Vico clearly stated the dilemma between the two, and only two, possible explanations of the origin of society. Either it came from the reflection of wise men, or from a certain human feeling and instinct among brutish men. He accepted the latter solution, that of "brutes" which gradually became human: the theory, that is, of the evolution of thought from the imaginative to the rational universal, and the progress of social relations from force to equity. But was this an adequate foundation for "ideal history" or the philosophy of mind? In the philosophy of mind, it could be translated into a similar if not identical view—the doctrine which, owing to Cartesianism and a certain recrudescence of the Scholasticism of Duns Scotus, lasted down to Vico's own times and expressed the life of the mind by the successive stages of the concept, obscurity, confusion, clarity and distinctness. Leibniz, as is well known, made a special study of obscure and confused perceptions, the"petites perceptions."The doctrine was essentially intellectualistic, since the concepts, however confused or obscure, were never anything else than concepts: and hence it was unable to account either for poetry or even for mental development, the dialectic of which cannot be understood if it is regarded as consisting of merely quantitative differences. Such differences are in reality not differences at all, but identities and therefore the negation of change: and in fact the whole of this school of thought was anti-aesthetic and static, devoid both of a true theory of imagination and a true theory of development. Vico's thought, on the other hand, was averse to intellectualism and in sympathy with imagination: it was entirely dynamic and evolutionary. For Vico, mind is aneternal drama: and since drama demands antithesis, his philosophy of mind is rooted in antithesis, that is in the real distinction and opposition between imagination and thought, poetry and metaphysic, force and equity, passion and morality; although he seems sometimes, for the reasons given above, to mistake its nature; or rather, although he actually does sometimes confuse it with empirical inquiries and doctrines, and with the determinations of history.
Vico's doctrine of mythology, while no less original and profound than that of poetry, is also, like the latter, not entirely lucid: for the relations between poetry and myth are so close that the shadow cast upon the one must of necessity extend to some degree over the other.
In proceeding to inquire, as we have hitherto done and shall continue to do, into the state of contemporary knowledge of the several sciences and problems with which Vico set out to deal, we may briefly recallà proposof the study of mythology not only the great literary collections of myths formed during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, of which Boccaccio had already given an example in the fourteenth century, but also the learned defences of the two explanatory theories, already known to classical antiquity and not entirely unknown in the Middle Ages. These were, first, the theory of myth as allegory of philosophical truths (moral, political and so forth), and secondly, the theory of myth as the history of actual persons and events, adorned by the fancy which made heroes into gods (Euhemerism). The former tendency inspired among other works theMythologiae sive explanationis fabularum libri decemof Natale Conti (1568) and Bacon'sDe sapientia veterum(1609); in which, however, this system had been advancedwith a certain hesitation, and with the explicit caution that, even if it were not valid as historical interpretation, it would always be of value as moralisation (aut antiquitatem illustrabimus aut res ipsas:"we shall explain either antiquity or the facts themselves"). The latter was authoritatively represented by John Leclerc (Clericus), the learned Dutch Genevese for whom Vico expressed so much respect and gratitude for the attention he had deigned to bestow upon hisDiritto universale.His edition of Hesiod'sTheogonymarked an epoch in the study of mythology, and he was followed among others by Banier, author of the workLes Fables expliquées par l'histoire(1735). A third system, also not without some ancient precedent, derived myths from particular nations, the Egyptians or the Hebrews, or from the original works of individual philosophers and poets. This view, when it neither resolved itself into a pure and simple historical supposition as to the origin of some or all myths, nor appealed to divine revelation, clearly involved the theory that myth is not an eternal form but a contingent product of the mind, born at a certain time and capable of dying or already dead.
Vico strongly opposed the first and third of these views of mythology, namely the allegorical theory and that of historical derivation. On the allegorical view, he mentions Bacon's treatise, which had stimulated him to the study of the subject, out which he considered "more ingenious than sound": on the other school, which regarded myths as sacred history altered and corrupted by the Gentiles and especially by the Greeks, he refers to Vossius'sDe theologia gentili(1642) and to a dissertation by Daniel Huet. Myths or fables do not contain esoteric wisdom, that is to say, rational concepts, subtly concealed by the veil of fable: hence they are not allegorical. Allegory implies on the one hand the concept or thing signified, on the other thefable or medium of concealment, and between the two, the art by which both are kept in equilibrium. But myths cannot be split up into these three moments, nor even into a thing signified and a thing which signifies it: their meaning is univocal. The theory also implies that a believer in the content does not believe in the form: but the makers of myths believed fully and ingenuously in their own work. Once, for instance, that first divine fable was created, the myth than which none greater was ever afterwards invented, that of Jupiter, king and father of gods and men, in the act of thundering, the very men who had invented him believed in him, and with their religion of terror feared, reverenced and worshipped him.
Myth, in a word, is not fable but history of such a kind as could be constructed by primitive minds, and strictly considered by them as an account of actual fact. The philosophers who arose later made use of myths to expound their doctrines in an allegorical manner; or deceived themselves into thinking that they found them there owing to the feeling of veneration which attaches to antiquity, and increases as our comprehension of it diminishes; or thought it expedient to make use of such things for political purposes, like Plato Homerising, and at the same time Platonising Homer: and in doing this they turned the myths into fables, which they were not originally, and are essentially not. Thus we may say that the philosophers and students of mythology who indulged in such strange fancies about the legends were the real poets, while the primitive poets or myth-makers were the true students, and intended to narrate the actual facts of their time. For the same reason, namely, because myth is an essential part of poetic or barbaric wisdom, and, as such, a spontaneous product of all times and places, it cannot be attributed to one single nation as its inventor, from which it passed to others; as if itwere a particular discovery of a particular man or the object of revelation.
This doctrine, superior as it is to the allegorical and historical theories, is another aspect of Vico's vindication of the non-logical forms of knowledge as against the intellectualism which denied them and merely represented them either as artificial forms or as due to supernatural causes. Nor does the opinion seem acceptable which attaches Vico to the Neo-Euhemeristic school. He does not indeed explicitly combat this school, and we may even grant that he presents certain superficial resemblances to it: but together with the resemblances there is this radical difference, that for Vico the stories are not alterations of actual history, but are essentially history; their supposed alteration is the actual truth as it appeared to the primitive mind.
Vico did not and could not give a more precise determination of the nature of myth, precisely because owing to the fluctuating character of his concept of poetry, itself he was not in a position to lay down the boundary between the two forms. He talks generally of poetry and myth as distinct things, but he does not establish the distinction. And yet Vico was familiar enough with the concept which supplies this distinctive criterion, and had enunciated it: but instead of using it for his doctrine of mythology, he had made of it one or more of his various definitions of poetry. That "poetic character," that "imaginative universal" whose introduction into aesthetic as the explanatory principle of poetry causes so many insuperable difficulties, is really the definition of mythology, and as such provides the science of mythology with the true principle that is required. If the concept of accomplishing great labours for the common welfare cannot be disengaged from the idea of a particular man who accomplished one of these labours, this concept becomes for instance the myth of Hercules: and Herculesis at once an individual man who does individual actions, and kills the Lernaean hydra and the Nemean lion or cleanses the stables of Augeas, and also a concept: just as the concept of beneficent and glorious labour is at once a concept and Hercules: a universal and an imaginary idea: an imaginative universal.
