of Roman law and the science of law in general, in order to fit himself for a chair of jurisprudence at Naples University. He pondered upon the origins of languages, religions, and states, out of dissatisfaction with his own historical theories as set forth in the Be antiquissima; perhaps also his convictions were shaken by a well-directed criticism by the editor of the Giornale dei letterati. His profession, the teaching of rhetoric, gave him continual opportunities for meditating upon the nature and relations of poetry and the forms of language. Thus even if it is inaccurate to say that Vico was led to his later position culminating in the Scienza Nuova by a philological, not a philosophical process (since clearly a philosophical position can only come into being through a process no less philosophical), it is at least certain that the material and stimulus for his new thought were supplied by philological studies.

These studies seem to have impressed upon him a fact of great importance; namely, that this subject-matter could only be and had actually been worked over by his thought through the aid of certain necessary principles, appearing on every page of the history which he had chosen for investigation. He had once believed that the moral sciences, as compared with the mathematical method, took the lowest place as regards certainty. But now, in his daily acquaintance with these sciences, he had come to hold the opposite view; namely, that nothing could be firmer than the foundation of the moral sciences!

This certainty was not the simple self-evidence of Descartes, in which the object, however internal it is said to be, remains extrinsic to the subject. It was a truly internal certainty, reached by an internal process. In the assimilation of historical facts, Vico felt himself to be making more truly his own something that already belonged to him; to be entering into possession of what was his by right. He was reconstructing the history of man; and what was the history of man but a product of man himself? Is not the creator of history simply man, with his ideas, his passions, his will, and his actions? And is not the mind of man, the creator of history, identical with the mind which is at work in thinking it and knowing it? The truth of the constructive principles of history then comes not from the validity of the clear and distinct idea, but from the indissoluble connexion of the subject and object of knowledge.

The importance of this new discovery, the discovery of the truth which Vico now recognised in the moral sciences, lay in the realisation of a new implication of the theory of knowledge laid down by himself in the former period of his speculations; namely, the criterion of truth consisting in the "convertibility of the true with the created." The reason why man could have perfect knowledge of man's world was simply that he had himself made that world. "When it happens that he who creates things also describes them, then the history is certain in the highest degree."

Connected as it thus was with his earlier view, the assertion of the possibility of the moral sciences did not, to Vico's own mind, present the importance and bring with it the consequences of a revolution entirely overthrowing the structure of his ideas, and compelling him to adjust them afresh. On the one hand, this assertion seemed to him a confirmation of his former doctrine, a new example to be added to those he had already collected of perfect knowledge; namely, God's knowledge of the universe and man's of the world of mathematics. On the other hand, it seemed to be an extension of the field of knowledge, whose boundaries (for definite boundaries still existed) had at first been too narrowly drawn. Formerly he had described a small luminous sphere in the centre of a vast and dimly lighted field; now the luminous sphere underwent a definite increase in size, and the penumbral region a corresponding diminution. This increase involved no sort of conflict with his religious beliefs; in fact, it seemed to support them and to gain support from them in turn. For did not religion teach the liberty, responsibility, and consciousness which man has in respect of his own acts and creations?

Thus Vico did not feel obliged to write a new treatise on metaphysics. It seemed enough to add a mere post-script to his former work, and to correct to some extent his earlier assertions. His new theory of knowledge, while adhering strictly to the criterion of truth enunciated by him in opposition to that of Descartes—the principle, that is, that only the creator of a thing can know it—divided the whole of reality into the world of nature and the world of man. But, while it laid down that the world of nature is created by God and that therefore God alone knows it, it restricted its agnosticism to this field. It asserted, on the other hand, that the human world, being man's creation, is known by man. In this way it raised the knowledge of human affairs, formerly considered merely approximate and probable, to the rank of perfect science; and it expressed surprise that philosophers should so laboriously endeavour to attain to science of the world of nature, which is a sealed book to mankind, while passing over the world of man, the science of which is attainable. The cause of this error he traced to the ease with which man's mind, involved and buried as it is in the body, feels bodily things, and the labour and pains it costs it to understand itself, as the bodily eye sees all objects outside itself, but in order to see itself requires the help of the mirror.

In everything else his system remained unchanged. Beyond the world of man lay the supernatural world, inaccessible to man, and the world of nature, itself also in a sense supernatural. Beyond the perfect knowledge which man could have of himself lay the metaphysic of Christian Platonism, now reduced to impotence, but continuing none the less to embarrass mankind. The natural sciences were now, as before, regarded as incomplete forms of knowledge: mathematics as a system of abstractions, absolutely valid in the abstract but in face of reality powerless. The Aristotelian syllogism, the Stoic sorites, and the Cartesian geometrical method were pursued with the same hatred as before; and the same enthusiastic praise was lavished upon the induction advocated and illustrated in his Organum by Bacon, that "great philosopher and great statesman," and fruitfully employed by his countrymen in experimental philosophy.

Vico's frequent claim to have constructed the science of human affairs on "a strict geometric method" might seem to indicate a change of opinion as to the applicability of that method. But his continual warnings, during the same period and in the same works, against the use in physical and moral questions of the mathematical method, which, "where there are no figures either of lines or numbers, either gives us no conclusiveness, or else, instead of demonstrating the truth, may often give an appearance of demonstration to falsehood," would flatly contradict the supposed change of front were it not that we could interpret it so as completely to restore the coherence of Vico's thought. This interpretation is quite simple. Once the power of converting the true with the created is seen to attach to the moral sciences no less than to geometry, these sciences could and indeed must develop on a method analogous to the synthetic method of geometry, the method which proceeds from a truth to its immediate consequence. In this manner they follow the progress of the world of man from its ideal origin to its perfect development; so that the student must not hope to be able to investigate these sciences per saltum, but must traverse them from beginning to end in detail, without refusing to accept unforeseen conclusions any more than he can refuse to do so in geometry; but concentrating his attention on the firmness of the bond between premisses and conclusion. Thus the method could be called geometric by analogy or synecdoche; in fact, however, it was essentially speculative, and not to be confused with the application of mathematics to questions of morals, of which the Cartesians and Spinoza have left examples.

Nor can we agree without reservation to the opinion of certain commentators that Vico, in asserting the existence of a single science of man, to be studied in the modifications of the human mind, was retreating to the position of a follower of Descartes. This opinion is often reinforced by another statement of Vico's, namely, that to conceive his New Science it would be well to return to a state of absolute ignorance, as if no philosophers, philologists, nor books had even existed in the world. It is true that with the new form of his theory of knowledge Vico himself joined the ranks of modern subjectivism, initiated by Descartes. In a sense, indeed, he had already done so in his activistic doctrine of truth as the reconstruction of the created. In this quite general sense Vico might himself be called a Cartesian. Nevertheless, if he was still behind Descartes in making his subjectivism a principle not of the whole of knowledge but of the knowledge of the world of man only, in another way he was ahead of the French philosopher, in that for him the truth attained in the world of man was not static but dynamic, not a discovery but a product, not consciousness but science.

As for the advice that one should proceed as if there were no books, no philosophical or philological doctrines in the world, its meaning is merely the necessity of ridding oneself of all prejudice, of all common habitual assumptions, of all accretions of memory and fancy, in order to attain "the state of pure understanding, empty of every particular form," which is necessary for the discovery and apprehension of any new truth. So far removed is this advice from the Cartesian or Malebranchian renunciation of learning and authority, that—to mention one fact only—in the very passage to which we have just referred we find the warning that the New Science presupposes a comprehensive and varied mass both of doctrine and of learning, the truths of which it takes over as already known, and uses them as terms in its new propositions.

In a word, Vico in his new theory of knowledge became not more Cartesian but more Vician—more himself. Descartes seemed to him not even a serviceable path by which to attain proof of the possibility of constructing the science of mind by means of the mind. The true path was Vico's own criterion of truth, brought into relation with its author's observations made in the course of his historical studies. If we wish to look for precedents in the history of philosophy for Vico's theory of knowledge in its second form, the division between the two worlds of reality and the two spheres of consciousness, and the preference for moral as compared with natural studies, would lead us back to the position adopted by Socrates as against the "Physiologists" of his time, and the feeling of religious mystery which brought the Athenian philosopher to a standstill in face of the natural world and directed his efforts to the study of the mind of man. Again, as to the superior transparency of the moral sciences, as dealing with objects created by man himself, we might recall the Aristotelian division of the sciences into physical, treating of motion external to man, and practical and "poietic," which deal with man's own creations. The distinction passed into the philosophy of the schools: Thomas Aquinas speaks of nature as "an order which reason contemplates but does not create" (ordo quem ratio considerat sed non facit), and of the world of human activity as "an order which reason creates by contemplation" (ordo quem ratio considerando facit). But no such reference is made by Vico, fond as he was of expressing the debt of his own thought to the ancient philosophers; and admitting that the doctrine had some force before his time, the divergence between this earlier view and that of Vico on the knowableness of the world of man is as great as that between the assertion of the omniscience of God the Creator and the theory of knowledge which Vico was able to draw from it.

Of this theory, his doctrine of the moral sciences was neither more nor less than the first legitimate application. Both its author and the majority of his commentators are using inaccurate language in describing it as a simple extension of the previous applications—a second instance, added to that of the mathematical sciences, already examined.

In the mathematical sciences, the principle of the conversion of the true with the created had been applied in appearance only. The principle itself was original and sound: so was the theory of mathematics. But the connexion between the two truths was altogether artificial and false. What was lacking was, unless we are mistaken, an effective relation between the concept of God who creates the world and, as creating it, knows it, and that of the man who arbitrarily constructs a world of abstractions, and in doing so either knows nothing at all, or else, when he ceases to be a geometer or arithmetician and becomes a philosopher, when he is composing not Euclid's Elements but the theory of knowledge in the De antiquissima, knows merely that his procedure is arbitrary. If the mathematical sciences construct their concepts as they please, if they produce not truth but definitions, they are as a matter of fact not sciences at all, nor any form of knowledge, and cannot be compared with the divine knowledge, the knowledge of actual reality. In mathematics, says Vico, "man, holding within himself an imaginary world of lines and numbers, operates in this world by abstraction just as God operates in the universe by reality." It is a luminous comparison; but perhaps its light is that of metaphor rather than logic.

In the moral sciences, on the other hand, the comparison is so entirely logical that it should frankly be called coincidence. Human knowledge is qualitatively identical with divine, and knows the world of man equally well; it is, however, quantitatively more restricted, and does not extend like the divine to the world of nature. In the human field we no longer find the expedients of weakness, definitions and falsifications; knowledge is here at its highest point of concreteness. Man creates the human world, creates it by transforming himself into the facts of society: by thinking it he re-creates his own creations, traverses over again the paths he has already traversed, reconstructs the whole ideally, and thus knows it with full and true knowledge. Here is a real world; and of this world man is truly the God.

It seems undeniable, then, that the application of the "verum-factum" made in the New Science is the only one which corresponds to the criterion previously formulated. The earlier attempt at an application of it to mathematics, though important in other respects and well calculated to free the mind from mathematical prejudice, cannot be considered a true or strict use of it. It is possible that Vico was sometimes vaguely conscious of the difference between the two applications, the strict and the metaphorical, which as a rule he confused and treated as identical. The science of the world of man, he says, proceeds exactly as does geometry, which while it constructs out of its elements or contemplates the world of quantity, itself creates it; but with proportionately greater reality, since order has no connexion with human affairs, containing as they do neither points, lines, surfaces, nor figures. Another indication of his gradually dawning consciousness that he had now for the first time in his doctrine of the world of man discovered a true and proper knowledge, not a mere fiction of knowledge, may perhaps be seen in the much greater conviction, warmth, and enthusiasm with which he now uses the epithet "divine": quite a different thing from the chilly, if not absolutely ironical, ad Dei instar of the De antiquissima. The proofs of the New Science, he says more than once, with fervour, "are divine in their nature, and should give thee, Reader, a divine joy: since in God knowledge and creation are one."

The conversion of the true with the created was bound to react upon the treatment of certitude in one, perhaps the chief, of the various meanings in which Vico uses the word, namely, historical fact: the peculiare, certum, as opposed to the commune or verum. This forms the other important section of Vico's second theory of knowledge. In the former theory these cognitions were, as we saw, legitimised and protected by being put on a level with all other kinds of knowledge, all of them equally weak or equally strong, being all alike founded on probability or authority, whether of the individual (autopsy) or of mankind.

But now that the knowledge of the human mind and its laws was rescued from the region of authority and probability, historical fact, although still in a sense, by its very nature, founded upon authority, was placed in a new light. The certain must enter into a new relation, confronted as it now was not by another certainty, that is, mere probable knowledge of the human mind, but by a truth, a piece of philosophical knowledge.

This relation is also called by Vico the relation between philosophy and philology: the former dealing with necessities of nature, necessaria naturae, and contemplating the reason from which issues the science of truth; the latter with decisions of the human will, placita humani arbitrii, and following the authority whence comes knowledge of the certain. The one considers the universal, the other the individual; the one, as Leibniz would have said, the vérités de raison, the other the vérités de fait. With Vico the distinction is not so clearly expressed: in fact, authority as opposed to reason sometimes, according to him, becomes a part of reason itself, or is confused with the knowledge of the human will as opposed to that of rational volition; but the general sense is none the less quite plain. By philology Vico means not only the study of words and their history, but, since words are bound up with the ideas of things, he means also the history of things. Thus philologists should deal with war, peace, alliances, travels, commerce, customs, laws and coinage, geography and chronology, and every other subject connected with man's life on earth. Philology in a word, in Vico's sense, which is also the true sense, embraces not only the history of language or literature, but also that of events, philosophy, and politics.

It is true that philology, the truth of fact or certitude, had not always been so brutally treated as it was by the Cartesians. Grotius had given evidence of immense historical learning employed on behalf of his doctrine of natural right. Gravina, Vico's contemporary and fellow-countryman, demanded as necessary to the student of law not only "the art of reasoning" (ratiocinandi ars) but "skill in the Latin tongue" (Latinae linguae peritia) and "knowledge of history" (notitia temporum). And Leibniz, whom we have just named, reasserted the value of learning as against the Cartesians, and extended his patronage, en grand seigneur, to the varied collection of historical anecdotes which he scattered freely over his pages. But Vico observed that the philosophy and philology of his time always remained external to one another, as they had been almost entirely in Greece and Rome. All the quotations from historians, orators, philosophers, and poets accumulated by Grotius were a mere embellishment. Perhaps Vico would have passed the same judgment upon the liberal use made of history by Leibniz, if he had known of it and expressed his opinion. In reading the works of philologists he was conscious of such a sense of vacuity and weariness in the unintelligent jumble of historical observations, that he was almost led to agree with Descartes and Malebranche in their hatred of scholarship: for a time, in fact, he did entirely agree with them. But these two philosophers—so his later thought ran—ought, instead of despising erudition, rather to have asked whether it were possible to reclaim philology to philosophical principles; and the philologists for their part, instead of marshalling facts for a display of learning, ought to strive to make them the aim of science. Philology must be reduced to a science. This was Vico's idea of the relation of certitude to truth, or philology to philosophy.

What was the meaning of reducing philology, or history, which is the same thing, to a science or philosophy? Strictly speaking, the reduction is impossible: not because they deal with subject-matter different in kind, but because their subject-matter is in point of fact homogeneous. History is already essentially philosophy. It is impossible to make the most insignificant historical statement without moulding it with thought, that is with philosophy. But since the existence of this philosophical basis of philology was not at that time realised, indeed it was none too often realised in later times, and in consequence easily denied; and since most people, as we have seen, imagined either an aristocratic geometrical philosophy, hating and avoiding the "profane mob" of facts, or else, as at first Vico did, a philosophy and a history equally devoid of cogency, and merely matters of opinion: for these reasons Vico, after the change of his philosophical point of view, now that he had attained to the consciousness of the speculative method in the science of man, and understood more deeply the human mind, was bound to see how much current history stood in need of reform and extension; to feel the lack of an improved philology as a consequence of the improved philosophy, and to express it in terms of the theory of knowledge by the formula reuniting philology to philosophy: "that this second science, as is fair, should be the consequence of the first" (ut haec posterior, ut par est, prioris sit consequentia). He was bound, in other words, to rescue history from its condition of inferiority, where it was a mere slave to caprice, vanity, moralising and precept-making, and other irrelevant aims, and to recognise its own true end as a necessary complement of eternal truth. Philosophy nowadays is full of and intimate with historical fact: and this gives it greater breadth and a more lively sense of dealing with concrete reality. This is no doubt one meaning of Vico's formula concerning the union of philosophy and philology, and the reduction of the latter to a science.

It is, however, certain that in propounding this formula he had in view a further and, as often happened, a different meaning. This other meaning might be most simply illustrated by comparing it, as Vico himself did with Bacon and his "more certain method of philosophising": that method which Bacon expressed in the title of his work by the words Cogitata et visa, and Vico proposed to "transfer from the natural to the human or political world." In a word, he demanded the construction of a typical history of human society (cogitare) which was then to be discovered in the facts (videre). Thus the ideal construction would acquire certainty from the facts, and the facts truth from the ideal construction: authority would be confirmed by reason and reason by authority. He demanded a science which should be at once a philosophy of man and a universal history of nations. Now this structure which he required—something intermediate between cogitare and videre, thought and experience, this mixture of the two processes—is intrinsically different from the unity of philosophy and philology, in so far as that is a philosophical interpretation of factual data. Such an interpretation is living history: the other is neither philosophy nor history, but an empirical science of man and society, drawing its materials from schemata which are neither the extra-temporal categories of philosophy nor the individual facts of history: although it can never be constructed without philosophical categories and historical facts. It is an empirical science; and as such, neither exact nor true, but only approximative and probable, and subject to verification and correction from the side both of philosophy and of history.

It would be impossible to decide either which of these two meanings of philology reduced to history is that of Vico himself, since both are included in his thought: or which is the prevailing one, since in point of fact now one, now the other prevails: although the second, or empirical, signification is the more often formulated. We might even say that when Vico entitled his treatise Scienza Nuova, the principal meaning he attached to this "invidious" name referred precisely to this empirical science, the science, that is, which was to be at once a philosophy and a history of man: the ideal history of the eternal laws which govern the course of all nations' deeds in their rise, progress, points of rest, decline and fall. The fact is, Vico did not and could not unify the two different meanings; he maintained the duality which, simply because it was never made explicit, presented an appearance of unity. Thus each of the tendencies shown by his interpreters is partially justified: one group of whom maintain that Vico laid down and employed the speculative method; another, that his procedure was both in intention and in effect empirical, inductive and psychological: the former believing that he aimed at a systematic philosophy of man, the latter that he was bent upon a scheme of sociology or social psychology. Both views are one-sided, but the second more so than the first. If there actually were in Vico elements both of Bacon and of Plato, of the empiricist and the philosopher, yet when we look at his intellectual personality as a whole, when we penetrate into the depths of his mind and share in his difficulties and his colossal labours, we must recognise that whatever he meant and believed Vico was of the stuff of a Plato and not a Bacon: that even the Bacon of whom he speaks is in part his own invention, a Bacon tinged with Platonism: and that the New Science seemed so new to him fundamentally, not because it was an empirical structure on Bacon's lines—indeed in that case no science could be older: we need only cite Aristotle's Politics and Machiavelli's Discourses, —but because it was impregnated throughout by a new philosophy, which did in truth break into it on every side, through all his empiricism.

[CHAPTER III]

INTERNAL STRUCTURE OF THE NEW SCIENCE

The lack of clearness on the relation of philosophy to philology, and the failure to distinguish between the two quite different ways of conceiving the reduction of philology to a science, are at once the consequences and the causes of the obscurity which prevails in the "New Science." By this name we refer to the whole mass of research and theory which Vico was producing from 1720 to 1730, elaborated above all in three works, the De uno universi iuris principio et fine uno and the first and second Scienza Nuova; it attains its maturest and most developed form in the last of these, and this is the most important for reference.

The New Science, agreeably to the various meanings of the terms philosophy and philology and of the relation between them, consists of three groups of investigations, philosophical, historical and empirical. Altogether it contains a philosophy of mind, a history, or group of histories, and a social science. To the first named belong the ideas expressed in various axioms or aphorisms scattered up and down the work, on imagination and the imaginative universal, on the intellect and the logical universal, on myth, religion, the moral judgment, force and law, certitude and truth, the passions, providence, and all the other determinations affecting the course or development of the thought or mind of man. To the second, namely history, belong the sketch of a universal history of primitive peoples from the time of the Flood, and of the origins of the various civilisations: the description of the ancient barbaric or heroic society in Greece and especially in Rome, with regard to religion, customs, law, language and political constitution: the study of primitive poetry, concentrating upon the determination of the genesis and character of the Homeric poems: the history of the social struggles between the patricians and plebeians and the origin of democracy, also studied chiefly in Rome: and the description of the return of barbarism or the Middle Ages, also studied in all aspects of life and compared with primitive barbaric society. Finally, to empirical science belongs the attempt to establish a uniform course of national history, dealing with the succession both of political forms and of other correlative manifestations of life both theoretical and practical, and the series of types successively drawn by Vico of the patriciate, the plebs, feudalism, the patriarchal family, symbolic law, metaphorical language, hieroglyphic writing and so forth.

Now if these three classes of inquiry and theory had been logically distinct in Vico's mind and united and compressed within the limits of a single book for literary reasons alone, the result might have been confused, ill-proportioned, out of harmony, and therefore fatiguing to the reader, but not obscure. But in point of fact it cannot be said that the Scienza Nuova, at least in its second form, the final exposition of his thought given by Vico, lacks a general plan, well enough conceived. The treatise is divided into five books. The first is intended to summarise general principles, that is, philosophy. The second, in addition to a short note on the most ancient universal history, describes the life of barbaric society, to which the third, on the discovery of the true Homer, the most conspicuous example of barbaric poetry, forms an appendix. The fourth is meant to sketch the empirical science of the movement of national history: and the fifth to exemplify the movement of "reflux" in the particular case of the Middle Ages. And yet, in spite of this fine architectonic scheme, the second Scienza Nuova is the most obscure, just as it is the most rich and complete of Vico's works. If on the other hand, while keeping his ideas clear in his mind, Vico had used an unfamiliar terminology or a style of exposition either too compressed or too full of allusions or implicit presuppositions, he would certainly have been a difficult writer, but in this case, as in the other, not obscure. But such a hypothesis does not suit the facts. Vico is very sparing of scholastic language; he prefers living and popular terminology. He is not compressed: in fact, he is fond of repeating his ideas, emphasising them by repetition with great insistence. And he lays all his cards on the table: that is to say, he shows all the material by which his doctrines have been suggested. Finally, it amounts to very little to say that Vico was not fully conscious of his own discoveries: such consciousness is more or less deficient in every thinker, and in fact none could have it more fully. The obscurity, the real obscurity which we find in Vico is not superficial. It does not come either from merely general or from secondary causes. It really consists in the obscurity of his ideas; in his insufficient understanding of certain connections, and the substitution for them of fallacious ones; in the arbitrary element, that is, which he introduces into his thought, or to put it more simply in his own downright errors. One might rewrite the New Science, recasting the order and changing and elucidating the terminology—the present writer has made the attempt for himself—and still the obscurity would remain, or even increase; for in such a translation the work in losing its original form would lose also the turbid but powerful strength which may at times take the place of clarity, and, while it does not illuminate, stirs the reader's mind and generates waves of thought as it were by sympathetic vibrations.

