When Vico accused Grotius and the school of natural rights of commencing their history half-way, with the civilised ages, and overlooking the earlier periods, the accusation, in its bearing upon the philosophy of practice, may be translated into a charge of ignoring the ideal moment of force and confining the attention to justice, equity and morality. The moment of force, constituting the other and earlier "half," was the field chosen by Hobbes, before him by Machiavelli, and still earlier by Epicurus, all of whom treated of this moment alone, "with impiety towards God, infamy to rulers and injustice towards nations." Hence the conclusion is easy, that in refuting the utilitarians and the theorists of force, Vico was at the same time recognising and absorbing the need which they represented, their only mistake having been that they developed this need in an abstract and one-sided way. His "state of nature" is in some respects like that of Hobbes, with the difference that mankind transcends the latter owing to the recognition of utility, the former owing to the religious and moral consciousness. But Vico does not on this account express any gratitude to Hobbes or Spinoza, Machiavelli or Epicurus, since he believed himself to have found in a classical author all the materials and the stimulus he required, all the counter-poise necessary to the Platonic philosophy. This was one of his "four authors," the one of whom we saidearlier that we had still to see the use which Vico made, namely Tacitus. This writer for his part contemplates with his unequalled metaphysical powers man as he is, while Plato contemplates him as he ought to be. Just as Plato in his universal science explores every corner of nobility, so Tacitus "descends into every scheme of utility," in order that among the infinite chaotic chances of malice and fortune the man of practical wisdom may act well. To the union in his mind of Greek philosopher and Roman historian, which he interprets, as is easily seen, in the manner usual among the "Tacitean" politicians of the seventeenth century, Vico attributes his own success in sketching a real idea of eternal history, "which the wise man would construct both of esoteric wisdom such as Plato's, and of common wisdom such as that of Tacitus." To Tacitus, finally, he owed the impulse towards the supreme task of making concrete his ideal, and realising the republic of Plato in the "dregs of Romulus."
As the cognitive mind passes from feeling without noticing to noticing with disturbed and confused faculties, and thence to the reflection of the clear mind, so analogously the volitional mind passes from the state of nature to practical certitude and thence to practical truth. In the correlative empirical science, the transition is more or less that from the savage to the heroic or barbaric condition and from the latter to the civilised. In these three types of society, all the manifestations of life correspond: thus there are three kinds of character, three kinds of manners and customs, three kinds of law and therefore of states, three kinds of language and writing, three kinds of authority, reason and justice, and three divisions of history. Confused and sometimes self-contradictory though Vico may be in fixing the particulars of these various correspondences, his general idea is plain. Where reflection is at a low ebb and imagination flourishes, the passions also flourish, habits are violent, governments aristocratic or feudal, families subjected to strict paternal rule, laws severe, legal procedure symbolical, language couched in metaphor and writing in hieroglyphics. Where on the other hand reflection predominates, poetry becomes either separate from or charged with philosophy, manners and customs lose their violence, the passions are brought into subjection, the people take the government into their own hands,all members of the family are alike citizens of the state, law is mitigated by equity and its procedure simplified, language loses its metaphorical clothing and writing becomes alphabetical. Mixed forms, which some politicians aim at producing artificially, would be abortions: and though we do find natural hybrid forms which retain a tinge of the earlier, each one, by reason of its own unity, always tries so far as possible to divest its subject of every property belonging to other forms.
Which of the various social types forms the foundation of the others and supplies the criterion for judging them? or what is the criterion and standard by which they must all alike be judged? For Vico, such a question is meaningless. Governments, he says, must adapt themselves to the nature of the people governed: the school of princes is the morality of nations. We may shudder at war, at the law of the stronger, at the reduction of the conquered to slavery, that is, to chattels: but the society which expressed itself in these customs was necessary and therefore good. The worship of strength, as we have said, occupied the position and discharged the function of the as yet impossible rule of reason. Later came the period of fully developed human reason, when men no longer valued each other by the standard of force, but by virtue of their rational nature, which is the true and eternal human nature, recognised one another as equals. The change of time brought change of customs: and the new were no less good, but no more so, than the old.
It would be as useless to seek the common measure of these various social types, as to ask what is the real age of the individual life, the common measure of childhood, youth, maturity and old age. The comparison is one presented by Vico himself. As children shape all their ideas according to their whims and carry them out with violence, as youths animate everything by their imagination,as grown men guide their affairs rather by pure reason and old men by sound prudence; so it is with the human race, which after its feeble, isolated and poverty-stricken origins, grows at first in unrestrained liberty, then rediscovers the necessaries, utilities and comforts of life by genius and imagination (the age of poetry), and finally cultivates wisdom by means of reason (the age of philosophy). Similarly, natural right arose first in laws so to speak of just passion and just violence: then it was clothed in various myths of just reason: and finally it was openly proclaimed in its pure rationality and noble truth.
By such a method of handling and passing judgment upon governments, laws and customs, Vico, escaped another of the leading doctrines or suppositions of the school of natural rights, the abstraction and anti-historicism we mentioned in its own place, which resulted in the conception of a natural law standing above positive law and therefore constituting a kind of eternal code, a perfect scheme of legislation, not yet fully actual but to be actualised, whose outlines show up clearly in the works of the school through their veil of doctrine and philosophy. But this eternal code was in its most important part a contingent and transitory code; or at least it advocated a code in agreement with the reformatory and revolutionary tendencies of these writers, publicists as they were rather than philosophers.
Vico rids himself of the ideal eternal code without seeming to do so: though he is quite ready to recognise that the "philosophers' natural right,"ius naturale philosophorum,is in idea eternal, and inexorably laid down "in accordance with eternal reason,"ad rationis aeternae libellam.But from this verbal concession of eternity made out of respect for the old traditional scholastic philosophy, whose influence he felt now and then, he goes on to deny its real eternity and supra-historical character; since instead of placing it aboveand outside history he puts it in the place which belongs to it, within history. The law of violence or heroic law, after passing into the law of uncivilised society, gradually attains a certain limit of clarity, in which state the only thing wanting to its perfection is that some school of philosophers should complete it by establishing it with reasoned principles, upon the idea of eternal justice: and this reasoning and systematisation is the"ius naturale philosophorum"the extreme form of the historical development of law, not its unchanging rule; a product, not a standard. Hence Vico's charge against Grotius of confusing the"ius naturale philosophorum,"the law composed of reasoned principles derived from moralists, theologians and, in part, jurists, with the natural law of nations,ius naturale gentium(in Grotius's language, confusing natural law with an arbitrary or positive form of law): of misunderstanding the Roman jurists, who intended to speak solely of the latter: and of offering to correct and venturing to criticise writers whose faults on inspection vanish.
