But if we can and must deny all value to Vico's cosmology, if the contradictions and obscurities in which he involves himself are manifest, and were observed by critics of his own time, still we cannot deny its dynamic nature as opposed to the mechanicism of contemporary philosophy. The theory of metaphysical points, in which God appears as the great geometrician who creates by knowing and knows by creating the realities of the universe, is as it were a symbol of the necessity of interpreting nature in idealistic language. We find here and there a theologian Vico, an agnostic Vico, or even a fanciful Vico composing cosmological and physical romances: but look where we will among his works, we shall never find a materialistic Vico.
Even this by no means overbold metaphysic aroused suspicions of pantheism, though the author insisted upon the theological doctrine that God's activity is convertibleab intrawith the thing created andab extrawith the fact, and that therefore the world was created in time; that the human soul, which as a mirror of the divine thinks infinity and eternity, is not bounded by the body and therefore not by time, and is therefore immortal; and that man, even if God were to reveal it to him, cannot understand how the infinite enters into finite objects. However, he thought it necessary to conclude his replies to his critics by collecting statements demonstrating his orthodoxy, and clinching the matter with the remark that "since God is in one sense substance and in another His creatures, and since theratio essendior essence is proper to substance, the created substances even as regards their essence are diverse and distinct from the substance of God."
Vico's thought was limited by the idea of transcendence, which prevented him from attaining not only the unity of reality, but also a truly complete knowledge of that world of man which he had so powerfully explained by means of the opposite principle. We now see why Vico, though he did not deny the fact of progress, could have no real conception of it. It has been observed that the conception of progress is foreign to Catholicism and dates from the Protestant Reformation, and that therefore the Catholic Vico was bound to deny himself the use of it. But the conception of an immanent providence is no less irreconcilable with Catholicism, and yet Vico is saturated with this idea. This means that he did not lack the impulse: rather he was unable to pass a certain point beyond which his faith would have been too obviously defeated. Progress, deduced from the immanent providence and introduced into the New Science, would have accentuated the difference within the uniformity, the origin at every moment of something new, the perpetual enrichment of the flux at every reflux: it would have changed history from an orderly traversing and retraversing of the line drawn by God under the eye of God to a drama whoseratio essendiis contained within itself: it would have enmeshed and drawn with it the whole universe and realised the thought of infinite worlds. In face of this vision Vico paused in apprehension and stubbornly refused to proceed: the philosopher in him had yielded to the Catholic.
It is clear from the facts above discussed that the historical portion of the New Science could not take the shape of a history of the human race in which peoples and individuals were recognised as playing each its own unique part in the whole course of events. To enable it to fulfil such a function Vico would have had to close up his system of thought, which was still at one point incomplete and not impervious to the religious idea, and to elevate his provident deity into a progressive deity, determining flux and reflux as the eternal rhythm of the process. Or on the other hand in order to attain the vision of individuality, in the diametrically opposite sense, in history, he would have had to abandon his rudimentary idealistic philosophy, break down the distinction between ordinary and extraordinary providence, and trace the history of man on the plan which God had revealed or permitted him to discover. Vico's orthodoxy rebelled against the former alternative, while his philosophy kept him from the second: and the result of his dilemma was that the history he reconstructed was not and could not be a universal history.
In consequence, it was not what is called a philosophy of history, if that phrase is taken in its original sense of a "universal history "—one which concentrates itsattention upon the broadest and least obvious connexions of facts—"philosophically narrated," more philosophically, that is, than is usual with annalists, anecdotists and compilers dealing with courts, politics and nations. The controversy as to whether Vico or Herder can claim to be the founder of the philosophy of history must be frankly decided in favour of Herder, whose work shows just that procedure of universal history which is lacking in the New Science. On the other hand it would be easy to find numerous predecessors for Herder, beginning with the Hebrew prophets and the scheme of the Four Monarchies, which remained not only in the Middle Ages but well into modern times the constructive scheme of universal history. Nor would it be out of place to add that the so-called philosophy of history, in so far as it is a universal history, constitutes neither a special philosophical science nor a form of history capable of sharp distinction from the rest, except when the passion for making it self-subsistent gives it the appearance of an abstract history or a historicised philosophy. Thus when Vico or Herder is credited with the foundation of a new science in the philosophy of history, the compliment is a doubtful one: a fact which especially in the case of Vico has gone far to obscure the value of their work. In fact, the "New Science of the common character of nations," understood as the equivocal science of the philosophy of history, has eclipsed the New Science as a new philosophy of mind and a rudimentary metaphysic of thought.
The conflict which for the general consciousness existed between science and faith reappears in Vico's treatment of history as a distinction and opposition between Jewish and Gentile history, sacred history and profane. Jewish history was not subjected, he believed, to the laws of history in general. Its course was unique, and its development proceeded on principles peculiarto itself, namely, the direct action of God. The New Science, which in its philosophical part did not give the explanatory principles of this process, was in consequence not compelled to deal with it in its historical part. This is perhaps what Vico would have wished. But the wish was met, setting aside the necessity of guarding against the charge of impiety, which was certainly a danger, by his scruples as a believer, and a conscientious believer; which urged him to look for some kind of harmony between the two histories, since however sharply distinguished (he recalled how even a Gentile writer, Tacitus, had described the Jews as "unsociable"), both alike developed under terrestrial conditions and had points of mutual contact, at least in the origin of mankind and its regeneration by means of Christianity. Following the inherent tendencies of his thought, Vico ought to and would willingly have avoided the narration of universal history and confined himself exclusively to questions of philosophy and philology. But as it happened, he was compelled now and then to depart from his programme and to attempt at once a unification of the two histories and a defence of sacred history based on arguments supplied by science and profane history.
This is the least successful, but a profoundly significant part of his work. He was forced to admit, though the admission was opposed by all his discoveries and outraged his whole system of thought, that the Hebrews had enjoyed the privilege of always keeping intact their memories of the beginning of the world, a memory which other nations claimed in vain; and hence sacred history must supply the true origin and succession of universal history. The necessity of connecting his views on primitive civilisation with Biblical chronology, with the date usually assigned to the creation of the world, with the traditions of a universal deluge and of a race of giants—the necessity of finding, as he says, the "continuityof sacred with profane history"—led him to the most extravagant flights of fancy. After the flood, in the year 1656 from the creation, at the separation of the sons of Noah, while the Hebrews began or continued their sacred history with Abraham and the other patriarchs and then with the laws given to Moses by God, all the other descendants of Shem, Ham, and Japhet, the first race more slowly and for a shorter period, the second and third with greater rapidity and for a longer time, lapsed into the state of nature and wandered over the earth as insensible and savage brutes. And while the Hebrews, subjected to their theocratic government, strictly educated and practising ablution, remained of normal stature, the members of the other races, living without either physical or moral discipline, wallowing in dirt and excrement and absorbing nitrogenous salts (just as the earth is enriched and made fertile by excrement), grew to monstrous and gigantic size. The state of nature lasted a hundred years for the Semites and two hundred for the other two races; at the end of which the earth which had long been sodden with the moisture of the universal deluge began to dry up and emit dry exhalations or fiery matter into the air so as to generate lightning. With lightning, as we already know, and with the mythology of the thundering sky, which is Jupiter, arose in these brutes the consciousness of God and of themselves, by which they became human. Thus begins the "age of the gods," which, socially, is that of domestic monarchy where the father is king and priest. In the course of this age the system of greater deities was gradually established, and the giants, by means of their religions of terror and their domestic education taming the flesh and developing the spiritual element in them, and by the practice of washing, shrank by degrees to the normal size of the men whom we find at the beginning of the next or heroic age.