Again, that sublime task which Vico declared proper to poetry, the task of giving life to inanimate objects, belongs properly not to poetry but to myth. Mythology, embodying its concepts in images, which are always individual things, at last animates them like living beings. Thus primitive man, ignorant of the cause of lightning and therefore not possessing the scientific definition of it, was led by the mythological tendency to conceive the sky as a vast living being, who, like man himself when, in the grip of his fierce passions, he shouted, muttered or roared, spoke and meant something by his speech. It is mythology again, not poetry, whose origin must be traced to "poverty," to the weakness of men's minds and their inability to deal with the problems they would solve, in their incapacity for thinking in rational universals and expressing themselves in accurate language, whence arose imaginative universals and metonymy, synecdoche and metaphor of all kinds. The contradictions we have seen in the imaginative universal which make it incapable of acting as the foundation of an aesthetic doctrine are quite in keeping in the doctrine of myth: for myth consists precisely of these contradictions: it is a concept trying to be an image and an image trying to be a concept, and hence a kind of poverty, or even of powerful impotence,—a contrast, a mental transition where white no longer exists and black has not yet come into being. Finally, poetic wisdom, that is, the theology, science, cosmography, geography, astronomy and the whole system of other ideas and beliefs of primitive nations as Vico describes them, was really mythology, not, as he says, poetry, forthe good reason, given by himself, that these things were their history: and poetry is poetry and not history, even more or less imaginary history. The Homeric poems are poetry in so far as they express the aspirations of Hellenism: the same poems, in so far as they were recited and heard as accounts of actual facts, are history: the two things being forms of mental products which, though they seem to be materially united in a single work, are not for that reason to be identified.
All this was both seen and not seen, or rather, sometimes realised and sometimes overlooked, by Vico: and hence he cannot be said to have succeeded in determining satisfactorily the distinction, and solving the problem of the relation, between mythology and poetry. Another problem of importance relating to the science of mythology, and still the subject of controversy, namely, the question whether myth belongs to philosophy or to history, might be supposed to have been decisively solved by Vico: since he repeats over and over again that myths contain the historical judgments of primitive peoples, not the philosophical. But in reality when we examine the point closely it appears that he neither solved the problem nor even propounded it. The historical judgments of which Vico is speaking are contrasted strictly not with philosophical judgments in general but with the "mystical judgments of the earliest philosophy" and the "judgments of analogy" which the writers criticised by Vico found in mythology. Thus on the one hand his words repeat the criticism of the allegorical theory and, on the other, controvert that fallacious method of historical interpretation which ascribes the ideas and customs of to-day to the nations of antiquity. The fact is that Vico's theory is just as much in agreement with the theory connecting myth with philosophy as with that which connects it with history; and as much with the eclecticism which admits both these elements as with the speculativeview which also admits them both, but because philosophy and history both in themselves and as constituents of myth are at bottom one and the same.
Considered as "poverty," myth must be superseded. In the natural effort of the human mind to rejoin God, the true One, from whom it has come, and its inability owing to the exuberant animal nature of primitive man to make use of the faculty, buried as it is beneath his too keen senses, of abstracting from subjects their properties and universal forms,—in these circumstances, it constructs for itself fanciful unities, imaginary genera or myths: but in its subsequent progress and development, it gradually resolves the imaginary genera into intelligible genera, poetic universals into rational, and sets itself free from mythology. Thus the error of myth passes into the truth of philosophy. Vico knew and employed a concept of error, error properly so called, which proceeds from the will, not from thought, which is never in error as regards itself, "for the mind is always put under compulsion by truth, since we can never lose sight of God" (mens enim semper a vero urgetur quia numquam aspectu amittere possumus Deum); the error which consists in the arbitrary conjunction of unmeaning words, "but words very often, by the will of him who is lying, escape the force of truth and desert the mind, or even do violence to the mind and turn away from God" (verba autem saepissime veri vim voluntate mentientis eludunt ac mentem deserunt, immo menti vim aciunt et Deo absistunt); the error, in a word, which exists when, in his own powerful language, "though men speak with their mouth, they have nothing in their minds; since within their minds there is falsity, which is nothing." But he also knows that error is never pure error, simply because there is no such thing as a false idea and falsity consists only in the wrong combination of ideas, and therefore it always contains truth, and every fable hasa certain element of truth. Hence, far from despising fables, Vico recognised their value as embryonic forms so to speak of stored-up knowledge or of what will one day develop into philosophy. The poets (which means, in Vico's new sense of the word, myth-makers) are the senses (that is, in its new meaning, rudimentary and imperfect philosophy): the philosophers are the intellect of mankind, that is the more highly developed philosophy which derives from the former. The idea of God evolves by degrees from the God who strikes the imagination of the isolated man, to the God of the family,divi parentum,the God of a social class or country,divi patrii,the God of nations, and finally to the God "who is Jupiter to all men," the God of humanity. The fables stimulated Plato to understand the three divine punishments which not men but only gods could inflict, oblivion, infamy and remorse: the passage through the lower world suggested to him the concept of the purgatorial journey by which the soul is purified of passions, and the arrival in Elysium suggested the journey of union by which the mind comes to unite itself with God by the contemplation of the eternal divine ideas.
From the similes and metaphors of the poets Aesop drew the examples and fables by which he gave advice: and the instance founded upon a single case which satisfies an untutored mind developed into induction, drawing its validity from several similar cases, as taught dialectically by Socrates, and thence the syllogism invented by Aristotle, which cannot exist without a universal. The etymologies of words reveal the truths observed by primitive man and deposited by him in his language: for instance the fact, laboriously proved by modern philosophers, that the senses themselves create the so-called sensible qualities is already suggested in the Latin wordolfacere,which implies the idea that the sense of smell "makes" the odour. Vico attaches suchimportance to this connexion between poetic universals and rational universals, between myth and philosophy, that he is led to assert that such judgments of philosophers as cannot find parallel or precedent in poetic and popular wisdom must be wrong. Here we have another meaning sometimes assigned by him to the relation of philosophy to philology: namely, a reciprocal confirmation of common wisdom by esoteric wisdom andvice versa,both of which are united in the idea of an everlasting philosophy of man.
Simultaneously with his theory of myth and its relation to philosophy, Vico expounds his theory of religion, and the relation it bears to philosophy. Two thoughts on this subject are to be found up and down the New Science. The first is, that religion arises in the phase of weakness and savagery from the mind's need to allay its desire to understand more or less the phenomena of nature and man; for instance, to explain lightning. The second is, that religion is produced in the mind by fear of the person who threatens by lightning. We might describe these two views as theories respectively of the theoretical and practical origin of religion; and since according to Vico's doctrine man consists of nothing but intellect and will, clearly religion can have no other origin than these two. Now, setting aside religion in its practical aspect, to be discussed later, religion in its theoretical aspect is surely nothing else than the imaginative universal, poetic animism, or myth. To it belongs the institution which Vico calls divination; that is, the methods of collecting and interpreting the language of Jupiter, the "real words," gestures and signs of God, formed as imaginative universals and created by the animating fancy. And as from myth come science and philosophy, so in like manner from divination comes the knowledge of ground and cause, philosophic or scientific prediction.
