The Roman law of Justinian, penetrated as it was by the idea of equity, was abandoned and fell into oblivion. In France and Spain any one who dared to appeal to it in a cause was severely punished; in Italy it is certain that the nobles considered it dishonourable to regulate their affairs by Roman law, and professed to live according to that of the Lombards; while the plebeians, slower in throwing off ancient customs, continued to practise certain parts of the Roman law by force of habit. In fact the law of the period consisted rather of habits than of statutes: rigid formulae and solemn ceremonial once more acquired importance, and a distinction was made betweenpacta nuda,naked agreements, andpacta vestita,agreements clothed and reinforced by these formulae and ceremonies. An example of the respect in which formulae were held is afforded by the action of the Emperor Conrad III. On taking Weinsberg, a town which had supported his rival for the empire, he condemned it to extermination, making an exception only in favour of the women and all they could bring out with them. The women came out of the doomed city carrying on their backs their sons, husbands and fathers: and the Emperor,standing before the gate at the head of his army with swords drawn and lances in rest to satisfy their leader's terrible wrath, watched them and allowed them to pass safe and sound out of respect for the letter of his own decree.
It was an illiterate period, a fact expressed by Vico in the statement that languages again became "mute" or hieroglyphic. The common tongues, Italian, French, Spanish and German, were not written down: only a few ecclesiastics wrote a barbarous Latin, and hence "cleric" and "scholar" became synonymous terms; but among the very priests such ignorance prevailed that we find documents signed by bishops with the sign of the cross, as they were unable to write their own names. Owing to this paucity of learning an English law laid down that a man condemned to death should be reprieved if he could write, as a valuable craftsman; and "man of letters" as well as "cleric" or "clerk" remained a name for a learned man. Hence the value and general employment of family arms to indicate the owners of a house, a tomb, land or livestock, and the frequency with which coats-of-arms are found on buildings of the time.
With barbarism returned the predominance of verse over prose. The prose of the Fathers of the Latin Church—and the same is true of those of the Greek—is full of poetic rhythms, so as to resemble a chant. The first modern lyric poetry was religious; and if there was not strictly a Christian religious poetry, this was because the subjects of our theology transcend all intelligence and imagination and crush the poetic faculty. Poetry and history were once more confounded; the romantic poets, the heroic poets of the return to barbarism, believed their own stories to be true, and thus Boiardo and Ariosto took as subject for their poems Turpin, Bishop of Paris. And just as the French language, when owing to the famous Parisian school and the highly subtle scholastic theologyit passed at a stroke from spontaneity to reflection, preserved pure diphthongs in great number while adopting abstract terms, so the story of Turpin survived in France like a Homeric poem. These authors of Latin poems confined themselves entirely to history, for instance, William of Apulia'sDe gestis Normannorum in Italiaand Gunther'sCarmen heroicum de rebus a Frederico Barbarossa gestis.The first writers in the vernacular were in Italy poets no less than in Provence and France. A punctilious virtue like that of Achilles again appeared, the complete morality of the duellist; hence arose the proud laws, the lofty duties and the vindictive satisfactions of the knight-errants sung by the romantic poets. Does not Cola di Rienzo seem to be a real Homeric character in his swift outburst of emotion when, as we read in his life, while speaking of the unhappy state of Rome he excited both himself and his listeners to unrestrained tears? Hyperbole was a common type of thought, as in children; for "I often remember," writes Vico, "when walking abroad that the gentle slopes which unfold themselves before my eyes appeared when I was a child to be steep and lofty mountains." Thus in the Middle Ages Roland and the other paladins were represented as gigantic in stature: and images of divine beings, the eternal Father, Christ, or the Virgin, painted or sculptured, were of colossal dimensions.