That Vico's obscurity, his mistake or mistakes, is due to the confusion or lack of distinction in his theory of knowledge mentioned above, on the question of the relations between philosophy, history and empirical science—a confusion which exists no less in his actual thought on the problems of the mind and history of man—that this is so can be seen by observing how philosophy, history and empirical science pass into each other by turns in Vico's mind, and vitiating each other in turn produce the perplexities, ambiguities, exaggerations and hasty statements which perturb the reader of the New Science. The philosophy of mind masquerades now as empirical science, now as history: empirical science now as philosophy, now as history: and historical propositions assume the universality of philosophical principles or the generality of empirical schemata. For example, the philosophy of man undertakes to determine the forms, categories or ideal moments of mind in their necessary succession, and in this aspect it well deserves the title or definition of "eternal ideal history" according to which particular histories proceed in time; while no fragment however small of actual history can be conceived in which this ideal history is not present. But, since ideal history is also for Vico the empirical determination of the order in which the forms of civilisations, states, languages, styles, and kinds of poetry succeed one another, it comes about that he conceives the empirical series as identical with the ideal series, and as deriving validity from it. Hence he asserts that this series must always be exactly reproduced in the facts, "even if infinite worlds were produced from time to time through eternity": an assertion which is plainly false, since there is no reason why the empirical fact of Greek or Roman aristocracy should be repeated for ever, with a "must have been, must be now, must be hereafter"; or why civilisations should rise and fall precisely as did those of antiquity. And this very treatment of the empirical course of events as absolute threw a shadow of empiricism over their ideal course; since the latter once identified with the former took over its empirical and temporal character instead of the eternal and extra—temporal character which it had as originally conceived. The same must be said of the various forms of mind which, as ideal and extra—temporal, are always all present in every fact; but Vico, by confusing them with the real and concrete facts which empirical science splits up into its schemata, destroyed them in their ideal form and distinction as soon as he had stated them. It is true that the moment of force is not that of justice; but the empirical type of barbaric society founded upon force, precisely because it is a representative and approximative determination, and is referred to a concrete and total state of things, contains not only force but justice as well; and when this ideal moment and this type of society are interchanged and treated as identical, on the one hand the philosophical concept of force is confused with that of justice and becomes impure, contradictory and incoherent, and finally annuls itself: on the other, the empirical type of barbaric society becomes exaggerated and unduly rigid. The confusion between the philosophic and the empirical is clearly expressed in Vico's aphorism defining the nature of things. "Nature of things is nothing else than their production at certain times and in certain manners: and whenever these latter are of such a kind, then the things produced are of such a kind and no other." Here we see the confusion between time and manner, between ideal and empirical genesis. Similarly, it is perfectly true that history ought to proceed in harmony with philosophy, and that a philosophical absurdity can never be a historical event: but, since the distinction between philosophy and empirical science was not drawn by Vico, when evidence was lacking and philosophy therefore inapplicable he felt no less sure of attaining truth. He merely filled the gap with a conjecture supplied by the schema of empirical science, and persuaded himself that he had fallen back on a "metaphysical proof." Or again, if he found himself faced by uncertain facts, instead of patiently waiting till the discovery of further evidence should dispel the doubt, he cut the knot by accepting the facts, as he put it, in conformity with laws: which always means the empirical schema. A legitimate method, doubtless, when treated as hypothetical. But this hypothesis became in its turn, for Vico, a "truth meditated in the idea": so that the comparison with facts, which none the less he recommends for the sake of confirmation, became strictly speaking superfluous: or, if the comparison showed that the facts disagreed with it, the facts, as mere appearance, must be in the wrong, rather than the hypothesis, which is laid down as philosophical truth, and therefore indubitable. Hence arises the tendency observed in Vico to do violence to the facts.

These examples are enough to indicate the deep-seated fault in the structure of the New Science, and to establish one point in our exposition and criticism of Vico's thought, in the course of which many other examples of the same point will arise of themselves, and those already given will become more clear. But another point which must be well established is that this fault is the fault of an organism in the highest degree healthy, and that the different species of inquiry between which Vico failed to distinguish were composed of investigations of extraordinary originality, truth, and importance. It is in fact the fault often found in highly original and inventive intellects, which seldom work out their discoveries in accurate detail, while less inventive minds are generally more precise and logical. Depth and acuteness do not always flourish equally side by side: and Vico, however much he fell short in acuteness, was always profoundly deep.

Light and shade, truth and error, which alternate and interweave at almost every point in the New Science, are variously distinguished according to the various temperaments of readers and critics: and in conspicuous cases, like that of Vico, such variations assume the most sharply defined form. Some minds are self-willed and suspicious, quick to mark any trifling contradiction, merciless in demanding proof of every statement, and indefatigable in wielding the forceps of dilemma to dismember an unfortunate great man. For them Vico's work, like many others of the same kind, is a closed book. At most, it will provide them with a theme for what is known as a "refutation": an easy and congenial task, yet hardly a successful one, since the man they have demolished generally emerges from the slaughter more alive than before. But there is another type of mind, which, at the first word which reaches the heart, at the first ray of truth which dawns upon the eyes, opens its whole self in desire, abandons itself in faith, and grows wild with enthusiasm; which refuses to hear of faults and never sees difficulties, or the difficulties at once vanish, and the faults find the easiest of justifications: and when it commits itself to writing, its writings appear in the guise of "defences." For such a mind we fear that the New Science is a book all too open. No doubt, if these two attitudes were the only alternatives, if no third choice were open, one would have to choose the fault of love rather than that of cold indifference; the excess of faith, which may yet enrich us by one or two aspects of the truth, rather than the absence of faith which never lets us realise one. But a third attitude is possible to, and indeed incumbent on the critic; namely, that which never takes its eyes off the light, but yet does not conceal the shade; which transcends the letter to attain the spirit, yet not ignoring the letter, but always returning to it, always endeavouring to play the part of a free but not a fanciful interpreter, a warm lover but not a blind one.

The two points above established, the strength and weakness essential to Vico's intellect, his tendency to confusion or his confusion of tendencies, supply us with a kind of general canon of interpretation; namely, that of separating analytically at every step his pure philosophy from the empiricism and history with which he mixes, and in which so to speak he embodies it, and on the other hand separating the latter from the former: and of observing, in the process, the causes and effects of the mixture. The dross cannot be treated as non-existent, bound up as it is with the gold in its natural state: but it must not hinder us from recognising and purifying the gold. Or, to drop the metaphor, the history must be indeed a history, but that it can only be if guided by intelligence.

[CHAPTER IV]

THE IMAGINATIVE FORM OF KNOWLEDGE

(POETRY AND LANGUAGE)

The chief, almost indeed the only, forms of the mind studied by Vico in the New Science are the inferior, individualising activities to which he gives the general name of "certitude." These are, in the region of theoretic mind, imagination: in that of the practical mind, power or will: and in the empirical science corresponding to the philosophy of mind, the barbaric society and poetic wisdom whose examination occupies, in his own words, "almost the whole bulk of the work."

His deep interest in these lower forms, and in the primitive societies and barbaric histories which display them, is further illustrated and explained, among his external circumstances, by the studies he undertook in Roman law and its expressions and rhetorical figures: by the still living tradition of Italian humanism: by the recently stimulated pursuit of the archaeological sciences: by his own desire to investigate the earliest civilisation of Italy, and so forth. But many of his contemporaries and countrymen were handling the same materials without acquiring any of his taste for and comprehension of imagination, simplicity and force: indeed Vico himself, when he wrote the De antiquissima, had the taste for these things but as yet no comprehension of them. The full reason for this interest is seen when we consider the development of Vico as a philosopher, without losing sight of the complexity of his nature in all its opposition to the Cartesian type of mind. Cartesianism, with its attention confined to the universalising and abstractive forms, ignored the individualising: and this necessarily attracted Vico all the more towards them as towards a mysterious problem. Cartesianism shrank in horror from the tangled forest of history: Vico plunged eagerly into that very department of history where the historical flavour, so to speak, is strongest; namely, that which is furthest and psychologically most different from civilised periods. Cartesianism extended the psychology of civilisation to all periods and nations: Vico was led to investigate in all their profound divergencies and contradictions the modes of feeling and thought proper to various times.

The great effort which had to be made, and actually was made by Vico, in order to penetrate through modern intellectualism and recapture the point of view of primitive psychology, is expressed in his language about the "grave difficulties" entailed by his "labour of fully twenty-five years" in the attempt to "stoop from these civilised natures of ours to those absolutely wild and savage minds, which we cannot picture to ourselves at all, and can only understand with great toil." It is expressed again, rather differently, by his insistence on the impossibility, now that, even with the common people, the mind of man is too completely separated from the senses, accustomed to the free use of abstract terms, sharpened by the art of writing, and spiritualised so to speak by the employment of numbers,—the impossibility of entering into the chaotic fancy of primitive man, whose mind was the very reverse of abstract, acute or spiritual; but rather sunk in the senses, blunted by passion, and buried in the body: and of grasping such ideas as that of the "sympathy of nature." This necessary effort—a painful one, but successful—was another reason for his feeling that his science was "new." He says indeed that this study of the ideal form and the historic period of certitude was entirely lacking to Greek philosophy as a whole. Plato had attempted it in the Cratylus, but unsuccessfully, because he knew nothing of the language of the first legislators, the heroic poets, and was deceived by the altered and modernised forms under which the laws existed in his time after continual revision at Athens. Among the moderns, J. C. Scaliger, Francisco Sanchez and Gaspar Schopp had fallen into a similar mistake when they attempted to explain language by the principles of logic, and indeed of Aristotelian logic, in spite of its having arisen centuries after language itself. Grotius, Selden, Puffendorf and the other writers on natural rights also studied human nature as civilised by religion and law; so that in retracing the course of history they began in the middle: that is to say, they confined themselves to the intellect, ignoring the imagination, and to the will under moral restraint, passing over the undisciplined passions. Vico himself, while he had shown his interest in this problem by undertaking to investigate the "most ancient wisdom of Italy," was yet led astray in his study by following the lead of the author of the Cratylus.

In its philosophical aspect, the New Science might, owing to this prominence given to the study of the individualising forms, above all the imagination (since the doctrine that primitive man is a poet and thinks in poetic images is in Vico's words the "master key" of the work) be called, without undue paradox, a philosophy of Mind with special attention to the Philosophy of Imagination or Aesthetic.

Aesthetic may in fact be considered as a discovery of Vico's, though with the reservations to which the determination of discoveries and discoverers is always subject; and although he did not deal with it in a separate treatise or give it the happy title with which Baumgarten christened it ten years or so later. It is interesting however to notice that the terminology of the New Science lights upon a name similar to one of the equivalents for Aesthetic which Baumgarten passes in review; namely that of "the Logic of Poetry." But ultimately the name matters little: what does matter is the fact: and the fact is that Vico adopted a theory of poetry which was then and was still for a time to be a bold and revolutionary innovation. At that time, as is well known, the old practical or didactic theory held the field: the theory which, starting late in the history of the ancient world, persisting through the Middle Ages, and transplanted into the Renaissance, regarded poetry as an ingenious disguise for the popularising of lofty philosophical and theological ideas. Beside this theory, though inferior in authority, stood another, which considered poetry as the product of or means to diversion and pleasure. These views had come to alter the original meaning of the Aristotelian treatise on poetry, so as to be at last introduced into it and discovered there as if Aristotle himself had held and written them. Nor was this mistake corrected by Cartesianism, which, as we should expect from its general direction, rather tended to enfeeble and annul the very object of these definitions, as a thing of no value, or practically none. At a time when philosophers were trying to reduce metaphysics and ethics to a mathematical form, and despised concrete intuition: when men were devising a literature and a poetry suited to disseminate science among the common people or the world of fashion: when experiments were being made in the construction of artificial, logical languages, superior to those of past or present usage: when, finally, it was thought possible to lay down rules for composing musical airs without being a musician, and poems without being a poet: in this atmosphere of detachment, coolness, hostility and mockery, only a miracle could arouse a different and indeed opposite feeling—a warm and vivid consciousness of the real nature of poetry in its original function: and this miracle was worked by the keen, restless and stormy mind of Giambattista Vico.

He criticised at once the three doctrines of poetry as a means of adorning and communicating intellectual truth, as merely subservient to pleasure, and as a harmless mental exercise for those who can do it. Poetry is not esoteric wisdom: it does not presuppose the logic of the intellect: it does not contain philosophical judgments. The philosophers, in finding these things in poetry, have simply put them there themselves without realising it. Poetry is produced not by the mere caprice of pleasure, but by natural necessity. It is so far from being superfluous and capable of elimination, that without it thought cannot arise: it is the primary activity of the human mind. Man, before he has arrived at the stage of forming universals, forms imaginary ideas. Before he reflects with a clear mind, he apprehends with faculties confused and disturbed: before he can articulate, he sings: before speaking in prose, he speaks in verse: before using technical terms, he uses metaphors, and the metaphorical use of words is as natural to him as that which we call "natural." So far from being a fashion of expounding metaphysics poetry is distinct from and opposed to metaphysics. The one frees the intellect from the senses, the other submerges and overwhelms it in them: the one reaches perfection in proportion as it rises to universality, the other, as it confines itself to the particular: the one enfeebles the imagination, the other strengthens it. The one takes precautions against turning the mind into body, the other delights in giving body to the mind. The judgments of poetry are composed of sense and emotion, those of philosophy are composed of reflection, which if introduced into poetry makes it frigid and unreal: and no one in the whole course of history has ever been at once a great poet and a great metaphysician. Poets and philosophers may be called respectively the senses and the intellect of mankind: and in this sense we may retain as true the scholastic saying "there is nothing in the intellect which was not first in the senses." Without sense, we cannot have intellect: without poetry, we cannot have philosophy, nor indeed any civilisation.

Almost more miraculous than this conception of poetry is the fact that Vico saw into the true nature of language, a problem much less canvassed and investigated, and no more satisfactorily solved, by ancient and modern philosophy down to the present day. Language was as a rule alternately confused with logic and debased into a mere external and conventional sign, or else in despair referred to a divine origin. Vico realised that the divine origin was in this case a mere refuge of indolence; that language is neither logic nor convention, and, like poetry, is neither esoteric wisdom nor due to a decision or agreement. Language arises naturally. In its first form, men express themselves "by mute actions," or by signs, and "by bodies having natural connexions with the ideas which they wish to indicate," i.e. by means of symbolic objects. But in the case both of articulated languages and of common speech, all philologists have, "with an excess of good faith," which means a deficiency of insight, accepted the view that meanings are decided at pleasure: whereas at the so-called origin of language meanings must have been natural, and every common word must certainly have started from one single individual of one nation, and been derived from the primitive language of gestures and objects. In Latin, as in other tongues, it is to be noticed that almost all the words are formed to express natural properties, or used by transference: and the greater part of every language, in every nation, is metaphorical. The opposite opinion was due to the ignorance of grammarians, who, meeting with a great number of words expressing confused and indistinct ideas, and not knowing their origin, which had formerly made them lucid and distinct, invented for their own peace of mind the conventional theory; and dragged in Aristotle and Galen as against Plato and Iamblichus. The serious objection generally brought against the natural origin of language and in favour of the conventional, namely the variations in the common speech among different nations, is solved by considering that owing to diversities of climate, temperament and custom nations looked at the same useful or necessary objects in different aspects, and hence produced different languages. This is also seen in the case of proverbs; which are substantially identical maxims of human life, but expressed in as many different forms as there are, or have been, different nations. The insistence, then, with which Vico claims to have discovered the true origin of languages "in the principles of poetry" is of especial importance. On the one hand, it entails the assertion of the spontaneous and imaginative origin of language, and on the other it tends implicitly if not explicitly to suppress the dualism between poetry and language.

In these principles of poetry Vico found not only the origin of languages, but also that of letters or writing. He pronounced the separation of the two Origins, connected as they were by nature and appearing, in the primitive dumb language of signs and objects, as identical, to be a mere mistake of the grammarians. Here again, it is no case of esoteric wisdom or convention. Hieroglyphics were not invented by philosophers as a means of concealing the mysteries of their lofty thoughts: they were a universal and natural necessity to all primitive peoples: and only the alphabetic scripts arose among nations by a free agreement. In other words Vico drew a distinction (though in a confused manner) within the so-called scripts, between those which are true scripts and therefore conventional, and others which are directly expressive and are therefore language, story-telling, poetry and painting. These expressive scripts or languages are characterised by the inseparability of content from form. They are poetical just in the sense that the story and its expression are one and the same thing, namely a metaphor common to poetry and painting, so that it could be depicted by a dumb man without verbal expression. As examples, Vico quotes traditional anecdotes; for instance, the five "real words" (the frog, the mouse, the bird, the ploughshare and the bow) sent by Idanturas king of the Scythians to Darius when the latter had declared war on him: and the parable of the tall poppies which King Tarquin enacted before the eyes of his son Sextus's ambassador, concerning the means of ruling Gabii—methods of expression parallel to practices still found among savages and the lower classes:—and in addition to these, heraldry, flags, and the emblems upon medals and coins. There is a frivolous legend which belittles and degrades the true value of heraldry by asserting it to have been invented in German tournaments as a custom of gallantry by young men seeking to win the love of noble maidens. But in the Middle Ages heraldry was a serious thing. It was, so to speak, the hieroglyphic script of the period: a wordless language to eke out the poverty of ordinary speech and alphabetic writing. It was only later, in times of culture, that it became a sport and a pleasure, and gallant and learned blazonings were adopted which had to be enlivened by means of mottoes because their own meaning was now merely analogical; while primitive and natural heraldry was dumb, or rather spoke without needing an interpreter. Even in the days of culture a few such expressive forms retained this simplicity and naturalness. Flags or ensigns for instance form a kind of armed language with which nations, as if deprived of speech, make themselves understood in the wider affairs of the natural rights of peoples; wars, alliances and commerce.

Thus in the light of Vico's aesthetical idea poetry, words, metaphors, writing and graphic symbols are all illuminated and spring to life: great things and small, epic poetry and heraldry. The doctrine of imaginary forms was quite a new departure in the history of ideas: for while Vico opposed his own conceptions to those of the contemporary schools, especially the Cartesian, he by no means attached himself to any other more or less remote school or tradition. He himself felt that he was opposed not to a particular school but to all who had ever formulated doctrines on the subject. He says that he has "overturned" all the theories about poetry held by Plato, Aristotle, and so on down to Patrizio, Scaliger and Castelvetro in modern times, all of whom had lost themselves in ineptitudes which "even to mention makes one ashamed." Patrizio made poetry begin with the songs of birds and the whistling of the wind! As regards language, he had been ultimately dissatisfied both with Plato and with the moderns Wolfgang Latius, Scaliger and Sanchez. As regards writing, once the theory of divine origin supported by Mallinkrot and Ingewald Eling was refuted, or rather interpreted in his own way, which came to the same thing, he made an attempt to discredit the futile, vague, ill-founded, misshapen, pompous and absurd opinions which derived it from the Goths and through them from Adam and personal instruction from God, or more directly from the Earthly Paradise, or from a Gothic Mercury as inventor. Finally, as to heraldry, he remarks that the writers on the subject have never understood anything about it, and have only by a mere random guess let fall a hint of the truth in calling it "heroic."

In fact it would be hard to find real and true precedents for Vico's aesthetic conceptions. At most, we might indicate vague suggestions contained in various scattered statements which he collects: a certain immediate stimulus in the discussions of the seventeenth century on the distinctions between intellect and genius, reason and imagination, dialectic and rhetoric: and a certain convergence of external particulars, such as the collection of rhetorical subtleties expressed in subtleties of language, made by Tesauro, a rhetorician of the time.

These conceptions, however, produced as they were by a remarkable stroke of originality, no sooner passed from general outline to particular determinations, from the first idea or inspiration to concrete development, than they appear to become confused, fluctuating and unstable. We may set aside the various opinions successively held by Vico, and bound up with the historical growth of his mind, upon the subjects of poetry, language or metaphor, beginning with his academic orations, passing thence by way of the De ratione and De antiquissima to the Diritto universale, from these to the first and thence to the second Scienza Nuova: a study of these might supply subject-matter for a special essay, but does not come within the scope of our treatise. But even in the final form of his aesthetic thought, contradictory doctrines exist side by side. He is not content with saying, as he does say, that poetical form is the primary activity of the mind; that it is composed of feelings of emotion; and that it is entirely imaginative and devoid of concepts and reflection. He goes on to add that poetry, as opposed to history, "represents reality in its best idea," and therefore fulfils the justice and gives every man the reward or punishment which he does not always get in history, governed as the latter often is by caprice, necessity and chance. Again, he says that the end of poetry is "to give life to the lifeless," since its most sublime task is the attempt to give life and sensation to insensible objects. He says that poetry is "nothing but imitation"; that children, with their great imitative powers, are poets; and that primitive races, the children of mankind, were also sublime poets. He says that poetry has for its special subject-matter "the impossible made credible": for instance, it is impossible that body should be mind, and yet it was believed that the thundering sky was Jupiter. Hence the miracles performed by magicians by means of incantations were a favourite subject of poetry. He says that poetry is due to "poverty," that is, that it is a pathological product of the mind. Since uncivilised man is of low brain-power and cannot satisfy the thirst he feels for the general and the universal, he fills their place by inventing imaginary genera, poetical universals or characters. Consequently the truth of the poet is identical with the truth of the philosopher: the one abstract, the other clothed in images: the one a metaphysic of reason, the other a metaphysic of feeling and fancy, suited to the understanding of the people. From poverty also, that is from inability to articulate, arises song, and therefore mutes and stammerers utter sounds which are songs: and metaphor arises from inability to express things in an accurate manner. He says, finally, that the aim of poetry is to teach the people to act virtuously.

These sayings indicate very various ideas about poetry, of which some are compatible with the central doctrine but thrown out in a disconnected manner and therefore not in fact reconciled with it: others are quite incompatible. Vico might have been cited in turn, on the testimony of single passages, as a supporter of the moralistic theory of art, the didactic theory, the abstract or typical theory, the mythological theory, the animistic theory, and so on. And if he neither falls back into the old theories he hated, nor loses himself among the new fallacies which followed him, it is due to the fact that all these waverings and inconsistencies were continually submerged by the thought that poetry is the primary form of the mind, prior to intellect and free from reflection and reasoning.

Just as he was unable by the use of his leading principle to distinguish and reconcile the other theories on the nature of poetry which already existed or had been invented by himself, so he did not succeed in escaping from the tyranny of old or new empirical classifications. He struggled to reduce these in their turn to philosophical form, and tried to deduce successively the various kinds of poetry, epic, lyric and dramatic: the kinds of verse and metre, spondaic, iambic and prose: the kinds of figurative language, metaphor, metonymy, synecdoche and irony: the parts of speech, onomatopoeism, interjection, pronoun, particle, noun and verb: the moods and tenses of the verb (in which connexion he refers to a case of aphasia observed by himself in Naples, "a gentleman seized with a severe apoplexy, who utters nouns but has completely forgotten verbs"): the kinds of writing, hieroglyphic, symbolic and alphabetical: and of languages, according to their increasing complexity, from monosyllables to compound words and from a preponderance of vowels and diphthongs to a preponderance of consonants. In the course of these attempts he frequently offered new and sometimes correct interpretations of isolated facts: but he did not and could not connect them into a scientific system. Moreover he never realised the relation between poetry and the other arts. On the one hand, he unites them, as when he considers painting and poetry to be fundamentally identical and notes a number of analogies between the poetry and painting of the Middle Ages: on the other, he separates them sharply, as when he asserts that delicacy in art is the outcome of philosophy, and that painting, sculpture, casting and intaglio are the most delicate arts because they are compelled to abstract the surface of the material objects they represent.

