Chapter 9

[42]Published by me inNapoli nobilis,xiii. (1904), f. 1., and again inSecondo suppl. alla Bibl. vich.pp. 70-2.

[43]Opp.vi. p. 17.

[44]Bibl. vich.pp. 103-5.

[45]Opp.vi. p. 145.

[46]Ibid.p. 110.

[47]Opusc.,ed. Villarosa, ii. p. 277.

[48]Bibl. vich.p. 105.

[49]"I praise Vico." Letter published by me inBibl. vich.p. 107.

[50]Bibl. vich.pp. 87-8.

[51]Ibid.p. 44.

[52]Autob.inOpp.iv. p. 416: cf. the evidence of a pupil inBibl. vich.p. 89.

[53]Opp.vi. p. 254.

[54]Autob.inOpp.iv. p. 416.

[55]Bibl. vich.p. 88.

[56]Sonnet published by G. Gentile,Il Figlio di G. B. Vico(Naples, Pierro, 1905), p. 173.

But among all these troubles, obstacles and disappointments, in the midst of this sadness which often draped his life in black, Vico enjoyed one of the loftiest joys accessible to man; the "life of meditation" freed and purified frompassion, lived by man in solitude without the turbulent and grievous company of the body: the life of security, because it is "made one with the soul always ready and present which shows man his being rooted in the Eternal that measures all times and walking in the Infinite that comprehends all finite things; it crowns him with an eternal and immeasurable joy not restricted invidiously to certain places nor grudgingly to certain times; but it can grow up within himself only if without envy of rivalry or fear of diminution it spreads and communicates itself unceasingly to more and more human minds."[57]That he has attained truth he never doubts, though he never ceases to elaborate it further; with the system presented in the work onUniversal Law,his mind, he says, "rested content."[58]The weariness and even the pain he had suffered were dear to him, because through them he arrived at his discoveries: "I bless the twenty-five full years I have spent in meditation upon this subject, in the midst of the adversities of fortune and the checks I have often received from the unhappy example of great thinkers who have attempted new and weighty discoveries."[59]How could he have done anything but bless these fatigues, pains and adversities, if, whenever he rose above the passionate perturbations of the empirical man and the struggles of the practical man, his mind showed him the inevitable necessity of his toil and of his sufferings, two necessities fused into one another so as to become one and indivisible?

His own philosophical doctrine then brought him the remedy for his ills, and worked in his spirit thecatharsisof liberation; the doctrine of the immanent Providence, or as it was later called, historical necessity, which was his central thought. "Praise be to Providence for ever, which, when the weak sight of mortals sees in it nothing but stern justice, then most of all is at work on a crowning mercy! For by this task I see that I am clothed upon with a new man; I feel that everything that goaded me to bewail my hard lot and to denounce the corruption of literature that has caused that lot, has vanished; for this corruption and this lot have strengthened me and enabled me to perfect my task. And more, it may perhaps not be true, but it would please me, were it true, that this labour has filled me with a certain spirit of heroism, through which no fear of death any longerdisturbs me and my mind feels no disquietude at the words of my rivals. Lastly, it has established me as upon a mighty rock of adamant before the judgment of God, who rewards the work of creation by the approval of the wise, who are always and everywhere few in numbers ... men of the loftiest intellect, of a learning all their own, generous and great-hearted, whose only labour is to enrich with deathless works the commonwealth of letters."[60]Thus Providence showed him the necessity of all that had befallen or should befall him in his life, taught him resignation and promised him glory.

[57]Opp.vi. p. 287.

[58]Ibid.p. 18.

[59]Ibid.pp. 153-4.

[60]Ibid.pp. 29-30.

So the hot-tempered man became at last tolerant: tolerant with that tolerance, that lofty indulgence which must not be confused with common toleration. The University, in which he had hoped for advancement and towards which he directed the thought of his earlier works, would have none of him; he retired within himself to think out theScienza Nuova.Now, says he with a smile in which we may still see a trace of bitterness, I owe this work to the University, which, by judging me unworthy of the chair and not wishing me to be "occupied in treating paragraphs," gave me leisure for meditation: "what greater obligation could I have?"[61]A friend, Sostegni the Florentine, in a sonnet to Vico, let slip some words in condemnation of the city of Naples for making so little of her distinguished son. Vico in his reply justifies his native place in noble words, as being stern towards him because she expected and desired much of him:

Stern mother, she caresses not her son,Lest so she fall into obscurity,But gravely listens, watching as he speaks.[62]