But the human mind is like land which, after lying waste for long centuries, when first cultivated bears crops of wonderful quality, size and abundance. Thus at the close of barbarism in Italy after four savage and stormy centuries, arose Dante, the Homer of the second barbarism, just as somewhat later flourished the delicate verse of Petrarch and the gallant and graceful prose of Boccaccio; all three incomparable in their way. And since barbarism is, as we have already indicated, truthful, frank, faithful, generous and magnanimous by nature, Dante puts onthe stage real persons and real actions of the dead; and his poem is called a "comedy" in allusion to the ancient comedy which followed the same principle. It is a poem in which both theIliadand theOdysseyfind parallels; the former in theInferno,where Dante employs his choleric genius and all his vast imagination in describing the effects of implacable wrath and recalling numbers of merciless punishments, a worthy companion-picture to the horrid slaughters of Homer (whose descriptions of them inspire pity in us, but gave nothing but pleasure to his own audience); the latter, theOdyssey,which celebrates the heroic endurance of Ulysses, is paralleled by thePurgatorio,a spectacle of severe punishments borne with immovable patience, and theParadisowhere infinite joy is experienced with an infinite tranquillity of mind. Another similarity between Dante and Homer lies in the physiognomy of the former's language, which is so varied that some suppose him to have collected it like Homer from all the dialects of his nation; an opinion of sixteenth-century scholars which will not stand criticism, for it is certain that when Dante used them these expressions must have been current at Florence, and that a lifetime would have been insufficient to collect them from this side and from that when there were no writers in the various dialects. But the most important resemblance of Dante to Homer is in poetic sublimity. Dante is a divine poet who to the delicate imaginations of to-day seems rough and uncivilised, and often shocks by unwonted harmonies an ear that has become morbidly sensitive through effeminate music. But he is received very differently by men of severe tastes who refuse to be satisfied with flowers, ornaments and graces. Like Homer too he is great not in esoteric wisdom but in the vigour of his imagination. Dante was undoubtedly a very learned theologian, but that was his weakness rather than his strength. If he had known neither Scholasticism norLatin, he would have been a still greater poet, and perhaps the Tuscan language would have had what Latin never had, a poet who could in everything bear comparison with Homer.
The man who wrote this page of criticism on Dante and vindicated him once more after centuries of anti-Dantesque taste (or mere Dantesque grammar or Dantesque scholasticism) and vindicated him in the very height of the prosperity of the Arcadianism so hostile to him, deserved to have made the acquaintance of William Shakespeare genius, which he was perhaps the only man alive capable of understanding. But in Italy, as in most countries outside England, nothing was known of Shakespear at this time, and Vico has only the vague and belated remark about him that the English, untouched by the prevailing delicacy of the century, took no pleasure in tragedies which had not an element of atrocity in them, just as the earliest taste of Greek drama was for the abominable feast of Thyestes and Medea's impious slaughter of her brother and children. The tendency towards Teutonic poetry and literature remained in Vico as we know an aspiration only; he was unable to get a clear view of it however closely he tried to examine it; and when he does mention it upon the strength of second-hand information, it is only to say that in the German nation, especially in the purely agricultural province of Silesia, "poets arose naturally"; in his search for an unsophisticated popular poetry he had in fact stumbled without realising his mistake upon the Silesian school of Hoffmanswaldau and Löhenstein, the German imitators of the Neapolitan Marino. But the only value of the anecdote is to illustrate anew the tricks played upon Vico by his lively fancy.
How the world emerged from the second barbarismi and the feudal constitution, Vico does not say. He does not seem to have fixed his attention upon the communalmovement which presents so many analogies with the struggles of the Roman plebs and the formation of ancient democracy. He makes game, here again, of those who traced the genesis of modern monarchies such as the French to a simple law like that of Tribonian by which, he explains ironically, the paladins of France deprived themselves of their power and conferred it upon the kings of the Capetian dynasty. He also observes that the baronial power, being dispersed and dissipated by reason of civil wars in which they were obliged to depend upon the people, was the more easily gathered up by sovereign monarchs; and that thus the "obsequium" of vassals to their baron passed into the "obsequium principis." But he gives quite a special importance to the rediscovery of Roman law (that "natural law of the European nations" as Grotius had called it) by the studies undertaken in the Italian universities. Men thus learnt anew the principles of natural equity; the nobles and plebeians became equal in the eyes of civil law as they are already in human nature, the secrets of the laws passed out of the hands of the feudatories, whose power consequently diminished by degrees, and the humane government of free republics and perfect monarchies came into being. The reflux of heroic society had now undergone a contrary reflux; it was no longer possible, under the conditions of modern civilisation, to recall it to life, just as it was impossible for the attempts of the Pythagoreans and Dion of Syracuse to restore the ancient aristocracies. The plebeians, once recognised as naturally equals of the nobles, no longer submitted to remaining inferior to them in civil life. And the few aristocratic republics which here and there survived in Europe were compelled to take infinite pains and all manner of wise measures in order to keep quiet and contented the multitudes whom they governed.
[1]See my preface to Sorel'sReflections on Violence(Italian tr., Bari, 1909). pp. xxii-xxvii.
[1]See my preface to Sorel'sReflections on Violence(Italian tr., Bari, 1909). pp. xxii-xxvii.
Having reached, in his review of the course of history, his own time, a time of civilisation spread over all nations, Vico gives a rapid description of the contemporary world and then says no more: perhaps unsatisfied, at any rate uncertain or cautious. As he was not led to embark upon the New Science by the direct call of political problems,1 at least in the ordinary meaning of the phrase, he never descends from the contemplations of the New Science to: the practical life, even in the form which it most usually takes with a philosopher, a work or short treatise criticising laws and institutions or suggesting improvements. Even when he does dimly conceive the idea of a "practical aspect" of his science, he never supposes that so far as he is concerned it could ever exist except "within the academies."