Such are the chief points in Vico's quaint reconstructionof the earliest history of man upon the earth, harmonised with the account in sacred history. We shall be less inclined to amusement or ridicule if we reflect upon the tragedy underlying the comedy: the tormented conscience of the believer which in its struggle with the philosopher seeks refuge in these extravagant ideas. At any rate, they gave Vico a series of insecure stepping-stones—the flood, the giants, the dry exhalations—which enabled him to cross the torrent of religious tradition and reach the dry land of critical history, where he found the primary starting-point of his philosophy of mind, the state of nature. It may further be suggested that the contact with Hebrew history—the only one which presented itself to him as a history in the strict sense, aunicum,something absolutely individualised even if in a miraculous manner—suggested to him the few attempts met with in his works to assign to various peoples a special function or mission; thus it sometimes appeared to him that the Hebrews representedmens,the Chaldeansratio,and the Japhetic racesphantasia.
Parallel to this imaginary history of the origin of the human race on the earth is Vico's attempt at Biblical apologetics. He lost no opportunity of adducing proofs from profane sources to confirm the statements of sacred history. For instance, a confirmation of the flood and the giants is supplied by the similar traditions of Greek and other nations. The theocratic government, which is not definitely mentioned by any profane history but merely alluded to obscurely by poets in their tales, is met with in the government of the Hebrews before and after the flood. The Hebrews again knew nothing of divination because they lived in direct contact with the true God, while the Chaldees had a system of magic or divination according to the movements of the stars, and the European peoples a system of augury. One certainly feels in all this something of an effort, a will to see or notto see: a kind of self-interruption and stimulation to belief. It is not infrequent among cultured and scientifically educated believers. Again, in his exposition of the historical genesis of grammatical forms, where he says that verbs began with the imperative, the monosyllabic command given by the father to wife, child or slave (es, sta, i, da, fac,etc.), Vico draws from this an indirect demonstration of the truth of Christianity, because the roots of Hebrew verbs are always found in the third person singular of the past tense; a clear proof that the patriarchs must have given their commands to their families in the name of a single God (Deus dixit). This, in Vico's opinion, is "a lightning to confound all those writers who have believed the Hebrews to be a colony proceeding from Egypt; since from the beginning of its foundation the Hebrew tongue had its origin in a single God." But in truth these lightnings instead of descending upon the head of the unbeliever serve only to illuminate the poverty of the arguments upon which apologetics rest, even with a man like Vico; and, objectively considered, the division introduced by religious scruple between sacred and profane history, and the consequent dogmatic treatment of the one, with its strange hypotheses and defences, and critical treatment of the other, produced and still produces an irresistible impression that the seclusion of sacred history from human science is due to the impotence not of the human science but of the sacred history; its impotence, that is, to preserve itself intact within the limits of science. Seldom has a religious scruple so endangered the cause of religion.
But Vico had far too genuine and exacting a scientific sense added to his natural antipathies to permit him ever to become a Selden or a Bossuet; and hence this apologetic for and harmonisation of sacred history remains in him a mere episode, which it is possible to ignore. And since on the other hand he was not permitted to treatphilosophy and history as entirely profane and to represent the complex movement of history according to the fundamental criterion of progress, his only course was to look at the facts from the point of view which his philosophy left open to him, that of flux and reflux, the eternal process and the eternal phases of the mind. Here lay his strength. Here he could recognise the specific, if not strictly the individual, character of laws, customs, poetry and myth, of whole social and cultural formations which history down to his own time had entirely misunderstood. For this reason, in narrating history he was bound to confine himself to emphasising the common aspects of certain groups of facts belonging to various nations and periods. In the New Science, he says, "the whole history of the laws and deeds of Rome and Greece is set forth, not in its particularity and in time, but following the substantial identity of intention and diversity of the modes of expression." Elsewhere he says, "the facts are adduced after the fashion of examples, because they are understood by means of principles," for "to see the principles confirmed by the innumerable host of their consequences is a thing which must await certain other works of ours, which are either as yet unpublished or now in process of publication." In other words, as we know, this science contains on the one hand a philosophical side, and on the other a descriptive or empirical, exemplified in history, in which the Romans figure not as Romans but in virtue of the common nature which they share with Greeks and possibly with Japanese; the history of Rome under the kings or in the early Republican period demonstrates its affinity with that of the earlier centuries of the Middle Ages; and Homer stands not as Homer but as an example of primitive poetry, and across the centuries finds and greets his brother in Dante. It is at once a strength and a limitation, because history emphatically does not fundamentally consistof these resemblances; but without the perception of the resemblances how could we ever determine the differences? Dante is not Homer, the barons are not the "patres," the Athenian Solon is not the Roman Publilius Philo; but certainly Dante is in some respects more closely related to Homer than to Petrarch, the early barons are nearer to the "patres" than to the later courtier-nobles, and Solon is more akin to a Roman tribune or dictator than to any other of the seven sages among whom he is usually placed. To observe these resemblances means denying or rejecting other more superficial ones, and preparing the way for knowledge of individuality by indicating the approximate place where the truth is to be found. Vico classifies, rather than narrates and represents; but there is classification and classification; it may be pressed into the service of a superficial thought or of a profound one. And the historical side of the New Science is one great substitution of profound for superficial classifications.
In this process, which constitutes the strength of Vico's treatment of history, the deficiencies and errors come not from outside the limits of the process but from causes at work within these limits themselves. It has been alleged in defence of Vico that a great part of his errors is due to the scantiness and inadequacy of the materials at his disposal. But the materials for any study are always scanty and inadequate compared to our thirst for knowledge; and in judging a historian the question is not this, but the method, cautious or incautious, on which he employs the materials that are at his disposal. Again, it has been said that Vico has the faults of his age; but this is to forget that he was born in the century which saw the development of the highly critical philology of Joseph Scaliger and the whole Dutch school, and that Zeno, Maffei and Muratori were his contemporaries in Italy. The truth is that just as the attitude of thoughtalready described in Vico confused pure philosophical method with the determinations of empirical science and historical data, so it confused historical research with the mixture of philosophy and empirical science. Vico was in a state similar to that of drunkenness; confusing categories with facts, he felt absolutely certaina prioriof what the facts would say: instead of letting them speak for themselves he put his own words into their mouth. A common illusion with him was to seem to see connexions between things where there was really none. This made him turn every hypothetical conjunction into a certainty, and read in other writers instead of their actual words things that they had never written, but which were internally spoken by himself unawares and projected into the writings of others. Exactitude was for him an impossibility, and in his mental excitement and exaltation he almost despised it: what harm can ten, twenty, a hundred errors do to what is substantially true? Exactitude, "diligence," as he says, "must lose itself in arguments of any size, because it is a minute, and because minute also a slow-footed virtue." Fanciful etymologies, daring and groundless mythological interpretations, changes of name and date, exaggerations of fact, false quotations are met with throughout his pages, and many may be found noted in the fine edition of the secondScienza Nuovaby Nicolini. Thus, as we observed in speaking of his philosophy that Vico's was not an acute mind, so now in speaking of his historical work we must say that it was not critical. But as while we denied him acuteness on a small scale we acknowledged his profundity or acuteness on a large scale, so here also we ought to add that if Vico lacked the critical sense in small matters, in great matters he had abundance of it. Careless, headstrong and confused in detail; cautious, logical and penetrative in essentials; he exposes his flank or rather his whole body to the attacksof the most miserable and mechanical pedant, and over-awes and inspires respect in every critic and historian however great. And,totus mensthough he is and all absorbed by his own discoveries, often he does not give his power of investigation and observation time and room to develop, and instead of history he invents myths and investigates romances; but when he allows the power free play, it does wonders in the field of history too, as we shall try to show in the following chapters.