This was the spirit that found expression in the Autobiography, a work which has been misjudged and in fact entirely misunderstood by Ferrari, who censures its prevailing teleological tendency and laments the absence of a "psychological" explanation of Vico's life;[63]as if Vico had not himself explained that he was writing it from a "philosophical"point of view.[64]And what is the meaning of a philosophical treatment of a philosopher's life but an understanding of the objective necessity of his thought and a perception of the scaffolding it involves even where the author at the moment of thinking did not clearly perceive it? Vico "meditates upon the causes, natural and moral, and upon the occasions of his fortunes; he meditates upon the inclinations or aversions he felt from childhood towards this or that branch of study; he meditates upon the opportunities or hindrances which assisted or retarded his progress; he meditates, lastly, upon certain efforts of his own in right directions which bore fruit in the reflections upon which he built his final work, theScienza Nuova,which work was to demonstrate that his literary life was bound to have been what it was and not different."[65]Vico'sAutobiographyis, in a word, the application of theScienza Nuovato the life of its author, the course of his own individual history: and its method is as just and true as it is original. Vico succeeded in part only of his attempt, and could not form a criticism and history of himself to the same extent to which a modern critic and historian is in a position to do—whose efforts will again be improved upon by those of the future—is too obvious to need emphasising. TheAutobiographyitself concludes with a blessing upon the author's hardships, a profession of faith in Providence and a sure expectation of fame and glory.

[61]Opp.vi. p. 29.

[62]Ibid.p. 446.

[63]In the Introduction to vol. iv. of theOpere.

[64]Autob.inOpp.iv. p. 402.

[65]Ibid.

In the last years of his life Vico, enfeebled by age, domestic trouble and illness, "entirely gave up his studies":[66]

My pen is slipping from my palsied grasp;The door of my thought's treasury is closed,[67]

he cries in two mournful lines of a sonnet in 1735. He prepared at this time additions and corrections for a possible reprint of the secondScienza Nuova,and incorporated them in the final manuscript of the work; he thought for a time of printing his small work "on the Equilibrium of the Living Body" (De aequilibrio corporis animantis) composed many years earlier and now lost;[68]he still discharged some of the dutiesof his office, such as the speech on the marriage of the king, Charles Bourbon, in 1738. But from 1736 or 1737 his son began to assist him in his professional work, and in January 1741 he was definitely appointed to the chair on his father's resignation.[69]Vico henceforth lived among his family like an old soldierexacta militia,thinking over his past battles and conscious of having done his life's work. His good son read to him for some hours every day out of the Latin classics he had once loved and studied so well. And in this evening of his life he was at least spared the crowning agony suffered in his last years by a philosopher more fortunate than himself, Immanuel Kant; the agony of continuing and completing his system of philosophy, and wearing himself out in a fruitless struggle with thoughts that eluded his grasp and words that no longer obeyed him. Vico had said all he had to say; a great historian of his own life, he knew the moment at which Providence had finished its work in him, closed the door of thought it had so freely opened, and ordered him to lay down his pen.[70]

[66]Ibid.p. 415.

[67]Opp.vi. p. 425 (Sonnet on the marriage of Raimondo di Sangro, 1735).

[68]Bibl. vich.pp. 38-9.

[69]Gentile,II Figlio di G. B. Vico,pp. 30-48.

[70]The documents and the scattered notes used in this lecture and quoted from the contents of myBibliografia vichianaare now all collected in my edition of theAutobiografia, carteggio e poesie varie:cf. the present vol.infra,p. 308.

The history of the vicissitudes of Vico's reputation must not be allowed to replace or be confused with the exposition and valuation of his thought, by losing sight of the history of philosophy properly so called or confusing it with the history of culture.[2]But even when we pass to this second history, we must guard against another kind of error, namely the pretence of determining by its means whether Vico's work was or was not of use in the advancement of culture, and what degree of utility we should grant it. The inquiry is meaningless, and the degree cannot be measured: for rightly considered one disciple may be worth tens or hundreds, one effect produced after centuries may compensate its age-long delay, one point undeservedly forgotten may become as notable and instructive as the best-deserved reputation, and one single truth twice discovered independently may from this re-discovery and seeming superfluity receive a confirmation of its inevitable necessity. The work of Vico—such is the usual verdict—was entirely useless, because it appeared out of its due time and prematurely, and remained unknown or was known only because it could convey nothing new. Such language is a blasphemy against history, which allows nothing to be useless and is always and throughout the work of Providence, whose vast utilities must not be measured by the pettiness of the human span.

Was Vico appreciated in the course of the eighteenthcentury? Did any one read him, understand him and follow his lead? The question has been answered with equal decision in the affirmative and the negative. The affirmative answer has been supported by a diligent collection of scattered passages up and down the writers of the century mentioning his name and doctrines and an accumulation of possible or apparent traces of his thoughts visible though unacknowledged in Italian and foreign literature. But a thinker like Vico can only be said to be known when his fundamental thought has been grasped and the spirit that animated him has been felt. Now the majority of the facts alleged as proof of the efficacy of his work concerns particular doctrines detached from the whole and accepted or contested just like those of any other scholar and critic or any paradox-monger of his time. This is true in the first place of his theory on the origin of the Twelve Tables, discussed in the controversy between Bernardo Tanucci and Guido Grandi from 1728 to 1731, contested in 1736 by Damiano Romano, accepted in France by Bonamy in 1735 and recalled in 1750 by Terrasson; of the views on the history and primitive government of Rome, mentioned by Chastellux, adopted and expanded by Duni, and used by Du Bignon who learnt them from Duni; of the hypotheses as to the prehistoric period and the origins of humanity, employed and modified by Boulanger in France and Mario Pagano in Italy; and lastly, of some conceptions upon poetry and language which reappear in Pagano, Cesarotti and some others.