The eternal code, considered in its essentials, is a Utopia: and since the first and greatest of Utopias is Plato's Republic, it is important, in order better to decide the point at issue, to examine Vico's attitude towards the political scheme of Plato. If we may listen to his own words, theRepublicwas another of his many incentives and examples when he conceived the New Science. With the study of Plato began the unconscious awakening in him of "the thought of conceiving an ideal eternal law, to be expressed in a universal state built on the idea or plan of providence, on which idea, indeed, are founded all the states of every period and race: an ideal Republic like that which Plato ought, as a consequence of his divine metaphysic, to have conceived." He ought, but could not, owing to his "ignorance of the first man's fall"; ignorance, that is, of the original state of natureand of the exclusively poetic or "common" wisdom which followed it: an ignorance maintained by the error, common to the minds of all men, of measuring by oneself the almost unknown nature of other people, as Plato exalted the rude and barbaric beginnings of Gentile man to the perfect state of his loftiest esoteric knowledge of the divine, and fancied these earliest men to possess a high degree of this esoteric wisdom, whereas on the contrary they were really "brutes, all stupidity and ferocity." In consequence of this learned error Plato, instead of conceiving an eternal Republic and the laws of an eternal justice by which Providence governs the nations of the world and directs it by means of the common needs of mankind, by which it is led to the common consciousness of the whole human race, "conceived an ideal Republic and a merely ideal justice, by which nations are not guided at all." In fact, they ought not to be guided by it: since among the determinations of the perfect state there are some which are dishonourable and detestable, such as the community of wives. Thus Vico took from Plato the idea of an eternal state, but entirely inverted it by the reservation which he added to it, that the true eternal republic is not the abstract state of Plato, but the course of history in all its phases, including the brutes at one end and Plato at the other. This is the "republic of mankind," the "great state of mankind," the "universal republic" (generis humani respublica, magna generis humani civitas, respublica universa) of which he means to investigate the "form, ranks, societies, occupations, laws, crimes, punishments, and science of jurisprudence" (formam ordines societates negotia leges peccata poenas et scientiam in ea tractandi iuris) and to follow the development of all these "from their origin, the beginnings of humanity, under the control of divine Providence, national custom and authority" (a suis usque primis humanitatis originibus, divina providentia moderante, moribus gentium ac proindeauctoritate), that is to say, "by means of the various elements of human utility and necessity, or even by means of opportunities arising by the spontaneous action of circumstances" (per varia utilitatum et necessitatum, humanarum rudimenta, sive adeo per ipsarum sponte rerum oblatas occasiones). The "great state of the nations founded and governed by God" is thus nothing else than History.
While refusing a fixed code and the draft of a model society, we do not mean to deny the possibility of a practical aspect of the science conceived by Vico, the New Science in its triple form of ideal history, typical history and historical history. Every truth has its practical side, that is to say, its practical consequences: and thinking in this or that way of the nature and development of mankind involves this or that practical line of conduct. A man who believes for instance in the docile innocence of savage races will approach them with a smile on his face, kindly words on his lips and the alphabet and catechism of rights and duties in his hand: one who believes in Vico's "brutes" will adopt somewhat sterner methods, perhaps even fire and the sword. One who, like Vico, believes that "custom is more potent than law" and that "custom changes not at a blow, but gradually and slowly" will not be inclined to hasty legislation, and will not delude himself into thinking he can remodel human nature after an ideal of his own devising. Such conduct in any case is not theory, but practice: and when the attempt is made to reduce it to theory, either a chaotic confusion of necessary and contingent determinations results, or else if we avoid these errors and strive to attain a strictly doctrinal form of conduct, we get neither more nor less than the scientific theory itself, from which our conduct derived.
The thought of following up the New Science with a practical theory appropriate to it evidently occurred toVico. Even in the first Italian edition of the work he stated two "practical" corollaries: first, a new art of criticism, to serve as a light to distinguish the truth in obscure and legendary history; and secondly an art of diagnosis, so to speak, for determining the degrees of necessity or utility in human affairs, and as its ultimate consequence, the chief end of this science, consisting in the recognition of indubitable symptoms of the conditions of nations. Properly considered, these arts of criticism and diagnosis unite into one, namely the better knowledge which it was possible, owing to the principles laid down by Vico, to obtain concerning the past and present life of nations.
This idea is repeated and explained in other parts of the same work. The sciences, studies and arts developed up to now, says Vico, deal with particular objects: the New Science, on the other hand, investigating as it does the principles themselves which lie at the source of all studies, is able to establish the ἀκμή or state of perfection of the entire system, and the degrees and extremes by which and within which human nature like all other mortal things must run its course and come to an end: so that through this science we can answer the practical questions how a nation in its rise may come to its state of perfection, and how in its decadence it may be stimulated to new life. The state of perfection would consist in a nation's resting upon fixed principles both demonstrated by unchanging reason and put into practice by human habits; principles in which the esoteric wisdom of the philosopher would extend a helping hand to the common wisdom of nations, thus uniting men of the greatest academic reputation with all those of wisdom in the state, the philosophers with the statesmen; and the science of civil matters divine and human, religion and law, a theology and morality imposed by command and acquired by habituation, would be supplemented by thescience of natural laws divine and human, a theology and morality imposed by reason and acquired by ratiocination: so that to transgress such principles would be true error, the wandering not of men but of wild animals.
The practical aspect of the New Science, then, was simply a summary or duplicate of the science itself, emphasising the two leading elements of spontaneous and reflective wisdom, certitude and truth, and the necessity of bearing both in mind.
Years later, in one of the elaborations of the secondScienza Nuovamade by Vico, we again meet with the idea and the phrase of a practical aspect of this science, in the title of a special concluding paragraph which he proposed to add to his work. It begins thus: "The whole of this work has now been thought out as a mere contemplative science dealing with the common character of nations: for this reason it may seem to offer no assistance to human prudence in order either to prevent or to delay the entire ruin of nations on the path of decadence, and thus to lack the practical side which every science must have whose subject-matter is dependent upon the human will, all such sciences being called practical." Now in what could such a practical side consist? "This practical application can easily be found from the contemplation itself of the course of the history of nations: which the wise men (statesmen) and princes of states observing, could by means of good ordinances, laws and examples recall peoples to their ἀκμή or state of perfection." In other words: a man warned is half saved. Contemplation is the only principle of conduct which the New Science can supply. The other half of salvation depends not on the person warning, namely thought, but upon the person warned, upon action. It does not occur to Vico to try to determine the "ordinances, laws and examples" whose adoption would be of value in this or that crisis or situation. This would not be a philosopher's task, as in facthe himself clearly recognises next moment, when he says: "The only practical principles we philosophers can supply are ones which can be confined to the academic sphere."
It would certainly be rash to claim precise knowledge of Vico's reasons for omitting this note on practical principles in the final manuscript of the last edition of theScienza Nuova,just as he had omitted in the second work of that title the assertions on the subject which had appeared in the first. But we may at least venture to guess that the principal reason was the obvious emptiness of this passage, promising as it did a practical application which it failed to provide, and finally confessing that such a practical application was either impossible or already included in the theory itself.