Practical philosophy "within the academies," that is to say, within the sphere of culture, is however still practical and political; and it is assuredly not the least important branch of politics. And a historian or philosopher can never entirely avoid it, though he can emphasise it more or less and develop it more or less fully.
Vico does emphasise and develop it freely. The first expression of his scientific life was precisely an examination of modern methods of study and education ascompared with those of the ancients: an examination which after various attempts and uncertainties in his first discoveries, took form in his University inaugural lecture of 1708,De nostri temporis studiorum ratione.In the following years, engaged as he was upon the New Science, he gave no further public demonstration of his discontent with the prevailing tendency of studies; but he expressed his feelings on the subject all the more often and all the more strongly in private letters, and did not wish to pass over the question in his autobiography. We need not then infer his polemical attitude from hints and chance phrases of his chief work; since he has himself more than once converted these hints into explicit statements and these chance phrases into leading propositions.
This polemic occupies two closely-related spheres corresponding to the double aspect of the New Science as a Philosophy of Mind and a Generalising Science. Under the first aspect Vico had vindicated the claims of imagination, the imaginative universal, probability, certitude, experience and authority, and therefore also of poetry, religion, history, observation of nature, scholarship and tradition. Under the second, he had traced a scheme of the natural development of the mind both in the history of mankind and in that of the individual, which he brings into constant relation with the phases of history. Hence his examination was bound to extend on the one hand to the mental condition of his own time and on the other to the way in which the education of children and young people was conceived and undertaken. In both spheres Vico saw the same defects; he was met by the same and intellectualism which had made impossible the process of thought and had mutilated and falsified the truth of human history.
On emerging from grammar-schools, boys were immediately plunged into logic. The logic studied might be, according to the teacher's taste, either the scholastic ormore often that composed by Arnauld and called the Port-Royal Logic, itself in substance Aristotelian and Scholastic, but full of dry judgments concerning abstruse subjects in advanced sciences and far removed from common knowledge; overloaded in fact with examples drawn from such sciences. Such a discipline was meant to make boys critical and to eradicate from their minds not only false, but even probable and plausible opinions. As a matter of fact it eradicated nothing, since their minds were still empty or scantily furnished, and unable to make any use of criticism for lack of matter to criticise. They were to be taught to judge before being taught to apprehend, an order false to the natural course of ideas, which are first apprehended, then judged, and finally reasoned. The result was that minds educated in this way became arid and unfruitful in development, and believed themselves capable of judging everything, while able to create nothing. They remained all their lives intensely acute in formal thinking, but incapable of any great labour; critical, in fact, but sterile. This caused not only unsoundness and arrogance of judgment but incapacity in practical life, dealings with men, and civil eloquence, which is founded less upon criticism than upon plausibility, and attains its end by making opportune remarks, understanding the psychology of one's inter-locutor and acting in a manner adapted to it. Vico himself had suffered from the logico-critical method of education. One of his first teachers, the Jesuit Del Balzo, had put into his hands the works of the epitomist Paulus Venetus: and his mind, being too weak as yet to cope with this kind of Chrysippean logic, almost broke down under the strain; so that having given up his studies in despair it was eighteen months before he resumed them. He preserved a happier memory of his youthful essays in poetry in the wildest style of the Neapolitan school of Marino: a form of diversion, he says, almost necessary to the mindof the young when metaphysic has rendered it too subtle and too rigid in precisely those years when the ardour of youth ought to lead the mind into errors, so as to save it from becoming chilly and dry. This age, the "barbarism of intellect," vigorous in imagination and also, through the close connexion that exists between the two, in memory, requires to be nourished and exercised by the reading of poetry, history and rhetoric as well as by the study of languages. The art which it ought to learn is not criticism but "topic," the true art of the "ingenium" or faculty of invention. By means of this art children acquire materials which enable them to form sound judgments in later life; for sound judgment depends upon a complete knowledge of its subject-matter, and "topic" is the art of discovering the whole content of any given thing. In this way young people simply by following the course of nature become at once philosophers and good speakers.