A more essential question was that of the method of studying and judging political institutions and laws; a question upon which Montesquieu has been compared with Vico and accused of freely using theScienza Nuovawithout acknowledging his debt. It is now established through Montesquieu's journal that in 1728 Antonio Conti at Venice advised the future author of theEsprit des Loisto buy Vico's book at Naples; and Montesquieu must have followed this advice on reaching Naples in the following year; for a copy of the 1725 edition of theScienza Nuovais still preserved in the library at the château of La Brède. But the mind of the French writer was too different from and inferior to that of Vico to draw vital nourishment from a work such as theScienza Nuova;and the traces of imitation alleged to have been discovered in theEsprit des Loisare very doubtful and in any case of minor importance. It must be said on the other hand that themerit generally attributed to Montesquieu of having introduced the historical element into positive laws and thus considering legislation in a truly philosophical manner (as Hegel said later), that is, as a moment depending upon a totality relative to all the other determinations which go to form the character of a people or a period; this merit, in order both of time and of excellence, belongs in reality to Vico.

Like Montesquieu in the science of legislation, so Wolf in the Homeric question has been suspected of tacitly deriving help from Vico's speculations. But at the time when he published theProlegomena ad Homerumin 1795 Wolf did not know theScienza Nuova; which he knew in name only in 1801 and in fact the year after, when Cesarotti presented him with the book. We must observe that Vico's judgment as to the barbaric nature of the Homeric epos and the absence in it of esoteric wisdom had been published in 1765 by theGazette littéraire de l'Europe; and further, that theScienza Nuovawas known and used by the Danish philologist and archaeologist Zoega, who quotes it in an essay on Homer composed in 1788 though not published till long afterwards; and that Zoega corresponded with Heyne, who afterwards accused Wolf of having derived from his own lectures the theory set forth in theProlegomena.Heyne had in fact expressed the idea of a gradual genesis of the Homeric poems in 1790. In a word we may say that Vico's views had to some extent penetrated into the atmosphere of German philology: in which case Wolf may have originally had a certain indirect knowledge of them. Even apart from this indirect communication the fact remains, and is recognised by all students of the question, that the Homeric theory conceived by Wolf must really be called not Wolfian but Vician, since such it truly is in its fundamental characteristics. Moreover, Wolf, as a philologist far superior to Vico but much less great as a thinker, was not in a position to understand the ideas which had led his predecessor to the doctrine he held concerning Homer: a fact which is clear from the somewhat superficial article he wrote on the subject in 1807.

There was certainly at Naples during the eighteenth century a vague consciousness in many minds of the greatness of Vico's work; but in what precisely this greatness consisted nobody could determine, owing to the lack of adequate experience and preparation. Outside Italy, especially inGermany, where this preparation existed or at least was much greater, Vico's work remained generally unknown, partly through the discredit into which Italian books had fallen since the end of the seventeenth century, and partly through the dimculties which Vico's style presented to a foreign reader. When theScienza Nuovadid fall into the hands of men competent to understand it, a series of insignificant accidents interposed to prevent such an understanding. Hamann procured theScienza Nuovafrom Florence in 1777, at which time he was engaged upon economics and physiocracy, fancying that it dealt with these subjects; and the delusion was not dispelled when in glancing over it he found himself faced by a collection of philological studies and studies carried out with considerable carelessness. Goethe received it at Naples in 1787 from Filangieri, who warmly recommended it, took it back to Germany and lent it in 1792 to Jacobi; but it was a happy coincidence rather than a true knowledge or a clear intuition that led him to couple Vico's name with that of Hamann. Herder, who may also have known Vico's work less through his correspondence with Hamann in 1777 than by his travels in Italy in 1789, speaks of it in 1797 in quite general terms, without noticing one of the many connexions between Vico and himself, especially as regards the theory of language and poetry.

The only men in the eighteenth century who really to some extent penetrated into the fundamental thought of Vico and proclaimed though unwillingly his genuine greatness were—and this is another proof of the solid mental fibre of Catholicism—his Catholic opponents, of whom there were plenty: Romano, Lami, Rogadei, and above all Finetti. They saw that in spite of his stubborn protestations of religious orthodoxy Vico held a conception of Providence very different from that of Christian theology; and that though he continually used the name of God he never allowed him to operate effectively in history as a personal God; that he made so sharp a distinction between sacred and profane history as to reach a purely natural and human theory of the origin of civilisation, by means of the state of nature, and of the origin of religion, by means of fear, shame and the imaginative universal; while the traditional Catholic doctrine admitted a certain communication between sacred and profane history, and recognised in pagan religion and civilisation the leaven of some kind of vague recollection of the primitive revealed truth;that though protesting that he accepted and reinforced the authority of the Bible, he threatened and shook it on many points; and that his criticism of profane historical tradition, conducted in a haughty spirit of rebellion against the past, might open the road to the most dangerous abuses, since it provoked the application of the same spirit and method to sacred history, which happened in the case of Boulanger.[3]In this accusation are faithfully indicated all the points destined later to enter into the nineteenth century's solemn eulogy of Vico. Thus churchmen began to be suspicious of him; and this bore fruit later in the restoration period, in the anti-Vician polemic of Bishop Colangelo, and somewhat earlier in a verdict of the royal censor Lorenzo Giustiniani, who pronounced theScienza Nuova"a work marking a most unfortunate crisis in European history."