The true and only reality then, in the world of nations, is the course of their history: and the principle which regulates this course is Providence. From this point of view the New Science may be defined as a "rational civil theology of the divine providence." Bacon, among his historical sciences, had named aHistoria Nemeseos(history of Divine Retribution). What for Bacon was little more than a mere name was for Vico a clearly stated problem and a developed theory. Philosophers, according to him, when they did not ignore Providence entirely, as materialists and determinists, considered it solely in the sphere of natural law, calling metaphysic by the name of "natural theology," and supporting the identification of God with the natural order observed in the motions of bodies, such as the spheres and the elements, and with the final cause which was seen to exist over and above the other natural causes. As against all this it was important to work out the doctrine of Providence "in the economy of matters civil."
It was observed by some of his earliest commentators, and the observation has been frequently repeated since, that Vico used the word "providence" indifferently in a subjective and an objective sense: sometimes to indicate the human belief in a provident deity controlling their doctrine, sometimes to denote the actual operation ofthis providence. The double or triple meaning of a single word in Vico's terminology is a thing which by now need cause no astonishment. We have often already been obliged to take pains to distinguish his homonyms and unite his synonyms. Hence we may at once recognise that one meaning of "Providence" for Vico might be and indeed is the belief in Providence, man's idea of God, first in the form of myth and later in the pure and rational form of philosophy. The Gentile nations of antiquity, he says, "began their metaphysical poetic wisdom by contemplating God in the attribute of his providence," upon which rested augury and divination. Without this idea, then, wisdom, the consciousness of the infinite, cannot take shape within man, nor can morality, the fear of and respect for the higher power which governs the affairs of men, arise. But in this sense of the word a further discussion of providence is unnecessary, after what we have said on the subjects of mythology and of the relation between morality and religion.
We therefore pass at once to Providence in its second sense, the real and strict conception of it; and here it seems advisable to leave Vico for a moment and to clear up certain points of doctrine.
It is a common observation that to create a given fact is one thing, to know it when created quite another. The knowledge of what a fact really is often comes in the life of the individual years later, in the life of mankind centuries later, than the fact itself. The very persons who are directly responsible for a given fact as a rule do not know it, or know it in a very imperfect and fallacious manner; so much so that the illusions which are said to accompany human activity have passed into a proverb. The poet thinks he is singing of purity when he is really singing of sensuality, and of strength while he is really singing of weakness; he believes himself to be a dreadful pessimist and is really childishly optimistic: imagineshimself a devil, when he is a good fellow without an ounce of vice in him. Philosophers deceive themselves no less. We need not go far to find examples. The philosopher we are studying supplies a whole series of them; few have been more in the dark as to the real tendencies of their own thought. The politician also deceives himself; very often he believes and declares himself to be fighting for liberty while he is a mere reactionary, or while believing himself to be serving the cause of reaction is really inciting to revolt and aiding the cause of freedom: and so on. Such illusions are easy to understand. Individuals and nations in the heat of creation, or scarcely yet passing out of such a state, can perhaps express their state of mind, but cannot treat it in the critical spirit of historical narration: and accordingly, when they cannot reconcile themselves to waiting in silence, they compose imaginary histories of themselves,Wahrheiten und Dichtungenat once. In fact this proved difficulty of understanding one's actions while acting is one motive of the wise advice to speak of oneself as little as possible and of the suspicion with which autobiographies and memoirs are regarded. Such works are interesting and possibly even valuable; but they never present the strict historical truth of the facts they narrate.
Human labours are thus veiled in the mists of illusion which arise from individuals. The superficial historian clings to the veil, and in his attempt to describe the course of events, uses these illusions to make his voice carry. In this way the history of poetry takes the form of a narration of the intentions, opinions and aims of poets, or of those attributed to them by their contemporaries; the history of philosophy becomes a series of anecdotes concerning the sentiments, whims and practical aims of philosophers: the history of politics, a tissue of intrigue, base interests, gossip and greed. But a more careful historian, or one of a different type, will have nothing todo with history of this kind. His first act is to dispel the mists, to sweep away the individual and his illusions, and to look facts in the face as they appeared in their objective succession and their supra-individual origin. Real, true history arises independently of individuals, as a product growing to completion behind their backs, the product of a force apart from individual agents, which may be called Fate, Chance, Fortune or God. The individual, who at first was everything, and filled the whole stage with his posturing and declamation, is now, in this second aspect of history, less than nothing; his actions and cries, stripped of all serious potency, provoke laughter or pity. We look in terror at the Fate that dominates him, we stand aghast at the strange coincidence of chance or the caprices of Fortune, we bow before the inscrutable designs of the divine providence. The individual appears in turn as the inert material, the powerless plaything and the blind instrument of these forces. But deeper thought leads us beyond even this second view of history. The pity which the individual seems to arouse and the amusement he evokes are in reality deserved not by him but by his fancies, or rather, by those individuals who mistake fancy for truth. Real history is composed of actions, not of fancies and illusions: but actions are the work of individuals, not indeed in so far as they dream, but in the inspiration of genius, the divine madness of truth, the holy enthusiasm of the hero. Fate, Chance, Fortune, God—all these explanations have the same defect: they separate the individual from his product, and instead of eliminating the capricious element, the individual will in history, as they claim to do, they immensely reinforce and increase it. Blind Fate, irresponsible chance, and tyrannical God are all alike capricious: and hence Fate passes into Chance and God, Chance into Fate and God, and God into both the others, all three being equivalent and identical.
The idea which transcends and corrects alike the individualistic and supra-individualistic views of history is the idea of history as rational. History is made by individuals: but individuality is nothing but the concreteness of the universal, and every individual action, simply because it is individual, is supra-individual. Neither the individual nor the universal exists as a distinct thing: the real thing is the one single course of history, whose abstract aspects are individuality without universality and universality without individuality. This one course of history is coherent in all its many determinations, like a work of art which is at the same time manifold and single, in which every word is inseparable from the rest, every shade of colour related to all the others, every line connected with every other line. On this understanding alone history can be understood. Otherwise it must remain unintelligible, like a string of words without meaning or the incoherent actions of a madman.
History then is the work neither of Fate nor of Chance but of the necessity which is not determination and the liberty which is not chance. And since the religious view, that history is the work of God, has this advantage and superiority over the others, that it introduces a cause for history other than fate or chance, and therefore not properly speaking a cause at all, but a creative activity, a free and intelligent mind, it is natural that out of gratitude to this higher view no less than by the suitability of the language we should be led to give to the rationality of history the name of God who rules and governs all things, and to call it the Divine Providence. In so naming it, we at the same time purge the title of its mythical dross which debased God and his providence afresh into a fate or a chance. Thus providence in history, in this final logical form, has double value as a criticism of individual illusions, when they come forwardas the entire and only reality of history, and as a criticism of divine transcendence. And we may say that this is the point of view which always has been and always is adopted, as if instinctively, without the profession of an explicit theory, by all minds naturally gifted with that particular faculty which we call the historic sense.