These inconsistencies and errors which we have briefly reviewed are due partly to Vico's insufficient power of distinguishing and elaborating, partly—and this is the greater part—to that fundamental fault which we have already seen to exist in the structure of the New Science. In this case the fault is, more precisely, Vico's confusion between the philosophical concept of the poetic form of the mind, and the empirical concept of the barbaric form of civilisation. "This earliest age of the world," as he himself says, "can be truly said to have concerned itself exclusively with the primary activity of the mind." But the earliest age of the world, composed as it was of men of flesh and blood, not of philosophical categories, cannot have been concerned with one solitary activity of the mind. This single activity may have preponderated, as we generally say: the very word reveals the quantitative and approximative nature of the conception: but all the others must have been at work simultaneously, imagination and intellect, perception and abstraction, will and morality, song and arithmetic. Vico could not shut his eyes to this obvious fact, and introduced into this phase of civilisation not only the poet, but also the theologian, the physicist, the astronomer, the pater-familias, the warrior, the politician, and the lawgiver; but he tried to regard the activities of all these as "poetical" in character, as he called it, by a metaphor drawn from the alleged preponderance of the imaginative form of the mind; and the whole system he called "poetic wisdom." The metaphorical nature of the terminology is suggested, in fact leaps to the eye, in certain characteristic passages, as where the "arts," that is, the mechanical crafts which produce objects of practical utility, are called "poetry with a certain kind of reality," and where ancient Roman law, because of the abundance of formulae and ceremonies with which it was adorned, is said to be a "serious dramatic poem." But the metaphors are dangerous, since, as in the case of the New Science, they light upon a soil favourable to their growth into concepts: and in point of fact the historical phase of barbarism, metaphorically expressed as poetic wisdom, soon turned in Vico's mind into the ideal phase of poetry, and transferred all its own attributes to this ideal phase. The former included theologians, and accordingly Vico regarded poetry as theology, but an imaginative theology: teachers, and poetry became a teacher, but of the common people: natural scientists, and it became science, but the science of an imaginary world. And since these barbarians, uncultivated as they were and confined to the world of images, could not think in concepts, the imaginations of poetry, individualised and particular, and its judgments, always expressed in material form, were falsely interpreted as "imaginative universals," supposed to be something intermediate between the individualising intuition and the universalising concept. Poetry, which ought to represent sense and nothing else, came to represent a sense already intellectualised; and the saying that nothing is found in the intellect that has not already been in the sense, acquired the meaning, that the intellect is nothing but the sense clarified, and the sense nothing but the intellect confused. Thus there was no further need for the added caution "except the intellect itself" (nisi intellectus ipse). Conversely, barbaric civilisation became a kind of mythological or allegorical representation of the ideal phase of poetry, and primitive tribes were transformed into crowds of "sublime poets" just as, in the ontogenesis corresponding to this philogenesis, children had been made into poets. The concept of the "imaginative universal" unites in itself the double contradiction of the doctrine; since to the imaginative element must be joined, in this mental construction, the element of universality which taken by itself would be a true and proper universal, rational and not imaginative. Hence arises a petitio principii by which the origin of the rational universal, the point requiring explanation, is already presupposed. On the other hand, if the imaginative universal is interpreted as freed from the element of universality, that is, as a mere imagination, Vico's aesthetic doctrine would certainly become once more consistent: but his "poetic wisdom" or barbaric civilisation would be deprived of an indispensable portion of its organism in parting with every kind of concept: for concepts are, so to speak, the skeleton of the body.

To resolve the contradiction it was necessary to separate poetry from poetic wisdom: and we do find some signs of this separation in Vico. He sometimes admits, almost against his will, the lack of correspondence between the philosophical category and the type of society, and in dealing with the latter is compelled to fall back upon such phrases as "very nearly" and "more or less." He says, for instance, that primitive man consisted "exclusively of strong imagination, with no, or very little, reason": that he was "almost all body, with hardly any reflection": or again, after making a show of philosophical distinction between the three languages of gods, heroes and men, he goes on to observe that "the language of the gods was almost all dumb, and very little articulate; the language of heroes was composed of equal quantities of articulation and dumb-show; the language of men was almost all articulated, and very little in dumb-show." He admits again in a fine simile that poetic speech out-lived poetic wisdom and survived far into the historic and civilised period, "as great and rapid rivers run far out into the sea and keep their waters fresh as they bear them along with the force of their flow." Even in modern times we cannot afford entirely to neglect imaginative speech: "to describe the operations of the pure mind, we must avail ourselves of poetic language, of metaphors drawn from the senses." It appears that poetry does not end with barbarism, for poets arise even in civilised times: and if it is said that the poets of the earliest times were naturally imaginative, those of later days artificially so, that is, according to Vico, by deliberately forgetting the proper use of words, freeing themselves from philosophy, filling their minds with childish and vulgar prejudices and submitting to the bondage of conventions like the use of rhyme—all these restrictions, besides being easily refuted, are merely an unsuccessful attempt to diminish the weight of the fact above mentioned, namely that poetry belongs to all ages, not merely to that of barbarism: it is an ideal category, not a historic fact. But the restrictions prove, as also do the infrequency and the unemphatic nature of the passages quoted, that Vico was not in a position to effect the separation of poetry from poetic wisdom, hampered as he was by the hybrid character of the concept and of the actual method of the New Science.

If, on the other hand, the idea of poetry as pure imagination had not remained firmly at the foundation of Vico's thought, in spite of all the confusions and inconsistencies in which it became involved, and had not been at work underground, so to speak, in the New Science, it would have been difficult or perhaps impossible to understand the leading conception which dominates his philosophy of mind, closely connected as it is with that idea. This is the conception of the mind as a development, or, to use Vico's own words, a progress or unfolding (corso, spiegamento); a conception which improved upon, though it did not explicitly contradict, the ordinary view which was almost exclusively confined to the enumeration and classification of the mind's faculties. The doctrine of imaginative universals as spontaneous mental products, rudimentary universals but not without an element of truth in them, was at least an adequate weapon against the empirical theory which made civilisation the outcome of a highly developed and rational practical wisdom and the personal labour of God or of wise men who must have sprung from the earth or fallen from heaven in some unaccountable manner.

Vico clearly stated the dilemma between the two, and only two, possible explanations of the origin of society. Either it came from the reflection of wise men, or from a certain human feeling and instinct among brutish men. He accepted the latter solution, that of "brutes" which gradually became human: the theory, that is, of the evolution of thought from the imaginative to the rational universal, and the progress of social relations from force to equity. But was this an adequate foundation for "ideal history" or the philosophy of mind? In the philosophy of mind, it could be translated into a similar if not identical view—the doctrine which, owing to Cartesianism and a certain recrudescence of the Scholasticism of Duns Scotus, lasted down to Vico's own times and expressed the life of the mind by the successive stages of the concept, obscurity, confusion, clarity and distinctness. Leibniz, as is well known, made a special study of obscure and confused perceptions, the "petites perceptions." The doctrine was essentially intellectualistic, since the concepts, however confused or obscure, were never anything else than concepts: and hence it was unable to account either for poetry or even for mental development, the dialectic of which cannot be understood if it is regarded as consisting of merely quantitative differences. Such differences are in reality not differences at all, but identities and therefore the negation of change: and in fact the whole of this school of thought was anti-aesthetic and static, devoid both of a true theory of imagination and a true theory of development. Vico's thought, on the other hand, was averse to intellectualism and in sympathy with imagination: it was entirely dynamic and evolutionary. For Vico, mind is an eternal drama: and since drama demands antithesis, his philosophy of mind is rooted in antithesis, that is in the real distinction and opposition between imagination and thought, poetry and metaphysic, force and equity, passion and morality; although he seems sometimes, for the reasons given above, to mistake its nature; or rather, although he actually does sometimes confuse it with empirical inquiries and doctrines, and with the determinations of history.

[CHAPTER V]

THE SEMI-IMAGINATIVE FORM OF KNOWLEDGE

(MYTH AND RELIGION)

Vico's doctrine of mythology, while no less original and profound than that of poetry, is also, like the latter, not entirely lucid: for the relations between poetry and myth are so close that the shadow cast upon the one must of necessity extend to some degree over the other.

In proceeding to inquire, as we have hitherto done and shall continue to do, into the state of contemporary knowledge of the several sciences and problems with which Vico set out to deal, we may briefly recall à propos of the study of mythology not only the great literary collections of myths formed during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, of which Boccaccio had already given an example in the fourteenth century, but also the learned defences of the two explanatory theories, already known to classical antiquity and not entirely unknown in the Middle Ages. These were, first, the theory of myth as allegory of philosophical truths (moral, political and so forth), and secondly, the theory of myth as the history of actual persons and events, adorned by the fancy which made heroes into gods (Euhemerism). The former tendency inspired among other works the Mythologiae sive explanationis fabularum libri decem of Natale Conti (1568) and Bacon's De sapientia veterum (1609); in which, however, this system had been advanced with a certain hesitation, and with the explicit caution that, even if it were not valid as historical interpretation, it would always be of value as moralisation (aut antiquitatem illustrabimus aut res ipsas: "we shall explain either antiquity or the facts themselves"). The latter was authoritatively represented by John Leclerc (Clericus), the learned Dutch Genevese for whom Vico expressed so much respect and gratitude for the attention he had deigned to bestow upon his Diritto universale. His edition of Hesiod's Theogony marked an epoch in the study of mythology, and he was followed among others by Banier, author of the work Les Fables expliquées par l'histoire(1735). A third system, also not without some ancient precedent, derived myths from particular nations, the Egyptians or the Hebrews, or from the original works of individual philosophers and poets. This view, when it neither resolved itself into a pure and simple historical supposition as to the origin of some or all myths, nor appealed to divine revelation, clearly involved the theory that myth is not an eternal form but a contingent product of the mind, born at a certain time and capable of dying or already dead.

Vico strongly opposed the first and third of these views of mythology, namely the allegorical theory and that of historical derivation. On the allegorical view, he mentions Bacon's treatise, which had stimulated him to the study of the subject, out which he considered "more ingenious than sound": on the other school, which regarded myths as sacred history altered and corrupted by the Gentiles and especially by the Greeks, he refers to Vossius's De theologia gentili (1642) and to a dissertation by Daniel Huet. Myths or fables do not contain esoteric wisdom, that is to say, rational concepts, subtly concealed by the veil of fable: hence they are not allegorical. Allegory implies on the one hand the concept or thing signified, on the other the fable or medium of concealment, and between the two, the art by which both are kept in equilibrium. But myths cannot be split up into these three moments, nor even into a thing signified and a thing which signifies it: their meaning is univocal. The theory also implies that a believer in the content does not believe in the form: but the makers of myths believed fully and ingenuously in their own work. Once, for instance, that first divine fable was created, the myth than which none greater was ever afterwards invented, that of Jupiter, king and father of gods and men, in the act of thundering, the very men who had invented him believed in him, and with their religion of terror feared, reverenced and worshipped him.

Myth, in a word, is not fable but history of such a kind as could be constructed by primitive minds, and strictly considered by them as an account of actual fact. The philosophers who arose later made use of myths to expound their doctrines in an allegorical manner; or deceived themselves into thinking that they found them there owing to the feeling of veneration which attaches to antiquity, and increases as our comprehension of it diminishes; or thought it expedient to make use of such things for political purposes, like Plato Homerising, and at the same time Platonising Homer: and in doing this they turned the myths into fables, which they were not originally, and are essentially not. Thus we may say that the philosophers and students of mythology who indulged in such strange fancies about the legends were the real poets, while the primitive poets or myth-makers were the true students, and intended to narrate the actual facts of their time. For the same reason, namely, because myth is an essential part of poetic or barbaric wisdom, and, as such, a spontaneous product of all times and places, it cannot be attributed to one single nation as its inventor, from which it passed to others; as if it were a particular discovery of a particular man or the object of revelation.

This doctrine, superior as it is to the allegorical and historical theories, is another aspect of Vico's vindication of the non-logical forms of knowledge as against the intellectualism which denied them and merely represented them either as artificial forms or as due to supernatural causes. Nor does the opinion seem acceptable which attaches Vico to the Neo-Euhemeristic school. He does not indeed explicitly combat this school, and we may even grant that he presents certain superficial resemblances to it: but together with the resemblances there is this radical difference, that for Vico the stories are not alterations of actual history, but are essentially history; their supposed alteration is the actual truth as it appeared to the primitive mind.

Vico did not and could not give a more precise determination of the nature of myth, precisely because owing to the fluctuating character of his concept of poetry, itself he was not in a position to lay down the boundary between the two forms. He talks generally of poetry and myth as distinct things, but he does not establish the distinction. And yet Vico was familiar enough with the concept which supplies this distinctive criterion, and had enunciated it: but instead of using it for his doctrine of mythology, he had made of it one or more of his various definitions of poetry. That "poetic character," that "imaginative universal" whose introduction into aesthetic as the explanatory principle of poetry causes so many insuperable difficulties, is really the definition of mythology, and as such provides the science of mythology with the true principle that is required. If the concept of accomplishing great labours for the common welfare cannot be disengaged from the idea of a particular man who accomplished one of these labours, this concept becomes for instance the myth of Hercules: and Hercules is at once an individual man who does individual actions, and kills the Lernaean hydra and the Nemean lion or cleanses the stables of Augeas, and also a concept: just as the concept of beneficent and glorious labour is at once a concept and Hercules: a universal and an imaginary idea: an imaginative universal.

Again, that sublime task which Vico declared proper to poetry, the task of giving life to inanimate objects, belongs properly not to poetry but to myth. Mythology, embodying its concepts in images, which are always individual things, at last animates them like living beings. Thus primitive man, ignorant of the cause of lightning and therefore not possessing the scientific definition of it, was led by the mythological tendency to conceive the sky as a vast living being, who, like man himself when, in the grip of his fierce passions, he shouted, muttered or roared, spoke and meant something by his speech. It is mythology again, not poetry, whose origin must be traced to "poverty," to the weakness of men's minds and their inability to deal with the problems they would solve, in their incapacity for thinking in rational universals and expressing themselves in accurate language, whence arose imaginative universals and metonymy, synecdoche and metaphor of all kinds. The contradictions we have seen in the imaginative universal which make it incapable of acting as the foundation of an aesthetic doctrine are quite in keeping in the doctrine of myth: for myth consists precisely of these contradictions: it is a concept trying to be an image and an image trying to be a concept, and hence a kind of poverty, or even of powerful impotence,—a contrast, a mental transition where white no longer exists and black has not yet come into being. Finally, poetic wisdom, that is, the theology, science, cosmography, geography, astronomy and the whole system of other ideas and beliefs of primitive nations as Vico describes them, was really mythology, not, as he says, poetry, for the good reason, given by himself, that these things were their history: and poetry is poetry and not history, even more or less imaginary history. The Homeric poems are poetry in so far as they express the aspirations of Hellenism: the same poems, in so far as they were recited and heard as accounts of actual facts, are history: the two things being forms of mental products which, though they seem to be materially united in a single work, are not for that reason to be identified.

All this was both seen and not seen, or rather, sometimes realised and sometimes overlooked, by Vico: and hence he cannot be said to have succeeded in determining satisfactorily the distinction, and solving the problem of the relation, between mythology and poetry. Another problem of importance relating to the science of mythology, and still the subject of controversy, namely, the question whether myth belongs to philosophy or to history, might be supposed to have been decisively solved by Vico: since he repeats over and over again that myths contain the historical judgments of primitive peoples, not the philosophical. But in reality when we examine the point closely it appears that he neither solved the problem nor even propounded it. The historical judgments of which Vico is speaking are contrasted strictly not with philosophical judgments in general but with the "mystical judgments of the earliest philosophy" and the "judgments of analogy" which the writers criticised by Vico found in mythology. Thus on the one hand his words repeat the criticism of the allegorical theory and, on the other, controvert that fallacious method of historical interpretation which ascribes the ideas and customs of to-day to the nations of antiquity. The fact is that Vico's theory is just as much in agreement with the theory connecting myth with philosophy as with that which connects it with history; and as much with the eclecticism which admits both these elements as with the speculative view which also admits them both, but because philosophy and history both in themselves and as constituents of myth are at bottom one and the same.

Considered as "poverty," myth must be superseded. In the natural effort of the human mind to rejoin God, the true One, from whom it has come, and its inability owing to the exuberant animal nature of primitive man to make use of the faculty, buried as it is beneath his too keen senses, of abstracting from subjects their properties and universal forms,—in these circumstances, it constructs for itself fanciful unities, imaginary genera or myths: but in its subsequent progress and development, it gradually resolves the imaginary genera into intelligible genera, poetic universals into rational, and sets itself free from mythology. Thus the error of myth passes into the truth of philosophy. Vico knew and employed a concept of error, error properly so called, which proceeds from the will, not from thought, which is never in error as regards itself, "for the mind is always put under compulsion by truth, since we can never lose sight of God" (mens enim semper a vero urgetur quia numquam aspectu amittere possumus Deum); the error which consists in the arbitrary conjunction of unmeaning words, "but words very often, by the will of him who is lying, escape the force of truth and desert the mind, or even do violence to the mind and turn away from God" (verba autem saepissime veri vim voluntate mentientis eludunt ac mentem deserunt, immo menti vim aciunt et Deo absistunt); the error, in a word, which exists when, in his own powerful language, "though men speak with their mouth, they have nothing in their minds; since within their minds there is falsity, which is nothing." But he also knows that error is never pure error, simply because there is no such thing as a false idea and falsity consists only in the wrong combination of ideas, and therefore it always contains truth, and every fable has a certain element of truth. Hence, far from despising fables, Vico recognised their value as embryonic forms so to speak of stored-up knowledge or of what will one day develop into philosophy. The poets (which means, in Vico's new sense of the word, myth-makers) are the senses (that is, in its new meaning, rudimentary and imperfect philosophy): the philosophers are the intellect of mankind, that is the more highly developed philosophy which derives from the former. The idea of God evolves by degrees from the God who strikes the imagination of the isolated man, to the God of the family, divi parentum, the God of a social class or country, divi patrii, the God of nations, and finally to the God "who is Jupiter to all men," the God of humanity. The fables stimulated Plato to understand the three divine punishments which not men but only gods could inflict, oblivion, infamy and remorse: the passage through the lower world suggested to him the concept of the purgatorial journey by which the soul is purified of passions, and the arrival in Elysium suggested the journey of union by which the mind comes to unite itself with God by the contemplation of the eternal divine ideas.

From the similes and metaphors of the poets Aesop drew the examples and fables by which he gave advice: and the instance founded upon a single case which satisfies an untutored mind developed into induction, drawing its validity from several similar cases, as taught dialectically by Socrates, and thence the syllogism invented by Aristotle, which cannot exist without a universal. The etymologies of words reveal the truths observed by primitive man and deposited by him in his language: for instance the fact, laboriously proved by modern philosophers, that the senses themselves create the so-called sensible qualities is already suggested in the Latin word olfacere, which implies the idea that the sense of smell "makes" the odour. Vico attaches such importance to this connexion between poetic universals and rational universals, between myth and philosophy, that he is led to assert that such judgments of philosophers as cannot find parallel or precedent in poetic and popular wisdom must be wrong. Here we have another meaning sometimes assigned by him to the relation of philosophy to philology: namely, a reciprocal confirmation of common wisdom by esoteric wisdom and vice versa, both of which are united in the idea of an everlasting philosophy of man.

Simultaneously with his theory of myth and its relation to philosophy, Vico expounds his theory of religion, and the relation it bears to philosophy. Two thoughts on this subject are to be found up and down the New Science. The first is, that religion arises in the phase of weakness and savagery from the mind's need to allay its desire to understand more or less the phenomena of nature and man; for instance, to explain lightning. The second is, that religion is produced in the mind by fear of the person who threatens by lightning. We might describe these two views as theories respectively of the theoretical and practical origin of religion; and since according to Vico's doctrine man consists of nothing but intellect and will, clearly religion can have no other origin than these two. Now, setting aside religion in its practical aspect, to be discussed later, religion in its theoretical aspect is surely nothing else than the imaginative universal, poetic animism, or myth. To it belongs the institution which Vico calls divination; that is, the methods of collecting and interpreting the language of Jupiter, the "real words," gestures and signs of God, formed as imaginative universals and created by the animating fancy. And as from myth come science and philosophy, so in like manner from divination comes the knowledge of ground and cause, philosophic or scientific prediction.

In this way Vico escaped the prejudice which was beginning to prevail in his time—we may recall Van Dale's history of ancient oracles, popularised by Fontenelle, and Banier's book already mentioned—and was to be so powerful for a century, of considering religions as "some one else's imposture": whereas, he says, they were really due to "one's own credulity." The man who refused to admit the artificial origin of myth could not admit it of religion. But just as he denied no less the supernatural or revealed origin of myth, so at the same time he proclaimed neither more nor less than the natural, even the human, origin of religions; and—a fact especially worthy of notice—placed this origin in an inadequate form of the mind, namely the semi-imaginative form identical with mythology. Nor need we attach weight to certain brief and incidental remarks which seem to contradict this theory, as when he says that religion precedes not only philosophy but language itself, which presupposes the consciousness of some community between man and man: such equivocations are due to the invariable confusedness of his method and his habitual lack of clearness. The identification of religion with myth, and its human origin, are ideas not only emphatically expressed, but essential to Vico's whole system. It is a human origin which in his own words does not exclude a different concept of religion, namely as revealed and hence of supernatural origin. In fact he always separates poetic theology, which is mythology, and natural theology, which is metaphysics or philosophy, from revealed theology. But this last concept is admitted by him not because it is connected with the others and derived from a principle common to them, but simply because Vico asserted its existence no less than theirs. The human origin, poetic theology, followed by metaphysical theology, is the form valid for the Gentile portion of mankind, that is the whole human race except the Hebrew people with its privilege of revelation. The motives that led Vico to maintain this dualism and the annoying inconsistencies in which it compelled him to rest will be seen later on in their own place. But precisely because Vico left this dualism without mediation, we must in expounding his thought hold fast both terms of the dualism: and for the time being we will confine ourselves to the merely human origin—religion as a product of the theoretical needs of man in a condition of comparative moral poverty. This conception has only an indirect connexion with Bruno's view of religion as a thing necessary to the ignorant and undeveloped mob, and with Campanula's theory of natural or permanent religion, an eternal rational philosophy coinciding with a Christianity freed from its abuses. Its parallels in contemporary authors are few and distant: even when they mention it in passing, they grasp it only in a superficial way and propound it without connecting it at all with their other ideas: they attack religion as a form of ignorance, and omit the wisdom of the ignorance, or religion as truth.

[CHAPTER VI]

THE MORAL CONSCIOUSNESS

Vico's other doctrines on the theoretical reason, that is to say on the logic of philosophy, of physical and mathematical science and of historical study, have been expounded above in the statement of his theory of knowledge, and are drawn almost entirely from his early works, since in the New Science the phase of the "completely developed mind" hardly appears except as a limit of the field of study. Here it will suffice to mention that he also touches upon the problem of the relation of poetry to history: but, still because of the confusion of philosophy with social science, he fails fully to solve it. From one point of view it seems to Vico that history is prior to poetry, because the latter, as he says, presupposes reality and contains an "imitation of the second degree": from another, poetry is the primary form, because among primitive peoples history is poetry, and the first historians are poets. At any rate he insists upon the poetic element essential to history: of Herodotus, the father of Greek history, he observes that not only are "his books full, for the most part, of fables," but "the style retains a very great Homeric element, a feature which all subsequent historians retained, using as they did a phraseology intermediate between the poetic and the colloquial": "almost the words of the poets," verba ferme poetarum, as he says elsewhere in a phrase borrowed from Cicero.

Nor are the relations between theory and practice, intellect and will, explained in detail by Vico, although on the whole he suggests the general idea that as in God intellect and will coincide, so it is in man, God's image; whose mind is not divided into thought and will—thought proceeding according to one method and will according to another—but his thought and will interpenetrate and form one single whole: a view far superior to that of the contemporary philosophy of Leibniz, which retained the idea of a divine arbitrament and therefore of irrationality. Another view, peculiar to Vico, might be taken by a hasty interpreter to imply the priority of practice to theory. He says that philosophers arrive at their conceptions thanks to experience of social institutions and laws in which men agree as a kind of universals: that Socrates and Plato, for instance, presupposed the Athenian democracy and law-courts. But the succession of religions producing republics, republics producing laws, and laws producing philosophical ideas, which he calls "a fragment of the history of philosophy philosophically narrated," is really a theory of sociological, not of philosophical value.

As regards his doctrines of practical reason, which we are here beginning to consider, it might be thought that Vico, unlike his attitude with regard to the theoretical reason, did not stand in sharp opposition to the thought of his time, but actually united himself with a contemporary movement, namely the school of natural rights. The head of the school and leader of the movement, Hugo Grotius, was called by Vico one of his "four authors," together with Plato, from whom he had drawn his aspirations towards an idealistic philosophy, Bacon, who had aroused in his mind the idea of a positive and historical science of society, and Tacitus, his debt to whom, or at least the debt which he believed he owed him, we shall examine later on. Along with Grotius he frequently mentions the other chief authorities on natural rights, Selden and Puffendorf, omitting their innumerable followers, whom he considers less as scientific authorities than as "adorners" of the Grotian system.