This tendency was opposed by the enthusiastic young students of social and political matters at Naples at the end of the eighteenth century, preparing themselves for an active part in the imminent revolution. Among them Vico came to be considered as an anti-clerical and anti-Catholic, and the legend arose, mentioned elsewhere in this volume, that Vico purposely and deliberately made his work obscure in order to escape ecclesiastical censure. These young men applied themselves to the study and praise of theScienza Nuova;they proposed to reprint it, since it had become rare, together with the other works and unpublished manuscripts of the author; they prepared expositions and criticisms of Vico's philosophical and historical system; some like Pagano tried to work it up afresh by adding to it the ideas of French sensationalism, others like Filangieri did not let their admiration of it dispel their rosy dreams of reform. In 1797 the German Gerning on coming to Naples noted the zeal with which Vico was studied, and projected a translation or at least a summary of theScienza Nuovain German. When the fall of the Neapolitan Republic in 1799 drove these young men, or rather those of them who escaped the massacres and the gallows of the Bourbon reaction, into exile in Northern Italy and especially in Lombardy, the cult of Vico was for the first time ardently propagated. Vincenzo Cuoco, Francesco Lomonaco, Francesco Salfi and other southern patriots passed the knowledge of theScienza Nuovato Monti, who mentionedit in his inaugural lecture at Pavia in 1803, to Ugo Foscolo, who absorbed many of its ideas into his poem theSepolcriand his critical essays: to Alessandro Manzoni, who was later to institute in hisDiscorso sulla storia longobardaa famous comparison between Vico and Muratori: and to others of less importance. Cuoco introduced Vico's work to Degérando, then at work on hisHistoire comparée des systèmes philosophiques; another exile, De Angelis, put theScienza Nuovainto the hands of Jules Michelet; Salfi mentioned Vico in articles in theRevue Encyclopédiqueand in books and minor works in French. It was also through the suggestion of these Neapolitans that theScienza Nuovawas reprinted at Milan in 1801; and other editions and collections of Vico's smaller works were not long in appearing. Thus in the first decade of the nineteenth century Vico's reputation, which had till then been merely local to Naples, spread over the whole of Italy.

But, suitably to their personal disposition and to the spirit of the times, the first and chief debt which the patriotic students of Vico owed to his thought was political in character or rather belonging to political philosophy; and consisted in a criticism of that Jacobinism and philo-Gallicism of which they had had such unhappy experience in the events of 1799.[4]Vico's thought led them to more concrete concepts; and this is particularly visible in Vincenzo Cuoco's admirableSaggio storico sulla rivoluzione napoletana(1800). Similarly Ballanche some decades later in hisEssais de palingénésie sociale(1827) wrote that if Vico had been known in France in the eighteenth century he would have exercised a beneficial influence on the subsequent social revolutions. Another particular aspect of Vico's work, the reform undertaken by him of historical methodology and social science as an aid to history, was observed and emphasised by the archaeologist Cataldo Iannelli in his workSulla natura e necessità della scienza delle cose e delle storie umane(1818). Foscolo and those who drew their inspiration from him chiefly introduced into literary criticism and history something of Vico's conceptions on the historical interpretation of poetry.

In Germany on the other hand Jacobi, who had read theDe antiquissima,immediately placed himself in the centre of the Vician philosophy by discovering and pointing out in 1811, in his workÜber den göttlichen Dingen und ihrer Offenbarung,the close connexion between the principle of theconvertibility of the true and the created and the Kantian theory that one can perfectly conceive and understand only what one is able to construct: a single step from which position leads, as he observes, to the system of identity. The same fact was recognised by Baader, who found in this system the confirmation and foundation of the principle enunciated by Vico. But the translation of theScienza Nuovamade by Weber in 1822 seems to have been unsuccessful; and it does not appear that Vico was known to Hegel, with whom he has so many substantial and formal affinities, especially in thePhenomenology; and whose mania for triads might be blamed just as the Catholic Finetti had blamed Vico for always standing "upon rule of three." The resemblances again of Vico's theories to the new German philological doctrines of Niebuhr, Müller, Böckh and many others were not at all willingly admitted. The attitude of Niebuhr is characteristic. Whether he knew Vico's work or not when he published the first edition of hisRömische Geschichte,he certainly knew it later through Savigny and through the article entitledVico und Niebuhrpublished in 1816 by the Swiss Orelli; and yet he continued to ignore him, through some kind of contempt or depreciation; an attitude hardly praiseworthy but imitated by Mommsen.