If now, to return to Vico, we ask how he solved the problem of the motive force of history, and what was the precise content for him of the concept of providence in the objective sense, it is perfectly easy to exclude the supposition that his was the transcendent or miraculous Providence which had formed the subject of Bossuet's eloquentDiscours.It is easy both because in all his philosophy he invariably reduces the transcendent to the immanent, and repeats over and over again here that his providence operates by natural means or (using scholastic phraseology) by secondary causes: and because upon this point his interpreters are practically unanimous.
No less insistent is his criticism of fate and chance, or according to his threefold division fortune, fate and chance. He observes that the doctrine of fate moves in a vicious circle, because the eternal series of causes in which it holds the world bound and chained, depends upon the will of Jupiter, and at the same time Jupiter is subject to fate; whence it results that the Stoics are themselves entangled in that "chain of Jupiter" with which they would imprison all things human. These three concepts, corresponding to that of opportunity when an object of desire is in question, to that of good luck in the case of unhoped-for events, and to that of accident in the case of the unexpected, are distinctions of the subjective understanding rather than anything else: objectively they come under one single law which may also be called fortune, if with Plato we recognise opportunityas the mistress of human affairs: and all three are manifestations and paths of the divine Providence which is intelligence, liberty and necessity. The creator of the world of nations "was indeed Mind, since men made it by their intelligence: it was not Fate, because they made it by free choice, nor yet Chance, since to all eternity on doing thus the same results follow."
Vico lights up in the most fanciful ways the comedy of errors formed by man's illusions as to the end of his own actions. Men thought they were escaping the threats of the thundering sky by carrying their women into caves to satisfy their animal passions out of God's sight: and by thus keeping them safely secluded they founded the first chaste unions and the first societies; marriage and the family. They fortified themselves in suitable places with the intention of defending themselves and their families: and in reality, by thus fortifying themselves in fixed places they put an end to their nomadic life and primitive wanderings, and began to learn agriculture. The weak and disorderly, reduced to the extremity of hunger and mutual slaughter, to save their lives took refuge in these fortified places, and became servants to the heroes: and thus without knowing it they raised the family to an aristocratic or feudal status. The aristocrats, feudal chiefs or patricians, their rule once established, hoped to defend and secure it by the strictest treatment of their servants the plebeians: but in this way they awoke in the servants a consciousness of their own power and made the plebeians into men, and the more the patricians prided themselves on their patriciate and struggled to preserve it, the more effectively they worked to destroy the patrician state and to create democracy. Thus, says Vico, the world of nations issues "from a mind widely different from, sometimes quite opposed, always superior, to the particular ends set before themselves by men: which restricted ends have beenmade means to wider ends, and employed to preserve the human race upon this earth."
It may be gathered from some of our quotations from Vico that he sometimes tended to conceive men as conscious of their own utilitarian ends but unconscious of moral ends. This would logically lead to explaining social life on exclusively utilitarian principles, and to considering morality as an accident relatively to the human will and therefore not really moral: an external accretion more or less capable of holding mankind together, or the obscure work of a supramundane providence. This utilitarianism especially creeps into a passage where he says that man, on account of his corrupt nature, being under the tyranny of self-love which compels him to make private utility his chief guide and to want every useful thing for himself and nothing for his fellow, unable to hold his passions in check so as to direct them by justice, in the state of nature desires only his own safety; after taking a wife and begetting children, desires his safety and the safety of his family; after attaining civil life, desires his own safety together with the safety of his city; after extending his rule over other peoples, he desires the safety of the nation; after joining with other nations in wars, treaties, alliances and commerce, he desires his safety and that of all mankind: and "in all these circumstances he principally desires his own interest." For this reason "it can be nothing else than divine providence that binds him down within such ordinances as to maintain by justice the society of the family, the state and ultimately of mankind; by which ordinances since man cannot attain what he wants, at least he wants to attain as much utility as is permitted: and this is what is called justice." The public virtue of Rome, he writes elsewhere, "was nothing but a good use made by providence of grave, unsightly and cruel private faults, that states might be preserved at a time when human minds, beingin a state of extreme particularity, could not naturally understand a common good."
Utilitarianism was however, as we know, strongly repugnant to Vico's observed ethics, founded as the latter is upon the moral consciousness or shame; and hence these statements, which unconsciously tend in that direction, can only be explained as resulting from the disturbance sometimes produced in his mind by the lingering remains of the transcendent or theological conception of providence, and also from the confused character of his thought, which prevented him from keeping the idea of individual illusions clearly distinguished from that of individual aims; so that he sometimes substituted the second when he ought to have been dealing solely with the first. If the provident deity is "the unity of the spirit which informs and animates the world of nations," these do not fail to obtain their particular ends in order that it may move on to its universal ones, but both alike are realised in them: and man is at every moment both utilitarian and moral, or at least supposes himself to be moral when he is utilitarian or utilitarian when he is really moral.
In any case, and in spite of these vacillations or rather confusions, the conception of particular ends as the vehicle of universal and of illusion as accompanying and co-operating with action implies a dialectical conception of the movement of history, and the transcending of the problem of evil. This problem is in fact very little emphasised by Vico, owing to the strength of his belief in the universal government of providence and of his persuasion that so-called evil is not only willed by man under the appearance of good, but is itself essentially a good. In a few rare passages in his earliest writings, where he encounters the problem of evil, Vico solves it simply in the sense that we men because of our iniquity which leads us to "regard ourselves, not this universeof things" (nosmetipsos, non hanc rerum universitatem spectamus) consider as evil those things which run counter to us, "which yet, since they contribute to the common nature of the world, are good" (quae tamen, quia in mundi commune conferunt, bona sunt).
Vico's conception of history thus became truly objective, freed from divine arbitrament, but freed equally from the rule of trifling causes and gossiping explanations, and acquiring a knowledge of its own essential end, which is to understand the nexus of facts, the logic of events; to be the rational reconstruction of a rational fact. Historical study at this time suffered less from the first of these errors (the theological conception had been ever since the beginning of the Italian Renaissance falling into universal decay) than from that form of history which was just then acquiring the name of "pragmatic," which restricted itself to the personal aspect of events, and failing by these means to reach full historical truth tried to gain warmth and life by means of political and moral instruction. A monument of pragmatic history arose in Vico's own country and contemporaneously with theScienza Nuova:Pietro Giannone'sCivil History of the Kingdom of Naples.The author was a man of his own district and age, and wrote a great work in the sphere of polemic, and even in certain respects of history: but such that all its greatness only serves to emphasise the greatness of Vico's book. If Vico had had to describe the origins of ecclesiastical property and power in the Middle Ages, he would have been able to write of something very different from the guile of popes, bishops and abbots, and the simplicity of dukes and emperors. And as we shall see, whenever he undertook to investigate any part of history he actually did discover in it something very different from these things.
The mind, after traversing its course of progress, after rising from sensation successively to the imaginative and the rational universal and from violence to equity, is bound in conformity with its eternal nature to re-traverse the course, to relapse into violence and sensation, and thence to renew its upward movement, to commence a reflux.