But to judge the historical views of Vico by confronting them, as many have done, with those of modern historical research and praising or depreciating them accordingly would hardly be conclusive. Where the two terms of the comparison agreed the agreement might be fortuitous: where they diverged, the later doctrine might be but a development or consequence of the earlier attempt, and in any case the modern state of historical knowledge by no means provides an absolute standard. On the other hand it would be out of place, as well as beyond our power, to rehandle all the problems dealt with by Vico to see what there is of truth and falsehood in his conclusions. That would mean no less than writing a thirdScienza Nuovamore adapted to our own times. Our task is merely to indicate the principal historical problems which Vico set before himself, to state the solutions he gave, and always to keep in mind the state of knowledge not in our own day but in Vico's, so as to determine what progress in historical study may be set down to his influence.
The period of historical research which preceded the life of Vico was, as we have said, by no means credulous or uncritical. The day was past when "chronicles of the world" were compiled, when any fable and any falsification however gross was accepted as history: and the seed sown by a few humanists had borne fruit in the Italian men of learning, the French juridical school, the school of Scaliger mentioned above, and all the great chronologists, epigraphists, archaeologists, topographers and geographers who in the seventeenth century formed the first immense critical collections of sources for ancient history. While the philologists were thus improving and perfecting their methods, detecting impostures and bridging lacunae, Bayle, Fontenelle, Saint-Évremond and many others were engaged in spreading a scepticism or historical Pyrrhonism as it was also called, due to the intellectualistic philosophy; and thus anticipating the polemic against the truth and utility of history which was to arise with immense vigour in the following century.
This latter tendency was hypercritical rather than critical, its end being the destruction of history in general: and since historical scepticism was very apt to assume the character of a paradox adapted to the needs of elegant society and the wits, its influence on the progress ofresearch was very small, or at most it succeeded in producing strong reactions, one of which is represented by Vico, in favour of tradition and authority. It is on the other hand only proper to observe the failings of the first seriously scientific efforts of philologists and antiquaries. They rehabilitated witnesses, laid bare falsifications, reconstructed lists of rulers and magistrates, connected chronology and contradicted certain legends: but, whether owing to the tendencies of thought usual among pure scholars and philologists or because of the general atmosphere of their century's culture, they neither had nor conveyed a feeling for the antique and the primitive. Strong in detail, they were weak in essentials. When one of the most brilliant grasped, for instance, the importance of ballad-literature as a means of transmitting history at a period when the use of writing was unknown or uncommon, he did not receive from this observation and others like it such a shock as might stimulate him to recast from top to bottom his intuition and conception of primitive life, as was the case with Vico, who almost in a flash grasped the philosophical form of certitude and the two periods of mental and social life corresponding to it in actual history: the periods of obscurity and of legend.
Vico himself started from a kind of scepticism, a scepticism as regards the prejudices of scholars and nations generally about the character and facts of antiquity: and in combating these prejudices he drew up a series of principles or "aphorisms," inspired apparently by Bacon's "idola," to which they present an analogy in the field of historical research. Vico puts the student on his guard first against the "magnificent opinions" which have been held up to his own day "concerning the most remote and least known antiquity": a naïve illusion whose origin he traces to the fact that man when in a state of entire ignorance erects himself into a rule for the universe. Here is the closest analogywith Bacon: for this statement is precisely like the class of "idola tribus," in which thought makes itself the rule of things "on the analogy of man, not of the universe" (ex analogia hominis, non ex analogia universi). On the same observation is founded the remark that "rumour grows in its course,"fama crescit eundo,and Tacitus'somne ignotum pro magnifico est,everything unknown is taken for something great. Hence arises the habit of interpreting ancient customs in the expectation of finding them similar or superior to those of modern civilised life. Thus Cicero admired the humanity of the early Romans in calling enemies in war "guests": not realising that the fact was precisely the opposite of this, and that guests werehostes,strangers and enemies. In the same way Seneca, by way of proving the duty of kindness to slaves, recalled that masters were anciently called "fathers of the family"; as if"patres familias"might not have been the very reverse of kind not only to slaves and servants but to their own children, regarded as on the level of slaves. The same prejudice led Grotius, in his desire to show the gentleness of the ancient Germans, to collect a great number of barbaric laws in which homicide was punished by a fine of a few pence: which is on the contrary really a proof of the cheapness of the blood of poor rustic vassals, who are precisely the "homines" mentioned by these laws.
In the second place, he warns us not to trust to the "conceit of nations," all of which, Greek or barbarian, Chaldean, Scythian, Egyptian, or Chinese, claimed, as Diodorus Siculus observes, to have founded humanity, discovered the amenities of life, and preserved their memory intact from the beginning of the world. Each of them, having for several thousand years had no communication with the others which might have led to the sharing of ideas, resembled in the obscurity of its chronology a man who sleeping in a very small chamber is misled by the darkness into believing it much too large ever to touchit with his hand. He who accepts these dreamer's boasts for certain knowledge finds himself in the difficulty of having to choose between the various memories of various nations, all of which with equal justification claim to be original.
By the side of national conceit Vico placed the "conceit of the learned," who desire their own knowledge to be as old as the world, and consequently delight in fancying an inaccessible esoteric wisdom among the ancients, coinciding miraculously with the opinions professed by each one of themselves, which they dress in the garb of antiquity in order to enforce their acceptance. Such was the mistake not only of Plato, especially in the researches of theCratylus,but of all historians, ancient and modern: Vico himself had fallen into it, and was therefore able to study it closely in his own case, when in theDe antiquissimahe believed himself to have found in the etymologies of Latin words the proof of an Italian metaphysic exactly agreeing with his own doctrines of the conversion of theveruniwith thefactumand of metaphysical points.