In this way Vico escaped the prejudice which was beginning to prevail in his time—we may recall Van Dale's history of ancient oracles, popularised by Fontenelle, and Banier's book already mentioned—and was to be so powerful for a century, of considering religions as "some one else's imposture": whereas, he says, they were really due to "one's own credulity." The man who refused to admit the artificial origin of myth could not admit it of religion. But just as he denied no less the supernatural or revealed origin of myth, so at the same time he proclaimed neither more nor less than the natural, even the human, origin of religions; and—a fact especially worthy of notice—placed this origin in an inadequate form of the mind, namely the semi-imaginative form identical with mythology. Nor need we attach weight to certain brief and incidental remarks which seem to contradict this theory, as when he says that religion precedes not only philosophy but language itself, which presupposes the consciousness of some community between man and man: such equivocations are due to the invariable confusedness of his method and his habitual lack of clearness. The identification of religion with myth, and its human origin, are ideas not only emphatically expressed, but essential to Vico's whole system. It is a human origin which in his own words does not exclude a different concept of religion, namely as revealed and hence of supernatural origin. In fact he always separates poetic theology, which is mythology, and natural theology, which is metaphysics or philosophy, from revealed theology. But this last concept is admitted by him not because it is connected with the others and derived from a principle common to them, but simply because Vico asserted its existence no less than theirs. The human origin, poetic theology, followed by metaphysical theology, is the form valid for the Gentile portion of mankind, that is the whole human race except the Hebrew people with itsprivilege of revelation. The motives that led Vico to maintain this dualism and the annoying inconsistencies in which it compelled him to rest will be seen later on in their own place. But precisely because Vico left this dualism without mediation, we must in expounding his thought hold fast both terms of the dualism: and for the time being we will confine ourselves to the merely human origin—religion as a product of the theoretical needs of man in a condition of comparative moral poverty. This conception has only an indirect connexion with Bruno's view of religion as a thing necessary to the ignorant and undeveloped mob, and with Campanula's theory of natural or permanent religion, an eternal rational philosophy coinciding with a Christianity freed from its abuses. Its parallels in contemporary authors are few and distant: even when they mention it in passing, they grasp it only in a superficial way and propound it without connecting it at all with their other ideas: they attack religion as a form of ignorance, and omit the wisdom of the ignorance, or religion as truth.
Vico's other doctrines on the theoretical reason, that is to say on the logic of philosophy, of physical and mathematical science and of historical study, have been expounded above in the statement of his theory of knowledge, and are drawn almost entirely from his early works, since in the New Science the phase of the "completely developed mind" hardly appears except as a limit of the field of study. Here it will suffice to mention that he also touches upon the problem of the relation of poetry to history: but, still because of the confusion of philosophy with social science, he fails fully to solve it. From one point of view it seems to Vico that history is prior to poetry, because the latter, as he says, presupposes reality and contains an "imitation of the second degree": from another, poetry is the primary form, because among primitive peoples history is poetry, and the first historians are poets. At any rate he insists upon the poetic element essential to history: of Herodotus, the father of Greek history, he observes that not only are "his books full, for the most part, of fables," but "the style retains a very great Homeric element, a feature which all subsequent historians retained, using as they did a phraseology intermediate between the poetic and the colloquial": "almost the words of the poets,"verba ferme poetarum,as he says elsewhere in a phrase borrowed from Cicero.
Nor are the relations between theory and practice, intellect and will, explained in detail by Vico, although on the whole he suggests the general idea that as in God intellect and will coincide, so it is in man, God's image; whose mind is not divided into thought and will—thought proceeding according to one method and will according to another—but his thought and will interpenetrate and form one single whole: a view far superior to that of the contemporary philosophy of Leibniz, which retained the idea of a divine arbitrament and therefore of irrationality. Another view, peculiar to Vico, might be taken by a hasty interpreter to imply the priority of practice to theory. He says that philosophers arrive at their conceptions thanks to experience of social institutions and laws in which men agree as a kind of universals: that Socrates and Plato, for instance, presupposed the Athenian democracy and law-courts. But the succession of religions producing republics, republics producing laws, and laws producing philosophical ideas, which he calls "a fragment of the history of philosophy philosophically narrated," is really a theory of sociological, not of philosophical value.
As regards his doctrines of practical reason, which we are here beginning to consider, it might be thought that Vico, unlike his attitude with regard to the theoretical reason, did not stand in sharp opposition to the thought of his time, but actually united himself with a contemporary movement, namely the school of natural rights. The head of the school and leader of the movement, Hugo Grotius, was called by Vico one of his "four authors," together with Plato, from whom he had drawn his aspirations towards an idealistic philosophy, Bacon, who had aroused in his mind the idea of a positive and historical science of society, and Tacitus, his debt to whom, or at least the debt which he believed he owed him, we shall examine later on. Along with Grotius he frequentlymentions the other chief authorities on natural rights, Selden and Puffendorf, omitting their innumerable followers, whom he considers less as scientific authorities than as "adorners" of the Grotian system.
His adherence to the school, in a certain sense, is clear, and is admitted and proclaimed by Vico himself. But it is also beyond doubt that he was no mere adherent: he was not a follower of the kind that retains the general or leading ideas while developing and correcting details. He was a follower in the dialectical sense only, that is, in so far as he thought it necessary to contest the primary theses, or to accept them only in a profoundly modified form. Natural right offered him not solutions but problems: and of these, while some came before him already clearly formulated, others, and these were the more important, arose only in his own mind: problems either unsolved or unrealised, till Vico propounded and in part solved them.
Natural rights presented many aspects and many tendencies: and it would be well to begin by distinguishing and enumerating these. In the first place, the school taken as a whole and in its essential character expressed the social progress by which Europe, on emerging from feudalism and religious warfare, acquired a new consciousness, distinctively bourgeois and non-clerical in character; and it observed that the growth of this consciousness was contemporaneous with the anti-clerical and bourgeois institution of "masonry." The word "natural" meant, among other things, "not supernatural": and hence implied hostility or indifference towards the supernatural, the institutions representing it, and the social conflicts resulting from it. It was not by accident that Grotius was an Arminian; that Puffendorf went to law with theologians; that Thomasius is remembered as one of the champions of freedom of conscience. The protestations of respect for religion and the church, habitually and liberally inserted by these publicists intheir works,—which are draped, so to speak, with a veil of piety,—were merely politic safeguards, enabling the author to threaten the enemy unobserved and to strike from under cover. This caution is praised, in Grotius's case for example, by a follower of the school (the author ofPauco plenior iuris naturalis historia,1719), who extols the master as "the instrument of divine providence," coming like Messiah to redeem the "natural light" from its bondage to the "supernatural," and as such gifted with all the power and ability he could need: so that after tasting the persecutions of Scholasticism, "he behaved with caution, to avoid further irritating the jealousy against his natural and reasonable prudence that had issued forth from its lair at his threats" (caute versabatur ... ne maius bilem adversus prudentiam naturalem et rationalem ex latebris productam tam minis irritaret), and in proceeding to separate human from divine laws, did not execute a frontal assault on the theological school when he attacked its fundamental errors, but even praised it in the preface to his work. The word "natural" also denoted what is common to individuals of different nations and ranks: and hence from a practical point of view provided an admirable war-cry for uniting the bourgeoisie of different countries in definite common aspirations and struggles. The treatises of natural rights were for the bourgeoisie of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries what the "Manifesto of the communists" and the cry "Proletariates of the world, unite" attempted to be for the working classes of the nineteenth.