Some antidote is doubtless necessary to the exuberance of the imagination. But this must be sought in linear geometry rather than in logic: for geometry is to some extent pictorial in character, while it strengthens the memory by the great number of its elements, ennobles the imagination by the delicacy of its figures and stimulates the inventive faculty by forcing it to review all these figures in order to choose those suitable to the demonstration of the quantity required. But the whole value of geometry also was annulled by the method then in favour with the schools, the algebraic method; which like the scholastic logic numbs all the vigour of youthful faculties, obscures the imagination, enfeebles the memory, and renders the inventive power and the understanding sluggish; thus damaging the liberal arts in four distinct ways, in the knowledge of languages and history, in invention and in prudence. More particularly algebra is fatal to the inventive faculty, because in using the algebraic method one is conscious only of the immediate field of vision;it weakens the memory because once the second sign is found the first need no longer be remembered; it blinds the imagination, because that faculty is not used at all; it destroys the understanding, because it lays claim to the power of divination. Young men who have devoted their time to it on proceeding to deal with the affairs of civil life find themselves, to their great grief and remorse, unfitted for such a life. Hence, to make it useful in some degree and to prevent these ill effects, it should be studied for a short time only at the close of the mathematical course, and employed only as a means of abbreviation. The habit of reasoning is formed much better by metaphysical analysis, which in all questions begins by taking truth in the infinity of being, and then descends by degrees; through the genera of the substance, eliminating in every species that which the thing is not, till it arrives at the ultimate differentia constituting the essence of the thing we wish to know.
Education as a whole was suffering from an excess of mathematics and a lack of concreteness. As if boys, on emerging from academic life, were to enter a human world composed of lines, numbers and algebraic symbols, their heads were crammed with the magnificent phrases "demonstration," "demonstrative truth," and "evidence," and the rule of probability was condemned; though this rule is the only guide of statesmen in their counsels, generals in their campaigns, orators in their treatment of a cause, judges in giving a decision, physicians in treating bodily diseases, and moralistic theologians in treating those of the conscience; the rule which the world accepts, and upon which it rests in all disputes and controversies, in all measures, and in all elections; which are universally determined by unanimity or the majority of votes. Such an education bred up an empty and inflated generation, pedantry without wisdom and argument without truth.
The educators themselves, that is to say, the general atmosphere of culture, resembled this scheme of education. Poetry was dead. The analytic methods had "numbed" (to repeat once more a word which Vico uses with great frequency and force) "all the generosity of the better poetry." And indeed Europe was never so entirely barren of all poetic growth as it was in the first half of the eighteenth century. Italy was reduced to the drama of Metastasio; France had produced no one to succeed Corneille and Molière; in Spain the national drama, that great outburst of the national spirit, was dead, and a rationalism imitating that of France was taking its place; England seemed to have entirely forgotten that she once gave birth to Shakespear, and even Germany was wasting her time over neo-classical imitations. Not only did nobody create new poetry, but nobody wanted it. The philosophers, following Descartes and Malebranche, had declared a war of extermination against all the faculties of the mind which depend upon sense, and especially against the imagination, which they hated as the source of every error. They condemned the poets on the false pretext that they told "fables," as if the fables they told were not those eternal properties of the human mind which to the political philosophers, economists and moralists are the subject-matter of reasoning, and to the poets that of representation.
The Cartesians also used their authority to belittle the study of languages. Did not Descartes say that the knowledge of Latin was no greater knowledge than was possessed by Cicero's servant-girl? Serious scholarship in Latin and Greek had come to an end with the writers of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries; the study of oriental languages was confined to the Protestants; and Holland was the only country in which law was still a subject of research. The famous library of Valletta at Naples, rich in the finest editions of Greek and Latinworks, was generously bought by the fathers of the Oratory, but for less than half its original value owing to the depreciation of books. In France the library of Cardinal Dubois found no purchaser and was sold in small lots. Princes no longer loved good Latin, and none of them thought of preserving to posterity by the pen of pure Latin scholarship even an event so weighty as the War of the Spanish Succession, comparable only to the second Punic war.
New methods were in great favour: but none of these could point to new facts discovered by their help. New formulae, old facts; and instead of facts, a futile hope of attaining universal knowledge in the shortest time and with the smallest effort. Civil and political learning was neglected for physical science, and physical science for mathematical; experience was almost ignored; the inventive thought of the previous century all but entirely exhausted. Scepticism, the result of the Cartesian method, invaded the field of knowledge.
The whole of Europe was during this period still under the dominion of the French language, a language which differs from the Italian in its hostility to poetry and eloquence; rich, says Vico, in terms of substance, and consequently, since substance is a brutal and immobile thing and does not admit of comparisons, incapable of giving colour, amplitude or weight to its statements; it resists inversion and is barren of metaphor. The French have no periods but only members of periods: their prosody has no verse better than the so-called Alexandrine, a system of couplets more thin and lifeless than the elegiac: and their words admit of no accent except those on the last two syllables. French is a language incapable of the sublime, but well adapted to the petty: owing to its abundance of terms of substance or abstract terms it is adapted also to the didactic style, and instead of eloquence it offersesprit.It was not unfitting that criticism and analysis originated in France and made use of the French tongue.