From these three prejudices, especially from the conceit of the learned, follows the fourth, here called that of the "sources" or "channels of culture," ironically called by Vico the theory of "scholastic succession among nations." Upon this theory Zoroaster for instance instructed Berosus for Chaldaea, Berosus in his turn Mercurius Trimegistus for Egypt, Mercurius taught Atlas the Ethiopian lawgiver, Atlas Orpheus the Thracian missionary, and finally Orpheus established his school in Greece. Long journeys these, and easy forsooth to those primitive nations which, scarcely out of the state of savagery, lived perched on mountains in almost inaccessible situations, unknown even to their neighbours! And these long journeys were undertaken with the object of spreading discoveries, which any nation could make for itself. If, when nations came to know each other through wars and treaties, they were found to agree,that was because they all contained some motive of truth and sprang from the same needs of man. Was it necessary to suppose the Athenian or Mosaic law to have affected that of the Romans, as did these "comparers" or delivers of laws, in order to explain the origin of the right recognised in Palestine, Athens and Rome to kill the thief by night? Was it necessary for Pythagoras to travel spreading the doctrine of the transmigration of souls, which we find as far afield as India?
There remained the prejudice of considering the ancient historians as best informed about primitive times: whereas in the history of origins they knew as little as, or less than, ourselves. As for Greek history, Vico found, or rather imagined that he found, in Thucydides, a confession that the Greeks up to the generation preceding that historian knew nothing of their own antiquity: and he also observed that it was only in the time of Xenophon that Greek historians began to have any precise information upon Persian affairs. Roman historians commonly began with the foundation of Rome: but the beginning of Rome was certainly not the beginning of the world. Rome was a new city founded in the midst of a large number of small and more ancient peoples in Latium: and even in the case of Rome Livy refuses to guarantee the truth of the facts of the earlier centuries of its history up to the Punic wars, which he is in a position to describe more accurately. He even confesses frankly that he does not know at what point Hannibal made his great and memorable entry into Italy, whether by the Cottian Alps or the Apennines. So well informed were the ancient historians!
Owing to these and similar sceptical principles, the whole of Greek history to the time of Herodotus and of Roman down to the second Punic war seemed to Vico quite uncertain, an unclaimed territory, so to speak, where one might enter and take possession by squatter'sright. He entered armed with positive principles directly issuing from the negative ones we have enumerated. For if Vico denied the credibility of historians distant in time from the facts they described, if he discounted national pride, if he laid bare the illusions and charlatanism of the learned, he nevertheless did not rest content with this work of destruction. In place of the old untrustworthy method he had banished, he endeavoured to supply a new, of better qualities and greater tenacity; a system of methods by which it was possible to acquire new historical documents and also to improve the study of those already known. No advance in historical knowledge is in fact ever made except by thus turning from the received narrative to the document underlying it, which alone has the power of confirming, correcting and enriching the narrative.
The first of Vico's contributions to historical method, the first source for the knowledge of the earliest civilisations which he exposed, is the etymology of language. The usual methods of this study in his time were purely arbitrary: it proceeded by considering the sound of each syllable or letter and looking for other superficial resemblances, and inferring from these facts the derivation of a word from this or that language, Latin, Greek or Hebrew. But etymology becomes a fruitful study only when it is remembered that language is the best evidence for the ancient life of a people, the life lived by them while the language was in the making: and when the student accordingly never ceases to explain language by customs and customs by language. Thus the etymology of abstract words leads us into the heart of a purely rustic society; forintellegere,to understand, for example, recallslegere,to collect the produce of the fields (hencelegumina,vegetables);disserere,to discuss, refers to scattering seed; and the majority of words for inanimate things reveal relations with the human body and its members,and the sensations and passions of man; thus "mouth" means any aperture, "lip" the edge of a pot, "forehead" and "back" are used for before and behind; and so on. Vico aimed at one science of etymology common to all native languages, composed of monosyllabic, and largely onomatopoeic roots: another of foreign loan-words, introduced after nations became mutually acquainted: a third, of universal application, for the science of international law, from which it should appear how the same men, facts or objects, looked at from the different points of view of different nations, received different names; and finally a dictionary of mental words, common to all nations, which should explain the uniform ideas of substances and the different modifications of them in national thought concerning the human needs and utilities common to all, according to the differences of their situation, climate, character and customs, and should thus narrate the origins of the various vocal languages, all converging in an ideal common language.
The second source revealed by Vico is the interpretation of myths or fables, which agreeably to his doctrine were not allegories, fictions or impostures, but the science of primitive man. In theDiritto universaleVico distinguished four different and successive characters of the gods. At first they represented natural facts, Jupiter the sky, Diana the flowing water, Dis or Pluto the lower earth, Neptune the sea, and so on; secondly, natural human affairs, for instance, Vulcan fire, Ceres corn, Saturn the seed; thirdly, social facts; and finally they rose to heaven and were translated to the stars, and terrestrial and human things were distinguished from divine. But in the twoScienze Nuovehe emphasised almost exclusively the third or social meaning, which became in his eyes the original; since, he appears to have thought, the earliest nations were too much intent upon themselves, too much immersed in their hard and difficultlife, to speculate in abstraction from social matters. Hence he found reflected in mythology the institutions, inventions, social cleavages, class-struggles, travels and warfare of primitive nations. Even in considerably advanced periods Vico was hostile to naturalistic or philosophical explanations. The saying "know thyself" attributed to the ancient sage seemed to him merely a piece of advice to the Athenian democracy, to know its own strength, later transferred to a metaphysical and moral sense. Beside this principle of social interpretation he established another of great importance: namely, that indecent meanings were inserted in myths at a late and corrupt period when men interpreted early customs in the light of their own, or tried to justify their own lusts by fancying that the gods had set them the example. Hence arose the adulterous Jupiter, Juno as the implacable enemy of Hercules' virtue, the chaste Diana soliciting the embraces of the sleeping Endymion, Apollo persecuting modest maidens even to their death, Mars, not content with committing adultery with Venus by land, but pursuing her even into the sea, and, worst of all, the love of Jupiter for Ganymede and of Jupiter again, transformed into a swan, for Leda. Such representations can only result in unrestrained vice, as happened in the case of the young Chaereas in Terence's comedy. But in their original shape and meaning all myths were serious and austere, worthy of the founders of nations. The pursuit of Daphne by Apollo for instance referred to the magicians or diviners who arranged weddings and followed women through the woods where they were still liable to promiscuous ravishing; Venus, covering her nakedness with the cestus, was a modest symbol of solemn matrimony; the heroes, sons of Jupiter, were not the offspring of adultery, but born of permanent and solemn marriages celebrated according to the will of Jupiter as revealed by the diviners. To the pure all things are pure, and impure to the impure:the forests and mountain-tops could never beget the fancies of the closet and the brothel.