This is the philosophical meaning of Vico's "reflux," but not the exact manner in which we find it expressed in his writings, where the eternal circle is considered almost exclusively as exemplified in the history of nations, as a reflux in the civil affairs of man. Civilisation comes to an end in the "barbarism of reflection," which is worse than the primitive barbarism of sensation; for while the latter was not without a wild nobility, the former is contemptible, untrustworthy and treacherous; and thus it is necessary that this evil subtlety of malicious intellect should rust away through the long centuries of a new barbarism of sensation. We must however withdraw and purge the conception of "reflux" from historical facts and the sociological scheme, not only to explain the absolute and eternal character which Vico attributes to it, but also to justify the historical representation and sociological law founded upon it, and drawing their cogency primarily from it.
The laws of flux and reflux, laid down by the philosophers and politicians of Greece and of the Italian Renaissance, were founded no less than Vico's upon a philosophy, but upon a very superficial one; they assumed their object to possess external and empty political forms, and endeavoured to fix the succession of these forms upon data of experience or by vague reasonings. But Vico's object is the forms of culture, including in themselves all the activities of life, economy and law, religion and art, science and language, and referring them back to their inmost source, the human mind, he establishes their succession "according to the rhythm of the elementary forms of the mind." Thus all the learning which has been expended in comparing the Vician reflux with the theories of Plato or Polybius, Machiavelli or Campanella, is practically wasted: the more so that Vico (who, as we know, though often misunderstanding his predecessors cannot be accused of wishing to pass them over: in fact, where he thought he found parallel or identical ideas in them, he was apt to boast of the fact) felt no need of mentioning this point, or thought it unimportant. The "circular movement" (ἀνακύκλωσις) of Polybius, the economy of nature by which states alter, change and return to the same point, has been thought almost an anticipation of the eternal ideal history; but Vico sets Polybius with the others, when he asks the reader to consider "how (little) philosophers have thought with knowledge upon their principles of civil government, and with what (little) truth Polybius has reasoned upon its changes." Campanella connected his historical cycles with astrological laws; and Machiavelli conceives the catastrophe which opens the reflux thus: "When human craft and malignity have gone as far as they can go, it happens of necessity that the world purifies itself by one of the three methods (pestilence, famine and deluge, beside the human methods of new religions and languages)in order that men, having become few and chastened, may live more conveniently and become better." The one precedent to which Vico refers, but only to interpret it in a way altogether his own and in fact to give it a totally new content, is the ancient Egyptian tradition of the three successive ages of gods, heroes and men.
If the philosophy lying at its root gives strength to Vico's sociological theory of reflux, the historical element with which it is leavened to some degree weakens it. Vico was especially versed in and attached to Roman history, which had been the first of his historical studies and the object of many years' devotion. The history of Rome accordingly, whether because of his deeper study of it or because of its complexity, impressiveness and long duration, came to stand in Vico's mind as the typical or normal history, to serve as a standard for all others, and be confused with the law of flux and reflux itself. Rome showed him the asylum of Romulus, that is, the transition from the state of nature to the political organism: aristocracies, monarchical at first in appearance only, later not even in appearance: democracy, issuing from its struggle with aristocracy and ending in real monarchy, the perfect form of civil life; thence by a process of degeneration, the barbarism of reflection or civilisation, incomparably worse than the primitive noble barbarism, and following in its train a second condition of wandering in a state of nature and a new barbarism, a new youth, the Middle Ages. It is the history of Rome hardly generalised at all and supplemented here and there by that of Greece, that appears in the Vician aphorisms formulating the laws of social dynamics. Men first feel the prick of necessity, then the attraction of utility: next they become aware of convenience, and after that take delight in pleasure; then dissipate themselves in luxury and finally fall victims to the madness of abusing their resources. There must at first be men of brutestrength like Polyphemus, that man may obey man in the state of family life, and to induce him to obey the law in the future state of civil life. There must be noble and proud men like Achilles, not inclined by nature to yield to their equals, in order to establish over the family the aristocratic type of republic. Then valiant and just men like Aristides and Scipio Africanus are necessary, to open the path to popular liberty. After this arise men of great apparent virtues accompanied by faults no less great, like Alexander or Caesar, acquiring immense popular reputations and introducing monarchy. Later still there must be serious reflective natures like Tiberius to consolidate the monarchy; and lastly wild, dissolute and shameless characters like Caligula, Nero and Domitian to overthrow it.
Owing to this rarefaction of Roman history into typical history, and the simultaneous consolidation of typical history into the history of Rome, Vico's law of reflux is riddled with exceptions, much more common and serious than those of the corresponding empirical laws; so that if as he believes his empirical science is identical with the ideal laws of the mind, its alleged permanency throughout all eternity and the whole universe seems the merest irony. He says that Carthage, Capua and Numantia, the three cities which threatened to dispute with Rome the empire of the world, failed to accomplish the ordained course of human affairs: since the Carthaginians were thwarted by the acuteness of the native African temperament, which by maritime commerce they increased still further: the Capuans by the soft climate and fertility of rich Campania: and the Numantines by their suppression in the first burst of heroism at the hands of Rome, led by Scipio Africanus the conqueror of Carthage, and aided by the forces of the world. And passing from ancient to modern times, America would now be traversing the path of human affairs but for its discovery by Europeans:Poland and England are still aristocratic, but would have arrived at perfect monarchy had not the natural course of civil affairs been hindered by extraordinary causes. As for the Middle Ages, they cannot be considered as in Vico's estimation a true return to the state of nature, if they open with the establishment of Christianity, the religion of the true God; nor in any case does the return to the state of nature and to barbarism seem the only path open to a nation that has attained its ἀκμή, its culmination. The alternative is that a decadent nation should lose its independence and fall under the rule of a better. Nor, lastly, is decadence inevitable if statesmen and philosophers working in harmony can preserve the perfection that has been reached and check the threatened destruction, and if in point of fact, as he observes, the aristocratic republics which survived his own day as remnants of the Middle Ages succeeded in preserving themselves by arts of "superfine wisdom." His own time Vico thought to be one of high civilisation. A complete humanity, he says, seems to be scattered to-day over all nations. A few great monarchs rule the world of nations, and those barbarian monarchs who still exist do so either owing to the persistence of the "common wisdom" of imaginative and cruel religions, or because of the natural temperaments of their respective peoples. The nations which form the empire of the Czar of Russia are of a sluggish disposition; those of the Khan of Tartary are an effeminate race; the subjects of the Negus of Ethiopia and the King of Fez and of Morocco are few and weak. In the temperate zone Japan maintains a heroic character not unlike that of Rome in the period of the Punic wars; her people are warlike, her language resembling Latin, her religion a fierce one of terrible gods all loaded with formidable weapons. The Chinese on the other hand, whose religion is mild, cultivate literature and are humane in the highest degree: the peoples of the Indies are alsohumane and practise the arts of peace; the Persians and Turks mingle the rude doctrine of their religion with an Asiatic softness, the Turks especially tempering their arrogance with pomp, magnificence, liberality and gratitude. Europe is above all humane, composed as it is of great monarchies and universally professing the Christian faith which inculcates an infinitely pure and perfect idea of God and commands charity