In so far as this school and this publicism were signs of a practical movement, the philosophical interest held in them a secondary place and discharged a function of minor importance: so that, secondly, the works on natural right, philosophically considered, did not as a rule rise above a simple popular empiricism. The principles on which they rest are not examined and oftennot even superficially reconciled: the concepts which they use are less concepts than general representations: and the form of the writing is systematic in appearance only. Some of these writers endeavoured to harmonise their doctrines of natural right with the Platonic, Stoic or Cartesian philosophies, or appealed to logical or metaphysical axioms, or made use of deduction and the mathematical method. But all this was mere aggregation, not fusion; ornament, not reinforcement: at most, it was of value as a proof of diligence and earnest intentions.
The philosophy, however, which was more or less implicit in the pamphleteers of natural rights, and explicit in the philosophers who set out to elaborate the doctrine, agreed with the spirit of the time, whose general characteristics are well known. Thus arose the third or ethical aspect of natural right, namely its utilitarianism; sometimes more or less concealed, sometimes openly declared, and worked out from time to time by a philosophy of mathematical or sensationalistic methods, and of materialistic or rationalistic tendencies: or else, what comes practically to the same thing, an abstract and intellectualistic morality, threatening at any moment to fall into utilitarianism. From this intellectualism and utilitarianism, combined with the practical and revolutionary character of this mental movement,—which was bent rather upon bringing about the triumph of an abstract system of right than upon recognising that which really develops in history, in all the complexity of its many forms and vicissitudes—derived its fourth characteristic, the lack of historical sense, or the anti-historical attitude of the school, which set up the abstract ideal of a human nature apart from human history instead of fused with and living in it.
Finally, bourgeois, anticlerical, utilitarian and materialistic as it was, the movement of natural right had a fifth important trait, namely its aversion to transcendenceand its tendency towards an immanental conception of man and of society. This characteristic is neither fully explained nor fully worked out in the doctrines, but is none the less easily recognised among the total views of the school.
Now Vico's genius was truly and indeed exclusively theoretical, and not at all practical or reformatory: his method was profoundly speculative and contemptuous of empiricism, his mind idealistic and opposed to materialism and utilitarianism: his theory of knowledge eager for the concrete, for "certitude," and, as such, of historical sympathies. Consequently his doctrine of the practical reason, though deriving its impetus from the theory of natural rights, was bound to emerge in a shape different from or even contrary to that theory in all the first four characteristics enumerated above. And if it did in one respect coincide—which it only does in the conclusion, not in the path by which the conclusion is reached—it did so in the very point in which Vico would least have wished it: in its immanental or anti-religious tendency.
But since our subject is not the criticisms and modifications which the theory of natural right received from Vico's thought, but rather that thought itself, it is time to pick up the thread of the exposition, following an order somewhat different from that in which we have summed up the various characteristics of the theory, and beginning by observing Vico's opposition to the professed or implicit utilitarianism of the school, and the ethical doctrine by which he replaced it.
The two chief representatives of utilitarianism in the seventeenth century, whom Vico always keeps in view, are Hobbes and Spinoza: but in addition to them, he refers to Locke and Bayle and, in the preceding century, Machiavelli; and going back to the ancients, the Stoics with their conception of faith and the Epicureans with that of chance, Carneades and his scepticism, and finally theunconscious theory contained in the saying "Vae victis" attributed to Brennus, chief of the Gauls who took Rome. He admired Hobbes's splendid attempt to enrich philosophy by a theory which had been lacking to the greatest days of Greece, the theory of man considered in the whole society of the human race: but he pronounced the result unsatisfactory, and the attempt, whose outcome, like that of Locke's system, was hardly distinguishable from Epicureanism, a failure. Hobbes did not observe that he could never have propounded his problem of the natural rights of mankind had not his motive been supplied by the Christian religion itself, which commands not indeed justice but charity to all mankind. With the Stoics on the other hand, with the fatalism and determinism which made it impossible for them to reason soundly about the state and laws, with the so-called "Spinozists of antiquity," he ideally united Spinoza; the uniqueness of whose utilitarianism, equally removed from the Lockian spirit and the Hobbist, since Spinoza "judges of the truth of things by the mind, not by sense" (mente non sensu de veris rerum diiudicat), did not escape Vico's notice. But unique though it was, it led Spinoza to think of the state in a somewhat undignified way "as of a mere society of shopkeepers." These utilitarian doctrines, with their libels upon human nature, seemed to Vico only fit for men without hope, too insignificant ever to have a share in the state or proud enough to believe themselves repressed and denied access to the positions of which in their arrogance they thought themselves worthy. Among these he counted the unfortunate Spinoza, who, he thinks, having as a Jew no country of his own, was moved by envy to devote himself to the construction of a metaphysic "intended to overthrow all the nations of the world." He passes stern judgment upon the state of contemporary ethics, which was all that it could be on the basis of a mechanistic and materialistic metaphysic without a gleamof finalism. Descartes produced nothing at all in this field, since his few written remains on the subject do not amount to a doctrine, and his treatise of the Passions belongs rather to medicine than to morals. Malebranche and Nicole were equally sterile, and Pascal'sPensées,the one exception, are "but scattered lights." Of the Italians, Pallavicino's treatiseDel beneoffers no very profound depths of ethics: and Muratori's attempt in hisFilosofia Moralewas a very unsuccessful one.
Utility is not the explanatory principle of morality, because it proceeds from man's bodily nature, and on that account is subject to change, while morality,honestas,is eternal. To derive morality from utility is to confound the occasion with the cause, to confine oneself to the surface and to offer no explanation at all of the facts. None of the various modes in which philosophers have successively called the utilitarian principle to life, fraud or imposture, force, desire,—none of these accounts for differentiation, that is, for the social organism. What fraud could ever have seduced and deceived the supposed simple and frugal first owners of the land, living as they did perfectly contented with their lot? What force could have succeeded, if the rich, the alleged usurpers, were few, and the poor, the robbed, were many? Such explanations are ridiculous, and unworthy of a serious problem. These strong and powerful men were really powerful with something other than mere strength: thus they became protectors of the weak and enemies of destructive and anti-social tendencies: their rule was one of force, it is true, but "imposed by a more powerful character" (a natura praestantiori dictata); a fact which the barbarian Brennus may be pardoned for not knowing, but not so a philosopher. The force which created and organised the earliest states was nothing but "noble human nature," to which states must always hark back, although they may have been won by fraud and force, in order tosubsist and maintain themselves: which agrees with Machiavelli's advice to hark back to the beginnings, but with the implication that the deepest beginnings are to be found in mercy and justice. Men are held together by something stouter than utility. Human society cannot originate and endure without mutual trust; unless people accept each other's promises and take each other's word for facts they cannot examine. Could this trust be perhaps ensured by strict penal laws against falsehood? But laws are a product of society, and this mutual trust is necessary that society may arise. It may be said, as it is by Locke, that we are dealing with a psychological process, by which men gradually acquired the habit of believing when some one spoke to them and promised to tell the truth. But in that case these men already understood the idea of a truth which by mere disclosure compelled assent without any personal teaching; and the psychological principle of habituation is transcended.