The only possession of value which grew up day by day in all this poverty was the abstracts, the encyclopaedias, the dictionaries of science which bore the names of such men as Bayle, Hoffmann and Moreri: the idlest and most casual method of learning that could possibly be devised. The genius of the age was more drawn towards expounding second-hand knowledge in an abbreviated form than towards attempting to enlarge its bounds. That seemed impossible: so men went on compiling dictionaries of mathematics. Every one felt a thirst for cheap science. To be thought good, a book must be clear and simple, capable of being discussed with ladies as a pastime; if it demanded wide and copious erudition of the reader, and forced upon him the unpleasant exercise of thought and synthesis, it was condemned as unintelligible.
These dictionaries and abstracts recalled to Vico's mind the similar products of the Greek decadence, the anthologies, lexicons and encyclopaedias of Suidas, Stobaeus and Photius. The whole culture of his time seemed to him to be repeating the downfall of Greek science, exhausting itself in a metaphysic either useless or harmful to civilisation and a mathematics engaged in investigating quantities intangible by rule and compass, and incapable of application. Like others among the best minds of his country he was persuaded that the republic of letters was approaching dissolution, if the divine providence failed by one of its innumerable secret paths to infuse new vigour into it. Where was now the wise man, the real "sapiens" whom Vico had found in history, first in the barbaric figure of the theologian-poet, then in the civilised and rational figure of Greek philosopher and Roman jurist, the man whom for to-day he hoped to find in the master of eloquence like himself, called to give unity, life and power to all knowledge? Wisdom is indeed not this or that science, nor yet the sum total ofscience; it is the faculty which rules over all studies and by which all the sciences and arts that go to make humanity are acquired. And since man is both thought and spirit, intellect and will, it must satisfy both these sides of man, the second as a result of the first: it must teach the knowledge of divine things, to bring to perfection things human. The wise man is man in his totality and entirety, the whole man.
The ideal is no doubt lofty, and the criticism upon the educational method and tendencies of thought current in his age are, no doubt, perfectly just. And yet among all these admirable truths, far in advance of the eighteenth century as they are, we feel in Vico the educationalist and critic something of the reactionary. We feel that, in his exclusive care for the fate of the highest and most austere science and his exclusive attention to the most complete form of human life, he failed to grasp the revolutionary importance of this scepticism or rationalism, this rebellion against the past, the necessary weapon of a warfare against kings, nobles and priests; of these abstracts and dictionaries which were to develop into the Encyclopaedia; of this popular science, the forerunner of journalism, and these booklets for the use of ladies in fashionable conversation which were the nourishment of the eighteenth-century salons and prepared men's minds for the radicalism of the Jacobins. We feel in him here as in his philosophical system, the Catholic chained to the philosopher, the Christian pessimist weighing down the dialectic of immanence. Unable to realise his adversaries' progress, he does not comprehend their real nature as lower than himself, but yet constituting steps leading up to himself, steps which he ought to have traversed in order to attain a truer understanding and grasp of himself. His polemical attitude towards the culture of his time completes and confirms the analysis already given of the merits and defects of his philosophy.
The reader need not expect that having brought our exposition to a close we shall add a verdict upon Vico's work, or what is known as an "appreciation" of it. If the verdict has not already emerged as a result of the exposition itself, or as identical with it, if description and criticism have been not one and same, the fault lies either with ourselves or with the reader's lack of attention; and in either case it cannot now be repaired by ornamental additions or redundant repetitions.
We confess also that we feel no sympathy with the chapters commonly placed at the conclusion of critical works upon philosophers and narrating the later history of their ideas. For if these "ideas" are understood in an extrinsic sense, in their influence upon society and culture, such a review may indeed have a value of its own,[1]but is foreign to the history of philosophy properly so called: if on the other hand they are considered as real and living philosophical ideas, their later history amounts to neither more nor less than the history of subsequent philosophy, and there is no reason for appending it to a study of one philosopher rather than another. Any other method implies the uncritical theory that ideas are something solid and crystallised, like precious stoneshanded on from one generation to another, whose shape and glitter can always be recognised unaltered in the new diadems they compose and the new brows they adorn. But in reality ideas are nothing but the unremitting thought of man, and transmission for them is nothing less than transformation.
It is nevertheless a fact that no one has written on Vico without feeling a need of casting his eyes over later years and noting the resemblances and analogies between the Neapolitan philosopher's doctrines and those of fifty or a hundred years after. And further, we ourselves, in spite of the antipathy we admittedly feel, and the methodical criteria we professedly employ, yet recognise now the same necessity. Why is this? Because Vico in his own day passed for an eccentric and lived as a recluse; because the later development of thought was almost entirely untouched by his direct influence; because even to-day, though well enough known in certain restricted circles, he has not taken the place he deserves in the general history of thought. How then can we show the manner in which his doctrines, true or false, respond to the deepest needs of the mind, more simply than by recording the similarity of the ideas and attempts which later appeared in such profusion and intensity as to stamp their individuality upon the philosophical and historical labours of a whole century? And even if after our intrinsic examination of his thought this comparison with the facts of later history seems unnecessary, it will at least be granted that if our discourse like any other must have its rhetorical conclusion, no peroration occurs more naturally than one consisting in a rapid review of subsequent philosophy and philology and emphasising their points of contact with the thought of Vico.