Beside these two rich sources, language and mythology, Vico names and employs a third, which he calls the "great fragments of the ancient world," that is to say, the memories preserved by historians and poets, such as the Egyptian tradition of the three ages of gods, heroes and men; the language of the gods mentioned in Homer; the thirty thousand names of the gods collected by Varro and referring to a like number of needs in the natural, moral, economic and civil life of the earliest times; the grove of Romulus, which Livy calls "the ancient plan of founding cities," and a few other golden sayings of ancient historians. Till now these fragments had been useless for the purposes of science, lying as they did in dirt, confusion and incompleteness: but when cleaned, restored and fitted together they conveyed valuable information. Nor did he overlook the monuments of architecture and sculpture, though the use he made of them was slight, and he saw that they were in the long run of little practical value. He declared that as for the historic period the most certain documents are the public coins, so for the legendary and obscure period their place is taken by "certain traces remaining in marble," as proofs of ancient customs, like the Egyptian pyramids with their hieroglyphic inscriptions and other fragments of the ancient world found in every region and bearing similar pictographic characters. It is also worthy of remark that he gives examples of arguments founded on technical observations and leading to conclusions in the sphere of prehistoric archaeology: as for instance when he says that one early period of human life is distinguished by the eating of roasted flesh, the simplest and least elaborate kind of food, because it requires nothing except the fire: a later period by boiled flesh, which also requires water, caldron and tripod.
One powerful method of investigation in Vico's handsis the comparative method, consisting in the comparison of better-known processes of development with those known imperfectly or in parts only, and the consequent reconstruction of the latter on the basis of the former. So for instance the principle of heroism, revealed by evidence found in Roman history, helps to explain the legendary history of the Greeks, to supply the deficiencies of that of Egypt and to shed light on the unknown history of all other nations of antiquity. Without denying the fact of transmission from one nation to another, Vico poured scorn upon the abuse of this conception, and minimised its value in the case of primitive societies: using in its place the idea of spontaneous development and endeavouring to reconstruct the process by the comparative method. But he took this method in a very broad sense, and made use in it of materials drawn from the most widely varying countries and periods. To explain for example how the thundering sky suggested to primitive man the idea of a god, he mentions the fact that the natives of America, when first they heard the noise and recognised the deadly effects of firearms in the hands of the Spaniards, believed them to be gods: the rhapsodists of the Homeric poems reminded him of the singers on the quay at Naples with their ballads of Roland and the paladins: the transformations or metamorphoses described by the ancient poets resembled the tales of goblins and fairies still told by mothers to amuse little children, or the widely-scattered mediaeval legends of the magician Merlin: he traces the mythology of the hearth down to the custom of the log which in Boccaccio's time at Florence the head of the family used to light upon the hearth at the new year, sprinkling incense and wine on it, and the Christmas-eve log among the lower classes at Naples; not to mention the custom in the Neapolitan kingdom of counting families by "hearths." He brought the serpent Python and all other mythical serpents intorelation with the viper of the Visconti "che i milanesi accampa" ("which calls to arms the Milanese") and the hieroglyphic script with the"rébus de Picardie"used in the north of France.
It would be useless to look in earlier or contemporary philology for clear general precedents for these principles, negative and positive, established by Vico for the history of obscure and legendary periods. They are too closely bound up with and essential to his whole philosophical thought ever to have originated apart from this thought itself. The rude fragments of ancient Roman laws, customs and formulae, the Homeric poems, the words of the Latin language, when examined with unprejudiced eyes—the power which enables a man of genius to see things without distortion—and worked over by a mind ready to accept them in their true nature, were bound to excite in Vico, compared with the learned but colourless or falsely-coloured historical research of his day, a rebellion and upheaval like that which took place a century later in the mind of Augustin Thierry when he saw, depicted in the pages of Chateaubriand's poetical prose, Pharamond and his Franks, with their unrestrained movements, their rude and savage arms, their terrible war-cries and their barbaric songs.
As the Franks, in the compilations of national history made by the Jesuit colleges and other French schools, appear stripped of all their characteristic features and reduced to wise monarchs, pious queens and devoted warriors of the Church, so ancient and primitive history, thanks to the rhetoric and the naïve ideas of scholars, has been painted in brilliant and untrue colours of the same kind as those with which Lebrun or Luca Giordano painted their pompous and theatrical pictures. Kings who devoted themselves to sage counsel in order to aid their subjects while at the same time not diminishing the splendour of their courts and the brilliancy of their happy nobles, philosopher kings such as made Plato sigh for the day when philosophers should rule or kings philosophise; loyal and valiant knights, eager to sacrifice themselves for the common welfare; statesmen who used to accomplish pilgrimages at speed in order to bring back from afar to their waiting citizens laws more wise than their own; good fathers of families, admirable mothers, brave and obedient young men, loving and modest maidens, every one a personification of some virtue or even of all virtues at once, models of human perfection: such are the figures which sanctified by their venerable antiquity fill alike volumes and imaginations. These are the heroes of Greek and Roman history: andall this splendid cloth-of-gold decoration must be torn off and cleared away if we would attempt to discover in the deepest recesses of the memory of mankind the true heroes, the heroes of reality, not of literature, of life, not of the stage: ignorant, superstitious, fierce, selfish, harsh to their families, cruel to their inferiors, avaricious, grasping, and yet, in spite of or even because of these same characteristics of barbarism, heroes: virtuous with the one kind of virtue possible and necessary in primitive times, the virtue of strength, discipline, and a deep and uncompromising sense of religion.
The misrepresentation of the primitive hero as a wise and virtuous member of a civilised society reaches its height, so far as political history is concerned, in the failure to understand the three chief words which sum up the constitution of the state: king, people and freedom. By a misunderstanding of the first, it is believed that the original form of the state was monarchy, the absolute monarchy which rests on the strength of the people and keeps in check the nobles: which is really a late development in history, if not the latest. Into this error had fallen Jean Bodin, whom Vico chose as the object of his polemic. But Bodin, more acute than other political writers, involved himself in a contradiction, because though he accepted the common error he nevertheless, observing the effects of an aristocratic republic in the supposed freedom of ancient Rome, propped up his system by distinguishing between state and government, and asserting that Rome in the earliest period was popular in state but aristocratically governed; and since this prop was too weak to bear the whole weight of the facts he at last confessed that this republic was aristocratic both in government and in state, thus contradicting the whole of his own doctrine as to the necessary succession of states. The truth is that the kings of these earliest periods were at Rome, as at Sparta and elsewhere, notmonarchs at all. The fathers, patricians or heroes were monarchical kings only in the period of domestic monarchy, when each family lived separately; but they were kings of a special kind, subject to no one but God, armed with religions of terror and consecrated with the most cruel penalties. On emerging from this first state, when the fathers united into a patrician order, their king was simply one or more of themselves, the mere magistrate of the order. Hence Rome, after expelling the Tarquins by a purely aristocratic revolution, did not change her state at all. She preserved her kings in the shape of two consuls, "annual kings," two aristocratic kings who were "deprived of no single detail of the royal power." The two kings of Sparta had the same character; they were liable like the consuls to be held accountable for their actions and could be condemned to death by the ephors.