The true cause of human society then is not utility, which only assists the action of the cause as its occasion, and brings it about that men, with all the weakness and poverty of their nature, and the divisions among them due to original sin, are led to extol their social nature "under compulsion of facts" (rebus ipsis dictantibus), in the phrase of the jurist Pomponius, quoted with approval by Vico. Objects, facts and circumstances in morality change, though morality itself does not change: and hence arises the illusion of the utilitarians, who cling to the external, confine themselves to the appearance and see the change but not the permanence. Murder is forbidden: but the approval, bestowed upon the man who when his life is threatened and he cannot otherwise save himself kills his unjust aggressor, does not imply that the moral judgment upon homicide varies; since in these particular circumstances the case is really one not of homicide but of capital punishment inflicted by theunjustly attacked person finding himself alone: a power tacitly delegated to him so to speak by society. Theft is forbidden: but the man who in order to preserve his life steals a loaf from another does not violate morality because he is exercising a right founded upon equity.
The only philosophy which carries with it a true ethic seems to Vico to be the Platonic, resting as it does upon a metaphysical principle, the eternal idea which draws out of itself and creates matter: while the Aristotelian ethic is founded upon a metaphysic leading to a physical principle, that of the matter from which particular forms are drawn, a principle which makes God a potter shaping objects external to himself. The ethic of the Roman lawyers was doubtless rich in fine aphorisms: but it was nothing but a mere art of equity, conveyed by means of endless minute maxims of natural justice, sought for by the writers in the reason of the laws and the will of the lawgiver. Hence it cannot be regarded as a moral philosophy, in which the best method is to proceed from a very small number of eternal truths, established by ideal justice in the fabric of metaphysic. For analogous reasons Vico could not rest satisfied with Grotius and the school of natural rights: of which in general he makes the perfectly just remark that their ponderous tomes, in spite of the impressive titles they bear, contain nothing that is not universally known. If Grotius's principles be weighed in the accurate balance of criticism, they are all found to be probable or plausible rather than necessary and incontestable. In dealing with the question of utility, Grotius missed the exact point by failing to distinguish the occasion from the cause: nor did he "nail down"—that is, he did not end—the ancient dispute as to whether right is a question of nature or of human opinion only, the same controversy as that carried on by philosophers and theologians with Carneades the sceptic and Epicurus: he advances the hypothesis of primitive men who were"simpletons," but quite omits to give reasons for it. And since these "simpletons" of his, after suffering injuries from their beast-like isolation, initiated a sociable life, a step to which they were determined by utility, Grotius himself slipped unawares into utilitarianism and Epicureanism.
Vico on the other hand answered the question, whether right is natural or conventional, by the grave aphorism "except in their natural condition, things neither progress nor endure." To the question, whence society arises, he replies by mentioning the common feeling of humanity, the conscience, the need which man feels of escaping from the internal enemy, which tortures his heart. The origin of society certainly lies in fear, but it is fear of oneself, not of another's violence: it lies in the agonies of remorse, the shame whose tinge suffusing the cheeks of the earliest men lit the first beacon of morality upon earth. Shame is the mother of all virtues, honour, frugality, honesty, loyalty to the pledged word, truthfulness in speech, abstention from others' property, and chastity. In extolling society, man is extolling human nature.
Shame or the moral consciousness, translated into terms of the corresponding empirical science, becomes that common consciousness of man upon matters of human necessity or utility which is the source of the natural right of nations. This common consciousness, says Vico, is an unreflective judgment, felt in common by a whole class, a whole people, a whole nation and the whole of mankind. An unreflective judgment is not strictly a judgment at all, since reflection is inseparable from judgment: it is not judgment, because it is felt and not thought. But on the other hand it is not what is called a "feeling,"—a vague term unknown to Vico, as it is to traditional philosophy. It is rather a practical attitude of mind, similar on the whole in persons living in similar conditions and producing similar customs in the varioussocial groups, from the customs of a particular class to those of all mankind. The attitude is quite spontaneous, and for this very reason unreflective; so that customs arise from within, not from without, and their similarity does not depend upon imitation ("without one nation taking example from another"). Through thissensus communisthe moral consciousness embodies itself in compact and unyielding institutions: and thus thesensus communisreduces to certitude the free will of man, which is in itself quite uncertain.
But this internal fear, shame or moral consciousness is aroused in man by religion. The fear is the fear of God, the shame is abasement before his face. Primitive man wanders over the earth alone, wild, fierce, without articulate speech, without a permanent mate, at the mercy of his unbridled and violent passions, a "brute" rather than a man. What can restrain him? what can rescue him from at last destroying himself? Wise men cannot direct him, for we cannot say whence or how they can reach him. The intervention of God cannot save him: God has withdrawn himself to his chosen people, and has no dealings with the rest of mankind, the Gentiles. But this "brute" is still a man: God, while abandoning him, has left a spark of his own essence at the bottom of his heart. See! the sky lightens: the wild creature stands awestruck and afraid: in his mind arises the shadowy idea of something greater than he, something divine. So he conceives or rather imagines a first God, a Sky-god, a thundering Jupiter: and to this deity he turns to appease his wrath or invoke his aid. But in order to conciliate him and secure his help, he must shape his own life conformably to his purpose: he must humble himself before his God, overcome his own pride and arrogance, abstain from certain actions and perform others. Thus the conception of a deity lends power tothat peculiar possession of the human will, the attempt, that is, the liberty, to control the movements communicated to the mind by the body and to annul or to redirect them simultaneously. With these acts of self-control, with freedom, morality comes into existence: the fear of God has laid the foundations of human life. Altars arise all over the earth: the caves of her mountains, whither the man now bears the woman, ashamed as he is of gratifying his desires before the face of the sky, which is the face of God, preside at the first marriage-rites and shelter the first families: her bosom opens to receive the sacred trust of the bodies of the dead. The first and fundamental ethical institutions—worship, wedlock and burial—have arisen.
This social and ethical power of the idea of God appears again in the course of subsequent history: since when nations have relapsed into savagery through warfare, and human laws have no more power over them, religion is the only means of subduing them. It reappears again in the individual development of human life: children indeed cannot learn piety except through the fear of some deity; and when all natural help fails him man requires a superior being to save him, and this being is God. All nations believe in a divine providence: tribes living in a society without any consciousness of God, for instance in some parts of Brazil, among the Kafirs, and in the Antilles, are travellers' tales, an attempt to increase the sale of their books by the narration of portents.