His adherence to the school, in a certain sense, is clear, and is admitted and proclaimed by Vico himself. But it is also beyond doubt that he was no mere adherent: he was not a follower of the kind that retains the general or leading ideas while developing and correcting details. He was a follower in the dialectical sense only, that is, in so far as he thought it necessary to contest the primary theses, or to accept them only in a profoundly modified form. Natural right offered him not solutions but problems: and of these, while some came before him already clearly formulated, others, and these were the more important, arose only in his own mind: problems either unsolved or unrealised, till Vico propounded and in part solved them.

Natural rights presented many aspects and many tendencies: and it would be well to begin by distinguishing and enumerating these. In the first place, the school taken as a whole and in its essential character expressed the social progress by which Europe, on emerging from feudalism and religious warfare, acquired a new consciousness, distinctively bourgeois and non-clerical in character; and it observed that the growth of this consciousness was contemporaneous with the anti-clerical and bourgeois institution of "masonry." The word "natural" meant, among other things, "not supernatural": and hence implied hostility or indifference towards the supernatural, the institutions representing it, and the social conflicts resulting from it. It was not by accident that Grotius was an Arminian; that Puffendorf went to law with theologians; that Thomasius is remembered as one of the champions of freedom of conscience. The protestations of respect for religion and the church, habitually and liberally inserted by these publicists in their works,—which are draped, so to speak, with a veil of piety,—were merely politic safeguards, enabling the author to threaten the enemy unobserved and to strike from under cover. This caution is praised, in Grotius's case for example, by a follower of the school (the author of Pauco plenior iuris naturalis historia, 1719), who extols the master as "the instrument of divine providence," coming like Messiah to redeem the "natural light" from its bondage to the "supernatural," and as such gifted with all the power and ability he could need: so that after tasting the persecutions of Scholasticism, "he behaved with caution, to avoid further irritating the jealousy against his natural and reasonable prudence that had issued forth from its lair at his threats" (caute versabatur ... ne maius bilem adversus prudentiam naturalem et rationalem ex latebris productam tam minis irritaret), and in proceeding to separate human from divine laws, did not execute a frontal assault on the theological school when he attacked its fundamental errors, but even praised it in the preface to his work. The word "natural" also denoted what is common to individuals of different nations and ranks: and hence from a practical point of view provided an admirable war-cry for uniting the bourgeoisie of different countries in definite common aspirations and struggles. The treatises of natural rights were for the bourgeoisie of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries what the "Manifesto of the communists" and the cry "Proletariates of the world, unite" attempted to be for the working classes of the nineteenth.

In so far as this school and this publicism were signs of a practical movement, the philosophical interest held in them a secondary place and discharged a function of minor importance: so that, secondly, the works on natural right, philosophically considered, did not as a rule rise above a simple popular empiricism. The principles on which they rest are not examined and often not even superficially reconciled: the concepts which they use are less concepts than general representations: and the form of the writing is systematic in appearance only. Some of these writers endeavoured to harmonise their doctrines of natural right with the Platonic, Stoic or Cartesian philosophies, or appealed to logical or metaphysical axioms, or made use of deduction and the mathematical method. But all this was mere aggregation, not fusion; ornament, not reinforcement: at most, it was of value as a proof of diligence and earnest intentions.

The philosophy, however, which was more or less implicit in the pamphleteers of natural rights, and explicit in the philosophers who set out to elaborate the doctrine, agreed with the spirit of the time, whose general characteristics are well known. Thus arose the third or ethical aspect of natural right, namely its utilitarianism; sometimes more or less concealed, sometimes openly declared, and worked out from time to time by a philosophy of mathematical or sensationalistic methods, and of materialistic or rationalistic tendencies: or else, what comes practically to the same thing, an abstract and intellectualistic morality, threatening at any moment to fall into utilitarianism. From this intellectualism and utilitarianism, combined with the practical and revolutionary character of this mental movement,—which was bent rather upon bringing about the triumph of an abstract system of right than upon recognising that which really develops in history, in all the complexity of its many forms and vicissitudes—derived its fourth characteristic, the lack of historical sense, or the anti-historical attitude of the school, which set up the abstract ideal of a human nature apart from human history instead of fused with and living in it.

Finally, bourgeois, anticlerical, utilitarian and materialistic as it was, the movement of natural right had a fifth important trait, namely its aversion to transcendence and its tendency towards an immanental conception of man and of society. This characteristic is neither fully explained nor fully worked out in the doctrines, but is none the less easily recognised among the total views of the school.

Now Vico's genius was truly and indeed exclusively theoretical, and not at all practical or reformatory: his method was profoundly speculative and contemptuous of empiricism, his mind idealistic and opposed to materialism and utilitarianism: his theory of knowledge eager for the concrete, for "certitude," and, as such, of historical sympathies. Consequently his doctrine of the practical reason, though deriving its impetus from the theory of natural rights, was bound to emerge in a shape different from or even contrary to that theory in all the first four characteristics enumerated above. And if it did in one respect coincide—which it only does in the conclusion, not in the path by which the conclusion is reached—it did so in the very point in which Vico would least have wished it: in its immanental or anti-religious tendency.

But since our subject is not the criticisms and modifications which the theory of natural right received from Vico's thought, but rather that thought itself, it is time to pick up the thread of the exposition, following an order somewhat different from that in which we have summed up the various characteristics of the theory, and beginning by observing Vico's opposition to the professed or implicit utilitarianism of the school, and the ethical doctrine by which he replaced it.

The two chief representatives of utilitarianism in the seventeenth century, whom Vico always keeps in view, are Hobbes and Spinoza: but in addition to them, he refers to Locke and Bayle and, in the preceding century, Machiavelli; and going back to the ancients, the Stoics with their conception of faith and the Epicureans with that of chance, Carneades and his scepticism, and finally the unconscious theory contained in the saying "Vae victis" attributed to Brennus, chief of the Gauls who took Rome. He admired Hobbes's splendid attempt to enrich philosophy by a theory which had been lacking to the greatest days of Greece, the theory of man considered in the whole society of the human race: but he pronounced the result unsatisfactory, and the attempt, whose outcome, like that of Locke's system, was hardly distinguishable from Epicureanism, a failure. Hobbes did not observe that he could never have propounded his problem of the natural rights of mankind had not his motive been supplied by the Christian religion itself, which commands not indeed justice but charity to all mankind. With the Stoics on the other hand, with the fatalism and determinism which made it impossible for them to reason soundly about the state and laws, with the so-called "Spinozists of antiquity," he ideally united Spinoza; the uniqueness of whose utilitarianism, equally removed from the Lockian spirit and the Hobbist, since Spinoza "judges of the truth of things by the mind, not by sense" (mente non sensu de veris rerum diiudicat), did not escape Vico's notice. But unique though it was, it led Spinoza to think of the state in a somewhat undignified way "as of a mere society of shopkeepers." These utilitarian doctrines, with their libels upon human nature, seemed to Vico only fit for men without hope, too insignificant ever to have a share in the state or proud enough to believe themselves repressed and denied access to the positions of which in their arrogance they thought themselves worthy. Among these he counted the unfortunate Spinoza, who, he thinks, having as a Jew no country of his own, was moved by envy to devote himself to the construction of a metaphysic "intended to overthrow all the nations of the world." He passes stern judgment upon the state of contemporary ethics, which was all that it could be on the basis of a mechanistic and materialistic metaphysic without a gleam of finalism. Descartes produced nothing at all in this field, since his few written remains on the subject do not amount to a doctrine, and his treatise of the Passions belongs rather to medicine than to morals. Malebranche and Nicole were equally sterile, and Pascal's Pensées, the one exception, are "but scattered lights." Of the Italians, Pallavicino's treatise Del bene offers no very profound depths of ethics: and Muratori's attempt in his Filosofia Morale was a very unsuccessful one.

Utility is not the explanatory principle of morality, because it proceeds from man's bodily nature, and on that account is subject to change, while morality, honestas, is eternal. To derive morality from utility is to confound the occasion with the cause, to confine oneself to the surface and to offer no explanation at all of the facts. None of the various modes in which philosophers have successively called the utilitarian principle to life, fraud or imposture, force, desire,—none of these accounts for differentiation, that is, for the social organism. What fraud could ever have seduced and deceived the supposed simple and frugal first owners of the land, living as they did perfectly contented with their lot? What force could have succeeded, if the rich, the alleged usurpers, were few, and the poor, the robbed, were many? Such explanations are ridiculous, and unworthy of a serious problem. These strong and powerful men were really powerful with something other than mere strength: thus they became protectors of the weak and enemies of destructive and anti-social tendencies: their rule was one of force, it is true, but "imposed by a more powerful character" (a natura praestantiori dictata); a fact which the barbarian Brennus may be pardoned for not knowing, but not so a philosopher. The force which created and organised the earliest states was nothing but "noble human nature," to which states must always hark back, although they may have been won by fraud and force, in order to subsist and maintain themselves: which agrees with Machiavelli's advice to hark back to the beginnings, but with the implication that the deepest beginnings are to be found in mercy and justice. Men are held together by something stouter than utility. Human society cannot originate and endure without mutual trust; unless people accept each other's promises and take each other's word for facts they cannot examine. Could this trust be perhaps ensured by strict penal laws against falsehood? But laws are a product of society, and this mutual trust is necessary that society may arise. It may be said, as it is by Locke, that we are dealing with a psychological process, by which men gradually acquired the habit of believing when some one spoke to them and promised to tell the truth. But in that case these men already understood the idea of a truth which by mere disclosure compelled assent without any personal teaching; and the psychological principle of habituation is transcended.

The true cause of human society then is not utility, which only assists the action of the cause as its occasion, and brings it about that men, with all the weakness and poverty of their nature, and the divisions among them due to original sin, are led to extol their social nature "under compulsion of facts" (rebus ipsis dictantibus), in the phrase of the jurist Pomponius, quoted with approval by Vico. Objects, facts and circumstances in morality change, though morality itself does not change: and hence arises the illusion of the utilitarians, who cling to the external, confine themselves to the appearance and see the change but not the permanence. Murder is forbidden: but the approval, bestowed upon the man who when his life is threatened and he cannot otherwise save himself kills his unjust aggressor, does not imply that the moral judgment upon homicide varies; since in these particular circumstances the case is really one not of homicide but of capital punishment inflicted by the unjustly attacked person finding himself alone: a power tacitly delegated to him so to speak by society. Theft is forbidden: but the man who in order to preserve his life steals a loaf from another does not violate morality because he is exercising a right founded upon equity.

The only philosophy which carries with it a true ethic seems to Vico to be the Platonic, resting as it does upon a metaphysical principle, the eternal idea which draws out of itself and creates matter: while the Aristotelian ethic is founded upon a metaphysic leading to a physical principle, that of the matter from which particular forms are drawn, a principle which makes God a potter shaping objects external to himself. The ethic of the Roman lawyers was doubtless rich in fine aphorisms: but it was nothing but a mere art of equity, conveyed by means of endless minute maxims of natural justice, sought for by the writers in the reason of the laws and the will of the lawgiver. Hence it cannot be regarded as a moral philosophy, in which the best method is to proceed from a very small number of eternal truths, established by ideal justice in the fabric of metaphysic. For analogous reasons Vico could not rest satisfied with Grotius and the school of natural rights: of which in general he makes the perfectly just remark that their ponderous tomes, in spite of the impressive titles they bear, contain nothing that is not universally known. If Grotius's principles be weighed in the accurate balance of criticism, they are all found to be probable or plausible rather than necessary and incontestable. In dealing with the question of utility, Grotius missed the exact point by failing to distinguish the occasion from the cause: nor did he "nail down"—that is, he did not end—the ancient dispute as to whether right is a question of nature or of human opinion only, the same controversy as that carried on by philosophers and theologians with Carneades the sceptic and Epicurus: he advances the hypothesis of primitive men who were "simpletons," but quite omits to give reasons for it. And since these "simpletons" of his, after suffering injuries from their beast-like isolation, initiated a sociable life, a step to which they were determined by utility, Grotius himself slipped unawares into utilitarianism and Epicureanism.

Vico on the other hand answered the question, whether right is natural or conventional, by the grave aphorism "except in their natural condition, things neither progress nor endure." To the question, whence society arises, he replies by mentioning the common feeling of humanity, the conscience, the need which man feels of escaping from the internal enemy, which tortures his heart. The origin of society certainly lies in fear, but it is fear of oneself, not of another's violence: it lies in the agonies of remorse, the shame whose tinge suffusing the cheeks of the earliest men lit the first beacon of morality upon earth. Shame is the mother of all virtues, honour, frugality, honesty, loyalty to the pledged word, truthfulness in speech, abstention from others' property, and chastity. In extolling society, man is extolling human nature.

Shame or the moral consciousness, translated into terms of the corresponding empirical science, becomes that common consciousness of man upon matters of human necessity or utility which is the source of the natural right of nations. This common consciousness, says Vico, is an unreflective judgment, felt in common by a whole class, a whole people, a whole nation and the whole of mankind. An unreflective judgment is not strictly a judgment at all, since reflection is inseparable from judgment: it is not judgment, because it is felt and not thought. But on the other hand it is not what is called a "feeling,"—a vague term unknown to Vico, as it is to traditional philosophy. It is rather a practical attitude of mind, similar on the whole in persons living in similar conditions and producing similar customs in the various social groups, from the customs of a particular class to those of all mankind. The attitude is quite spontaneous, and for this very reason unreflective; so that customs arise from within, not from without, and their similarity does not depend upon imitation ("without one nation taking example from another"). Through this sensus communis the moral consciousness embodies itself in compact and unyielding institutions: and thus the sensus communis reduces to certitude the free will of man, which is in itself quite uncertain.

[CHAPTER VII]

MORALITY AND RELIGION

But this internal fear, shame or moral consciousness is aroused in man by religion. The fear is the fear of God, the shame is abasement before his face. Primitive man wanders over the earth alone, wild, fierce, without articulate speech, without a permanent mate, at the mercy of his unbridled and violent passions, a "brute" rather than a man. What can restrain him? what can rescue him from at last destroying himself? Wise men cannot direct him, for we cannot say whence or how they can reach him. The intervention of God cannot save him: God has withdrawn himself to his chosen people, and has no dealings with the rest of mankind, the Gentiles. But this "brute" is still a man: God, while abandoning him, has left a spark of his own essence at the bottom of his heart. See! the sky lightens: the wild creature stands awestruck and afraid: in his mind arises the shadowy idea of something greater than he, something divine. So he conceives or rather imagines a first God, a Sky-god, a thundering Jupiter: and to this deity he turns to appease his wrath or invoke his aid. But in order to conciliate him and secure his help, he must shape his own life conformably to his purpose: he must humble himself before his God, overcome his own pride and arrogance, abstain from certain actions and perform others. Thus the conception of a deity lends power to that peculiar possession of the human will, the attempt, that is, the liberty, to control the movements communicated to the mind by the body and to annul or to redirect them simultaneously. With these acts of self-control, with freedom, morality comes into existence: the fear of God has laid the foundations of human life. Altars arise all over the earth: the caves of her mountains, whither the man now bears the woman, ashamed as he is of gratifying his desires before the face of the sky, which is the face of God, preside at the first marriage-rites and shelter the first families: her bosom opens to receive the sacred trust of the bodies of the dead. The first and fundamental ethical institutions—worship, wedlock and burial—have arisen.

This social and ethical power of the idea of God appears again in the course of subsequent history: since when nations have relapsed into savagery through warfare, and human laws have no more power over them, religion is the only means of subduing them. It reappears again in the individual development of human life: children indeed cannot learn piety except through the fear of some deity; and when all natural help fails him man requires a superior being to save him, and this being is God. All nations believe in a divine providence: tribes living in a society without any consciousness of God, for instance in some parts of Brazil, among the Kafirs, and in the Antilles, are travellers' tales, an attempt to increase the sale of their books by the narration of portents.

If this is so,—and doubtless it is—then no doctrine can be more foolish than that which claims to conceive a morality and civilisation without religion. Just as no well-established physical science is possible without the guidance of abstract mathematical truth, so no knowledge of morality can arise except together with abstract metaphysical truths, without, that is, the idea of God. When the religious consciousness is extinguished or obscured the conception of society and the state is extinguished or obscured with it. Jews, Christians, Gentiles and Mahommedans possess this conception because all alike believe in some deity, whether as an infinite free spirit, or as several gods consisting of mind and body, or as one single God, an infinite free spirit in an infinite body. The Epicureans did not possess such a conception, attributing to God as they did body alone, and chance together with body: nor did the Stoics, who made him subject to fate. And Cicero made the admirable remark to the Epicurean Atticus, that he could not discuss laws with him unless he first granted the existence of the divine providence. Hobbes, who revived Epicureanism, and Spinoza, who revived Stoicism, as we have seen entirely failed to understand the nature of society and the state. One must consort with primitive man, stupid, hirsute, unclean and dishevelled, to refute those learned authors of "desiccated literature," with Peter Bayle at their head, who maintain that human society can and indeed does live without religion.

The absence of the idea of God supplied the chief argument in Vico's criticism of Grotius and Puffendorf, two of these authors whom he held in great honour as "princes" of the school of natural rights. Neither of these writers, he says, lays down the principle of divine providence as primary and essential. Grotius does not expressly deny it: but on account of his very attachment to truth, he endeavours to exclude it, and asserts that his system will stand even if all knowledge of God be removed. Hence Vico accuses him of Socinianism, since he makes human innocence consist in the simplicity of human nature. Puffendorf is still worse: he seems to ignore providential direction, and begins with the scandalously Epicurean supposition that man is thrown into this world with no help or attention from God, without even that spark within his heart which is destined to grow into the flame of morality: and having been reproved for this, he tries to justify himself in a special essay, but does not succeed in discovering the true principle on which alone society can be explained.

Now why, in face of all these energetic declarations and arguments of Vico's on the necessity of religion to morality, did we say above that the only point of real resemblance between him and Grotius, Puffendorf and the natural-right school generally was his purely immanental conception of ethics? Because, if we examine the point closely, Vico is not in opposition to the method of that school. Like them, in constructing his science of human society he excludes with Grotius all idea of God, and with Puffendorf considers man as without help or attention from God, excluding him, that is, from revealed religion and its God. As for these two writers, so for Vico the subject under consideration is natural rights, not supernatural: the law of the Gentiles, not of the chosen people: the law which arises of itself among the caves, not that which comes down from Sinai. Vico's opposition, which he expresses with his accustomed confusion and obscurity, turns not upon assertions like these, but upon the actual conception of religion. In one word, the religion of which he speaks is not the same as that of which Grotius and Puffendorf spoke, or rather did not speak.

Religion, as we have already seen, means for Vico not necessarily revelation, but conception of reality: either that which expresses itself as it does in the period of fully developed mind in the form of intelligible metaphysic, which passes from the thought of God to explain logic by its reasoning and to condescend to purify the human heart by morality: or that which takes concrete shape, as it does in the earliest stage of humanity, in the form of poetical metaphysics. One may easily ignore revealed religion when inquiring into the foundations of morality: but how can one ever ignore this natural religion, identical as it is with knowledge of the truth? Plutarch, discussing the primitive religions of terror, asks the question whether it would not have been better, instead of worshipping the gods in so impious a manner, that there should be no religion at all: but he forgot that from these cruel superstitions brilliant civilisations developed, and no civilisation could ever have grown from atheism. Without a religion, whether gentle or fierce, rational or fantastic, to give the idea, more or less clearly defined, more or less elevated, of something superior to the individual and uniting all individuals, the moral will would have no object for its volition.

At this point we see the meaning of what we have described as the second, practical or ethical, signification of the word "religion" in Vico. In this signification, Vico justifies and vindicates the impious saying that "fear creates the gods": he even places the source of religion in the longing for eternal life which man feels when stirred by a universal sense of immortality hidden in the depths of the mind. In this second signification, religion is a practical fact, indeed it is morality itself, as in the first meaning it was truth itself.

If the meaning of religion for Vico, either as the condition of morality, in the first sense of the word, or as synonymous with it, in the second, is once understood, it is clear that when he condemned Grotius and Puffendorf for their omission of this most important concept, he was substantially doing nothing but clenching his criticism of the insipid moralising and the concealed utilitarianism of these two thinkers. On other occasions also he resorted to the valuable weapon of the concept of religion, with the same end in view. Because if he sometimes credited philosophy with the task of assisting mankind by raising and directing fallen human nature, at other times he decided that philosophy is rather adapted to reasoning, and that the moral philosophers with the greatest powers of reasoning are of value only to stimulate the senses by their eloquence to perform the duties of virtue, while religion alone has the power of making men act virtuously. Then in the empirical science corresponding to this part of the philosophy of mind, Vico turns religion (or poetical metaphysic) and philosophy into two historical epochs, making the former characteristic of the barbaric period and the latter of the civilised. He maintains, as he is clearly bound to do, that religion is the sole foundation of all civilisation and of philosophy itself, and rejects Polybius's saying that if there had been philosophers in the world religion would have been unnecessary. How could philosophy have arisen, he objects, had not states, that is, civilisation, arisen first? and how could states have arisen without the aid of religion? Thus the saying ought to be reversed: without religion there is no philosophy. It was religion, it was the divine providence that tamed the sons of Polyphemus and reduced them to the humanity of Aristides and Socrates, of Laelius and Scipio Africanus.

The conception again of the "state of nature," which served in the treatises of the school of natural rights as an hypothesis and a means of exposition with a view either to developing the argument independently of mystical theology without evoking too many protests, or to conveying implicitly their utilitarian theories, acquired in Vico's hands a new function and a new content. A perfectly honest Catholic, having satisfied his conscience by separating revealed from human religion, he was in a position to assume the state of nature as a literal and actual reality. It is an ideal reality, in so far as it represents in the dialectic of the practical consciousness a moment necessary for the genesis of reality, the pre-moral moment: a historical and empirical reality, as the approximately actual condition of those periods of anarchy and disturbance which precede the rise of civilisations or follow upon their fall. The natural-right school acquiesced more or less in the traditional doctrine of the church, namely that the Gentiles, in the dispersion following on the confusion of Babel, had taken away with them a residuum of revealed religion, a vague memory of the true God, and that hence arose the possibility of social life and of false gods, shadows of the true God: and thus the "state of nature" had been put forward in their system as something abstract and unreal. Vico worked out strictly the distinction between Jews and Gentiles, and conceived the state of nature as devoid of any help coming from previous revelation: as a state in which man stood alone, so to speak, face to face with his own chaotic and turbulent passions. It was a state actually without morality, but—in contradistinction to the utilitarian hypothesis—pregnant with moral requirements, and was transcended by this implicit character becoming explicit. But this transcendence was brought about naturally, not by means of divine grace: the true divine grace is human nature itself, shared by Gentiles no less than Jews, all equally illuminated by a divine light.

Man's will is free, weak though it is, to make his passions into virtues; and in his struggle towards virtue he is helped in a natural manner by God through providence. Certainly Vico did not intend to deny the efficacy of direct and personal divine grace as well: but following his usual method he separates the latter from the natural operation of providence, which is the only question of importance for him and the only one he considers. So far as concerns the controversies on grace, he always likes to maintain a middle position between two extremes represented typically, according to him, by Pelagianism and Calvinism: and ever since as a young man he studied the works of Richard, the theologian of the Sorbonne, he had accepted his demonstration of the superiority of the Augustinian doctrine, just because it was intermediate between these extremes. A moderate doctrine of this kind seemed to him, as he says, to provide a suitable foundation for a principle of the natural rights of nations which should explain the origin of Roman and other Gentile law, while at the same time remaining in agreement with the Catholic religion. He was inclined to admit that there was a privileged nation, namely the Jewish; and that in the struggle against the passions the Christian had an advantage over the non-Christian, because in cases where natural grace failed he might be helped by supernatural. But, in a word, miracles are miracles, and the New Science is not a science of the miraculous.