As these states had been falsely considered monarchical, so, no less falsely, they had been taken as popular in character. The people referred to in this way does not coincide with, in fact it excludes, the plebs: the"populus"was simply the patrician order, and freedom meant simply the freedom of the patricians, the liberty of the master: and the "patria" was appropriately so called, because it really wasres patrum,the property of a few fathers. It is absurd to think that the plebs, a horde of the most worthless labourers treated as slaves, could possess the right of electing the king, and that the fathers confined themselves to merely approving this election in the senate. The relations between fathers and plebeians were quite other than neighbourly peace, mutual trust and hearty co-operation. The heroes, according to a passage of Aristotle, took a solemn oath to be eternal enemies of the plebs: that was the form their democratic spirit took. And the "Roman virtue" which sets before us so many and such glorious examples,gives no example of kindliness to the common people. Brutus, who dedicated his house in the persons of his two sons to the cause of freedom: Scaevola, who terrified Porsena by punishing his own right hand in the fire: the stern Manlius, who executed his own son when he returned victorious through a successful breach of military discipline: Curtius, who leapt in full armour with his horse into the fatal chasm: Decius, who devoted himself for the safety of his army: Fabricius and Curius, who refused the Samnite gold and the kingdom of Pyrrhus: Attilius Regulus, who went to certain death to preserve the sanctity of a Roman's oath: what did these men ever do for the commons, except increase their miseries by war, plunge them deeper into the waters of usury, and immure them more closely in the private dungeons of the nobles where they were flogged bare-backed like the vilest slaves? And woe to any aristocrat who allowed himself the slightest desire to alleviate these miseries! He was promptly accused of sedition and treason and sent to his death; the fate that in Rome befel Manlius Capitolinus, who saved the Capitol from the fires of the Gaul, and yet for his democratic sympathies was thrown from the Tarpeian rock; the fate that came in Sparta, the hero-city of Greece as Rome was the hero-city of the world, to the great-souled king Agis, the Manlius Capitolinus of Lacedaemon, who, for trying to lighten the burden of the unhappy commons by a law abolishing debts and to aid them by another giving them testamentary rights, was strangled by the ephors. The famous "Roman virtue" amazes any one who is obsessed by the modern idea of a virtue consisting in justice and benevolence to all mankind. What virtue could live with such pride? What moderation with such avarice? What mercy with such cruelty? What justice with such inequality?
The heroes treated their own families no less harshlythan the plebs. The education of children was stern, rough and cruel. The Spartans, in order that their sons might not fear pain and death, beat them within an inch of their lives in the temple of Diana, so that they often fell dead in agonies of pain beneath their father's blows. In Greece as in Rome it was lawful to kill innocent new-born children, a custom the reverse of the modern, by which the delights which surround little children shape the softer side of human nature. Wives were bought by the dowries of the heroic period, a survival of which was the practice solemnly observed in Rome of marriage"coemptione et farre"(a similar custom is ascribed by Tacitus to the ancient Germans and must be considered universal among barbarous peoples), and were maintained simply as a necessity of nature for the procreation of children and in other respects treated like slaves; as can still be seen in many parts of the old world and almost everywhere in the new. The acquisition of children and the thrift of the wife were simply reckoned as so much profit to the father and husband.
The counterpart of this political and domestic system is found in the ordinary life of the period, which was innocent of all luxury, refinement and ease. Pastimes were arduous, such as wrestling and hunting, to harden body and mind, or else dangerous, like jousting or hunting big game, to accustom men to think lightly of wounds and death. Wars were carried on under a religious aspect and were always therefore extremely bitter. From such wars resulted the system of heroic slavery, by which the conquered were held to be men without God, so that they lost civil and natural liberty at once. Foreigners were considered enemies: the earliest nations were intensely inhospitable. Brigandage and piracy were recognised; and Plutarch says that the heroes considered it a great honour and prize of valour to be called "robbers."
It was, in fine, a society immediately proceeding outof that of the gods, which as we know was the climax of the state of nature. In its passage from the prehistoric age as we should say in modern language into the dawn of history it still retained much of the earlier customs, those customs which Vico thinking of the lonely Polyphemus in his cave called "Cyclopean rules." The age of gold out of which it came, innocent, kindly, humane, tolerant and dutiful, as scholars and poets believed, was in reality one perpetual "superstitious fanaticism," tormented by a continual terror of the gods, to placate whom men used to offer human sacrifice, traces of which remain among the historic Phoenicians, Scyths and Germans, the tribes of America and even the Romans themselves, who afterwards substituted for it the ceremony of throwing straw puppets into the Tiber. Even the sacrifice of children was not unknown; memories of it are preserved in Agamemnon's sacrifice of Iphigenia and elsewhere. But in this age of the gods, in spite of or by means of this cruel superstition, were founded the great institutions of humanity; religious cults together with augurial divination, marriage and burial. Weddings, judgment-seats and altars, and the removal of the bodies of the dead from the reach of the malignant air and the wild beasts "taught the human brutes to be pious" as Foscolo says in hisSepolcri,merely versifying Vico's prose. These "Cyclopes" who conjoined and confused in themselves the functions of king, wise man (that is divination) and priest, at first placed their dwellings on the heights of mountains, in places airy and therefore healthy, naturally fortified, and near the perennial springs, where were the nests of eagles and vultures, the birds with which augury dealt. Hence the importance of water and fire, which became symbols of the family; the earliest marriages were solemnised"aqua et igni"between parties who shared a common spring and hearth, and therefore belonged to the same household; so that theymust have been between brothers and sisters. The period of the cyclopes was a strongly moral period. It was not true of it that "pleasure and law were one" in the sense fancied by later effeminate poets; for these men, whose minds like those which we may still find among the peasants of to-day were insensible to the refinements of vice, found that alone pleasant which was lawful and that alone lawful which was useful. They were just with the justice of a savage towards his god; continent, for they had made an end of promiscuous intercourse; brave, hard-working and high-spirited, as they were bound to be, surrounded as they were by hardships and perils. It was only later that these primeval groups of humanity descended into the plains and began to till them, and then, from living inland as they did at first, travelled gradually to the sea, learnt the art of navigation and founded colonies.
In this way families orgentesexisted before states. States were in fact formed of families grouped into an order ofgentes maioresor "ancient noble houses" as they were afterwards called to distinguish them from others added later to the order (for instance at the time of Junius Brutus, to fill the vacancies in the Roman senate after the expulsion of the kings) and called"gentes minores."But thesegenteshad within themselves an element of differentiation and strife. Families were not composed, as is generally believed owing to the common mistake of giving modern meanings to ancient words, of wives and children alone; but also of slaves,famuli,those who, being less strong and remaining longer in the nomadic state of nature, finally "as sometimes wild animals, driven either by extreme cold or by hunters, to save their life betake themselves to inhabited places" had sought refuge with the stronger, in the fortresses of the fathers. In return for the protection thus granted they tilled the father's land, and were bound and as it were tied tothem, and hence callednexi; they followed them and served them, and therefore gained the name ofclientes.The relation of slaves to fathers was the second form of human relation, the first being the natural one of matrimony; it constituted the feudal status, which has wrongly been believed peculiar to a certain definite period of barbarism, the Middle Ages, whereas it existed in all heroic societies, and was the eternal feudal principle whence sprang all the republics of the world. As Tacitus says, speaking of the Germans, the chief oath of these slaves and clients was to guard and defend each his own master and to assign to his master's glory his own deeds of valour (suum principem defendere et tueri, sua quoque fortia facta gloriae eius adsignare, praecipuum iuramentum erat); which is one of the severest conditions of the feudal system. Moreover the father's children are rather confused with the slaves than distinguished from them. They are distinguished by their title ofliberi,but are identified by their similar position of obedience and lack of separate personality.