to the whole human race. Vico fixed his attention upon the confederacy of the Swiss cantons and the united provinces of Holland, which reminded him of the Aetolian and Achaean leagues, and on the composition of the German Empire, a system of free states and sovereign princes, which seemed to him a kind of attempt in the direction of a great aristocratic state; the most perfect of all, and the ultimate form of civil life, since no other can be conceived superior to it, reproducing as it does the earliest form, the aristocracy of patricians each supreme in his own family and all united in the ruling class of the first state; but reproducing it in a form not of barbarism but of the highest civilisation. Such is the humanity by which Europe is on every hand distinguished, that it abounds with every element contributory to human happiness, mental pleasures no less than bodily comforts, and all this in virtue of the Christian religion, teaching as it does sublime truths, supported by the most learned philosophers of the Gentile races and of the three greatest languages of the world, Hebrew, Greek and Latin, and thus uniting the wisdom of authority with that of reason, the choicest philosophical doctrine with the most highly developed philological learning. Can this lofty civilisation, safeguarded as it is by Christianity, be moving, or ever likely to move towards a new state of nature? It is difficult to discover Vico's real opinion on this point. Among his verses there is a poem of a profoundly pessimistic tone, but this is a youthful effusion, and in any case refers to the end ofthe world as imminent, rather than to a future social decadence. In his letters there is a melancholy picture of the condition of learning in his time: but it applies to this restricted field only, not to the sphere of social and political life. On the other hand, in his last philosophical work, theDe mente heroica,referring to those who declared that all things were now perfect and that no new tasks could arise, he says that the tide of progress is flowing at its strongest. "The world is still young: for only in the last seven hundred years, four hundred of which were spent in barbarism, how many new discoveries have been made! How many new arts have arisen! How many new sciences have been developed!" (Mundus iuvenescit adhuc; nam septingentis non ultra abhinc annis, quorum tamen quadringentos barbaries percurrit, quot nova inventa! quot novae artes! quot novae scientiae excogitatae!) But we may observe that theDe mente heroicais an official oration, and that Vico may on that account have suppressed for the occasion his doubts or his deepest convictions. In any case, how can we reconcile the prophecy of an imminent collapse with the rise of that creation of providence, the New Science, shedding upon the life of nations a light which rendered possible the diagnosis and cure of their ailments? On the whole it is probable that the difficulty of determining Vico's opinion as to the fate of contemporary society is due to the fact that he had really no settled conviction on the subject, and was led hither and thither in various and contrary directions by the influence of hopes and fears.
If it had not been disturbed by the scheme of Roman history, the empirical theory of the reflux would never have been forced to admit so many and serious exceptions; nor would it have fallen into such painful confusions. It would have accommodated its author's historical observations with greater ease, and its general characteristics would have been much simpler and more general. Itwould have consisted primarily in the determination and illustration of the connexion between predominantly imaginative and predominantly intellectual, spontaneous and reflective, periods, the latter periods issuing out of the former by an increase of energy, and returning to them by degeneration and decomposition. Political history shows over and over again the spectacle of aristocracies declining from their first strength to a debased and contemptible state and yielding before the onset of classes less refined or even absolutely uncultured, but of stouter moral fibre; while these again, after becoming civilised in their turn and attaining the highest development of the historical idea whose germ they bear within themselves, enter upon a new period of decay and fermentation, from which issues a new ruling class in the vigour of a youthful barbarism. The history of philosophy again shows positive and speculative periods; philosophical solutions congeal into scholastic theory and dogma, the mind reverts to the mere unthinking observation of particular fact, and the speculative process arises once more. Literary history, too, speaks of periods of realism and idealism, romantic and classical periods: of a corrupt classicism, Alexandrian or decadent art, and of a romantic barbarism which arises from it. These are true cases of Vico's reflux. But since the nature of the mind which underlies these cycles is outside time and therefore exists in every moment of time, we must not exaggerate the difference of the periods: and if on the one hand the outline of the law must be distinct, it must on the other hand not lose a certain elasticity. We must never forget that at every period, aristocratic or democratic, romantic or classical, positive or speculative, and even in every individual and every fact, moments both aristocratic and democratic, romantic and classical, positive and speculative can be observed; and that these distinctions are to a great extent quantitative and made for the sake ofconvenience. These facts should lead us to avoid alike maintaining the law at all costs and so falling into artificiality, and rejecting it entirely and so refusing the help which may be derived from general and approximative views.
Thus understood and amended, not only is the theory free from the great and striking exceptions which are necessary when it is modelled upon the history and final catastrophe of Rome, but the accusations of undue uniformity lodged against Vico disappear. Vincenzo Cuoco, one of the first, if not the first intelligent student of Vico's works, remarks concerning and in criticism of the law of reflux, that "nature never resembles itself; it is man who by compounding his observations forms classes and names." This is perfectly true; but if applied to this case it would be an argument not against the Vician reflux but against every sort of empirical human science. Others accused Vico of overlooking groups of causes of great historical weight, such as climate, racial and national character, and exceptional occurrences. But, omitting the fact that he often mentions these things, for he connects national character and climate with the forms and changes of states, and mentions events and circumstances which upset the natural and ordinary course of national history, for example in his discussion of Greek history, the truth is that he was bound to ignore them and could not waste time over such things, since his concern was with uniformities and not with divergences, or rather with certain uniformities and not with certain others which compared with the former were negligible divergences. Similarly—the parallel is an obvious one, and indeed is more than a parallel—any one who attempts to trace the general characteristics of the different periods of life, infancy, childhood, adolescence and so forth, will ignore the comparative rapidity and slowness of development due to differences of climate, race or accidental circumstances.Another of these true but irrelevant charges is that Vico denied the communication and interpenetration of civilisations, and insisted that they arise separately in different nations without any mutual knowledge and therefore without reciprocal imitation. This charge has been met by the observation that Vico does not fail to record cases of the influence of one people upon another and of the transmission of civilisations and their products; the transmission for example of alphabetic writing from the Chaldaeans to the Phoenicians and from them to the Egyptians; and that in any case his law is not empirical but philosophical and refers to the spontaneous creative activity of the human mind. The point at issue is however precisely the empirical aspect of this law, not the philosophical: and the true reply seems to us to be, as we have already suggested, that Vico could not take and ought not to have taken other circumstances into account, just as—to recall one instance—any one who in studying the various phases of life describes the first manifestations of the sexual craving in the vague imaginations and similar phenomena of puberty, does not take into account the ways in which the less experienced may be initiated into love by the more experienced, since he is setting out to deal not with the social laws of imitation but with the physiological laws of organic development. If it is said that even without imitation or sophistication the sexual craving arises no less and demands satisfaction, such a statement doubtless merely asserts the incontrovertible truth of a certain very ancient Eastern tale included by Boccaccio in theDecameron: but at the same time it supplies the most complete parallel to the famous and much controverted aphorism of Vico.