That it is not, is proved by Vico's criticism on the third of the "principles" of natural rights, against John Selden, a famous man in his day though forgotten later, and author of De iure naturali et gentium iuxta disciplinant Hebraeorum (1640). Selden disagreed with Grotius, in this as in certain other questions, in not denying, and even in exalting, the value of religion: he conceived moral and civil life impossible for mankind except through revelation. This revelation, made by God to the Jewish people, passed from them according to Selden by several channels to the Gentiles: Pythagoras for instance had learnt from Ezekiel; Aristotle, at the time of the campaigns of Alexander in Asia, formed a friendship with Simon the Just; Numa Pompilius acquired some knowledge of the Bible and the prophets. This was enough to reassure any believer who had been frightened away from the works of the natural-right school by their heterodox tendencies. But Vico will have none of this ultra-religious system. If Grotius ignored providence and Puffendorf denied it, Selden was wrong, said Vico, in supplying it, making it a deus ex machina, without explaining it by the essential character of the human mind. It was a system not only unphilosophical but incompatible with sacred history, which admits to a certain extent even in the case of the Jews a natural, not revealed, law: and it was only because, during the captivity in Egypt, they lost sight of this that the direct intervention of God with the laws given to Moses took place. Nor did the theory agree, as to the alleged dissemination of Jewish knowledge and laws among the Gentiles, with the words of the Jew Josephus and of Lactantius; and in general, it was unsupported by even the smallest documentary evidence. Vico's conclusion therefore remains unaltered. The Jews enjoyed in addition the extraordinary aid of the true God: but the other nations attained civilisation solely through the ordinary light of providence.

Whether or no Vico quoted and interpreted Grotius and Puffendorf accurately is for us a question of small importance. His exposition and estimate of other philosophers matter less than his own doctrines, whatever their historical relations, which, to tell the truth, are many in number. Nevertheless it will be as well to indicate briefly, as regards the difficulties which may arise upon this point, the answer which we think plausible. Any one who after reading Vico's censures opened the De iure belli et pacis and found that Grotius explicitly includes among his three fundamental principles, with reason and the social nature, the divine will, and that this ignoring of God amounts to little more than a mere phrase laying emphasis on the power of the social nature and reason, which would take effect "even if we were to grant that God does not exist" (etiamsi dar emus non esse Deum) or that he does not care for human affairs, "which cannot be granted without the grossest impiety" (quod sine summo scelere dari nequit): any one who opened Puffendorf and read a most solemn denunciation of the Grotian hypothesis as impious and absurd, and a declaration that natural laws would remain hanging in the air devoid of force apart from the will of God as legislator; any one who read these words might be led to accuse Vico of negligence or even of insincerity in his criticisms of his predecessors. But in truth Vico did not know what to make of a God set side by side with other sources of morality, or set above them as a superfluous source for the sources: he, searching for God as he did in the heart of man, saw and felt the gulf fixed between him and those who no longer had him in their hearts and barely kept him on their lips through habit or prudence. A more subtle question would be to ask why,—if Vico agreed with the natural-right school in ignoring revelation, and if he instead of rejecting it deepened their superficial immanental doctrine,—why he put himself forward as their implacable enemy and persisted in boasting loudly before prelates and pontiffs of having formulated a system of natural rights different from that of the three Protestant authors and adapted to the Roman church. The supposition that he acted thus through politic caution might be advanced if instead of Vico we were dealing with, for instance, a passionate and powerful but deceitful friar like Tommaso Campanella: but the spotless character of Vico entirely precludes it, and we can only suppose that, lacking as his ideas always were in clarity, on this occasion he indulged his tendency to confusion and nourished his illusions, to the extent of conferring upon himself the flattering style and title of Defensor Ecclesiae at the very moment when he was destroying the religion of the church by means of the religion of humanity.

[CHAPTER VIII]

MORALITY AND LAW

With the dazzling light of his originality still shining before our eyes, it is impossible to fix our attention upon those doctrines and classifications which Vico drew from the traditional philosophy and placed especially in the first book of the Diritto universale: though it is precisely these that have become favourites with many readers, and are now almost common property through the frequent quotation of them. That God is "infinite power knowledge and will" (posse nosse velle infinitum) and man "finite power knowledge and will struggling towards the infinite" (posse nosse velle finitum quod tendit ad infinitum): that the state is the image of God, and because "it has all things beneath it, nothing above" (omnia infra se, nil superius habet), therefore "it renders account to God alone and to no one else" (uni Deo, praeterea reddat rationem nemini), and that just as in God freedom is inherent in his eternal reason, so the state freely obeys the laws it has itself established: that justice "directs and equates utilities" (utilitates dirigit et exaequat), directing, like an architect, in the building-up of the state, the two particular kinds of justice, commutative and distributive, the two divine artisans that measure utility with the two divine measures, arithmetic and geometry, so that "what is equal when you measure is also just when you choose" (quod est aequum cum metiris, idem est iustum quum eligis), these and similar assertions seem not merely lacking in originality but even false or meaningless, adorned though they may be with the name either of Aristotle or of Campanella or of other philosophers of the ancient world or the Renaissance. If, to take one, justice consisted in measuring, a philosophy of justice would be unnecessary, for the science of calculation and measurement would be enough. Vico himself at one point involuntarily and ingenuously discloses the vicious circle of this metaphor substituted for a concept, by saying that men ought "to share utility equally among themselves, only preserving a just difference where it is a question of desert, and that to preserve the equality."

More profitable than collecting these second-hand formulae would be to collect the many acute observations of moral psychology found here and there in his writings, expressed in his gem-like style; or to recall his little-known theory of laughter, which he derives from disappointed expectation and from the weakness of the mind, and therefore denies the faculty both to animals and to the perfect man, considering a man who laughs to be a satyr or faun, intermediate between a brute and a man. But abstaining from such a collection, which forms no part of our plan, we would rather observe that even in the commonplace distinctions and classifications mentioned above Vico shows a certain merit: he recognises, even while he propounds them, the necessary confusion and identification of all or many of these distinctions. Thus after distinguishing the two kinds of justice, the three kinds of virtue and the three kinds of law, he ends by declaring that these dualities, triplicities and multiplicities each form a unity.

Justice and virtue also, for Vico, form a unity, since that power of truth, or human reason, which is virtue in so far as it struggles with selfishness, is also justice in so far as it directs or equates utilities. This implies that Vico does not distinguish, at least in the systematic exposition of the Diritto universale, between law and morality: a distinction which indeed received little emphasis in the doctrine of natural rights, and is barely indicated in Grotius, for instance, as one between a greater and less degree of morality. Vico's doctrine of punishment is also purely moral, and deduced from the ethical concept of remorse. It is inflicted, he says, by the law, and is nothing but a social reinforcement of the individual conscience, in the case where the offender does not himself expiate his crime by means of remorse and internal punishment.

But the more the problem of the relation between law and morality is absent in Vico's theoretical formulation and systematic treatment, the more present it is in his particular observations; indeed it may be said to pervade the whole of the New Science. Nor could it be otherwise, seeing that this relation refers to the distinction between the moral will and the inferior or earlier forms of will; and we know that all Vico's tendencies were towards exploring the lower and obscure region of the mind, both cognitive and practical, in the sphere alike of imagination, will and passion.

He always realised the supreme importance of the passions; and if he could not approve of giving them the upper hand, if he always considered the Epicurean morality a morality "of idlers shut up in their pleasure-gardens," he did not at all approve of excessively severe moralities such as that of the Stoics, which was no less than the other a morality of "solitaries," not one for men living in a state. Stoicism certainly preaches an eternal and immutable justice, and makes honour the criterion of human action; but it does violence to human nature, dehumanises it, annuls it and drives it to despair by pretending that it is quite insensible to the passions, by ignoring the utility and necessity of the bodily nature, by inculcating that rule—a rule "harder than iron"—that sins are all equal and that he who strikes a slave is as guilty as he who kills his father. The same doubts must have been aroused in Vico's mind by Jansenism, as he complains that "out of hatred of probability, Christian morality in France is becoming rigidified." We ought to follow not these solitary philosophers but rather those political ones, especially the Platonic type, which recognises that the passions should be not eradicated but moderated and "converted into human virtues." Thus out of cruelty, avarice and ambition, the three universal faults of mankind, Providence elicits the warrior, the merchant and the judge; the bravery, wealth and wisdom of states. From these three failings, which would destroy mankind on the earth, civil prosperity is formed.

Concerning matters of utility, Vico observes that "in themselves," ex se, they are neither good nor bad (neque turpes neque honestae) but become so merely through their relation to the moral consciousness ("but their unfairness is baseness, their fairness, honour: sed earum inaequalitas est turpitudo, acqualitas autem honestas"). In the empirical science of utility, he defends against Grotius a "prior natural law," ius naturale prius, to which belong self-defence and the procreation and upbringing of children: and this right he connects with the Stoic ἀδιάφορον. That it has no moral authority is proved by the fact that the law which follows it in the historical order, the "posterior natural law," ius naturale posterius, defined by Justinian as "that which is established among all men by natural reason and is preserved by all nations alike" (quod naturalis ratio inter omnes homines constituit et apud omnes gentes per aeque custoditur), is prior in the order of right, prius iure, overcomes the former when they conflict and sets upon it the seal of immutability. Now, although this first natural law is defined and exemplified in a merely empirical manner, it is surely at bottom nothing but pure law, law not yet moralised.

But it is upon the concept of "certitude" that law as distinct from morality properly, according to Vico, rests. The word certitude is used by him in many senses, neither clearly distinguished nor harmonised nor deduced one from another: though they all as we have seen unite, rather confusedly, in the general idea of the spontaneous as distinguished, from the reflective form of the mind. Certitude in its practical signification implies among other things an opposition to the "truth" of volition, and is, in a word, force as against equity and justice, authority as against reason, mere will as against the moral will. These are distinctions occurring to our own thoughts, rather than stated by Vico, who both distinguishes and fails to distinguish. For instance, he affirms that "certitude proceeds from authority, truth from reason" (certuni ab auctoritate est, verum a ratione) and immediately afterwards adds that "it is quite impossible for authority to conflict with reason, for in that case there would be not laws but abortive laws" (auctoritas cum ratione omnino pugnare non potest, nam ita non leges essent, sed monstra legum). At any rate, the New Science seems to him, by reason of this treatment of certitude, to contain a philosophy of authority, which, he adds, "is the source of what theological moralists call external justice." That is to say, he connected the concept of certitude with the distinction and terminology of external and internal, already employed by the scholastic morality, which, used about this time by Christianus Thomasius, were destined without any great philosophical merit on his part to give an impetus to the investigation of the philosophical relations between law and morality.

Another and kindred meaning of practical certitude in Vico is the so-called letter of the law, formula legum; which may stand in opposition to reason and the moral consciousness, but none the less has its own peculiar value: "dura lex, sed certa: durum sed scriptum est—the law is harsh, but it is certain; it is harsh, but so it is written." It is in a word the value of law simply as law, which though devoid of any real ethical content yet has always the value that comes from a command over the will. "The certitude of law" (writes Vico) "is a darkening of the reason supported merely by authority, and makes the law harsh in practical experience by laying down their certitude, which in good Latin (certuni) means particularised, or in the scholastic terminology individualised." To a certain extent Vico grasped the individual character which lies at the root of every law. That one must "judge according to law, not according to example" (legibus non exemplis iudicandum) is a comparatively late principle: the first laws were strictly "exempta," exemplary punishments. From real examples were derived the ideal examples employed by logic and rhetoric: and when the intelligible universal was understood, it was recognised that law had a certain universal character.

The primitive society sketched by Vico is, in its juristic aspect, the myth so to speak of pure law or practical force. Once upon a time men lived possessed of immense bodily strength, and proportionately feeble in understanding, who thought all strength greater than their own divine, and this belief constituted their law. They thought of the gods simply as beings stronger than themselves, whom they were compelled to obey, though with a bad grace: like Polyphemus, who if he had been strong enough would have fought Zeus himself, or Achilles, who told Apollo that if only they were equally matched he would not hesitate to try his strength against him. The wisdom of providence decreed that these fierce men, not tamed as yet by the rule of reason, should at least fear the divine nature of force and measure reason by its standard. This is the foundation of the principle of the "external justice of war." But the myth of the period of force cannot have the strictness of a philosophical concept, and consequently these strong men are considered by Vico from another point of view as ethically the best: "strongest" and "best," fortissimi and optimi, are regarded as synonymous terms: and their law, though not truth or rational law, is not pure certitude, but truth "mixed with certitude," ex certo mixtum. But the very mixture of certitude with, and its preponderance over, truth, which is here asserted, postulates the concept of pure certitude as presupposed by Vico.

When Vico accused Grotius and the school of natural rights of commencing their history half-way, with the civilised ages, and overlooking the earlier periods, the accusation, in its bearing upon the philosophy of practice, may be translated into a charge of ignoring the ideal moment of force and confining the attention to justice, equity and morality. The moment of force, constituting the other and earlier "half," was the field chosen by Hobbes, before him by Machiavelli, and still earlier by Epicurus, all of whom treated of this moment alone, "with impiety towards God, infamy to rulers and injustice towards nations." Hence the conclusion is easy, that in refuting the utilitarians and the theorists of force, Vico was at the same time recognising and absorbing the need which they represented, their only mistake having been that they developed this need in an abstract and one-sided way. His "state of nature" is in some respects like that of Hobbes, with the difference that mankind transcends the latter owing to the recognition of utility, the former owing to the religious and moral consciousness. But Vico does not on this account express any gratitude to Hobbes or Spinoza, Machiavelli or Epicurus, since he believed himself to have found in a classical author all the materials and the stimulus he required, all the counter-poise necessary to the Platonic philosophy. This was one of his "four authors," the one of whom we said earlier that we had still to see the use which Vico made, namely Tacitus. This writer for his part contemplates with his unequalled metaphysical powers man as he is, while Plato contemplates him as he ought to be. Just as Plato in his universal science explores every corner of nobility, so Tacitus "descends into every scheme of utility," in order that among the infinite chaotic chances of malice and fortune the man of practical wisdom may act well. To the union in his mind of Greek philosopher and Roman historian, which he interprets, as is easily seen, in the manner usual among the "Tacitean" politicians of the seventeenth century, Vico attributes his own success in sketching a real idea of eternal history, "which the wise man would construct both of esoteric wisdom such as Plato's, and of common wisdom such as that of Tacitus." To Tacitus, finally, he owed the impulse towards the supreme task of making concrete his ideal, and realising the republic of Plato in the "dregs of Romulus."

[CHAPTER IX]

THE HISTORICAL ASPECT OF LAW

As the cognitive mind passes from feeling without noticing to noticing with disturbed and confused faculties, and thence to the reflection of the clear mind, so analogously the volitional mind passes from the state of nature to practical certitude and thence to practical truth. In the correlative empirical science, the transition is more or less that from the savage to the heroic or barbaric condition and from the latter to the civilised. In these three types of society, all the manifestations of life correspond: thus there are three kinds of character, three kinds of manners and customs, three kinds of law and therefore of states, three kinds of language and writing, three kinds of authority, reason and justice, and three divisions of history. Confused and sometimes self-contradictory though Vico may be in fixing the particulars of these various correspondences, his general idea is plain. Where reflection is at a low ebb and imagination flourishes, the passions also flourish, habits are violent, governments aristocratic or feudal, families subjected to strict paternal rule, laws severe, legal procedure symbolical, language couched in metaphor and writing in hieroglyphics. Where on the other hand reflection predominates, poetry becomes either separate from or charged with philosophy, manners and customs lose their violence, the passions are brought into subjection, the people take the government into their own hands, all members of the family are alike citizens of the state, law is mitigated by equity and its procedure simplified, language loses its metaphorical clothing and writing becomes alphabetical. Mixed forms, which some politicians aim at producing artificially, would be abortions: and though we do find natural hybrid forms which retain a tinge of the earlier, each one, by reason of its own unity, always tries so far as possible to divest its subject of every property belonging to other forms.

Which of the various social types forms the foundation of the others and supplies the criterion for judging them? or what is the criterion and standard by which they must all alike be judged? For Vico, such a question is meaningless. Governments, he says, must adapt themselves to the nature of the people governed: the school of princes is the morality of nations. We may shudder at war, at the law of the stronger, at the reduction of the conquered to slavery, that is, to chattels: but the society which expressed itself in these customs was necessary and therefore good. The worship of strength, as we have said, occupied the position and discharged the function of the as yet impossible rule of reason. Later came the period of fully developed human reason, when men no longer valued each other by the standard of force, but by virtue of their rational nature, which is the true and eternal human nature, recognised one another as equals. The change of time brought change of customs: and the new were no less good, but no more so, than the old.

It would be as useless to seek the common measure of these various social types, as to ask what is the real age of the individual life, the common measure of childhood, youth, maturity and old age. The comparison is one presented by Vico himself. As children shape all their ideas according to their whims and carry them out with violence, as youths animate everything by their imagination, as grown men guide their affairs rather by pure reason and old men by sound prudence; so it is with the human race, which after its feeble, isolated and poverty-stricken origins, grows at first in unrestrained liberty, then rediscovers the necessaries, utilities and comforts of life by genius and imagination (the age of poetry), and finally cultivates wisdom by means of reason (the age of philosophy). Similarly, natural right arose first in laws so to speak of just passion and just violence: then it was clothed in various myths of just reason: and finally it was openly proclaimed in its pure rationality and noble truth.

By such a method of handling and passing judgment upon governments, laws and customs, Vico, escaped another of the leading doctrines or suppositions of the school of natural rights, the abstraction and anti-historicism we mentioned in its own place, which resulted in the conception of a natural law standing above positive law and therefore constituting a kind of eternal code, a perfect scheme of legislation, not yet fully actual but to be actualised, whose outlines show up clearly in the works of the school through their veil of doctrine and philosophy. But this eternal code was in its most important part a contingent and transitory code; or at least it advocated a code in agreement with the reformatory and revolutionary tendencies of these writers, publicists as they were rather than philosophers.

Vico rids himself of the ideal eternal code without seeming to do so: though he is quite ready to recognise that the "philosophers' natural right," ius naturale philosophorum, is in idea eternal, and inexorably laid down "in accordance with eternal reason," ad rationis aeternae libellam. But from this verbal concession of eternity made out of respect for the old traditional scholastic philosophy, whose influence he felt now and then, he goes on to deny its real eternity and supra-historical character; since instead of placing it above and outside history he puts it in the place which belongs to it, within history. The law of violence or heroic law, after passing into the law of uncivilised society, gradually attains a certain limit of clarity, in which state the only thing wanting to its perfection is that some school of philosophers should complete it by establishing it with reasoned principles, upon the idea of eternal justice: and this reasoning and systematisation is the "ius naturale philosophorum" the extreme form of the historical development of law, not its unchanging rule; a product, not a standard. Hence Vico's charge against Grotius of confusing the "ius naturale philosophorum," the law composed of reasoned principles derived from moralists, theologians and, in part, jurists, with the natural law of nations, ius naturale gentium (in Grotius's language, confusing natural law with an arbitrary or positive form of law): of misunderstanding the Roman jurists, who intended to speak solely of the latter: and of offering to correct and venturing to criticise writers whose faults on inspection vanish.

The eternal code, considered in its essentials, is a Utopia: and since the first and greatest of Utopias is Plato's Republic, it is important, in order better to decide the point at issue, to examine Vico's attitude towards the political scheme of Plato. If we may listen to his own words, the Republic was another of his many incentives and examples when he conceived the New Science. With the study of Plato began the unconscious awakening in him of "the thought of conceiving an ideal eternal law, to be expressed in a universal state built on the idea or plan of providence, on which idea, indeed, are founded all the states of every period and race: an ideal Republic like that which Plato ought, as a consequence of his divine metaphysic, to have conceived." He ought, but could not, owing to his "ignorance of the first man's fall"; ignorance, that is, of the original state of nature and of the exclusively poetic or "common" wisdom which followed it: an ignorance maintained by the error, common to the minds of all men, of measuring by oneself the almost unknown nature of other people, as Plato exalted the rude and barbaric beginnings of Gentile man to the perfect state of his loftiest esoteric knowledge of the divine, and fancied these earliest men to possess a high degree of this esoteric wisdom, whereas on the contrary they were really "brutes, all stupidity and ferocity." In consequence of this learned error Plato, instead of conceiving an eternal Republic and the laws of an eternal justice by which Providence governs the nations of the world and directs it by means of the common needs of mankind, by which it is led to the common consciousness of the whole human race, "conceived an ideal Republic and a merely ideal justice, by which nations are not guided at all." In fact, they ought not to be guided by it: since among the determinations of the perfect state there are some which are dishonourable and detestable, such as the community of wives. Thus Vico took from Plato the idea of an eternal state, but entirely inverted it by the reservation which he added to it, that the true eternal republic is not the abstract state of Plato, but the course of history in all its phases, including the brutes at one end and Plato at the other. This is the "republic of mankind," the "great state of mankind," the "universal republic" (generis humani respublica, magna generis humani civitas, respublica universa) of which he means to investigate the "form, ranks, societies, occupations, laws, crimes, punishments, and science of jurisprudence" (formam ordines societates negotia leges peccata poenas et scientiam in ea tractandi iuris) and to follow the development of all these "from their origin, the beginnings of humanity, under the control of divine Providence, national custom and authority" (a suis usque primis humanitatis originibus, divina providentia moderante, moribus gentium ac proinde auctoritate), that is to say, "by means of the various elements of human utility and necessity, or even by means of opportunities arising by the spontaneous action of circumstances" (per varia utilitatum et necessitatum, humanarum rudimenta, sive adeo per ipsarum sponte rerum oblatas occasiones). The "great state of the nations founded and governed by God" is thus nothing else than History.

While refusing a fixed code and the draft of a model society, we do not mean to deny the possibility of a practical aspect of the science conceived by Vico, the New Science in its triple form of ideal history, typical history and historical history. Every truth has its practical side, that is to say, its practical consequences: and thinking in this or that way of the nature and development of mankind involves this or that practical line of conduct. A man who believes for instance in the docile innocence of savage races will approach them with a smile on his face, kindly words on his lips and the alphabet and catechism of rights and duties in his hand: one who believes in Vico's "brutes" will adopt somewhat sterner methods, perhaps even fire and the sword. One who, like Vico, believes that "custom is more potent than law" and that "custom changes not at a blow, but gradually and slowly" will not be inclined to hasty legislation, and will not delude himself into thinking he can remodel human nature after an ideal of his own devising. Such conduct in any case is not theory, but practice: and when the attempt is made to reduce it to theory, either a chaotic confusion of necessary and contingent determinations results, or else if we avoid these errors and strive to attain a strictly doctrinal form of conduct, we get neither more nor less than the scientific theory itself, from which our conduct derived.

The thought of following up the New Science with a practical theory appropriate to it evidently occurred to Vico. Even in the first Italian edition of the work he stated two "practical" corollaries: first, a new art of criticism, to serve as a light to distinguish the truth in obscure and legendary history; and secondly an art of diagnosis, so to speak, for determining the degrees of necessity or utility in human affairs, and as its ultimate consequence, the chief end of this science, consisting in the recognition of indubitable symptoms of the conditions of nations. Properly considered, these arts of criticism and diagnosis unite into one, namely the better knowledge which it was possible, owing to the principles laid down by Vico, to obtain concerning the past and present life of nations.