The need felt by the fathers of securing themselves against the frequent mutinies of the slaves led to the mutual alliance of fathers, the patrician order and the heroic state. Of this state the slaves constituted the first plebs. They had no citizen's rights, since they were not citizens; no solemnities of marriage, since the auspices were a monopoly of the fathers; nor the right of making wills, since that right had and always kept the political character of a command. They were therefore excluded from thecomitia curiataheld by the patricians under arms, which survived later for dealing with sacred questions; profane matters being everywhere in the earliest times, at Rome as in Greece and Egypt, considered as sacred. The king of the patricians, whom we have called the magistrate of the order, was thus especially their leader and general in their resistance to the slaves or plebeians.
But the heroes did not provide for the stability of their order by means of forcible resistance alone. Just as, when they abdicated their position of sovereignty in their respective families for one of subordination to the higher sovereignty of the order, they formed a kind of noble or armed feudal system, so to keep their slaves more or less reconciled to obedience they granted them, without admitting them to citizenship, a kind of rustic feudalism. The origin of property is thus explained in a way entirely different on the one hand from the charmingly poetical theory according to which men adorned with all the virtues of the golden age when justice dwelt on earth, foreseeing the disorder that might result from communism, themselves with kindly arbitration marked out the limits of fields, endeavouring not to assign to one nothing but fertile, to another nothing but barren ground; to one a waterless portion, to another one abounding in perennial streams: and different on the other hand from the "philosophical" origin by a voluntary submission to the wise, or that invented by "politician kings" who derived property from violence. The granting of this rustic feudalism, which might be called the first agrarian law, distinguished three kinds of land-tenure: bonitary for the people, quiritary or noble, supported by arms, for the fathers, and eminent, belonging to the whole order. And since the strength of the order rested upon its wealth, it did all in its power to prevent the enrichment of the plebs; and in war—here we see the social motive of the "Roman clemency"—deprived the conquered of their arms only, leaving them in bonitary possession of their lands and imposing upon them a suitable tribute. For the same reason the patricians were very reluctant to go to war, for then the plebeian multitude gained experience of warfare and became dangerous.
The detachment of law from force was slow, and traces of the latter remained in every part of the former. Inthe heroic republic there were at first no laws providing for the punishment of offences and the restitution of private injuries; hence, failing judiciary laws, arose the need of duels and reprisals, which perpetuated the customs of the age of innocence or of the gods. Poetry and history describe some of these duels, which were armed judgments: for instance, that of Menelaus and Paris under the walls of Troy, and that of the Horatii and Curiatii, between Rome and Alba. It was a plan of divine providence, in order that between barbaric nations of scanty understanding and incapable of listening to reason war should not always beget war: that right and wrong might be to some degree determined by a belief in the favour or disfavour of the gods as the cause of victory or defeat.
These ordeals by battle were accompanied and superseded by ordeals by verbal formulae, used in their religious habit of mind with the most minute and scrupulous exactitude and with care not to alter a single letter (religio verborum). Horatius, who by killing his sister fell under the law "horrendi carminis," could never have been acquitted by the decemvirs, however free from blame they thought him; and the people acquitted him, says Livy, "more through admiration of his valour than the justice of his cause" (magis admiratione virtutis quant iure causae). In later days Roman law still retained this character of verbal precision to such a degree that it forms the crux of several of Plautus's comedies, in which panders are at the mercy of enamoured young men who have led them to violate some legal formula.
The private law of this society corresponded closely with its economic constitution. It was an entirely natural society, confined to the necessaries of life, and did not use money; hence the law knew nothing of contracts formed, according to the law of a later period, by mere consent. All obligations were ratified by giving the hand; thefirst buying and selling was barter; the rent of a house consisted in a mortgage on the soil for building it, the rent of land in planting it; companies and credit were unknown.
The material character of the first contracts and the forcible character of early legal processes were gradually modified as time went on, and became symbolic. As the fiction of force in marriage-rites recalled the actual force with which the giants dragged the first women into caves, so no less the ceremonies ofmancipatio, usucapioand vengeance had formerly been acts really performed.Mancipatiowas performed as we said with the actual hand, that is with real force; for instance, in occupation, the original source of all rights of possession;usucapioby the permanent planting of the body upon the thing possessed; vengeance was originally a duel or a"conditio,"private retaliation. Then they became ceremonies or fictions:mancipatiobecame a civil transference with solemn acts and phrases (si quis nexum faciet mancipiumque uti lingua nuncupassit ita ius esto—"If any one makes a thing bond to him and his possession, let the law be so that he publish it with his tongue");usucapioa tenure which is supposed to last as long as life; retaliation a series of personal actions accompanied by a solemn declaration of them to the debtor. There were worn in the forum as many masks as there were legal personalities, and under the "person" or mask of a paterfamilias were hidden all the children and all the slaves of the house. Instead of abstract forms, which were not yet thought of, living bodily forms were used. Heredity for instance was invented as mistress of hereditary property, and imagined to exist completely in every particular piece of inherited goods; the idea of indivisible right again, was materialised in the glebe or clod of earth presented to the judge with the formula"hunc fundum"This ancient jurisprudence was throughout poetical; its fictionsturned facts into falsehoods and falsehoods into facts, made the unborn live, the living dead, and the dead to survive in their posterity. It created numbers of empty legal personalities without subjects (iura imaginaria), rights invented by the imagination; and the formulae in which the laws were expressed were called because of their strict rhythm of such and so many words "verses"—carmina.The fragments of the Twelve Tables, if carefully considered, end their sentences for the most part in an Adonian verse, which is ultimately a fragment of the hexameter metre; and Cicero, realising this, begins his "Laws" with the sentenceDeos caste adeunto pietatem adhibento.Cicero also tells us that the Roman boys used to sing the laws of the twelve tables "like a regular song" (tanquam necessarium carmen), and Aelian says the same of the Cretan children and the laws of Minos. The Egyptian laws according to one tradition were "poems of the goddess Isis," and those given by Lycurgus to the Spartans and by Draco to the Athenians were formulated in verse. The whole of the ancient Roman law was a "serious poem," or as Vico says elsewhere a "kind of Roman drama,"poema quoddam dramaticum Romanum,performed by the Romans in the forum; and ancient jurisprudence was a "severe poetry."
This poetic atmosphere in heroic society and this metrical tendency in its language are facts borne out by many witnesses and proofs, by the observations and conjectures of scholars and by the narrations of travellers and missionaries. Hebraists are divided upon the question whether Hebrew poetry is metrical or rhythmical; but Josephus, Origen and Eusebius are in favour of metre, and St. Jerome asserts that a great part of the book of Job is in hexameter verse. The Arabs, who had no knowledge of writing, preserved their language down to the time when they overran the eastern provinces of the Greek empire by handing on the memory of their nationalpoems. The Egyptians wrote the lives of the dead in verse; the Persians and Chinese committed to verse their earliest history, as also, according to Tacitus, the Germans and, according to Justus Lipsius, the Americans. And since of these two last nations the former was only known to the Romans late in their history and the latter to Europe at the end of the fifteenth century, there is good reason to suppose that the same is true of all other barbaric nations ancient and modern.