If this is so,—and doubtless it is—then no doctrine can be more foolish than that which claims to conceive a morality and civilisation without religion. Just as no well-established physical science is possible without the guidance of abstract mathematical truth, so no knowledge of morality can arise except together with abstract metaphysical truths, without, that is, the idea of God. When the religious consciousness is extinguished or obscuredthe conception of society and the state is extinguished or obscured with it. Jews, Christians, Gentiles and Mahommedans possess this conception because all alike believe in some deity, whether as an infinite free spirit, or as several gods consisting of mind and body, or as one single God, an infinite free spirit in an infinite body. The Epicureans did not possess such a conception, attributing to God as they did body alone, and chance together with body: nor did the Stoics, who made him subject to fate. And Cicero made the admirable remark to the Epicurean Atticus, that he could not discuss laws with him unless he first granted the existence of the divine providence. Hobbes, who revived Epicureanism, and Spinoza, who revived Stoicism, as we have seen entirely failed to understand the nature of society and the state. One must consort with primitive man, stupid, hirsute, unclean and dishevelled, to refute those learned authors of "desiccated literature," with Peter Bayle at their head, who maintain that human society can and indeed does live without religion.
The absence of the idea of God supplied the chief argument in Vico's criticism of Grotius and Puffendorf, two of these authors whom he held in great honour as "princes" of the school of natural rights. Neither of these writers, he says, lays down the principle of divine providence as primary and essential. Grotius does not expressly deny it: but on account of his very attachment to truth, he endeavours to exclude it, and asserts that his system will stand even if all knowledge of God be removed. Hence Vico accuses him of Socinianism, since he makes human innocence consist in the simplicity of human nature. Puffendorf is still worse: he seems to ignore providential direction, and begins with the scandalously Epicurean supposition that man is thrown into this world with no help or attention from God, without even that spark within his heart which is destined to grow into theflame of morality: and having been reproved for this, he tries to justify himself in a special essay, but does not succeed in discovering the true principle on which alone society can be explained.
Now why, in face of all these energetic declarations and arguments of Vico's on the necessity of religion to morality, did we say above that the only point of real resemblance between him and Grotius, Puffendorf and the natural-right school generally was his purely immanental conception of ethics? Because, if we examine the point closely, Vico is not in opposition to the method of that school. Like them, in constructing his science of human society he excludes with Grotius all idea of God, and with Puffendorf considers man as without help or attention from God, excluding him, that is, from revealed religion and its God. As for these two writers, so for Vico the subject under consideration is natural rights, not supernatural: the law of the Gentiles, not of the chosen people: the law which arises of itself among the caves, not that which comes down from Sinai. Vico's opposition, which he expresses with his accustomed confusion and obscurity, turns not upon assertions like these, but upon the actual conception of religion. In one word, the religion of which he speaks is not the same as that of which Grotius and Puffendorf spoke, or rather did not speak.
Religion, as we have already seen, means for Vico not necessarily revelation, but conception of reality: either that which expresses itself as it does in the period of fully developed mind in the form of intelligible metaphysic, which passes from the thought of God to explain logic by its reasoning and to condescend to purify the human heart by morality: or that which takes concrete shape, as it does in the earliest stage of humanity, in the form of poetical metaphysics. One may easily ignore revealed religion when inquiring into the foundations of morality: but how can one ever ignore this natural religion,identical as it is with knowledge of the truth? Plutarch, discussing the primitive religions of terror, asks the question whether it would not have been better, instead of worshipping the gods in so impious a manner, that there should be no religion at all: but he forgot that from these cruel superstitions brilliant civilisations developed, and no civilisation could ever have grown from atheism. Without a religion, whether gentle or fierce, rational or fantastic, to give the idea, more or less clearly defined, more or less elevated, of something superior to the individual and uniting all individuals, the moral will would have no object for its volition.
At this point we see the meaning of what we have described as the second, practical or ethical, signification of the word "religion" in Vico. In this signification, Vico justifies and vindicates the impious saying that "fear creates the gods": he even places the source of religion in the longing for eternal life which man feels when stirred by a universal sense of immortality hidden in the depths of the mind. In this second signification, religion is a practical fact, indeed it is morality itself, as in the first meaning it was truth itself.
If the meaning of religion for Vico, either as the condition of morality, in the first sense of the word, or as synonymous with it, in the second, is once understood, it is clear that when he condemned Grotius and Puffendorf for their omission of this most important concept, he was substantially doing nothing but clenching his criticism of the insipid moralising and the concealed utilitarianism of these two thinkers. On other occasions also he resorted to the valuable weapon of the concept of religion, with the same end in view. Because if he sometimes credited philosophy with the task of assisting mankind by raising and directing fallen human nature, at other times he decided that philosophy is rather adapted to reasoning, and that the moral philosophers with the greatest powersof reasoning are of value only to stimulate the senses by their eloquence to perform the duties of virtue, while religion alone has the power of making men act virtuously. Then in the empirical science corresponding to this part of the philosophy of mind, Vico turns religion (or poetical metaphysic) and philosophy into two historical epochs, making the former characteristic of the barbaric period and the latter of the civilised. He maintains, as he is clearly bound to do, that religion is the sole foundation of all civilisation and of philosophy itself, and rejects Polybius's saying that if there had been philosophers in the world religion would have been unnecessary. How could philosophy have arisen, he objects, had not states, that is, civilisation, arisen first? and how could states have arisen without the aid of religion? Thus the saying ought to be reversed: without religion there is no philosophy. It was religion, it was the divine providence that tamed the sons of Polyphemus and reduced them to the humanity of Aristides and Socrates, of Laelius and Scipio Africanus.
The conception again of the "state of nature," which served in the treatises of the school of natural rights as an hypothesis and a means of exposition with a view either to developing the argument independently of mystical theology without evoking too many protests, or to conveying implicitly their utilitarian theories, acquired in Vico's hands a new function and a new content. A perfectly honest Catholic, having satisfied his conscience by separating revealed from human religion, he was in a position to assume the state of nature as a literal and actual reality. It is an ideal reality, in so far as it represents in the dialectic of the practical consciousness a moment necessary for the genesis of reality, the pre-moral moment: a historical and empirical reality, as the approximately actual condition of those periods of anarchy and disturbance which precede the rise of civilisations or follow upon theirfall. The natural-right school acquiesced more or less in the traditional doctrine of the church, namely that the Gentiles, in the dispersion following on the confusion of Babel, had taken away with them a residuum of revealed religion, a vague memory of the true God, and that hence arose the possibility of social life and of false gods, shadows of the true God: and thus the "state of nature" had been put forward in their system as something abstract and unreal. Vico worked out strictly the distinction between Jews and Gentiles, and conceived the state of nature as devoid of any help coming from previous revelation: as a state in which man stood alone, so to speak, face to face with his own chaotic and turbulent passions. It was a state actually without morality, but—in contradistinction to the utilitarian hypothesis—pregnant with moral requirements, and was transcended by this implicit character becoming explicit. But this transcendence was brought about naturally, not by means of divine grace: the true divine grace is human nature itself, shared by Gentiles no less than Jews, all equally illuminated by a divine light.