This idea is repeated and explained in other parts of the same work. The sciences, studies and arts developed up to now, says Vico, deal with particular objects: the New Science, on the other hand, investigating as it does the principles themselves which lie at the source of all studies, is able to establish the ἀκμή or state of perfection of the entire system, and the degrees and extremes by which and within which human nature like all other mortal things must run its course and come to an end: so that through this science we can answer the practical questions how a nation in its rise may come to its state of perfection, and how in its decadence it may be stimulated to new life. The state of perfection would consist in a nation's resting upon fixed principles both demonstrated by unchanging reason and put into practice by human habits; principles in which the esoteric wisdom of the philosopher would extend a helping hand to the common wisdom of nations, thus uniting men of the greatest academic reputation with all those of wisdom in the state, the philosophers with the statesmen; and the science of civil matters divine and human, religion and law, a theology and morality imposed by command and acquired by habituation, would be supplemented by the science of natural laws divine and human, a theology and morality imposed by reason and acquired by ratiocination: so that to transgress such principles would be true error, the wandering not of men but of wild animals.

The practical aspect of the New Science, then, was simply a summary or duplicate of the science itself, emphasising the two leading elements of spontaneous and reflective wisdom, certitude and truth, and the necessity of bearing both in mind.

Years later, in one of the elaborations of the second Scienza Nuova made by Vico, we again meet with the idea and the phrase of a practical aspect of this science, in the title of a special concluding paragraph which he proposed to add to his work. It begins thus: "The whole of this work has now been thought out as a mere contemplative science dealing with the common character of nations: for this reason it may seem to offer no assistance to human prudence in order either to prevent or to delay the entire ruin of nations on the path of decadence, and thus to lack the practical side which every science must have whose subject-matter is dependent upon the human will, all such sciences being called practical." Now in what could such a practical side consist? "This practical application can easily be found from the contemplation itself of the course of the history of nations: which the wise men (statesmen) and princes of states observing, could by means of good ordinances, laws and examples recall peoples to their ἀκμή or state of perfection." In other words: a man warned is half saved. Contemplation is the only principle of conduct which the New Science can supply. The other half of salvation depends not on the person warning, namely thought, but upon the person warned, upon action. It does not occur to Vico to try to determine the "ordinances, laws and examples" whose adoption would be of value in this or that crisis or situation. This would not be a philosopher's task, as in fact he himself clearly recognises next moment, when he says: "The only practical principles we philosophers can supply are ones which can be confined to the academic sphere."

It would certainly be rash to claim precise knowledge of Vico's reasons for omitting this note on practical principles in the final manuscript of the last edition of the Scienza Nuova, just as he had omitted in the second work of that title the assertions on the subject which had appeared in the first. But we may at least venture to guess that the principal reason was the obvious emptiness of this passage, promising as it did a practical application which it failed to provide, and finally confessing that such a practical application was either impossible or already included in the theory itself.

[CHAPTER X]

PROVIDENCE

The true and only reality then, in the world of nations, is the course of their history: and the principle which regulates this course is Providence. From this point of view the New Science may be defined as a "rational civil theology of the divine providence." Bacon, among his historical sciences, had named a Historia Nemeseos (history of Divine Retribution). What for Bacon was little more than a mere name was for Vico a clearly stated problem and a developed theory. Philosophers, according to him, when they did not ignore Providence entirely, as materialists and determinists, considered it solely in the sphere of natural law, calling metaphysic by the name of "natural theology," and supporting the identification of God with the natural order observed in the motions of bodies, such as the spheres and the elements, and with the final cause which was seen to exist over and above the other natural causes. As against all this it was important to work out the doctrine of Providence "in the economy of matters civil."

It was observed by some of his earliest commentators, and the observation has been frequently repeated since, that Vico used the word "providence" indifferently in a subjective and an objective sense: sometimes to indicate the human belief in a provident deity controlling their doctrine, sometimes to denote the actual operation of this providence. The double or triple meaning of a single word in Vico's terminology is a thing which by now need cause no astonishment. We have often already been obliged to take pains to distinguish his homonyms and unite his synonyms. Hence we may at once recognise that one meaning of "Providence" for Vico might be and indeed is the belief in Providence, man's idea of God, first in the form of myth and later in the pure and rational form of philosophy. The Gentile nations of antiquity, he says, "began their metaphysical poetic wisdom by contemplating God in the attribute of his providence," upon which rested augury and divination. Without this idea, then, wisdom, the consciousness of the infinite, cannot take shape within man, nor can morality, the fear of and respect for the higher power which governs the affairs of men, arise. But in this sense of the word a further discussion of providence is unnecessary, after what we have said on the subjects of mythology and of the relation between morality and religion.

We therefore pass at once to Providence in its second sense, the real and strict conception of it; and here it seems advisable to leave Vico for a moment and to clear up certain points of doctrine.

It is a common observation that to create a given fact is one thing, to know it when created quite another. The knowledge of what a fact really is often comes in the life of the individual years later, in the life of mankind centuries later, than the fact itself. The very persons who are directly responsible for a given fact as a rule do not know it, or know it in a very imperfect and fallacious manner; so much so that the illusions which are said to accompany human activity have passed into a proverb. The poet thinks he is singing of purity when he is really singing of sensuality, and of strength while he is really singing of weakness; he believes himself to be a dreadful pessimist and is really childishly optimistic: imagines himself a devil, when he is a good fellow without an ounce of vice in him. Philosophers deceive themselves no less. We need not go far to find examples. The philosopher we are studying supplies a whole series of them; few have been more in the dark as to the real tendencies of their own thought. The politician also deceives himself; very often he believes and declares himself to be fighting for liberty while he is a mere reactionary, or while believing himself to be serving the cause of reaction is really inciting to revolt and aiding the cause of freedom: and so on. Such illusions are easy to understand. Individuals and nations in the heat of creation, or scarcely yet passing out of such a state, can perhaps express their state of mind, but cannot treat it in the critical spirit of historical narration: and accordingly, when they cannot reconcile themselves to waiting in silence, they compose imaginary histories of themselves, Wahrheiten und Dichtungen at once. In fact this proved difficulty of understanding one's actions while acting is one motive of the wise advice to speak of oneself as little as possible and of the suspicion with which autobiographies and memoirs are regarded. Such works are interesting and possibly even valuable; but they never present the strict historical truth of the facts they narrate.

Human labours are thus veiled in the mists of illusion which arise from individuals. The superficial historian clings to the veil, and in his attempt to describe the course of events, uses these illusions to make his voice carry. In this way the history of poetry takes the form of a narration of the intentions, opinions and aims of poets, or of those attributed to them by their contemporaries; the history of philosophy becomes a series of anecdotes concerning the sentiments, whims and practical aims of philosophers: the history of politics, a tissue of intrigue, base interests, gossip and greed. But a more careful historian, or one of a different type, will have nothing to do with history of this kind. His first act is to dispel the mists, to sweep away the individual and his illusions, and to look facts in the face as they appeared in their objective succession and their supra-individual origin. Real, true history arises independently of individuals, as a product growing to completion behind their backs, the product of a force apart from individual agents, which may be called Fate, Chance, Fortune or God. The individual, who at first was everything, and filled the whole stage with his posturing and declamation, is now, in this second aspect of history, less than nothing; his actions and cries, stripped of all serious potency, provoke laughter or pity. We look in terror at the Fate that dominates him, we stand aghast at the strange coincidence of chance or the caprices of Fortune, we bow before the inscrutable designs of the divine providence. The individual appears in turn as the inert material, the powerless plaything and the blind instrument of these forces. But deeper thought leads us beyond even this second view of history. The pity which the individual seems to arouse and the amusement he evokes are in reality deserved not by him but by his fancies, or rather, by those individuals who mistake fancy for truth. Real history is composed of actions, not of fancies and illusions: but actions are the work of individuals, not indeed in so far as they dream, but in the inspiration of genius, the divine madness of truth, the holy enthusiasm of the hero. Fate, Chance, Fortune, God—all these explanations have the same defect: they separate the individual from his product, and instead of eliminating the capricious element, the individual will in history, as they claim to do, they immensely reinforce and increase it. Blind Fate, irresponsible chance, and tyrannical God are all alike capricious: and hence Fate passes into Chance and God, Chance into Fate and God, and God into both the others, all three being equivalent and identical.

The idea which transcends and corrects alike the individualistic and supra-individualistic views of history is the idea of history as rational. History is made by individuals: but individuality is nothing but the concreteness of the universal, and every individual action, simply because it is individual, is supra-individual. Neither the individual nor the universal exists as a distinct thing: the real thing is the one single course of history, whose abstract aspects are individuality without universality and universality without individuality. This one course of history is coherent in all its many determinations, like a work of art which is at the same time manifold and single, in which every word is inseparable from the rest, every shade of colour related to all the others, every line connected with every other line. On this understanding alone history can be understood. Otherwise it must remain unintelligible, like a string of words without meaning or the incoherent actions of a madman.

History then is the work neither of Fate nor of Chance but of the necessity which is not determination and the liberty which is not chance. And since the religious view, that history is the work of God, has this advantage and superiority over the others, that it introduces a cause for history other than fate or chance, and therefore not properly speaking a cause at all, but a creative activity, a free and intelligent mind, it is natural that out of gratitude to this higher view no less than by the suitability of the language we should be led to give to the rationality of history the name of God who rules and governs all things, and to call it the Divine Providence. In so naming it, we at the same time purge the title of its mythical dross which debased God and his providence afresh into a fate or a chance. Thus providence in history, in this final logical form, has double value as a criticism of individual illusions, when they come forward as the entire and only reality of history, and as a criticism of divine transcendence. And we may say that this is the point of view which always has been and always is adopted, as if instinctively, without the profession of an explicit theory, by all minds naturally gifted with that particular faculty which we call the historic sense.

If now, to return to Vico, we ask how he solved the problem of the motive force of history, and what was the precise content for him of the concept of providence in the objective sense, it is perfectly easy to exclude the supposition that his was the transcendent or miraculous Providence which had formed the subject of Bossuet's eloquent Discours. It is easy both because in all his philosophy he invariably reduces the transcendent to the immanent, and repeats over and over again here that his providence operates by natural means or (using scholastic phraseology) by secondary causes: and because upon this point his interpreters are practically unanimous.

No less insistent is his criticism of fate and chance, or according to his threefold division fortune, fate and chance. He observes that the doctrine of fate moves in a vicious circle, because the eternal series of causes in which it holds the world bound and chained, depends upon the will of Jupiter, and at the same time Jupiter is subject to fate; whence it results that the Stoics are themselves entangled in that "chain of Jupiter" with which they would imprison all things human. These three concepts, corresponding to that of opportunity when an object of desire is in question, to that of good luck in the case of unhoped-for events, and to that of accident in the case of the unexpected, are distinctions of the subjective understanding rather than anything else: objectively they come under one single law which may also be called fortune, if with Plato we recognise opportunity as the mistress of human affairs: and all three are manifestations and paths of the divine Providence which is intelligence, liberty and necessity. The creator of the world of nations "was indeed Mind, since men made it by their intelligence: it was not Fate, because they made it by free choice, nor yet Chance, since to all eternity on doing thus the same results follow."

Vico lights up in the most fanciful ways the comedy of errors formed by man's illusions as to the end of his own actions. Men thought they were escaping the threats of the thundering sky by carrying their women into caves to satisfy their animal passions out of God's sight: and by thus keeping them safely secluded they founded the first chaste unions and the first societies; marriage and the family. They fortified themselves in suitable places with the intention of defending themselves and their families: and in reality, by thus fortifying themselves in fixed places they put an end to their nomadic life and primitive wanderings, and began to learn agriculture. The weak and disorderly, reduced to the extremity of hunger and mutual slaughter, to save their lives took refuge in these fortified places, and became servants to the heroes: and thus without knowing it they raised the family to an aristocratic or feudal status. The aristocrats, feudal chiefs or patricians, their rule once established, hoped to defend and secure it by the strictest treatment of their servants the plebeians: but in this way they awoke in the servants a consciousness of their own power and made the plebeians into men, and the more the patricians prided themselves on their patriciate and struggled to preserve it, the more effectively they worked to destroy the patrician state and to create democracy. Thus, says Vico, the world of nations issues "from a mind widely different from, sometimes quite opposed, always superior, to the particular ends set before themselves by men: which restricted ends have been made means to wider ends, and employed to preserve the human race upon this earth."

It may be gathered from some of our quotations from Vico that he sometimes tended to conceive men as conscious of their own utilitarian ends but unconscious of moral ends. This would logically lead to explaining social life on exclusively utilitarian principles, and to considering morality as an accident relatively to the human will and therefore not really moral: an external accretion more or less capable of holding mankind together, or the obscure work of a supramundane providence. This utilitarianism especially creeps into a passage where he says that man, on account of his corrupt nature, being under the tyranny of self-love which compels him to make private utility his chief guide and to want every useful thing for himself and nothing for his fellow, unable to hold his passions in check so as to direct them by justice, in the state of nature desires only his own safety; after taking a wife and begetting children, desires his safety and the safety of his family; after attaining civil life, desires his own safety together with the safety of his city; after extending his rule over other peoples, he desires the safety of the nation; after joining with other nations in wars, treaties, alliances and commerce, he desires his safety and that of all mankind: and "in all these circumstances he principally desires his own interest." For this reason "it can be nothing else than divine providence that binds him down within such ordinances as to maintain by justice the society of the family, the state and ultimately of mankind; by which ordinances since man cannot attain what he wants, at least he wants to attain as much utility as is permitted: and this is what is called justice." The public virtue of Rome, he writes elsewhere, "was nothing but a good use made by providence of grave, unsightly and cruel private faults, that states might be preserved at a time when human minds, being in a state of extreme particularity, could not naturally understand a common good."

Utilitarianism was however, as we know, strongly repugnant to Vico's observed ethics, founded as the latter is upon the moral consciousness or shame; and hence these statements, which unconsciously tend in that direction, can only be explained as resulting from the disturbance sometimes produced in his mind by the lingering remains of the transcendent or theological conception of providence, and also from the confused character of his thought, which prevented him from keeping the idea of individual illusions clearly distinguished from that of individual aims; so that he sometimes substituted the second when he ought to have been dealing solely with the first. If the provident deity is "the unity of the spirit which informs and animates the world of nations," these do not fail to obtain their particular ends in order that it may move on to its universal ones, but both alike are realised in them: and man is at every moment both utilitarian and moral, or at least supposes himself to be moral when he is utilitarian or utilitarian when he is really moral.

In any case, and in spite of these vacillations or rather confusions, the conception of particular ends as the vehicle of universal and of illusion as accompanying and co-operating with action implies a dialectical conception of the movement of history, and the transcending of the problem of evil. This problem is in fact very little emphasised by Vico, owing to the strength of his belief in the universal government of providence and of his persuasion that so-called evil is not only willed by man under the appearance of good, but is itself essentially a good. In a few rare passages in his earliest writings, where he encounters the problem of evil, Vico solves it simply in the sense that we men because of our iniquity which leads us to "regard ourselves, not this universe of things" (nosmetipsos, non hanc rerum universitatem spectamus) consider as evil those things which run counter to us, "which yet, since they contribute to the common nature of the world, are good" (quae tamen, quia in mundi commune conferunt, bona sunt).

Vico's conception of history thus became truly objective, freed from divine arbitrament, but freed equally from the rule of trifling causes and gossiping explanations, and acquiring a knowledge of its own essential end, which is to understand the nexus of facts, the logic of events; to be the rational reconstruction of a rational fact. Historical study at this time suffered less from the first of these errors (the theological conception had been ever since the beginning of the Italian Renaissance falling into universal decay) than from that form of history which was just then acquiring the name of "pragmatic," which restricted itself to the personal aspect of events, and failing by these means to reach full historical truth tried to gain warmth and life by means of political and moral instruction. A monument of pragmatic history arose in Vico's own country and contemporaneously with the Scienza Nuova: Pietro Giannone's Civil History of the Kingdom of Naples. The author was a man of his own district and age, and wrote a great work in the sphere of polemic, and even in certain respects of history: but such that all its greatness only serves to emphasise the greatness of Vico's book. If Vico had had to describe the origins of ecclesiastical property and power in the Middle Ages, he would have been able to write of something very different from the guile of popes, bishops and abbots, and the simplicity of dukes and emperors. And as we shall see, whenever he undertook to investigate any part of history he actually did discover in it something very different from these things.

[CHAPTER XI]

THE LAW OF REFLUX

The mind, after traversing its course of progress, after rising from sensation successively to the imaginative and the rational universal and from violence to equity, is bound in conformity with its eternal nature to re-traverse the course, to relapse into violence and sensation, and thence to renew its upward movement, to commence a reflux.

This is the philosophical meaning of Vico's "reflux," but not the exact manner in which we find it expressed in his writings, where the eternal circle is considered almost exclusively as exemplified in the history of nations, as a reflux in the civil affairs of man. Civilisation comes to an end in the "barbarism of reflection," which is worse than the primitive barbarism of sensation; for while the latter was not without a wild nobility, the former is contemptible, untrustworthy and treacherous; and thus it is necessary that this evil subtlety of malicious intellect should rust away through the long centuries of a new barbarism of sensation. We must however withdraw and purge the conception of "reflux" from historical facts and the sociological scheme, not only to explain the absolute and eternal character which Vico attributes to it, but also to justify the historical representation and sociological law founded upon it, and drawing their cogency primarily from it.

The laws of flux and reflux, laid down by the philosophers and politicians of Greece and of the Italian Renaissance, were founded no less than Vico's upon a philosophy, but upon a very superficial one; they assumed their object to possess external and empty political forms, and endeavoured to fix the succession of these forms upon data of experience or by vague reasonings. But Vico's object is the forms of culture, including in themselves all the activities of life, economy and law, religion and art, science and language, and referring them back to their inmost source, the human mind, he establishes their succession "according to the rhythm of the elementary forms of the mind." Thus all the learning which has been expended in comparing the Vician reflux with the theories of Plato or Polybius, Machiavelli or Campanella, is practically wasted: the more so that Vico (who, as we know, though often misunderstanding his predecessors cannot be accused of wishing to pass them over: in fact, where he thought he found parallel or identical ideas in them, he was apt to boast of the fact) felt no need of mentioning this point, or thought it unimportant. The "circular movement" (ἀνακύκλωσις) of Polybius, the economy of nature by which states alter, change and return to the same point, has been thought almost an anticipation of the eternal ideal history; but Vico sets Polybius with the others, when he asks the reader to consider "how (little) philosophers have thought with knowledge upon their principles of civil government, and with what (little) truth Polybius has reasoned upon its changes." Campanella connected his historical cycles with astrological laws; and Machiavelli conceives the catastrophe which opens the reflux thus: "When human craft and malignity have gone as far as they can go, it happens of necessity that the world purifies itself by one of the three methods (pestilence, famine and deluge, beside the human methods of new religions and languages) in order that men, having become few and chastened, may live more conveniently and become better." The one precedent to which Vico refers, but only to interpret it in a way altogether his own and in fact to give it a totally new content, is the ancient Egyptian tradition of the three successive ages of gods, heroes and men.

If the philosophy lying at its root gives strength to Vico's sociological theory of reflux, the historical element with which it is leavened to some degree weakens it. Vico was especially versed in and attached to Roman history, which had been the first of his historical studies and the object of many years' devotion. The history of Rome accordingly, whether because of his deeper study of it or because of its complexity, impressiveness and long duration, came to stand in Vico's mind as the typical or normal history, to serve as a standard for all others, and be confused with the law of flux and reflux itself. Rome showed him the asylum of Romulus, that is, the transition from the state of nature to the political organism: aristocracies, monarchical at first in appearance only, later not even in appearance: democracy, issuing from its struggle with aristocracy and ending in real monarchy, the perfect form of civil life; thence by a process of degeneration, the barbarism of reflection or civilisation, incomparably worse than the primitive noble barbarism, and following in its train a second condition of wandering in a state of nature and a new barbarism, a new youth, the Middle Ages. It is the history of Rome hardly generalised at all and supplemented here and there by that of Greece, that appears in the Vician aphorisms formulating the laws of social dynamics. Men first feel the prick of necessity, then the attraction of utility: next they become aware of convenience, and after that take delight in pleasure; then dissipate themselves in luxury and finally fall victims to the madness of abusing their resources. There must at first be men of brute strength like Polyphemus, that man may obey man in the state of family life, and to induce him to obey the law in the future state of civil life. There must be noble and proud men like Achilles, not inclined by nature to yield to their equals, in order to establish over the family the aristocratic type of republic. Then valiant and just men like Aristides and Scipio Africanus are necessary, to open the path to popular liberty. After this arise men of great apparent virtues accompanied by faults no less great, like Alexander or Caesar, acquiring immense popular reputations and introducing monarchy. Later still there must be serious reflective natures like Tiberius to consolidate the monarchy; and lastly wild, dissolute and shameless characters like Caligula, Nero and Domitian to overthrow it.

Owing to this rarefaction of Roman history into typical history, and the simultaneous consolidation of typical history into the history of Rome, Vico's law of reflux is riddled with exceptions, much more common and serious than those of the corresponding empirical laws; so that if as he believes his empirical science is identical with the ideal laws of the mind, its alleged permanency throughout all eternity and the whole universe seems the merest irony. He says that Carthage, Capua and Numantia, the three cities which threatened to dispute with Rome the empire of the world, failed to accomplish the ordained course of human affairs: since the Carthaginians were thwarted by the acuteness of the native African temperament, which by maritime commerce they increased still further: the Capuans by the soft climate and fertility of rich Campania: and the Numantines by their suppression in the first burst of heroism at the hands of Rome, led by Scipio Africanus the conqueror of Carthage, and aided by the forces of the world. And passing from ancient to modern times, America would now be traversing the path of human affairs but for its discovery by Europeans: Poland and England are still aristocratic, but would have arrived at perfect monarchy had not the natural course of civil affairs been hindered by extraordinary causes. As for the Middle Ages, they cannot be considered as in Vico's estimation a true return to the state of nature, if they open with the establishment of Christianity, the religion of the true God; nor in any case does the return to the state of nature and to barbarism seem the only path open to a nation that has attained its ἀκμή, its culmination. The alternative is that a decadent nation should lose its independence and fall under the rule of a better. Nor, lastly, is decadence inevitable if statesmen and philosophers working in harmony can preserve the perfection that has been reached and check the threatened destruction, and if in point of fact, as he observes, the aristocratic republics which survived his own day as remnants of the Middle Ages succeeded in preserving themselves by arts of "superfine wisdom." His own time Vico thought to be one of high civilisation. A complete humanity, he says, seems to be scattered to-day over all nations. A few great monarchs rule the world of nations, and those barbarian monarchs who still exist do so either owing to the persistence of the "common wisdom" of imaginative and cruel religions, or because of the natural temperaments of their respective peoples. The nations which form the empire of the Czar of Russia are of a sluggish disposition; those of the Khan of Tartary are an effeminate race; the subjects of the Negus of Ethiopia and the King of Fez and of Morocco are few and weak. In the temperate zone Japan maintains a heroic character not unlike that of Rome in the period of the Punic wars; her people are warlike, her language resembling Latin, her religion a fierce one of terrible gods all loaded with formidable weapons. The Chinese on the other hand, whose religion is mild, cultivate literature and are humane in the highest degree: the peoples of the Indies are also humane and practise the arts of peace; the Persians and Turks mingle the rude doctrine of their religion with an Asiatic softness, the Turks especially tempering their arrogance with pomp, magnificence, liberality and gratitude. Europe is above all humane, composed as it is of great monarchies and universally professing the Christian faith which inculcates an infinitely pure and perfect idea of God and commands charity to the whole human race. Vico fixed his attention upon the confederacy of the Swiss cantons and the united provinces of Holland, which reminded him of the Aetolian and Achaean leagues, and on the composition of the German Empire, a system of free states and sovereign princes, which seemed to him a kind of attempt in the direction of a great aristocratic state; the most perfect of all, and the ultimate form of civil life, since no other can be conceived superior to it, reproducing as it does the earliest form, the aristocracy of patricians each supreme in his own family and all united in the ruling class of the first state; but reproducing it in a form not of barbarism but of the highest civilisation. Such is the humanity by which Europe is on every hand distinguished, that it abounds with every element contributory to human happiness, mental pleasures no less than bodily comforts, and all this in virtue of the Christian religion, teaching as it does sublime truths, supported by the most learned philosophers of the Gentile races and of the three greatest languages of the world, Hebrew, Greek and Latin, and thus uniting the wisdom of authority with that of reason, the choicest philosophical doctrine with the most highly developed philological learning. Can this lofty civilisation, safeguarded as it is by Christianity, be moving, or ever likely to move towards a new state of nature? It is difficult to discover Vico's real opinion on this point. Among his verses there is a poem of a profoundly pessimistic tone, but this is a youthful effusion, and in any case refers to the end of the world as imminent, rather than to a future social decadence. In his letters there is a melancholy picture of the condition of learning in his time: but it applies to this restricted field only, not to the sphere of social and political life. On the other hand, in his last philosophical work, the De mente heroica, referring to those who declared that all things were now perfect and that no new tasks could arise, he says that the tide of progress is flowing at its strongest. "The world is still young: for only in the last seven hundred years, four hundred of which were spent in barbarism, how many new discoveries have been made! How many new arts have arisen! How many new sciences have been developed!" (Mundus iuvenescit adhuc; nam septingentis non ultra abhinc annis, quorum tamen quadringentos barbaries percurrit, quot nova inventa! quot novae artes! quot novae scientiae excogitatae!) But we may observe that the De mente heroica is an official oration, and that Vico may on that account have suppressed for the occasion his doubts or his deepest convictions. In any case, how can we reconcile the prophecy of an imminent collapse with the rise of that creation of providence, the New Science, shedding upon the life of nations a light which rendered possible the diagnosis and cure of their ailments? On the whole it is probable that the difficulty of determining Vico's opinion as to the fate of contemporary society is due to the fact that he had really no settled conviction on the subject, and was led hither and thither in various and contrary directions by the influence of hopes and fears.