We might even adopt the method by which he compares the second barbarism with the first, and present the later history of thought as a "reflux" of Vico's ideas. In thefirst place his criticism of Descartes' immediate knowledge recurs, together with his conversion of the true with the created, in the speculative movement beginning with Kant and Hegel and culminating in the doctrine of the identity of truth and reality, thought and existence. His unity of philosophy and philology recurs in the vindication of history against the scepticism and intellectualism of the eighteenth century due to Cartesianism; in the à priori synthesis of Kant which reconciles the real and the ideal, experience and the categories; and in the historical philosophy of Hegel, the greatest exponent of nineteenth-century historical tendencies. This unity of philosophy and philology, a unity with Vico sometimes confused and impure in method, recurred in its faulty aspects also in the Hegelian school; so that this mental tendency might with justice be entitled "Vicianism." The limitation which Vico tried to impose on the value of mathematics and exact science recurred, as did his criticism of the mathematical and naturalistic conception of philosophy, in Jacobi's critique of Spinozistic determinism and Hegel's of the abstract intellect; and in the case of mathematics in particular Dugald Stewart and others recognised that its validity lay not in the postulates but in the definitions, and the "fictions" of which Vico speaks reappear in the modern terminology of the philosophy of these sciences. His poetical logic or science of the imagination passes into Aesthetic, so ardently studied by the philosophers, literary men and artists of Germany in the eighteenth century, brought by Kant into great prominence by his criticism of the Leibnitian doctrine of intuition as confused conception, and further advanced by Schelling and Hegel, who place art among the pure forms of the mind and so approach the position of Vico. Romanticism too, especially in Germany but also more or less in other countries, was Vician, emphasising as it did the original function of the imagination. His doctrines of languagerecurred when Herder and Humboldt treated it not intellectualistically as an artificial system of symbols, but as a free and poetic creation of the mind. The theory of religion and mythology abandoned the hypotheses of allegory and deception, and with David Hume recognised that religion is a natural fact, corresponding to the beginnings of human life in its passionate and imaginative state; with Heyne, that mythology is "symbolic speech," a product not of arbitrary invention but of necessity and poverty, of the "lack of words," which finds expression "in comparisons with things already known" (per rerum iam tum notarum similitudines);and with Ottfried Müller, that it is impossible to understand mythology without entering into the very heart of the human soul, where we may see its necessity and spontaneity. Religion was regarded no longer as something extraneous or hostile to philosophy, as a piece of stupidity or of deception practised by the unscrupulous upon the simple, but according to Vico's own doctrine as a rudimentary philosophy; so that the whole content of reasoned metaphysic was already to a certain extent implicit in poetical or religious metaphysic. Similarly, poetry and history were no longer kept distinct or set face to face to destroy each other; and as one of the great inspirers of the new German literature, Hamann (who in many ways resembles Vico in tendency, though unequal to him in mental power), had already foreseen when he uttered the warning, "if our poetry is worthless, our history will become leaner than Pharaoh's kine," a breath of poetry revived the historical study of the nineteenth century; once colourless, it became picturesque: once frigid, it regained warmth and life. The criticism of Hobbes' and Locke's utilitarianism, and the affirmation of the moral consciousness as a spontaneous sense of shame and a judgment entirely free from reflection reappeared in full panoply with the Critique of the Practical Reason; and that oftheir social atomism and consequent contractualism in Hegel's Philosophy of Right. The liberty of conscience and religious indifferentism professed and inculcated by the publicists of the seventeenth century were negated as a philosophical doctrine; and a nation without God seemed to Hegel, as it did to Vico, a phenomenon not to be found in history and existing only in the gossip of travellers in unknown or little-known lands. Carrying on the work of the Reformation, which Vico could neither grasp nor truly appreciate, the idealistic philosophy of Germany aimed not at exterminating religion, but at refining it, and at giving philosophy itself the spiritual value of religion. The certitude, the hard certitude which Vico distinguished from truth in the sphere of law, formed the subject of thought from Thomasius to Kant and Fichte and so on to the most recent writers, who have sought even if they have never found the distinctive criterion of the two forms; all or nearly all show a vivid consciousness of what is called "constraint" or "compulsion," a fact which had been almost forgotten in the old superficial and rhetorical moral theory. The historical school of law, in its reaction against the abstract revolutionary and reformatory tendencies of the eighteenth century, was bound to recall Vico's polemic against the Platonic or Grotian theory of an ideal republic or a natural law above and outside history and serving as a standard for history, and to recognise with Vico that law is correlative to the whole social life of a people at a given moment of its history and capable of being judged only in relation to it; a living and plastic reality, in a continual process of change like that of language. Finally, Vico's providence, the rationality and objectivity of history, which obeys a logic different from that attributed to it by the fancies and illusions of the individual, acquires a more prosaic name, but without changing its nature, in the "cunning of the reason" formulated by Hegel: it appearedagain, ingeniously but perversely treated, in Schopenhauer's "cunning of the species," and again, treated with little ingenuity on a purely psychological method, in Wundt's so-called law of the "heterogenesis of ends."
