[1]In the appendix to hisOpera Medica(Tolosae Tectosagum, 1636, p. 110). Windelband draws attention to this thought,Gesch. der neueren Philosophie,3rd ed. i. p. 23.
[1]In the appendix to hisOpera Medica(Tolosae Tectosagum, 1636, p. 110). Windelband draws attention to this thought,Gesch. der neueren Philosophie,3rd ed. i. p. 23.
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 studiorumandDe 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 devotehimself 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 theBe antiquissima; perhaps also his convictions were shaken by a well-directed criticism by the editor of theGiornale 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 theScienza Nuovaby 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. Inthe 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 stillexisted) 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 hisOrganumby 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 idealorigin to its perfect development; so that the student must not hope to be able to investigate these sciencesper 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 doctrinesin 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 owncreations. 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 theDe antiquissima,knows merely that his procedure is arbitrary. If the mathematical sciences constructtheir 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 whileit 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 instarof theDe 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: thepeculiare, certum,as opposed to thecommuneorverum.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, thevérités de raison,the other thevérités 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 historicalanecdotes 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 geometricalphilosophy, 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 wordsCogitata 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 idealconstruction 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 betweencogitareandvidere,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 treatiseScienza 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'sPoliticsand Machiavelli'sDiscourses,—but because it was impregnated throughout by a new philosophy, which did in truth break into it on every side, through all his empiricism.
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, theDe uno universi iuris principio et fine unoand the first and secondScienza 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 thesecond, 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 theScienza 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, formsan 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 secondScienza Nuovais 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 takethe 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 aristocracyshould 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 neverbe 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 generallymore 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 offthe 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.
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 theDe antiquissima,had the taste for these things but as yet no comprehension of them. The full reason for this interest is seen when weconsider 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 theCratylus,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 theCratylus.
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 treatiseor 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 adifferent 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 agreat 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 greatnumber 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 thereforeconventional, 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 affairsof 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 mightindicate 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 theDe rationeandDe antiquissimato theDiritto universale,from these to the first and thence to the secondScienza 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 thethought 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, thepater-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, asin 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 apetitio principiiby 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 doesnot 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 theoutcome 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.