Nor is the Vician law of reflux necessarily opposed, as has often been thought, to the conception of social progress. It would be so opposed if instead of being a law of mereuniformity it were one of identity, in agreement with the idea of an unending cyclical repetition of single individual facts which has been adopted by certain extravagant minds of both ancient and modern times. The reflux of history, the eternal cycle of the mind, can and must be conceived, even if Vico does not so express it, as not merely diverse in its uniform movements, but as perpetually increasing in richness and outgrowing itself, so that the new period of sense is in reality enriched by all the intellect and all the development that preceded it, and the same is true of the new period of the imagination or of the developed mind. The return of barbarism in the Middle Ages was in some respects uniform with ancient barbarism; but it must not for that reason be considered as identical with it, since it contains in itself Christianity, which summarises and transcends ancient thought.
Whether the conception of progress is formulated and thrown into relief by Vico is quite another question. Vico does not deny progress; he even refers to it in speaking of the conditions of his own time as an actual fact: but he has no conception of it and still less does he throw such a conception into relief. His philosophy, while it attains the lofty vision of the process of mind in obedience to its own laws, nevertheless retains by reason of this failure to apprehend the progressive enrichment of reality an element of sadness and desolation. The individual character of men and events is obliterated in Vico; individuals and events are represented merely as particular cases of one aspect of the mind or of one phase of civilisation. Hence we always find Aristides alongside of Scipio and Alexander alongside of Caesar: never Aristides simply as Aristides, Scipio as Scipio, and Alexander and Caesar as Alexander and as Caesar. Progress implies that each fact and each individual has its own unique function; each makes its own contribution, for which no other can be substituted, to the poem of history;and each responds with a deeper voice to the one that went before.
But the reason why Vico was bound to miss the idea of progress and why his studies in history were inevitably one-sided can be clearly perceived only after a review of his metaphysics.
By "metaphysics" we understand Vico's conception of reality as a whole, not of the world of man by itself; and we also include in the meaning of the word his ultimate negative conclusion asserting the unknowability or the imperfect knowability of one or more spheres of reality, or of that highest sphere in which the others reunite.
In point of fact, as we observed in considering the second and latest form of his theory of knowledge, Vico drew a sharp line between the world of man and the world of nature: the former transparent to man because created by him, the latter opaque, because only God its Creator has knowledge of it. And his conception of the total and ultimate reality, the metaphysic which he expounds together with his earlier theory of knowledge, retains the value granted to it by that theory and no other: it is a probable conjecture, but one incapable of verification, and reaches completion in the certitude of revealed theology. Hence this metaphysic remains out of all possible connexion with the New Science, which proceeds by the certain method of truth and cuts itself off from revelation. Vico never rejected it. He discusses it in his autobiography of 1725, the year of the firstScienza Nuova;he refers to it with satisfaction in 1737, seven years after the secondScienza Nuova,when his scientific life was, as he himself considered, at an end. But though he neverrejected it he always kept it aside, so to speak, in a corner of his mind.
This point established, it might seem that there can be nothing more to be said of any philosophical importance about Vico's metaphysics. But this is not the case. Since every department of philosophy implies in itself every other, and since we can therefore always deduce from the treatment of one of the so-called particular philosophical sciences the character of the whole, it is legitimate to examine the New Science and to consider what metaphysic is implicit therein; to determine what philosophical complement is logically supported and demanded by this science.
The New Science, which asserted the full knowability of human affairs, not merely on the surface, like a psychological treatment, but in the depths of their nature: the New Science, which transcended the individual to attain the conception of the mind which informs all things and is Providence: the Science which with divine pleasure contemplated the eternal cycle of the mind, elevated as it was to such a height, necessarily tended to interpret the whole of reality, both Nature and God, as Mind. That this tendency was objective to the New Science, and not subjective to Vico, in whose mind the science so to speak thought itself out, need hardly be repeated. Vico personally not only did not encourage it but actually curtailed and repressed it so energetically as to leave no trace of it in his works. There was no philosophical doctrine of which he had such terror and against which he so frequently waged war as that of pantheism; and perhaps this polemical preoccupation is the only trace, though quite an involuntary trace, visible in his writings of the tendency which he must have observed in himself. He was, and wished to remain, a Christian and a Catholic; transcendence, the personality of God, the substantiality of the soul, though his science did not lead him towardsthem, were uncontrollable necessities to his consciousness. But just as this fact allowed Vico to repress but not to eradicate the essential logical tendency of his thought, so it enables us to recognise that tendency in the facts themselves. An Italian critic, Spaventa, is right when he says that in Vico the necessity of a new metaphysic makes itself felt; another, a German Catholic, is equally right in denning his system as "semi-pantheistic." It would perhaps be more dangerous to go on to say, with the Italian above mentioned, that Vico makes an advance on the Cartesian idea of two substances and the Spinozistic of two attributes, and even on the Leibnitian doctrine of the monad, and that he transcends parallelism and pre-established harmony by distinguishing the two providences, the two attributes, nature and mind, in such a way that the one is a step to the other, and by conceiving the point of union and the origin of the opposition as an unfolding or development, so that nature is regarded as the phenomenon and proper basis of mind, the pre-supposition which mind creates to itself in order to be really mind, to be a true unity. For while we may doubt whether the distinction of the two attributes or two providences, the natural and the human, is a well-grounded and inevitable consequence of conceiving substance as mind and thought, it is impossible to deduce the evolutionary transition from one to the other as a tendency implicit in Vico's conception of thought. There is certainly particular documentary evidence for this latter particular tendency: but it is scanty and unconvincing, and occurs not in the system of the New Science but rather in the chronologically earlier system.