In France, the spread of knowledge concerning Vico's thought was due to Michelet, who translated his works and in his last years described Italy as "the second mother and nurse who in my youth suckled me upon Virgil, and in my maturity nourished me with Vico; potent cordials that have many times renewed my heart." Michelet was the first or one of the first to proclaim, in his introduction, that Vico was not understood in the eighteenth century because he wrote for the nineteenth. Michelet was joined by Ballanche, of whom we spoke above, and also by Jouffroy, Lerminier, Chateaubriand, and Cousin, some of whom grasped the connexion between Vico and the German philosophy that Cousin was at this time propagating in France; and later by Laurent, Vacherot, De Ferron, Franck, Cournot and many others. Vico was read and admired by Comte, who mentioned him in a letter to John Stuart Mill in 1844, and lastly Léon Gambetta conceived in his youth a general history of commerce upon the scheme of the Vician "reflux." The popularity of Vico's name in France at this period was so great that it is several times mentioned in joke in passages of Balzac's novelsand in Flaubert'sBouvard et Pécuchet.But thought of the quality of Vico's could never have a very deep or lasting influence in the persistently intellectualistic and spiritualistic atmosphere of France. Perhaps the most conspicuous results it produced were the theories of Fustel de Coulanges on the ancient city and the origin of feudalism.

But, to return to Italy, if the aspirations towards a national uprising, which tended to vindicate and glorify all the ornaments Italy could boast, raised Vico's name almost to a level with that of Dante, the simultaneous renaissance of philosophy, which was shaking off the sensationalism and materialism of the eighteenth century, was bound to attach itself to the last great idealistic philosopher, to use his thoughts and to shelter itself behind his authority. Vico's complete works were now collected and editions of the single treatises multiplied. And since in the national uprising two currents could be distinguished, partly successive and partly fused, the neo-Guelphian and the radical, and since this distinction was represented in the philosophical awakening by that between Catholic idealism and rationalistic idealism, the schools of Rosmini and Gioberti on the one hand and Bruno and Hegel on the other; Vico, at once a Catholic and a free philosopher, lent himself admirably, as is easy to understand, to the contrary sympathies and interpretations of the two schools. Thus originated two different pictures of him, both historically justified, though the one painted him as he would have wished to be, the other as he was. The Vico of the liberal Catholics was above all the Vico of the metaphysical points, the Platonist, the mystic of the unknowable God, the traditionalist of the prologues to theDiritto universale,and hence the strictly Italian philosopher as opposed to those of the rest of Europe, sons of the Reformation: whereas the Vico of the rationalists, the bold and heretical author of theScienza Nuova,is a European philosopher to be set side by side with Descartes and Spinoza, Kant and Hegel. The former picture may be seen in the works of Rosmini, Gioberti, Tommaseo and many others, among which we must not forget those of a Neapolitan writer of lofty spirit, Enrico Cenni, perhaps the best of all, who draws a loving picture of the Vico of the Catholics. The latter portrait is found in the philosophers and critics who from 1840 onwards acquired their education in the school of German idealism; especially Bertrando Spaventa and Francesco de Sanctis, who were the first to seeclearly Vico's relations to earlier and later European thought and to substitute for mere observations and vague impressions on the subject a scientific interpretation and a determinate judgment. That the second school of interpreters and critics were in the right, and that the liberal or idealistic Catholics had taken up an untenable position and reproduced in their irresolution and incoherence the irresolution and incoherence of Vico himself, was proved by the fact, among others, that less liberal but more consistent Catholics like the Spaniard Jaime Balmes show an inflexible distrust and hostility towards the author of theScienza Nuova.

The study of history in Italy during this period was less deeply modified by Vico's influence; chiefly perhaps because the impulse of the national uprising led to the neglect of primitive and Roman history and the devotion of all its best energies to research into the origin and vicissitudes of the Italian republics, a subject Vico had entirely ignored. On the other hand, jurisprudence especially in the south was dominated by his thought; and though it produced in this field no great scientific results, it gave to the jurists a loftiness and breadth of judgment and a concreteness of view which were long remembered and regretted.

After 1870, with the decay of philosophy in Italy and elsewhere, the study of Vico also decayed: and for more than forty years there was no demand for a reprint of his works. The monograph by Cantoni in the year 1867, in spite of some valuable passages, already shows unmistakable signs of the decadence, founded as it is upon the idea that Vico's value is greater according as he is less of a metaphysician and more of a psychologist and historian: a position due not so much to the intrinsic weakness ascribed to him by Cantoni in philosophical matters as to the implicit conviction on the critic's part that metaphysic in general is a valueless thing, useful only for rousing enthusiasm in the addled heads of southern Italians. The great idealist of the New Science was subjected, as a final insult, to the praises of the positivists, who in their astonishing ignorance almost amounting to innocence did not—and still do not—hesitate to allege as a confirmation of their formal profession of faith the words "verum ipsum factum," which according to them means that the truth is the fact which we see and touch. Writings making any serious contribution to the knowledge of any particular point on Vico's doctrines were rare. Interest in Vico only reawokewithin the last decade with the general reawakening of philosophical studies.