Almost all the leading doctrines of nineteenth-century idealism, we have seen, may be regarded as refluxes of Vician doctrines. Almost all; for there is one of which we find in Vico not the premonition but the necessity, not a temporary filling but a gap to be filled. Here the nineteenth century is no longer a reflux of, but an advance upon Vico; and discordant voices of warning or reproach rise up against him. His distinction of the two worlds of mind and nature, to both of which the criterion of his theory of knowledge, the conversion of the truth with the thing created, was applicable, but applicable to the former by man himself because that world is a world created by man, and therefore knowable by him, to the second by God the Creator, so that this world is unknowable by man; this distinction was not accepted by the new philosophy, which, more Vician than Vico, made the demigod Man into a God, lifted human thought to the level of universal mind or the idea, spiritualised or idealised nature, and tried to understand it speculatively in the "Philosophy of Nature" as itself a product of mind. As soon as the last remnant of transcendence was in this way destroyed, the concept of progress overlooked by Vico and grasped and affirmed to some extent by the Cartesians and their eighteenth-century followers in their superficial and rationalistic manner shone out in its full splendour.
But if in this point Vico cannot stand the comparison with later philosophy, the failure is amply atoned by the full agreement between his historical discoveries and the criticism and research of the nineteenth century. Above all, he agrees with his successors in his rules of method, his scepticism as regards the narrative of ancient historians,his recognition of the superiority of documents and monuments over narrative, his investigation of language as a store-house of primitive beliefs and customs, his social interpretation of mythology, his emphasis on spontaneous development rather than external communication of civilisation, his care not to interpret primitive psychology in the light of modern psychology; and so on. In his actual solutions of historical problems he also agrees with later historians. These restated the archaic and barbaric character of primitive Greek and Roman civilisation, and the aristocratic and feudal tendency of its political constitution: they took up the view of ancient legal ceremonial as a dramatic poem containing allusions to the actions of fighting: the transformation of the Roman heroes into heroes of democracy came to an end with the Jacobins in France and their imitators in Italy and elsewhere; Homer was considered great in proportion to his ruggedness; the history of Rome was reconstructed chiefly on the basis of Roman law, and the names of the seven kings appeared as symbols of institutions and the traditional origin of Rome as a late invention derived from Greece or from Greek models: the substance of this history was seen to consist in the economic and juridical struggle between patriciate and plebs, and the plebs was derived from thefamulior clients: the struggle of the classes, which Vico was the first to illuminate clearly, was recognised as a criterion of wide application to the history of all time and serving as an explanation of the most sweeping social revolutions: the Middle Ages, especially during the Restoration which followed the Napoleonic period, exercised a powerful appeal to sentiment and influence on thought, being admired and regretted as the antithesis of the rationalistic bourgeois society, and understood in consequence as the religious, aristocratic and poetical period discovered by Vico, the youth of modern Europe. Thus Italy rediscovered the greatness of her own Dante,and the criticism of that poet which Vico had initiated was carried to completion by De Sanctis. In the same way, Niebuhr and Mommsen brought to maturity his view of Roman history; Wolf, his theory of Homer; Heyne, Müller and Bachhofen, his interpretation of mythology; Grimm and other philologists his projected reconstruction of ancient life by means of etymology; Savigny and the historical school, his study of the spontaneous development of law, and his preference for custom rather than statute and code: Thierry and Fustel de Coulanges in France, Troya in Italy and a host of scholars in Germany his conception of the Middle Ages and of feudalism: Marx and Sorel his idea of the struggle of classes and the rejuvenation of society by a return to a primitive state of mind and a new barbarism: and lastly the superman of Nietzsche recalls in some degree Vico's hero. These are merely a few names picked without care and almost at random; for to mention all, and each in his right place, would mean writing the whole history of the latest phase of European thought, a history which is not yet finished, though it has undergone, under the name of "positivism," a parenthetical recurrence of the abstract and materialistic thought of the eighteenth century, a parenthesis which now however seems to be at an end.