The earliest metre, found not only in Greece but in Assyria, Phoenicia and Egypt, was the heroic or hexameter. Owing to the slowness of thought and the difficulties of pronunciation it was bound at first to have a spondaic character (hence the final foot in the line was always a spondee) and only later when mind and tongue became more active did it admit the dactyl. Then, when this activity still further increased, arose the iambic (pede praestoas Horace calls it) which approximates most nearly to prose; so much so, indeed, that the early prose writers before Gorgias practically used the iambic metre of poetry, and prose frequently passed over into iambic verse. Tragedy was composed in iambics, a metre which is naturally adapted to it, produced as it was to give expression to wrath, according to the story which makes Archilochus invent it to express his anger against Lycambus; and if comedy afterwards adopted the same metre, it was only by the "meaningless following of example," not because the iambic metre was naturally suited to it as it was to tragedy.
The primitive language of these societies was poetical not only through its use of metre but also by being composed through and through of lively metaphors, vivid fancies, striking resemblances, apt comparisons, expressions by means of cause or effect, whole or part, elliptic or pleonastic figures of speech, onomatopoeisms or imitations of sounds by words, abbreviations,compound words, minute circumlocutions, characteristic epithets, contortions in syntax and episodes. All these are ways of making oneself understood devised by men ignorant of the precise words required, or of a word, if in conversation, understood by both parties. The episode is characteristic of women and peasants, who are unable to select what they need and omit what is alien to their subject; contorted language is the result of inability to express oneself directly, or of being prevented from doing so, as may be seen in the case of irascible or contemptuous persons, who make use of the nominative and oblique cases but do not utter verbs. The very words of these languages taken one by one reveal in the frequency of their diphthongs a trace of the song out of which speech arose; and this abundance of diphthongs still remains in the Greek and French languages, which passed rapidly and prematurely from the age of spontaneity to that of reflection. The German language would certainly offer a rich store of heroic forms, with its abundance of compound words which so happily translate those of Greek, and its syntax which exceeds Latin in complexity as Latin does Greek. If German scholars, says Vico several times with a wistful glance at a field of study closed to himself, would use the principles of the New Science in research upon the origins of their language, they would certainly make wonderful discoveries.
The conception of the universe prevalent among the men of this period, and the histories of themselves which they related, of their origins, warfare and fortunes, were also poetical, or rather mythical. It was even the case as we have seen that their conceptions in the sphere of social history preceded those of a cosmological, physical or psychological character. By a rigid application of this principle Vico developed his doctrine of "natural theogony," arising naturally in the imagination on the occasion of certain human needs and utilities: the genesis of thetwelve greater Gods,Di maiores,that is to say, the gods invented by thegentes maioresand, to a great extent, brought by them to the foundation of the state. Jupiter or the sky, with his language of lightning, was the author of the first laws of the family; Juno symbolised marriage, Diana matrimonial chastity, Apollo the light of civilisation; Vulcan, Saturn and Cybele were respectively the fire with which the forests were burnt to make clearings, the sowing of seed and the tilling of land; Mars symbolised the warfare of the heroes"pro aris et focis,"and Venus civilised beauty. In addition to this celestial Venus arose a plebeian Venus to whom was given the attribute of doves; not as typifying the passion of love, but because they were"degeneres"common birds in comparison with the eagle. A double signification, patrician and plebeian, was given in the same way to Vulcan and Mars. The stormy relations of the fathers with the slaves, the struggles and penalties referred to in the myths of Tantalus and Sisyphus, begin to be reflected in the twelve greater gods. Hercules, struggling with Antaeus, signifies the nobles of the heroic cities, and Antaeus the mutinied slaves led back into the primitive cities on the mountain-tops (Antaeus lifted up into the air) and overcome and bound down to the earth, that is to say forced back to their servile labour. The birth of the tenth divinity, Minerva, expresses the weakening and diminution of the heroic power, since the plebeian Vulcan (the mutinied slaves) strikes the head of Jupiter with an axe, the tool of a servile art. Mercury represents the granting of bonitary rights to the plebs and the maintenance of quiritary rights by the fathers. The last of the twelve deities, Neptune, arose when the peoples descended to the sea-coast; and the legends of Minos, the Argonauts, the Trojan war, the return of Ulysses, Europa and the bull, the Minotaur, Perseus and Theseus refer to colonisation and piracy. The mythological interpretation of history does notcease with the foundation of states. The founders of civilisation, Zoroaster and Mercurius Trimegistus, Orpheus and Confucius, even if they are not strictly gods, are at least poetical characters. Aesop is typical of the"socii"or slaves of the heroes and hence is represented as ugly, that is, devoid of civilised beauty (honestas); and his fable of the lions' society shows to perfection the real relation of the heroes to their slaves, in which the latter share the toils, but not the spoils. Draco, of whom Greek historians tell us nothing but that he imposed a stern code of laws, symbolises the cruelty of the heroes to their slaves. Solon was either a party-leader of the Athenian plebs, or else a simple personification of the plebs itself, considered from the point of view of its vengeance. In the history of Rome we find poetical figures in Romulus, to whom were ascribed all the laws of the orders; in Numa, author of the laws dealing with sacred matters and religious ceremonies; in Tullus Hostilius, who organised and legislated for the military system; in Servius Tullius the author of the census (which has been imagined, contrary to all historical truth, the foundation of a popular republic, whereas it was really the foundation of an aristocratic); and in Tarquinius Priscus, who invented insignia of rank and military uniforms; lastly, the Decemvirs and the Twelve Tables are turned into poetical figures, since to these events and persons were ascribed a great number of laws favourable to liberty and really dating from a later period.
Thus, before philosophers began to elaborate the system of myths by creating new ones when they believed they were interpreting the old (Plato for instance introduced into the myth of Jupiter the idea of the omnipresent and all-pervading ether, his own invention, and other philosophers saw in the birth of Minerva from the head of Jupiter a description of the divine wisdom, or in Chaos and Orcus the confused mass of the universalseeds of nature and the primitive matter of the world), poet-theologians had expressed their ideas in mythology, ideas in which the metaphysical and physical elements were very small, but containing a large nucleus of human and political fact. The Chaos of these theologian-poets was the confusion of human seed during the period of brutal community of women; it was confused because devoid of human regulation, obscure because devoid of the light of civilisation. The misshapen monster Orcus devoured everything because men in this community had no human shape, and were absolved by the void, because through the impossibility of knowing their offspring they left no trace of themselves behind. The four elements of the world corresponded to the four elements of social life: the air where Jupiter lightened, the water of the perennial springs, the fire that burnt the forests, and the earth, the scene of man's labours. Being and subsisting were conceived the former as the act of eating (peasants still say of a sick man, meaning that he is not dead yet, that he is "still eating") and the latter as "standing upon one's feet." The composition of the body was analysed into solids and liquids, that of the soul into air: generation into the act of"concipere"or"concapere,"that is, taking hold of neighbouring material bodies, overcoming their resistance and adapting and assimilating them to one's own nature: and all the internal functions of the soul were ascribed to the head, the breast or the heart.