If it had not been disturbed by the scheme of Roman history, the empirical theory of the reflux would never have been forced to admit so many and serious exceptions; nor would it have fallen into such painful confusions. It would have accommodated its author's historical observations with greater ease, and its general characteristics would have been much simpler and more general. It would have consisted primarily in the determination and illustration of the connexion between predominantly imaginative and predominantly intellectual, spontaneous and reflective, periods, the latter periods issuing out of the former by an increase of energy, and returning to them by degeneration and decomposition. Political history shows over and over again the spectacle of aristocracies declining from their first strength to a debased and contemptible state and yielding before the onset of classes less refined or even absolutely uncultured, but of stouter moral fibre; while these again, after becoming civilised in their turn and attaining the highest development of the historical idea whose germ they bear within themselves, enter upon a new period of decay and fermentation, from which issues a new ruling class in the vigour of a youthful barbarism. The history of philosophy again shows positive and speculative periods; philosophical solutions congeal into scholastic theory and dogma, the mind reverts to the mere unthinking observation of particular fact, and the speculative process arises once more. Literary history, too, speaks of periods of realism and idealism, romantic and classical periods: of a corrupt classicism, Alexandrian or decadent art, and of a romantic barbarism which arises from it. These are true cases of Vico's reflux. But since the nature of the mind which underlies these cycles is outside time and therefore exists in every moment of time, we must not exaggerate the difference of the periods: and if on the one hand the outline of the law must be distinct, it must on the other hand not lose a certain elasticity. We must never forget that at every period, aristocratic or democratic, romantic or classical, positive or speculative, and even in every individual and every fact, moments both aristocratic and democratic, romantic and classical, positive and speculative can be observed; and that these distinctions are to a great extent quantitative and made for the sake of convenience. These facts should lead us to avoid alike maintaining the law at all costs and so falling into artificiality, and rejecting it entirely and so refusing the help which may be derived from general and approximative views.

Thus understood and amended, not only is the theory free from the great and striking exceptions which are necessary when it is modelled upon the history and final catastrophe of Rome, but the accusations of undue uniformity lodged against Vico disappear. Vincenzo Cuoco, one of the first, if not the first intelligent student of Vico's works, remarks concerning and in criticism of the law of reflux, that "nature never resembles itself; it is man who by compounding his observations forms classes and names." This is perfectly true; but if applied to this case it would be an argument not against the Vician reflux but against every sort of empirical human science. Others accused Vico of overlooking groups of causes of great historical weight, such as climate, racial and national character, and exceptional occurrences. But, omitting the fact that he often mentions these things, for he connects national character and climate with the forms and changes of states, and mentions events and circumstances which upset the natural and ordinary course of national history, for example in his discussion of Greek history, the truth is that he was bound to ignore them and could not waste time over such things, since his concern was with uniformities and not with divergences, or rather with certain uniformities and not with certain others which compared with the former were negligible divergences. Similarly—the parallel is an obvious one, and indeed is more than a parallel—any one who attempts to trace the general characteristics of the different periods of life, infancy, childhood, adolescence and so forth, will ignore the comparative rapidity and slowness of development due to differences of climate, race or accidental circumstances. Another of these true but irrelevant charges is that Vico denied the communication and interpenetration of civilisations, and insisted that they arise separately in different nations without any mutual knowledge and therefore without reciprocal imitation. This charge has been met by the observation that Vico does not fail to record cases of the influence of one people upon another and of the transmission of civilisations and their products; the transmission for example of alphabetic writing from the Chaldaeans to the Phoenicians and from them to the Egyptians; and that in any case his law is not empirical but philosophical and refers to the spontaneous creative activity of the human mind. The point at issue is however precisely the empirical aspect of this law, not the philosophical: and the true reply seems to us to be, as we have already suggested, that Vico could not take and ought not to have taken other circumstances into account, just as—to recall one instance—any one who in studying the various phases of life describes the first manifestations of the sexual craving in the vague imaginations and similar phenomena of puberty, does not take into account the ways in which the less experienced may be initiated into love by the more experienced, since he is setting out to deal not with the social laws of imitation but with the physiological laws of organic development. If it is said that even without imitation or sophistication the sexual craving arises no less and demands satisfaction, such a statement doubtless merely asserts the incontrovertible truth of a certain very ancient Eastern tale included by Boccaccio in the Decameron: but at the same time it supplies the most complete parallel to the famous and much controverted aphorism of Vico.

Nor is the Vician law of reflux necessarily opposed, as has often been thought, to the conception of social progress. It would be so opposed if instead of being a law of mere uniformity it were one of identity, in agreement with the idea of an unending cyclical repetition of single individual facts which has been adopted by certain extravagant minds of both ancient and modern times. The reflux of history, the eternal cycle of the mind, can and must be conceived, even if Vico does not so express it, as not merely diverse in its uniform movements, but as perpetually increasing in richness and outgrowing itself, so that the new period of sense is in reality enriched by all the intellect and all the development that preceded it, and the same is true of the new period of the imagination or of the developed mind. The return of barbarism in the Middle Ages was in some respects uniform with ancient barbarism; but it must not for that reason be considered as identical with it, since it contains in itself Christianity, which summarises and transcends ancient thought.

Whether the conception of progress is formulated and thrown into relief by Vico is quite another question. Vico does not deny progress; he even refers to it in speaking of the conditions of his own time as an actual fact: but he has no conception of it and still less does he throw such a conception into relief. His philosophy, while it attains the lofty vision of the process of mind in obedience to its own laws, nevertheless retains by reason of this failure to apprehend the progressive enrichment of reality an element of sadness and desolation. The individual character of men and events is obliterated in Vico; individuals and events are represented merely as particular cases of one aspect of the mind or of one phase of civilisation. Hence we always find Aristides alongside of Scipio and Alexander alongside of Caesar: never Aristides simply as Aristides, Scipio as Scipio, and Alexander and Caesar as Alexander and as Caesar. Progress implies that each fact and each individual has its own unique function; each makes its own contribution, for which no other can be substituted, to the poem of history; and each responds with a deeper voice to the one that went before.

But the reason why Vico was bound to miss the idea of progress and why his studies in history were inevitably one-sided can be clearly perceived only after a review of his metaphysics.

[CHAPTER XII]

METAPHYSICS

By "metaphysics" we understand Vico's conception of reality as a whole, not of the world of man by itself; and we also include in the meaning of the word his ultimate negative conclusion asserting the unknowability or the imperfect knowability of one or more spheres of reality, or of that highest sphere in which the others reunite.

In point of fact, as we observed in considering the second and latest form of his theory of knowledge, Vico drew a sharp line between the world of man and the world of nature: the former transparent to man because created by him, the latter opaque, because only God its Creator has knowledge of it. And his conception of the total and ultimate reality, the metaphysic which he expounds together with his earlier theory of knowledge, retains the value granted to it by that theory and no other: it is a probable conjecture, but one incapable of verification, and reaches completion in the certitude of revealed theology. Hence this metaphysic remains out of all possible connexion with the New Science, which proceeds by the certain method of truth and cuts itself off from revelation. Vico never rejected it. He discusses it in his autobiography of 1725, the year of the first Scienza Nuova; he refers to it with satisfaction in 1737, seven years after the second Scienza Nuova, when his scientific life was, as he himself considered, at an end. But though he never rejected it he always kept it aside, so to speak, in a corner of his mind.

This point established, it might seem that there can be nothing more to be said of any philosophical importance about Vico's metaphysics. But this is not the case. Since every department of philosophy implies in itself every other, and since we can therefore always deduce from the treatment of one of the so-called particular philosophical sciences the character of the whole, it is legitimate to examine the New Science and to consider what metaphysic is implicit therein; to determine what philosophical complement is logically supported and demanded by this science.

The New Science, which asserted the full knowability of human affairs, not merely on the surface, like a psychological treatment, but in the depths of their nature: the New Science, which transcended the individual to attain the conception of the mind which informs all things and is Providence: the Science which with divine pleasure contemplated the eternal cycle of the mind, elevated as it was to such a height, necessarily tended to interpret the whole of reality, both Nature and God, as Mind. That this tendency was objective to the New Science, and not subjective to Vico, in whose mind the science so to speak thought itself out, need hardly be repeated. Vico personally not only did not encourage it but actually curtailed and repressed it so energetically as to leave no trace of it in his works. There was no philosophical doctrine of which he had such terror and against which he so frequently waged war as that of pantheism; and perhaps this polemical preoccupation is the only trace, though quite an involuntary trace, visible in his writings of the tendency which he must have observed in himself. He was, and wished to remain, a Christian and a Catholic; transcendence, the personality of God, the substantiality of the soul, though his science did not lead him towards them, were uncontrollable necessities to his consciousness. But just as this fact allowed Vico to repress but not to eradicate the essential logical tendency of his thought, so it enables us to recognise that tendency in the facts themselves. An Italian critic, Spaventa, is right when he says that in Vico the necessity of a new metaphysic makes itself felt; another, a German Catholic, is equally right in denning his system as "semi-pantheistic." It would perhaps be more dangerous to go on to say, with the Italian above mentioned, that Vico makes an advance on the Cartesian idea of two substances and the Spinozistic of two attributes, and even on the Leibnitian doctrine of the monad, and that he transcends parallelism and pre-established harmony by distinguishing the two providences, the two attributes, nature and mind, in such a way that the one is a step to the other, and by conceiving the point of union and the origin of the opposition as an unfolding or development, so that nature is regarded as the phenomenon and proper basis of mind, the pre-supposition which mind creates to itself in order to be really mind, to be a true unity. For while we may doubt whether the distinction of the two attributes or two providences, the natural and the human, is a well-grounded and inevitable consequence of conceiving substance as mind and thought, it is impossible to deduce the evolutionary transition from one to the other as a tendency implicit in Vico's conception of thought. There is certainly particular documentary evidence for this latter particular tendency: but it is scanty and unconvincing, and occurs not in the system of the New Science but rather in the chronologically earlier system.

For the metaphysic laid down by Vico in the earlier phase of his thought is not, as it has seemed to some, and as it may at first sight appear, entirely devoid of significance and value. It shows the same aversion to materialism and the same love of idealism which inspire the meditations of the New Science. The philosophy of Epicurus, which takes as its starting-point matter already formed and divided into ultimate particles of various shapes, composed of other parts which are supposed to be indivisible owing to the absence of void between them, seemed to him a philosophy such as to satisfy the naïve mind of a child or the uncritical mind of a woman; and the delight with which he followed the explanation of the forms of material nature according to this philosopher, in the poem of Lucretius, was equalled by the amusement and pity with which he watched him forced by stern necessity to lose himself in countless ineptitudes and follies in trying to explain the phenomena of thought. Vico accused the Cartesian physics no less than the Epicurean of a "false position," since it also takes ready-formed matter as its starting-point, differing from the Epicurean matter in that, while the latter limits the divisibility of matter at the atoms, the former makes its elements infinitely divisible; that the one places motion in the void, the other in the solid; the one initiates the shaping of its infinite worlds by a casual declination of atoms from the downward path of their own weight and gravitation, the other generates its indefinite vortices from an impetus imparted to a section of inert and therefore not yet divided matter, which on receiving this motion divides into fragments, and, hampered by its mass, necessarily makes an effort to move in a straight line, and being unable to do so through its solidity begins, divided as it is into fragments, to move about the centre of each fragment. In this way while Epicurus entrusted the world to chance, Descartes subjected it to fate; and it was in vain that to save himself from materialism he superimposed upon his physics a quasi-Platonic metaphysic, by which he attempted to establish two substances, the one extended and the other intelligent, and to make room for an immaterial agent; for these two parts were not reconciled in his system, since his mechanical physics included in itself a metaphysic like the Epicurean, establishing one kind and one only of active material substance. For similar or analogous reasons Vico rejected the philosophies of Gassendi, Spinoza and Locke; and the physical science of other authors such as Robert Boyle seemed to him valuable for purposes of medicine and the "spargiric art," but useless for philosophy. Galileo he considered to have looked at physical science with the eye of a great geometrician, but without the aid of the full light of metaphysics. He had sympathy with philosophers who were also geometricians, and therefore with the Pythagorean or Timaean physics, according to which the world consists of numbers; with the Platonic metaphysics, which from the form of our minds without any other hypothesis establishes, upon our knowledge and consciousness of certain eternal truths which are in our mind and cannot be ignored or denied, the eternal idea as the principle of all things; with the doctrine of metaphysical points, attributed by him to Zeno the Stoic; and finally with the philosophy of the Italian Renaissance, the period adorned by Ficino, Pico della Mirandola, Steuco, Nifo, Mazzoni, Piccolomini, Acquaviva and Patrizio.

The fundamental concept of his cosmology was supplied by the metaphysical point, in which the employment of mathematics in metaphysics, a process admitted by Vico as analogous to that of construction, found expression. Just as from the geometrical point proceed the line and the surface, and the point which is defined as having no parts supplies the proof that lines otherwise incommensurable can be divided equally into their component points, so it is legitimate to postulate points not geometrical but metaphysical, which though not extended generate extension. Between God, who is rest, and matter, which is motion, the intermediate place is taken by the metaphysical point, whose attribute is conation, the indefinite energy and attempt on the part of the universe to bring into being and sustain each particular thing. The existence of matter is nothing but an indefinite power of keeping the universe extended, which underlies all extended objects equally however unequal they may be, and also an indefinite power of motion underlying all particular motions, however unequal. Behind a grain of sand lies something which when this particle is divided gives to it and preserves in it an infinite extension and magnitude; so that the whole mass of the universe is included in the grain of sand, if not actually, yet potentially and in capacity. This effort of the universe, underlying each smallest particle of matter, is neither the extension of the particle nor the extension of the universe: it is the thought of God, which, free from all materiality, gives motion and impulse to the whole. Every particular determination of reality agrees with this fundamental truth. Time is divisible, eternity indivisible; disturbances of the mind wax and wane, its quiescence has no degrees; extended things are corruptible, unextended things permanent in their indivisibility; body can be divided, mind cannot; possibilities are at a single point, accidents are everywhere; science is one, while opinion produces differences; virtue is neither in one place nor another, vice walks up and down in every direction; the good is one, the bad is innumerable; in every kind of thing in a word the best occurs in the category of the indivisible.

Substance in general, which underlies and sustains things, is divided into two species, extended substance or that which equally supports unequal extensions, and thinking substance which equally supports unequal thoughts. And just as one part of extension is divided from another but indivisible in the substance of the body, so one part of thought, that is to say a determinate thought, is divided from another but indivisible in the substance of the soul. Activity or freedom is peculiar to the soul, and entirely denied to body: and Descartes, in making a conation of body the beginning of his physics, was strictly adopting the methods of a poet and falling into the anthropomorphic conceptions of primitive races. The phenomena which students of mechanics call activities, forms, or powers, are insensible movements by which bodies move either, as the ancients said, towards their centres of gravity, or, as the modern theory of mechanics asserts, away from their centre of motion. The communication of motion, moreover, is just as inconceivable in body as is activity. To grant it would be equivalent to granting the interpenetration of bodies, since motion is nothing but matter in motion; the blow given to a ball is only the occasion for the energy of the universe, which was so weak in the ball as to make it seem at rest, to expand and thus to give it an appearance of more sensible motion. On the other hand, Vico agreed with the Cartesians, especially Malebranche, as to the origin of ideas, which he inclined to believe that God creates in us from time to time. He also held with the Cartesians that the lower animals are automata; and he agreed with all contemporary thought as to the subjectivity of secondary qualities.

Setting aside these last doctrines, which are not Vico's own, indeed he scarcely refers to them, the fundamental doctrine of metaphysical points is all his own. His attribution of it to an imaginary Zeno, in whose person were combined and confused the Eleatic and the Stoic (a mistake common in the philosophical literature of the time), can deceive nobody, and did not even deceive Vico himself, who when pressed explained how he had been led to that interpretation of Aristotle's statements about Zeno, and finally says that if the doctrine cannot be accepted as that of Zeno, he will adopt it as his own, without the patronage of any great names. Nor on the other hand can it be traced to the Leibnitian monadology. We cannot be sure that Vico was acquainted with this doctrine. In any case he does not mention it, while Leibniz he does mention in terms of deep respect: and the resemblance is very vague, for the metaphysical points are not monads. The discovery by Leibniz and Newton of the differential calculus may however be said to have influenced him. It was then for the first time becoming known in Italy; and its terminology of maximum infinities, greater and less infinities, and so on would, says Vico, completely baffle the human understanding, since the infinite admits neither of degrees nor of multiplication, but for the help of a metaphysic which shows that all actual extension and actual movement is a power or capacity for extension and motion always equal to itself and infinite. The contributions of Platonic lines of thought (the Platonism of the Renaissance) and those of Galileo, especially the latter, to Vico's conception have been worked out with even more justice: his originality however is in no degree impaired by these facts.

The idea in which his originality found expression was, no doubt, fantastic and arbitrary, and in consequence bound to remain undeveloped and without influence on Vico's other conceptions. To the reviewer in the Giornale dei letterati, who called this metaphysic a mere sketch, the author replied that it was quite complete: an abortion in fact, rather than a sketch, and, as such, complete. And in the Scienza Nuova, beside a few references to the refusal to attribute activity to matter, there is one fugitive but interesting attempt at a connexion with a geometrical or arithmetical metaphysic on the model of that described above. In this passage it is stated that upon the order of material and complex civil affairs the order of numbers, which are abstract and absolutely simple, is imposed: and the fact is noted that governments begin with the one, in domestic monarchy, pass to the few in aristocracy, advance to the many and the all in popular republics, and finally return to the one in civil monarchies, so that humanity moves perpetually from the one to the one, from domestic monarchy to civil monarchy.

But if we can and must deny all value to Vico's cosmology, if the contradictions and obscurities in which he involves himself are manifest, and were observed by critics of his own time, still we cannot deny its dynamic nature as opposed to the mechanicism of contemporary philosophy. The theory of metaphysical points, in which God appears as the great geometrician who creates by knowing and knows by creating the realities of the universe, is as it were a symbol of the necessity of interpreting nature in idealistic language. We find here and there a theologian Vico, an agnostic Vico, or even a fanciful Vico composing cosmological and physical romances: but look where we will among his works, we shall never find a materialistic Vico.

Even this by no means overbold metaphysic aroused suspicions of pantheism, though the author insisted upon the theological doctrine that God's activity is convertible ab intra with the thing created and ab extra with the fact, and that therefore the world was created in time; that the human soul, which as a mirror of the divine thinks infinity and eternity, is not bounded by the body and therefore not by time, and is therefore immortal; and that man, even if God were to reveal it to him, cannot understand how the infinite enters into finite objects. However, he thought it necessary to conclude his replies to his critics by collecting statements demonstrating his orthodoxy, and clinching the matter with the remark that "since God is in one sense substance and in another His creatures, and since the ratio essendi or essence is proper to substance, the created substances even as regards their essence are diverse and distinct from the substance of God."

Vico's thought was limited by the idea of transcendence, which prevented him from attaining not only the unity of reality, but also a truly complete knowledge of that world of man which he had so powerfully explained by means of the opposite principle. We now see why Vico, though he did not deny the fact of progress, could have no real conception of it. It has been observed that the conception of progress is foreign to Catholicism and dates from the Protestant Reformation, and that therefore the Catholic Vico was bound to deny himself the use of it. But the conception of an immanent providence is no less irreconcilable with Catholicism, and yet Vico is saturated with this idea. This means that he did not lack the impulse: rather he was unable to pass a certain point beyond which his faith would have been too obviously defeated. Progress, deduced from the immanent providence and introduced into the New Science, would have accentuated the difference within the uniformity, the origin at every moment of something new, the perpetual enrichment of the flux at every reflux: it would have changed history from an orderly traversing and retraversing of the line drawn by God under the eye of God to a drama whose ratio essendi is contained within itself: it would have enmeshed and drawn with it the whole universe and realised the thought of infinite worlds. In face of this vision Vico paused in apprehension and stubbornly refused to proceed: the philosopher in him had yielded to the Catholic.

[CHAPTER XIII]

TRANSITION TO HISTORY: GENERAL CHARACTER OF VICO'S TREATMENT OF HISTORY

It is clear from the facts above discussed that the historical portion of the New Science could not take the shape of a history of the human race in which peoples and individuals were recognised as playing each its own unique part in the whole course of events. To enable it to fulfil such a function Vico would have had to close up his system of thought, which was still at one point incomplete and not impervious to the religious idea, and to elevate his provident deity into a progressive deity, determining flux and reflux as the eternal rhythm of the process. Or on the other hand in order to attain the vision of individuality, in the diametrically opposite sense, in history, he would have had to abandon his rudimentary idealistic philosophy, break down the distinction between ordinary and extraordinary providence, and trace the history of man on the plan which God had revealed or permitted him to discover. Vico's orthodoxy rebelled against the former alternative, while his philosophy kept him from the second: and the result of his dilemma was that the history he reconstructed was not and could not be a universal history.

In consequence, it was not what is called a philosophy of history, if that phrase is taken in its original sense of a "universal history "—one which concentrates its attention upon the broadest and least obvious connexions of facts—"philosophically narrated," more philosophically, that is, than is usual with annalists, anecdotists and compilers dealing with courts, politics and nations. The controversy as to whether Vico or Herder can claim to be the founder of the philosophy of history must be frankly decided in favour of Herder, whose work shows just that procedure of universal history which is lacking in the New Science. On the other hand it would be easy to find numerous predecessors for Herder, beginning with the Hebrew prophets and the scheme of the Four Monarchies, which remained not only in the Middle Ages but well into modern times the constructive scheme of universal history. Nor would it be out of place to add that the so-called philosophy of history, in so far as it is a universal history, constitutes neither a special philosophical science nor a form of history capable of sharp distinction from the rest, except when the passion for making it self-subsistent gives it the appearance of an abstract history or a historicised philosophy. Thus when Vico or Herder is credited with the foundation of a new science in the philosophy of history, the compliment is a doubtful one: a fact which especially in the case of Vico has gone far to obscure the value of their work. In fact, the "New Science of the common character of nations," understood as the equivocal science of the philosophy of history, has eclipsed the New Science as a new philosophy of mind and a rudimentary metaphysic of thought.