Man's will is free, weak though it is, to make his passions into virtues; and in his struggle towards virtue he is helped in a natural manner by God through providence. Certainly Vico did not intend to deny the efficacy of direct and personal divine grace as well: but following his usual method he separates the latter from the natural operation of providence, which is the only question of importance for him and the only one he considers. So far as concerns the controversies on grace, he always likes to maintain a middle position between two extremes represented typically, according to him, by Pelagianism and Calvinism: and ever since as a young man he studied the works of Richard, the theologian of the Sorbonne, he had accepted his demonstration of the superiority of the Augustinian doctrine, just because it was intermediatebetween these extremes. A moderate doctrine of this kind seemed to him, as he says, to provide a suitable foundation for a principle of the natural rights of nations which should explain the origin of Roman and other Gentile law, while at the same time remaining in agreement with the Catholic religion. He was inclined to admit that there was a privileged nation, namely the Jewish; and that in the struggle against the passions the Christian had an advantage over the non-Christian, because in cases where natural grace failed he might be helped by supernatural. But, in a word, miracles are miracles, and the New Science is not a science of the miraculous.
That it is not, is proved by Vico's criticism on the third of the "principles" of natural rights, against John Selden, a famous man in his day though forgotten later, and author ofDe iure naturali et gentium iuxta disciplinant Hebraeorum(1640). Selden disagreed with Grotius, in this as in certain other questions, in not denying, and even in exalting, the value of religion: he conceived moral and civil life impossible for mankind except through revelation. This revelation, made by God to the Jewish people, passed from them according to Selden by several channels to the Gentiles: Pythagoras for instance had learnt from Ezekiel; Aristotle, at the time of the campaigns of Alexander in Asia, formed a friendship with Simon the Just; Numa Pompilius acquired some knowledge of the Bible and the prophets. This was enough to reassure any believer who had been frightened away from the works of the natural-right school by their heterodox tendencies. But Vico will have none of this ultra-religious system. If Grotius ignored providence and Puffendorf denied it, Selden was wrong, said Vico, in supplying it, making it adeus ex machina,without explaining it by the essential character of the human mind. It was a system not only unphilosophical but incompatible with sacred history, which admits to a certain extent even inthe case of the Jews a natural, not revealed, law: and it was only because, during the captivity in Egypt, they lost sight of this that the direct intervention of God with the laws given to Moses took place. Nor did the theory agree, as to the alleged dissemination of Jewish knowledge and laws among the Gentiles, with the words of the Jew Josephus and of Lactantius; and in general, it was unsupported by even the smallest documentary evidence. Vico's conclusion therefore remains unaltered. The Jews enjoyed in addition the extraordinary aid of the true God: but the other nations attained civilisation solely through the ordinary light of providence.
Whether or no Vico quoted and interpreted Grotius and Puffendorf accurately is for us a question of small importance. His exposition and estimate of other philosophers matter less than his own doctrines, whatever their historical relations, which, to tell the truth, are many in number. Nevertheless it will be as well to indicate briefly, as regards the difficulties which may arise upon this point, the answer which we think plausible. Any one who after reading Vico's censures opened theDe iure belli et pacisand found that Grotius explicitly includes among his three fundamental principles, with reason and the social nature, the divine will, and that this ignoring of God amounts to little more than a mere phrase laying emphasis on the power of the social nature and reason, which would take effect "even if we were to grant that God does not exist" (etiamsi dar emus non esse Deum) or that he does not care for human affairs, "which cannot be granted without the grossest impiety" (quod sine summo scelere dari nequit): any one who opened Puffendorf and read a most solemn denunciation of the Grotian hypothesis as impious and absurd, and a declaration that natural laws would remain hanging in the air devoid of force apart from the will of God as legislator; any one who read these words might be led to accuse Vico of negligence or even of insincerityin his criticisms of his predecessors. But in truth Vico did not know what to make of a God set side by side with other sources of morality, or set above them as a superfluous source for the sources: he, searching for God as he did in the heart of man, saw and felt the gulf fixed between him and those who no longer had him in their hearts and barely kept him on their lips through habit or prudence. A more subtle question would be to ask why,—if Vico agreed with the natural-right school in ignoring revelation, and if he instead of rejecting it deepened their superficial immanental doctrine,—why he put himself forward as their implacable enemy and persisted in boasting loudly before prelates and pontiffs of having formulated a system of natural rights different from that of the three Protestant authors and adapted to the Roman church. The supposition that he acted thus through politic caution might be advanced if instead of Vico we were dealing with, for instance, a passionate and powerful but deceitful friar like Tommaso Campanella: but the spotless character of Vico entirely precludes it, and we can only suppose that, lacking as his ideas always were in clarity, on this occasion he indulged his tendency to confusion and nourished his illusions, to the extent of conferring upon himself the flattering style and title ofDefensor Ecclesiaeat the very moment when he was destroying the religion of the church by means of the religion of humanity.
With the dazzling light of his originality still shining before our eyes, it is impossible to fix our attention upon those doctrines and classifications which Vico drew from the traditional philosophy and placed especially in the first book of theDiritto universale: though it is precisely these that have become favourites with many readers, and are now almost common property through the frequent quotation of them. That God is "infinite power knowledge and will" (posse nosse velle infinitum) and man "finite power knowledge and will struggling towards the infinite" (posse nosse velle finitum quod tendit ad infinitum): that the state is the image of God, and because "it has all things beneath it, nothing above" (omnia infra se, nil superius habet), therefore "it renders account to God alone and to no one else" (uni Deo, praeterea reddat rationem nemini), and that just as in God freedom is inherent in his eternal reason, so the state freely obeys the laws it has itself established: that justice "directs and equates utilities" (utilitates dirigit et exaequat), directing, like an architect, in the building-up of the state, the two particular kinds of justice, commutative and distributive, the two divine artisans that measure utility with the two divine measures, arithmetic and geometry, so that "what is equal when you measure is also just when you choose" (quod est aequum cum metiris, idem est iustum quum eligis),these and similar assertions seem not merely lacking in originality but even false or meaningless, adorned though they may be with the name either of Aristotle or of Campanella or of other philosophers of the ancient world or the Renaissance. If, to take one, justice consisted in measuring, a philosophy of justice would be unnecessary, for the science of calculation and measurement would be enough. Vico himself at one point involuntarily and ingenuously discloses the vicious circle of this metaphor substituted for a concept, by saying that men ought "to share utility equally among themselves, only preserving ajustdifference where it is a question of desert, and that to preserve the equality."