Of the two best comprehensive works on Vico published towards the end of last century one is due to the German Catholic Karl Werner (1881) who expounds his philosophical and historical doctrines with great care, judging them from the point of view of speculative theism, a theory evolved under the influence of Baader and the second philosophy of Schelling, and tending much more to the comprehension of Vico than the psychology of Cantoni. The other is the work of an Englishman, Robert Flint (1884), who wrote for the collection of Philosophical Classics a brief monograph upon the subject, accurate in detail, and if not profound at least guided by clear and sound sense. Recently Sorel in France has shown the fruitfulness of certain views of Vico's, especially that of the reflux, by applying them to the history of primitive Christianity and the theory of the modern proletarian movement, while in Germany Biese and Mauthner have brought his conceptions of metaphor and language once more into favour.

But in spite of all this Vico has never had justice done him in works devoted to the history of modern philosophy. These, in the case both of Höffding's book and of the greatly superior work of Windelband, and in fact of all others, either pass over the Italian philosopher in complete silence or else merely mention him as an experimenter, later than Bossuet and earlier than Herder, in the dubious science of the "philosophy of history." This lack of attention arises partly from an insufficient knowledge of Vico's real nature; his fertile activities in the theory of knowledge, in ethics, in aesthetic, in law and in religion are all hidden behind that one label "philosopher of history." Partly however it is due to the reaction of the history of politics and culture on the history of philosophy; which produces the effect that thinkers whose social influence came to an end with the fall of the peoples or states to which they belonged, or who for some reason or other had no considerable influence on European civilisation, are sacrificed to others much less important from a philosophical point of view but more influential or better known as exponents of social life and representatives of cultural tendencies; so that where it would be thought impossible to ignore, for example, Paley or d'Holbach or Mendelssohn, it seems natural to pass over Giambattista Vico, though in such company he is a giant among pigmies. The historical injustice of thiscourse has been already shown theoretically by the distinction we have emphasised between the history of philosophy and the history of culture; and in Vico's special case by our whole work, which clearly shows the lacuna left by the omission of Vico in the general history of European thought at the beginning of the eighteenth century.

[1]This appendix briefly recapitulates the chief results of my researches into the subject set forth in theBibliografia vichianaand its two supplements (cf. the present volume,infra,p. 310), to which work I refer for fuller details and for the evidence for the facts here laid down.

[2]See above, pp.236,237.

[3]Labanca has devoted a highly instructive volume to the Catholic criticisms of Vico: see the present volume,infra,p. 309.

[4]See above,pp. 247-9.

My statement, that the criterion of knowledge contained in Vico's formula of the conversion of the true with the created is an original and modern principle, has been contradicted by certain Catholic editors; who state that this doctrine, however true, is not original to Vico, and is indeed far from modern, being a purely Scholastic doctrine. If I thought otherwise, this was only due to my insufficient knowledge of Scholasticism.

I might indeed ask at the outset how such complete ignorance of scholasticism were possible: an ignorance not of its manifold varieties and the tangled forest of its distinctions—that would be comprehensible: but of no less a matter than the fundamental criterion of its theory of knowledge, the starting-point of modern thought and as such, it would seem, inevitably familiar to every student of the elements of philosophy. But since it is always useful to suspect oneself of ignorance, or even to believe oneself more ignorant than one really is, I will make so far as concerns myself a voluntary display of humility. I find it less easy, I confess, to extend the accusation of ignorance to all who, like myself, have failed to run Vico's criterion to earth in the scholastic lumber-room: Jacobi for instance, who on reading it as expressed in theDe antiquissima,sees in it the first manifestation of Kantianism and absolute idealism:[2]or the Catholic theologian Baader, who finds its later development in Schelling's philosophyof identity:[3]or the learned and subtle Spanish Thomist, Jaime Balmes, who treats it as a unique idea and attacks it from the scholastic point of view:[4]or the equally learned Catholic Bertini, who accepts and develops Jacobi's observation:[5]or the eminent historian of philosophy Wilhelm Windelband, who, while unacquainted with Vico's doctrines, on coming across indications of a similar thought in Sanchez'sQuod nihil sciturwas greatly struck by it and endorsed its value by the assertion that it was to bear fruit at a later date and in the hands of a greater philosopher, Immanuel Kant:[6]or again the specialist in the history of scholasticism, Karl Werner, the author of a careful monograph on Vico,[7]who nowhere notices the alleged scholastic character of Vico's theory of knowledge. Scholasticism must indeed be a difficult and mysterious doctrine, if it is inaccessible to all these students, qualified and bound though they are to understand it.

But we cannot pause on the threshold to speculate: we must plunge straight into the argument. In what part of scholasticism can we find Vico's criterion converting knowledge with creation?