These innumerable reappearances of the work of an individual in the work of several generations, this parallelism between a man and a century, justify a fanciful phrase with which we might draw from the later developments in order to describe Vico; namely that he is neither more nor less than the nineteenth century in germ. The description may serve to summarise our reconstruction and exposition of his doctrines, and to contribute towards a right understanding of his place in the history of modern philosophy. He may rightly be placed side by side with Leibniz, with whom he has so often been compared;but not, as has been believed, because of any resemblance (the comparisons made in this belief have been shown to be false or superficial) but precisely because he is unlike him and in fact his very opposite. Leibniz is Cartesianism raised to its highest power; an intellectualist, in spite of thepetites perceptionsand the confused knowledge; a mechanicist, in spite of his dynamism, which perhaps exists in his fancy rather than in his actual thought; hostile to history, in spite of his immense historical erudition; blind to any knowledge of the true nature of language, though deeply interested in language all his life; devoid of dialectic, in spite of his attempt to explain the evil in the universe. In relation to later idealism, the Leibnitian philosophy stands as the most complete expression of the old metaphysic which had to be transcended: that of Vico is the sketch of the new metaphysic, only needing further development and determination. The one spoke to his own century, and his century crowded round him and echoed his words far and wide. The other spoke to a century yet to come; and the place in which he cried was a wilderness that gave no answer. But the crowd and the wilderness add nothing to and take nothing from the intrinsic character of a thought.
[1]See Appendix II.
[1]See Appendix II.
The transformation, half rhetorical, half mythical, which the heat of the national reawakening effected in poets, philosophers, and almost every character of any importance in Italian history, representing them as patriots, liberals, and in open rebellion or secret revolt against the throne and the altar, tried for a time to touch with its magic wand and to work its will upon Giambattista Vico. It was said, among other things, that Vico, conscious of the severe blow dealt by his thought to the traditional beliefs of religion, and warned by his friends, took pains to plunge the New Science into such obscurity that only the finest intellects could perceive its tendencies. But though this legend, energetically spread as it was by the patriots and republicans of 1799, was believed here and there, it could not long stand out against criticism or even against common sense; and Cataldo Iannelli was right to pass over it with a few words of contemptuous irony.[2]It is certain from an objective point of view that Vico's doctrines implicitly contained a criticism of Christiantranscendence and theology as well as of the history of Christianity. From the subjective point of view it may be that Vico during his youth (of which we know very little) was the victim of religious doubts. Such doubts may have been suggested to him not only by his reading, but by the society of young men of his own age, among whom "libertines," or as contemporary literature still called them "epicureans" or "atheists," were not uncommon.[3]In a letter of 1720 to Father Giacchi, he says that at Naples the "weaknesses and errors dating from his early youth" are remembered against him, and that these, fixed in the memory, became as often happens "eternal criteria for the judgment of everything beautiful and complete which he subsequently succeeded in doing."[4]What can these errors and weaknesses have been?
Again when theDe universi iuris uno principio et fine unoappeared, or rather the "Synopsis" which announced its programme, "the first voices" which Vico heard raised against him "were tinged with an assumed piety." He found protection and consolation in the face of such criticism in religion itself, that is to say in the approval of Giacchi, "the leading light of the strictest and most holy order of religious."[5]But just as we possess no detailed information as to the criticisms levelled against him on this head, so we have no certain knowledge even of the most general kind as to the religious doubts that may have troubled him. All Vico's writings show the Catholic religion established in his heart, grave, solid and immovable as a pillar of adamant; so solid and so strong that it remained absolutely untouched by the criticism of mythology inaugurated by himself. Nor was Vico an irreproachable Catholic in external demonstration only. He not only submitted every word he ever printed to the double censorship, public and private, of ecclesiasticalfriends, and led his life as a philosopher and writer among priestly vestments and monastic cowls no less than among legal gowns; he was even scrupulous enough to desist from his commentary on Grotius, thinking it unseemly that a Catholic should annotate a Protestant writer;[6]and so delicate was his sense of Catholic honour that he refused to admit polemic upon matters of religious feeling. "As to this difficulty," he says to his critics of theGiornale dei letterati, "like that which you propound to me concerning the immortality of the soul, where it appears that you have in hand seven distinct arguments, if they had not been prepared for me by you, I should judge that they go deeper and penetrate to a region which is not only protected and secured by my life and conduct, but which to defend is to outrage. But let us return to our subject."[7]His Catholicism was untainted by the superstition so general and so deeply rooted at the time, especially at Naples, where St. Januarius intervened as an actor and director in every event of public and private life. It was the Catholicism of a lofty soul and mind, not the faith of a charcoal-burner. But Vico never assumed the part of censor of superstitions. He was content with not speaking of them, as one keeps silence concerning the failings of persons or institutions which command one's respect.