For the metaphysic laid down by Vico in the earlier phase of his thought is not, as it has seemed to some, and as it may at first sight appear, entirely devoid of significance and value. It shows the same aversion to materialism and the same love of idealism which inspirethe meditations of the New Science. The philosophy of Epicurus, which takes as its starting-point matter already formed and divided into ultimate particles of various shapes, composed of other parts which are supposed to be indivisible owing to the absence of void between them, seemed to him a philosophy such as to satisfy the naïve mind of a child or the uncritical mind of a woman; and the delight with which he followed the explanation of the forms of material nature according to this philosopher, in the poem of Lucretius, was equalled by the amusement and pity with which he watched him forced by stern necessity to lose himself in countless ineptitudes and follies in trying to explain the phenomena of thought. Vico accused the Cartesian physics no less than the Epicurean of a "false position," since it also takes ready-formed matter as its starting-point, differing from the Epicurean matter in that, while the latter limits the divisibility of matter at the atoms, the former makes its elements infinitely divisible; that the one places motion in the void, the other in the solid; the one initiates the shaping of its infinite worlds by a casual declination of atoms from the downward path of their own weight and gravitation, the other generates its indefinite vortices from an impetus imparted to a section of inert and therefore not yet divided matter, which on receiving this motion divides into fragments, and, hampered by its mass, necessarily makes an effort to move in a straight line, and being unable to do so through its solidity begins, divided as it is into fragments, to move about the centre of each fragment. In this way while Epicurus entrusted the world to chance, Descartes subjected it to fate; and it was in vain that to save himself from materialism he superimposed upon his physics a quasi-Platonic metaphysic, by which he attempted to establish two substances, the one extended and the other intelligent, and to make room for an immaterial agent; for these two parts werenot reconciled in his system, since his mechanical physics included in itself a metaphysic like the Epicurean, establishing one kind and one only of active material substance. For similar or analogous reasons Vico rejected the philosophies of Gassendi, Spinoza and Locke; and the physical science of other authors such as Robert Boyle seemed to him valuable for purposes of medicine and the "spargiric art," but useless for philosophy. Galileo he considered to have looked at physical science with the eye of a great geometrician, but without the aid of the full light of metaphysics. He had sympathy with philosophers who were also geometricians, and therefore with the Pythagorean or Timaean physics, according to which the world consists of numbers; with the Platonic metaphysics, which from the form of our minds without any other hypothesis establishes, upon our knowledge and consciousness of certain eternal truths which are in our mind and cannot be ignored or denied, the eternal idea as the principle of all things; with the doctrine of metaphysical points, attributed by him to Zeno the Stoic; and finally with the philosophy of the Italian Renaissance, the period adorned by Ficino, Pico della Mirandola, Steuco, Nifo, Mazzoni, Piccolomini, Acquaviva and Patrizio.
The fundamental concept of his cosmology was supplied by the metaphysical point, in which the employment of mathematics in metaphysics, a process admitted by Vico as analogous to that of construction, found expression. Just as from the geometrical point proceed the line and the surface, and the point which is defined as having no parts supplies the proof that lines otherwise incommensurable can be divided equally into their component points, so it is legitimate to postulate points not geometrical but metaphysical, which though not extended generate extension. Between God, who is rest, and matter, which is motion, the intermediate place is taken by the metaphysical point, whose attribute is conation,the indefinite energy and attempt on the part of the universe to bring into being and sustain each particular thing. The existence of matter is nothing but an indefinite power of keeping the universe extended, which underlies all extended objects equally however unequal they may be, and also an indefinite power of motion underlying all particular motions, however unequal. Behind a grain of sand lies something which when this particle is divided gives to it and preserves in it an infinite extension and magnitude; so that the whole mass of the universe is included in the grain of sand, if not actually, yet potentially and in capacity. This effort of the universe, underlying each smallest particle of matter, is neither the extension of the particle nor the extension of the universe: it is the thought of God, which, free from all materiality, gives motion and impulse to the whole. Every particular determination of reality agrees with this fundamental truth. Time is divisible, eternity indivisible; disturbances of the mind wax and wane, its quiescence has no degrees; extended things are corruptible, unextended things permanent in their indivisibility; body can be divided, mind cannot; possibilities are at a single point, accidents are everywhere; science is one, while opinion produces differences; virtue is neither in one place nor another, vice walks up and down in every direction; the good is one, the bad is innumerable; in every kind of thing in a word the best occurs in the category of the indivisible.
Substance in general, which underlies and sustains things, is divided into two species, extended substance or that which equally supports unequal extensions, and thinking substance which equally supports unequal thoughts. And just as one part of extension is divided from another but indivisible in the substance of the body, so one part of thought, that is to say a determinate thought, is divided from another but indivisible in thesubstance of the soul. Activity or freedom is peculiar to the soul, and entirely denied to body: and Descartes, in making a conation of body the beginning of his physics, was strictly adopting the methods of a poet and falling into the anthropomorphic conceptions of primitive races. The phenomena which students of mechanics call activities, forms, or powers, are insensible movements by which bodies move either, as the ancients said, towards their centres of gravity, or, as the modern theory of mechanics asserts, away from their centre of motion. The communication of motion, moreover, is just as inconceivable in body as is activity. To grant it would be equivalent to granting the interpenetration of bodies, since motion is nothing but matter in motion; the blow given to a ball is only the occasion for the energy of the universe, which was so weak in the ball as to make it seem at rest, to expand and thus to give it an appearance of more sensible motion. On the other hand, Vico agreed with the Cartesians, especially Malebranche, as to the origin of ideas, which he inclined to believe that God creates in us from time to time. He also held with the Cartesians that the lower animals are automata; and he agreed with all contemporary thought as to the subjectivity of secondary qualities.
Setting aside these last doctrines, which are not Vico's own, indeed he scarcely refers to them, the fundamental doctrine of metaphysical points is all his own. His attribution of it to an imaginary Zeno, in whose person were combined and confused the Eleatic and the Stoic (a mistake common in the philosophical literature of the time), can deceive nobody, and did not even deceive Vico himself, who when pressed explained how he had been led to that interpretation of Aristotle's statements about Zeno, and finally says that if the doctrine cannot be accepted as that of Zeno, he will adopt it as his own, without the patronage of any great names. Nor on theother hand can it be traced to the Leibnitian monadology. We cannot be sure that Vico was acquainted with this doctrine. In any case he does not mention it, while Leibniz he does mention in terms of deep respect: and the resemblance is very vague, for the metaphysical points are not monads. The discovery by Leibniz and Newton of the differential calculus may however be said to have influenced him. It was then for the first time becoming known in Italy; and its terminology of maximum infinities, greater and less infinities, and so on would, says Vico, completely baffle the human understanding, since the infinite admits neither of degrees nor of multiplication, but for the help of a metaphysic which shows that all actual extension and actual movement is a power or capacity for extension and motion always equal to itself and infinite. The contributions of Platonic lines of thought (the Platonism of the Renaissance) and those of Galileo, especially the latter, to Vico's conception have been worked out with even more justice: his originality however is in no degree impaired by these facts.
The idea in which his originality found expression was, no doubt, fantastic and arbitrary, and in consequence bound to remain undeveloped and without influence on Vico's other conceptions. To the reviewer in theGiornale dei letterati,who called this metaphysic a mere sketch, the author replied that it was quite complete: an abortion in fact, rather than a sketch, and, as such, complete. And in theScienza Nuova,beside a few references to the refusal to attribute activity to matter, there is one fugitive but interesting attempt at a connexion with a geometrical or arithmetical metaphysic on the model of that described above. In this passage it is stated that upon the order of material and complex civil affairs the order of numbers, which are abstract and absolutely simple, is imposed: and the fact is noted that governments begin with theone, in domestic monarchy, pass to the few in aristocracy, advance to the many and the all in popular republics, and finally return to the one in civil monarchies, so that humanity moves perpetually from the one to the one, from domestic monarchy to civil monarchy.