The conflict which for the general consciousness existed between science and faith reappears in Vico's treatment of history as a distinction and opposition between Jewish and Gentile history, sacred history and profane. Jewish history was not subjected, he believed, to the laws of history in general. Its course was unique, and its development proceeded on principles peculiar to itself, namely, the direct action of God. The New Science, which in its philosophical part did not give the explanatory principles of this process, was in consequence not compelled to deal with it in its historical part. This is perhaps what Vico would have wished. But the wish was met, setting aside the necessity of guarding against the charge of impiety, which was certainly a danger, by his scruples as a believer, and a conscientious believer; which urged him to look for some kind of harmony between the two histories, since however sharply distinguished (he recalled how even a Gentile writer, Tacitus, had described the Jews as "unsociable"), both alike developed under terrestrial conditions and had points of mutual contact, at least in the origin of mankind and its regeneration by means of Christianity. Following the inherent tendencies of his thought, Vico ought to and would willingly have avoided the narration of universal history and confined himself exclusively to questions of philosophy and philology. But as it happened, he was compelled now and then to depart from his programme and to attempt at once a unification of the two histories and a defence of sacred history based on arguments supplied by science and profane history.

This is the least successful, but a profoundly significant part of his work. He was forced to admit, though the admission was opposed by all his discoveries and outraged his whole system of thought, that the Hebrews had enjoyed the privilege of always keeping intact their memories of the beginning of the world, a memory which other nations claimed in vain; and hence sacred history must supply the true origin and succession of universal history. The necessity of connecting his views on primitive civilisation with Biblical chronology, with the date usually assigned to the creation of the world, with the traditions of a universal deluge and of a race of giants—the necessity of finding, as he says, the "continuity of sacred with profane history"—led him to the most extravagant flights of fancy. After the flood, in the year 1656 from the creation, at the separation of the sons of Noah, while the Hebrews began or continued their sacred history with Abraham and the other patriarchs and then with the laws given to Moses by God, all the other descendants of Shem, Ham, and Japhet, the first race more slowly and for a shorter period, the second and third with greater rapidity and for a longer time, lapsed into the state of nature and wandered over the earth as insensible and savage brutes. And while the Hebrews, subjected to their theocratic government, strictly educated and practising ablution, remained of normal stature, the members of the other races, living without either physical or moral discipline, wallowing in dirt and excrement and absorbing nitrogenous salts (just as the earth is enriched and made fertile by excrement), grew to monstrous and gigantic size. The state of nature lasted a hundred years for the Semites and two hundred for the other two races; at the end of which the earth which had long been sodden with the moisture of the universal deluge began to dry up and emit dry exhalations or fiery matter into the air so as to generate lightning. With lightning, as we already know, and with the mythology of the thundering sky, which is Jupiter, arose in these brutes the consciousness of God and of themselves, by which they became human. Thus begins the "age of the gods," which, socially, is that of domestic monarchy where the father is king and priest. In the course of this age the system of greater deities was gradually established, and the giants, by means of their religions of terror and their domestic education taming the flesh and developing the spiritual element in them, and by the practice of washing, shrank by degrees to the normal size of the men whom we find at the beginning of the next or heroic age.

Such are the chief points in Vico's quaint reconstruction of the earliest history of man upon the earth, harmonised with the account in sacred history. We shall be less inclined to amusement or ridicule if we reflect upon the tragedy underlying the comedy: the tormented conscience of the believer which in its struggle with the philosopher seeks refuge in these extravagant ideas. At any rate, they gave Vico a series of insecure stepping-stones—the flood, the giants, the dry exhalations—which enabled him to cross the torrent of religious tradition and reach the dry land of critical history, where he found the primary starting-point of his philosophy of mind, the state of nature. It may further be suggested that the contact with Hebrew history—the only one which presented itself to him as a history in the strict sense, a unicum, something absolutely individualised even if in a miraculous manner—suggested to him the few attempts met with in his works to assign to various peoples a special function or mission; thus it sometimes appeared to him that the Hebrews represented mens, the Chaldeans ratio, and the Japhetic races phantasia.

Parallel to this imaginary history of the origin of the human race on the earth is Vico's attempt at Biblical apologetics. He lost no opportunity of adducing proofs from profane sources to confirm the statements of sacred history. For instance, a confirmation of the flood and the giants is supplied by the similar traditions of Greek and other nations. The theocratic government, which is not definitely mentioned by any profane history but merely alluded to obscurely by poets in their tales, is met with in the government of the Hebrews before and after the flood. The Hebrews again knew nothing of divination because they lived in direct contact with the true God, while the Chaldees had a system of magic or divination according to the movements of the stars, and the European peoples a system of augury. One certainly feels in all this something of an effort, a will to see or not to see: a kind of self-interruption and stimulation to belief. It is not infrequent among cultured and scientifically educated believers. Again, in his exposition of the historical genesis of grammatical forms, where he says that verbs began with the imperative, the monosyllabic command given by the father to wife, child or slave (es, sta, i, da, fac, etc.), Vico draws from this an indirect demonstration of the truth of Christianity, because the roots of Hebrew verbs are always found in the third person singular of the past tense; a clear proof that the patriarchs must have given their commands to their families in the name of a single God (Deus dixit). This, in Vico's opinion, is "a lightning to confound all those writers who have believed the Hebrews to be a colony proceeding from Egypt; since from the beginning of its foundation the Hebrew tongue had its origin in a single God." But in truth these lightnings instead of descending upon the head of the unbeliever serve only to illuminate the poverty of the arguments upon which apologetics rest, even with a man like Vico; and, objectively considered, the division introduced by religious scruple between sacred and profane history, and the consequent dogmatic treatment of the one, with its strange hypotheses and defences, and critical treatment of the other, produced and still produces an irresistible impression that the seclusion of sacred history from human science is due to the impotence not of the human science but of the sacred history; its impotence, that is, to preserve itself intact within the limits of science. Seldom has a religious scruple so endangered the cause of religion.

But Vico had far too genuine and exacting a scientific sense added to his natural antipathies to permit him ever to become a Selden or a Bossuet; and hence this apologetic for and harmonisation of sacred history remains in him a mere episode, which it is possible to ignore. And since on the other hand he was not permitted to treat philosophy and history as entirely profane and to represent the complex movement of history according to the fundamental criterion of progress, his only course was to look at the facts from the point of view which his philosophy left open to him, that of flux and reflux, the eternal process and the eternal phases of the mind. Here lay his strength. Here he could recognise the specific, if not strictly the individual, character of laws, customs, poetry and myth, of whole social and cultural formations which history down to his own time had entirely misunderstood. For this reason, in narrating history he was bound to confine himself to emphasising the common aspects of certain groups of facts belonging to various nations and periods. In the New Science, he says, "the whole history of the laws and deeds of Rome and Greece is set forth, not in its particularity and in time, but following the substantial identity of intention and diversity of the modes of expression." Elsewhere he says, "the facts are adduced after the fashion of examples, because they are understood by means of principles," for "to see the principles confirmed by the innumerable host of their consequences is a thing which must await certain other works of ours, which are either as yet unpublished or now in process of publication." In other words, as we know, this science contains on the one hand a philosophical side, and on the other a descriptive or empirical, exemplified in history, in which the Romans figure not as Romans but in virtue of the common nature which they share with Greeks and possibly with Japanese; the history of Rome under the kings or in the early Republican period demonstrates its affinity with that of the earlier centuries of the Middle Ages; and Homer stands not as Homer but as an example of primitive poetry, and across the centuries finds and greets his brother in Dante. It is at once a strength and a limitation, because history emphatically does not fundamentally consist of these resemblances; but without the perception of the resemblances how could we ever determine the differences? Dante is not Homer, the barons are not the "patres," the Athenian Solon is not the Roman Publilius Philo; but certainly Dante is in some respects more closely related to Homer than to Petrarch, the early barons are nearer to the "patres" than to the later courtier-nobles, and Solon is more akin to a Roman tribune or dictator than to any other of the seven sages among whom he is usually placed. To observe these resemblances means denying or rejecting other more superficial ones, and preparing the way for knowledge of individuality by indicating the approximate place where the truth is to be found. Vico classifies, rather than narrates and represents; but there is classification and classification; it may be pressed into the service of a superficial thought or of a profound one. And the historical side of the New Science is one great substitution of profound for superficial classifications.

In this process, which constitutes the strength of Vico's treatment of history, the deficiencies and errors come not from outside the limits of the process but from causes at work within these limits themselves. It has been alleged in defence of Vico that a great part of his errors is due to the scantiness and inadequacy of the materials at his disposal. But the materials for any study are always scanty and inadequate compared to our thirst for knowledge; and in judging a historian the question is not this, but the method, cautious or incautious, on which he employs the materials that are at his disposal. Again, it has been said that Vico has the faults of his age; but this is to forget that he was born in the century which saw the development of the highly critical philology of Joseph Scaliger and the whole Dutch school, and that Zeno, Maffei and Muratori were his contemporaries in Italy. The truth is that just as the attitude of thought already described in Vico confused pure philosophical method with the determinations of empirical science and historical data, so it confused historical research with the mixture of philosophy and empirical science. Vico was in a state similar to that of drunkenness; confusing categories with facts, he felt absolutely certain a priori of what the facts would say: instead of letting them speak for themselves he put his own words into their mouth. A common illusion with him was to seem to see connexions between things where there was really none. This made him turn every hypothetical conjunction into a certainty, and read in other writers instead of their actual words things that they had never written, but which were internally spoken by himself unawares and projected into the writings of others. Exactitude was for him an impossibility, and in his mental excitement and exaltation he almost despised it: what harm can ten, twenty, a hundred errors do to what is substantially true? Exactitude, "diligence," as he says, "must lose itself in arguments of any size, because it is a minute, and because minute also a slow-footed virtue." Fanciful etymologies, daring and groundless mythological interpretations, changes of name and date, exaggerations of fact, false quotations are met with throughout his pages, and many may be found noted in the fine edition of the second Scienza Nuova by Nicolini. Thus, as we observed in speaking of his philosophy that Vico's was not an acute mind, so now in speaking of his historical work we must say that it was not critical. But as while we denied him acuteness on a small scale we acknowledged his profundity or acuteness on a large scale, so here also we ought to add that if Vico lacked the critical sense in small matters, in great matters he had abundance of it. Careless, headstrong and confused in detail; cautious, logical and penetrative in essentials; he exposes his flank or rather his whole body to the attacks of the most miserable and mechanical pedant, and over-awes and inspires respect in every critic and historian however great. And, totus mens though he is and all absorbed by his own discoveries, often he does not give his power of investigation and observation time and room to develop, and instead of history he invents myths and investigates romances; but when he allows the power free play, it does wonders in the field of history too, as we shall try to show in the following chapters.

But to judge the historical views of Vico by confronting them, as many have done, with those of modern historical research and praising or depreciating them accordingly would hardly be conclusive. Where the two terms of the comparison agreed the agreement might be fortuitous: where they diverged, the later doctrine might be but a development or consequence of the earlier attempt, and in any case the modern state of historical knowledge by no means provides an absolute standard. On the other hand it would be out of place, as well as beyond our power, to rehandle all the problems dealt with by Vico to see what there is of truth and falsehood in his conclusions. That would mean no less than writing a third Scienza Nuova more adapted to our own times. Our task is merely to indicate the principal historical problems which Vico set before himself, to state the solutions he gave, and always to keep in mind the state of knowledge not in our own day but in Vico's, so as to determine what progress in historical study may be set down to his influence.

[CHAPTER XIV]

NEW PRINCIPLES FOR THE HISTORY OF OBSCURE AND LEGENDARY PERIODS

The period of historical research which preceded the life of Vico was, as we have said, by no means credulous or uncritical. The day was past when "chronicles of the world" were compiled, when any fable and any falsification however gross was accepted as history: and the seed sown by a few humanists had borne fruit in the Italian men of learning, the French juridical school, the school of Scaliger mentioned above, and all the great chronologists, epigraphists, archaeologists, topographers and geographers who in the seventeenth century formed the first immense critical collections of sources for ancient history. While the philologists were thus improving and perfecting their methods, detecting impostures and bridging lacunae, Bayle, Fontenelle, Saint-Évremond and many others were engaged in spreading a scepticism or historical Pyrrhonism as it was also called, due to the intellectualistic philosophy; and thus anticipating the polemic against the truth and utility of history which was to arise with immense vigour in the following century.

This latter tendency was hypercritical rather than critical, its end being the destruction of history in general: and since historical scepticism was very apt to assume the character of a paradox adapted to the needs of elegant society and the wits, its influence on the progress of research was very small, or at most it succeeded in producing strong reactions, one of which is represented by Vico, in favour of tradition and authority. It is on the other hand only proper to observe the failings of the first seriously scientific efforts of philologists and antiquaries. They rehabilitated witnesses, laid bare falsifications, reconstructed lists of rulers and magistrates, connected chronology and contradicted certain legends: but, whether owing to the tendencies of thought usual among pure scholars and philologists or because of the general atmosphere of their century's culture, they neither had nor conveyed a feeling for the antique and the primitive. Strong in detail, they were weak in essentials. When one of the most brilliant grasped, for instance, the importance of ballad-literature as a means of transmitting history at a period when the use of writing was unknown or uncommon, he did not receive from this observation and others like it such a shock as might stimulate him to recast from top to bottom his intuition and conception of primitive life, as was the case with Vico, who almost in a flash grasped the philosophical form of certitude and the two periods of mental and social life corresponding to it in actual history: the periods of obscurity and of legend.

Vico himself started from a kind of scepticism, a scepticism as regards the prejudices of scholars and nations generally about the character and facts of antiquity: and in combating these prejudices he drew up a series of principles or "aphorisms," inspired apparently by Bacon's "idola," to which they present an analogy in the field of historical research. Vico puts the student on his guard first against the "magnificent opinions" which have been held up to his own day "concerning the most remote and least known antiquity": a naïve illusion whose origin he traces to the fact that man when in a state of entire ignorance erects himself into a rule for the universe. Here is the closest analogy with Bacon: for this statement is precisely like the class of "idola tribus," in which thought makes itself the rule of things "on the analogy of man, not of the universe" (ex analogia hominis, non ex analogia universi). On the same observation is founded the remark that "rumour grows in its course," fama crescit eundo, and Tacitus's omne ignotum pro magnifico est, everything unknown is taken for something great. Hence arises the habit of interpreting ancient customs in the expectation of finding them similar or superior to those of modern civilised life. Thus Cicero admired the humanity of the early Romans in calling enemies in war "guests": not realising that the fact was precisely the opposite of this, and that guests were hostes, strangers and enemies. In the same way Seneca, by way of proving the duty of kindness to slaves, recalled that masters were anciently called "fathers of the family"; as if "patres familias" might not have been the very reverse of kind not only to slaves and servants but to their own children, regarded as on the level of slaves. The same prejudice led Grotius, in his desire to show the gentleness of the ancient Germans, to collect a great number of barbaric laws in which homicide was punished by a fine of a few pence: which is on the contrary really a proof of the cheapness of the blood of poor rustic vassals, who are precisely the "homines" mentioned by these laws.

In the second place, he warns us not to trust to the "conceit of nations," all of which, Greek or barbarian, Chaldean, Scythian, Egyptian, or Chinese, claimed, as Diodorus Siculus observes, to have founded humanity, discovered the amenities of life, and preserved their memory intact from the beginning of the world. Each of them, having for several thousand years had no communication with the others which might have led to the sharing of ideas, resembled in the obscurity of its chronology a man who sleeping in a very small chamber is misled by the darkness into believing it much too large ever to touch it with his hand. He who accepts these dreamer's boasts for certain knowledge finds himself in the difficulty of having to choose between the various memories of various nations, all of which with equal justification claim to be original.

By the side of national conceit Vico placed the "conceit of the learned," who desire their own knowledge to be as old as the world, and consequently delight in fancying an inaccessible esoteric wisdom among the ancients, coinciding miraculously with the opinions professed by each one of themselves, which they dress in the garb of antiquity in order to enforce their acceptance. Such was the mistake not only of Plato, especially in the researches of the Cratylus, but of all historians, ancient and modern: Vico himself had fallen into it, and was therefore able to study it closely in his own case, when in the De antiquissima he believed himself to have found in the etymologies of Latin words the proof of an Italian metaphysic exactly agreeing with his own doctrines of the conversion of the veruni with the factum and of metaphysical points.

From these three prejudices, especially from the conceit of the learned, follows the fourth, here called that of the "sources" or "channels of culture," ironically called by Vico the theory of "scholastic succession among nations." Upon this theory Zoroaster for instance instructed Berosus for Chaldaea, Berosus in his turn Mercurius Trimegistus for Egypt, Mercurius taught Atlas the Ethiopian lawgiver, Atlas Orpheus the Thracian missionary, and finally Orpheus established his school in Greece. Long journeys these, and easy forsooth to those primitive nations which, scarcely out of the state of savagery, lived perched on mountains in almost inaccessible situations, unknown even to their neighbours! And these long journeys were undertaken with the object of spreading discoveries, which any nation could make for itself. If, when nations came to know each other through wars and treaties, they were found to agree, that was because they all contained some motive of truth and sprang from the same needs of man. Was it necessary to suppose the Athenian or Mosaic law to have affected that of the Romans, as did these "comparers" or delivers of laws, in order to explain the origin of the right recognised in Palestine, Athens and Rome to kill the thief by night? Was it necessary for Pythagoras to travel spreading the doctrine of the transmigration of souls, which we find as far afield as India?

There remained the prejudice of considering the ancient historians as best informed about primitive times: whereas in the history of origins they knew as little as, or less than, ourselves. As for Greek history, Vico found, or rather imagined that he found, in Thucydides, a confession that the Greeks up to the generation preceding that historian knew nothing of their own antiquity: and he also observed that it was only in the time of Xenophon that Greek historians began to have any precise information upon Persian affairs. Roman historians commonly began with the foundation of Rome: but the beginning of Rome was certainly not the beginning of the world. Rome was a new city founded in the midst of a large number of small and more ancient peoples in Latium: and even in the case of Rome Livy refuses to guarantee the truth of the facts of the earlier centuries of its history up to the Punic wars, which he is in a position to describe more accurately. He even confesses frankly that he does not know at what point Hannibal made his great and memorable entry into Italy, whether by the Cottian Alps or the Apennines. So well informed were the ancient historians!

Owing to these and similar sceptical principles, the whole of Greek history to the time of Herodotus and of Roman down to the second Punic war seemed to Vico quite uncertain, an unclaimed territory, so to speak, where one might enter and take possession by squatter's right. He entered armed with positive principles directly issuing from the negative ones we have enumerated. For if Vico denied the credibility of historians distant in time from the facts they described, if he discounted national pride, if he laid bare the illusions and charlatanism of the learned, he nevertheless did not rest content with this work of destruction. In place of the old untrustworthy method he had banished, he endeavoured to supply a new, of better qualities and greater tenacity; a system of methods by which it was possible to acquire new historical documents and also to improve the study of those already known. No advance in historical knowledge is in fact ever made except by thus turning from the received narrative to the document underlying it, which alone has the power of confirming, correcting and enriching the narrative.

The first of Vico's contributions to historical method, the first source for the knowledge of the earliest civilisations which he exposed, is the etymology of language. The usual methods of this study in his time were purely arbitrary: it proceeded by considering the sound of each syllable or letter and looking for other superficial resemblances, and inferring from these facts the derivation of a word from this or that language, Latin, Greek or Hebrew. But etymology becomes a fruitful study only when it is remembered that language is the best evidence for the ancient life of a people, the life lived by them while the language was in the making: and when the student accordingly never ceases to explain language by customs and customs by language. Thus the etymology of abstract words leads us into the heart of a purely rustic society; for intellegere, to understand, for example, recalls legere, to collect the produce of the fields (hence legumina, vegetables); disserere, to discuss, refers to scattering seed; and the majority of words for inanimate things reveal relations with the human body and its members, and the sensations and passions of man; thus "mouth" means any aperture, "lip" the edge of a pot, "forehead" and "back" are used for before and behind; and so on. Vico aimed at one science of etymology common to all native languages, composed of monosyllabic, and largely onomatopoeic roots: another of foreign loan-words, introduced after nations became mutually acquainted: a third, of universal application, for the science of international law, from which it should appear how the same men, facts or objects, looked at from the different points of view of different nations, received different names; and finally a dictionary of mental words, common to all nations, which should explain the uniform ideas of substances and the different modifications of them in national thought concerning the human needs and utilities common to all, according to the differences of their situation, climate, character and customs, and should thus narrate the origins of the various vocal languages, all converging in an ideal common language.

The second source revealed by Vico is the interpretation of myths or fables, which agreeably to his doctrine were not allegories, fictions or impostures, but the science of primitive man. In the Diritto universale Vico distinguished four different and successive characters of the gods. At first they represented natural facts, Jupiter the sky, Diana the flowing water, Dis or Pluto the lower earth, Neptune the sea, and so on; secondly, natural human affairs, for instance, Vulcan fire, Ceres corn, Saturn the seed; thirdly, social facts; and finally they rose to heaven and were translated to the stars, and terrestrial and human things were distinguished from divine. But in the two Scienze Nuove he emphasised almost exclusively the third or social meaning, which became in his eyes the original; since, he appears to have thought, the earliest nations were too much intent upon themselves, too much immersed in their hard and difficult life, to speculate in abstraction from social matters. Hence he found reflected in mythology the institutions, inventions, social cleavages, class-struggles, travels and warfare of primitive nations. Even in considerably advanced periods Vico was hostile to naturalistic or philosophical explanations. The saying "know thyself" attributed to the ancient sage seemed to him merely a piece of advice to the Athenian democracy, to know its own strength, later transferred to a metaphysical and moral sense. Beside this principle of social interpretation he established another of great importance: namely, that indecent meanings were inserted in myths at a late and corrupt period when men interpreted early customs in the light of their own, or tried to justify their own lusts by fancying that the gods had set them the example. Hence arose the adulterous Jupiter, Juno as the implacable enemy of Hercules' virtue, the chaste Diana soliciting the embraces of the sleeping Endymion, Apollo persecuting modest maidens even to their death, Mars, not content with committing adultery with Venus by land, but pursuing her even into the sea, and, worst of all, the love of Jupiter for Ganymede and of Jupiter again, transformed into a swan, for Leda. Such representations can only result in unrestrained vice, as happened in the case of the young Chaereas in Terence's comedy. But in their original shape and meaning all myths were serious and austere, worthy of the founders of nations. The pursuit of Daphne by Apollo for instance referred to the magicians or diviners who arranged weddings and followed women through the woods where they were still liable to promiscuous ravishing; Venus, covering her nakedness with the cestus, was a modest symbol of solemn matrimony; the heroes, sons of Jupiter, were not the offspring of adultery, but born of permanent and solemn marriages celebrated according to the will of Jupiter as revealed by the diviners. To the pure all things are pure, and impure to the impure: the forests and mountain-tops could never beget the fancies of the closet and the brothel.

Beside these two rich sources, language and mythology, Vico names and employs a third, which he calls the "great fragments of the ancient world," that is to say, the memories preserved by historians and poets, such as the Egyptian tradition of the three ages of gods, heroes and men; the language of the gods mentioned in Homer; the thirty thousand names of the gods collected by Varro and referring to a like number of needs in the natural, moral, economic and civil life of the earliest times; the grove of Romulus, which Livy calls "the ancient plan of founding cities," and a few other golden sayings of ancient historians. Till now these fragments had been useless for the purposes of science, lying as they did in dirt, confusion and incompleteness: but when cleaned, restored and fitted together they conveyed valuable information. Nor did he overlook the monuments of architecture and sculpture, though the use he made of them was slight, and he saw that they were in the long run of little practical value. He declared that as for the historic period the most certain documents are the public coins, so for the legendary and obscure period their place is taken by "certain traces remaining in marble," as proofs of ancient customs, like the Egyptian pyramids with their hieroglyphic inscriptions and other fragments of the ancient world found in every region and bearing similar pictographic characters. It is also worthy of remark that he gives examples of arguments founded on technical observations and leading to conclusions in the sphere of prehistoric archaeology: as for instance when he says that one early period of human life is distinguished by the eating of roasted flesh, the simplest and least elaborate kind of food, because it requires nothing except the fire: a later period by boiled flesh, which also requires water, caldron and tripod.