More profitable than collecting these second-hand formulae would be to collect the many acute observations of moral psychology found here and there in his writings, expressed in his gem-like style; or to recall his little-known theory of laughter, which he derives from disappointed expectation and from the weakness of the mind, and therefore denies the faculty both to animals and to the perfect man, considering a man who laughs to be a satyr or faun, intermediate between a brute and a man. But abstaining from such a collection, which forms no part of our plan, we would rather observe that even in the commonplace distinctions and classifications mentioned above Vico shows a certain merit: he recognises, even while he propounds them, the necessary confusion and identification of all or many of these distinctions. Thus after distinguishing the two kinds of justice, the three kinds of virtue and the three kinds of law, he ends by declaring that these dualities, triplicities and multiplicities each form a unity.
Justice and virtue also, for Vico, form a unity, since that power of truth, or human reason, which is virtue in so far as it struggles with selfishness, is also justice in so far as it directs or equates utilities. This implies that Vico does not distinguish, at least in the systematicexposition of theDiritto universale,between law and morality: a distinction which indeed received little emphasis in the doctrine of natural rights, and is barely indicated in Grotius, for instance, as one between a greater and less degree of morality. Vico's doctrine of punishment is also purely moral, and deduced from the ethical concept of remorse. It is inflicted, he says, by the law, and is nothing but a social reinforcement of the individual conscience, in the case where the offender does not himself expiate his crime by means of remorse and internal punishment.
But the more the problem of the relation between law and morality is absent in Vico's theoretical formulation and systematic treatment, the more present it is in his particular observations; indeed it may be said to pervade the whole of the New Science. Nor could it be otherwise, seeing that this relation refers to the distinction between the moral will and the inferior or earlier forms of will; and we know that all Vico's tendencies were towards exploring the lower and obscure region of the mind, both cognitive and practical, in the sphere alike of imagination, will and passion.
He always realised the supreme importance of the passions; and if he could not approve of giving them the upper hand, if he always considered the Epicurean morality a morality "of idlers shut up in their pleasure-gardens," he did not at all approve of excessively severe moralities such as that of the Stoics, which was no less than the other a morality of "solitaries," not one for men living in a state. Stoicism certainly preaches an eternal and immutable justice, and makes honour the criterion of human action; but it does violence to human nature, dehumanises it, annuls it and drives it to despair by pretending that it is quite insensible to the passions, by ignoring the utility and necessity of the bodily nature, by inculcating that rule—a rule "harder than iron"—that sins are all equal and that he whostrikes a slave is as guilty as he who kills his father. The same doubts must have been aroused in Vico's mind by Jansenism, as he complains that "out of hatred of probability, Christian morality in France is becoming rigidified." We ought to follow not these solitary philosophers but rather those political ones, especially the Platonic type, which recognises that the passions should be not eradicated but moderated and "converted into human virtues." Thus out of cruelty, avarice and ambition, the three universal faults of mankind, Providence elicits the warrior, the merchant and the judge; the bravery, wealth and wisdom of states. From these three failings, which would destroy mankind on the earth, civil prosperity is formed.
Concerning matters of utility, Vico observes that "in themselves,"ex se,they are neither good nor bad (neque turpes neque honestae) but become so merely through their relation to the moral consciousness ("but their unfairness is baseness, their fairness, honour:sed earum inaequalitas est turpitudo, acqualitas autem honestas"). In the empirical science of utility, he defends against Grotius a "prior natural law,"ius naturale prius,to which belong self-defence and the procreation and upbringing of children: and this right he connects with the Stoicἀδιάφορον.That it has no moral authority is proved by the fact that the law which follows it in the historical order, the "posterior natural law,"ius naturale posterius,defined by Justinian as "that which is established among all men by natural reason and is preserved by all nations alike" (quod naturalis ratio inter omnes homines constituit et apud omnes gentes per aeque custoditur), is prior in the order of right,prius iure,overcomes the former when they conflict and sets upon it the seal of immutability. Now, although this first natural law is defined and exemplified in a merely empirical manner, it is surely at bottom nothing but pure law, law not yet moralised.
But it is upon the concept of "certitude" that law as distinct from morality properly, according to Vico, rests. The word certitude is used by him in many senses, neither clearly distinguished nor harmonised nor deduced one from another: though they all as we have seen unite, rather confusedly, in the general idea of the spontaneous as distinguished, from the reflective form of the mind. Certitude in its practical signification implies among other things an opposition to the "truth" of volition, and is, in a word, force as against equity and justice, authority as against reason, mere will as against the moral will. These are distinctions occurring to our own thoughts, rather than stated by Vico, who both distinguishes and fails to distinguish. For instance, he affirms that "certitude proceeds from authority, truth from reason" (certuni ab auctoritate est, verum a ratione) and immediately afterwards adds that "it is quite impossible for authority to conflict with reason, for in that case there would be not laws but abortive laws" (auctoritas cum ratione omnino pugnare non potest, nam ita non leges essent, sed monstra legum). At any rate, the New Science seems to him, by reason of this treatment of certitude, to contain a philosophy of authority, which, he adds, "is the source of what theological moralists call external justice." That is to say, he connected the concept of certitude with the distinction and terminology of external and internal, already employed by the scholastic morality, which, used about this time by Christianus Thomasius, were destined without any great philosophical merit on his part to give an impetus to the investigation of the philosophical relations between law and morality.
Another and kindred meaning of practical certitude in Vico is the so-called letter of the law,formula legum;which may stand in opposition to reason and the moral consciousness, but none the less has its own peculiar value: "dura lex, sed certa: durum sed scriptum est—thelaw is harsh, but it is certain; it is harsh, but so it is written." It is in a word the value of law simply as law, which though devoid of any real ethical content yet has always the value that comes from a command over the will. "The certitude of law" (writes Vico) "is a darkening of the reason supported merely by authority, and makes the law harsh in practical experience by laying down their certitude, which in good Latin (certuni) means particularised, or in the scholastic terminology individualised." To a certain extent Vico grasped the individual character which lies at the root of every law. That one must "judge according to law, not according to example" (legibus non exemplis iudicandum) is a comparatively late principle: the first laws were strictly"exempta,"exemplary punishments. From real examples were derived the ideal examples employed by logic and rhetoric: and when the intelligible universal was understood, it was recognised that law had a certain universal character.
The primitive society sketched by Vico is, in its juristic aspect, the myth so to speak of pure law or practical force. Once upon a time men lived possessed of immense bodily strength, and proportionately feeble in understanding, who thought all strength greater than their own divine, and this belief constituted their law. They thought of the gods simply as beings stronger than themselves, whom they were compelled to obey, though with a bad grace: like Polyphemus, who if he had been strong enough would have fought Zeus himself, or Achilles, who told Apollo that if only they were equally matched he would not hesitate to try his strength against him. The wisdom of providence decreed that these fierce men, not tamed as yet by the rule of reason, should at least fear the divine nature of force and measure reason by its standard. This is the foundation of the principle of the "external justice of war." But the myth of the period of forcecannot have the strictness of a philosophical concept, and consequently these strong men are considered by Vico from another point of view as ethically the best: "strongest" and "best,"fortissimiandoptimi,are regarded as synonymous terms: and their law, though not truth or rational law, is not pure certitude, but truth "mixed with certitude,"ex certo mixtum.But the very mixture of certitude with, and its preponderance over, truth, which is here asserted, postulates the concept of pure certitude as presupposed by Vico.