The Thomistic saying, "truth and reality are convertible,"ens et verum convertuntur,has been quoted:[8]but quotations of this kind are perhaps more calculated to confuse by words than to convince by facts. The same value attaches to the statement that Vico himself confessed the scholastic origin of his principle, since the very first chapter of theDe antiquissimabegins with the words "in Latin, the truth and the fact reciprocate, or, as the scholastic mob says, convert,""Latinis verum et factum reciprocantur, seu, ut scholarum vulgus loquitur, convertuntur."Here it is perfectly clear to any one on a moment's thought that Vico, Latinist as he was, meantsimply to substitute the Ciceronian "reciprocari" for the barbarous "converti."

St. Thomas explained the meaning of his formula quite clearly, especially in the Summa Theologica, Part I. question xvi. art. 3. Here he asks whether the truth and the reality are convertible,utrum verum et ens convertantur;to which he replies as follows: "that as the good is of the nature of the desirable, so the truth has the nature of knowledge. But in so far as a thing has existence in itself, thus far it is knowable. And for this reason it is said inDe anima,Bk. III. text. 37 (431 b 21) that 'the soul is in a sense all things' according to sense and intellect. And hence as the good is convertible with the existent, so is the true. But yet as the good adds to existence the nature of the desirable, so also the truth adds a reference to the intellect." (Quod sicut bonum habet rationem appetibilis, ita verum habet ordinem cognitionis. Unumquodque autem in quantum habet de esse, in tantum est cognoscibile. Et propter hoc dicitur in3de Anima, text.37,quod 'anima est quodammodo omnia' secundum sensum et intellectum. Et ideo sicut bonum convertitur cum ente, ita et verum. Sed tamen sicut bonum addit rationem appetibilis supra ens, ita et verum comparationem ad intellectum.) Nothing then can be known except what exists, and nothing can exist but what is good: existence, truth and goodness are all convertible. Thus, too, things are called good in so far as they correspond to the idea in their Creator's mind. "Each single thing partakes of the truth of its own nature in so far as it imitates the knowledge of God, like an artefact in so far as it agrees with the art": "the knowledge of God is the cause of things": "the knowledge of God is the measure of things." (Unumquodque in tantum habet de veritate suae natura, in quantum imitatur Dei scientiam sicut artificiatum in quantum concordat artiI. xiv. 12.Scientia Dei est causa rerumI. xiv. 12.Scientia Dei est mensura rerumI. xiv. 12.) But truth and goodness, the objects of intellect and will respectively, if on the one hand they are "convertible in reality,"convertentur secundum rem,on the other they are "distinguishable in thought,"diversificantur secundum rationem(I. lix. 2). What have these thoughts in common with Vico's idea that the condition of knowing a truth is to create it? In fact, what is here stated is that the condition of making a thing is to know it, or as St. Thomas says in the same place (I. xiv. 8)in St. Augustine's words (De Trinitatexv. 13) "Universas creaturas et spirituelles et corporales non quia sunt ideo novit Deus, sed ideo sunt quia novit." (God does not know all His creatures corporeal and spiritual because they exist: but they exist because He knows them.)

Vico makes no kind of mention of the formulaens et verum convertuntur,though he knows and quotes—a fact which has escaped my critics—the analogous phrase "the true and the good are convertible,"verum et bonum convertuntur:[9]a formula which he diverts to his own purposes, or rather unites it with his own. "In the first place," he writes, "I establish a truth which is convertible with the created, and in this sense I understand the good of the schools, convertible with existence: and hence I infer that the one and only truth is in God, since in Him is contained all Creation."[10]This union is reached quite openly by identifyingverumwithfactum,thenfactumwithens,and finally theverum-factum-enswith thebonum: by substituting the doctrine of Vico for that of the schools. By such a method of interpretation one could reduce all doctrines to a single one, aperennis philosophia.I do not say that it would be a method entirely devoid of truth; but it is certainly not a historical method.

That Vico's criterion is not only different from but inconsistent with Thomism was shown, as I have already said, by Balmes; who pronounced it "specious but devoid of solid foundation." He uses St. Thomas's statements to controvert Vico's theological doctrine that God understands because He creates, opposing to it the Scholastic view that He creates because He understands. He denies, that the Word was conceived by the mere knowledge of what is contained in the divine omnipotence, for it is conceived not simply by creatures but also and chiefly by the cognition of the divine essence ("for the Father by understanding himself and the Son and the Holy Ghost and all other things embraced by His knowledge conceives the Word, so that thus the whole Trinity is implied in the Word, and also every creature":Pater enim intellegendo se et Filium et Spiritum sanctum et omnia alia quae ejus scientia continentur concipit Verbum, ut sic tota Trinitas Verbo dicatur, et etiam omnis creatura);he objects that, granting this criterion, God could never know himself, because He is not His own cause. He denies thatintelligence is only possible through causality, inasmuch as it is also possible through identity. He accuses Vico's criterion of involving scepticism: in a word he maintains that the facts of knowledge are known by reason, even if they are not the products of reason.[11]I am not concerned to ask whether Balmes is right, or whether Vico's criterion can be reconciled with Christian theology. I am concerned merely with establishing, not only by quotation from St. Thomas but also by the help of the judgment of an authoritative interpreter of his system that this doctrine is not Thomistic.

Even granting that the criterion in question is irreconcilable with Thomism but not with an improved Christian theology, it is certainly irreconcilable with both in the form it adopts in what I have called "Vico's second theory of knowledge," in theScienza Nuova,which Balmes either did not know or omitted to mention, and is passed over by my critics with a light-heartedness that is not particularly enviable. One of them asserts that "the alleged distinction" (the distinction that is drawn by myself) "between Vico's first and second theories of knowledge does not in point of fact exist, and produces no effects of any kind." What? Has it no effects, when those historical studies and sciences of mind, which in theDe antiquissimaoccupied the lowest position among mere probabilities became in theScienza Nuovathe truest of all—true even in a higher degree than mathematics itself as dealing with the human world which "is man's creation?" when their form is found "in the modifications of the actual human mind itself?" when they have "a reality as much greater, as the reality of the laws of human affairs is greater than that of points, lines, areas and figures?"[12]Is there no distinction, when we pass from the scepticism of theDe antiquissimato the rationalism of the statement that these "proofs are of a divine nature," and must produce "a divine pleasure, since in God to know and to create are one and the same"?[13]

It is true that upon this point my attention has been recalled to a well-known passage of Galileo (Dialogo dei massimi sistemi), an especial favourite of our own Spaventa,[14]where we find the thought that the human intellect differs from the divineextensivè,but notintensivè,and that if the divine intellect knows infinitely more about mathematical propositions because it knows them all, yet "of these few facts known by the human intellect, its knowledge is equal to that of the divine in objective certainty, since it attains comprehension of the necessity than which no greater certainty, it seems, can exist." But in any case Galileo was not a Schoolman, and moreover this pronouncement of his seemed so dangerous to the Christian theory of ideas, that he himself was obliged to alter it by admitting that while "so far as the truth of which mathematical proof gives no knowledge is concerned, this is identical with that which the divine wisdom knows," yet "the manner, in which God knows the infinitely numerous propositions of which we know a few, is immensely superior to our own, which proceeds discursively from one conclusion to another, while His is simple intuition." It is important too not to forget that this very statement figures among the heads of the accusation in Galileo's trial.[15]

If the formula of the conversion of the true with the created is not found in Thomism, it may perhaps be found, at least in its original, sceptical or mystical, intention, in other tendencies of scholasticism or mediaeval philosophy generally. With Thomism Vico seems to have had neither acquaintance nor sympathy: but from his autobiography it is plain that he studied nominalism and the summaries of Petrus Hispanus and Paulus Venetus, though with little profit,[16]and later also, much more profitably, the Scotist philosophy; which he considered the most Platonic of the Scholastic systems.[17]Traces of this appear in several views expressed in theDe antiquissima,especially in those dealing with universals and ideas. In this direction, the direction that is to say of the Scotist system and the closely allied system of Occamism, I have attempted various researches, without attaining any remarkable results: further, I have applied for assistance to various specialists in Scholasticism, but in vain; they woulddo nothing but express their own superficial impressions or lose themselves in idle disputation. In general it seems possible to say that Duns Scotus's theory of knowledge presents points of affinity to that of Vico: for example, in the polemic against the Thomistic doctrine of theadaequatio intellectus et rei,which he refutes by applying it to the divine knowledge, since God knows objects as willed by Him, and they exist because He wills their existence without His being necessitated by them.[18]For Occam again the thought of objects has no reality and objectivity (or subjectivity according to the usage of Scholastic terminology, which is the reverse of modern) in God, and is nothing else than the objects themselves, known by God according to the possibility of creating them, in virtue of which they are thinkable to the divine mind.[19]But the question for Vico is not merely the priority of creation to knowledge or knowledge to creation, but the convertibility or identity of knowledge and creation.

In certain recently published philosophical observations by Paolo Sarpi,[20]a nominalist of Occam's school,[21]the following statements are to be found. They are the more notable because standing as they do without any results in Sarpi's thought and being undeveloped in subsequent philosophy, they seem to be not his own invention but a mere repetition of scholastic dicta. "We have certain knowledge both of the existence and of the cause of those things which we understand fully how to create: of those which we know by experience, we know the existence, but not the cause. We can however guess at it, and look simply for a possible cause: but out of many found to be possible we cannot be certain which is the true one. This fact may be seen in descriptions of astronomical theories, and would also be true in the case of a man who saw a clock for the first time. Of the various guesses, that of a man who knew how to make similar objects would be nearest the truth,e.g.one who understood the construction of machinery when he saw a different kind of machine: but none the less he will never on that account[22]know for certain. There are then three kinds of knowledge:first, knowledge how to make the object: secondly, experience of it: and thirdly, guessing at possibilities." This thought, then, namely that objects are known by their creator, and that God knows objects because He creates them, seems to have been current in the schools: and this explains the fact of its reappearing in an incidental manner and as an obvious truth in Francesco Sanchez'sQuod nihil scitur(1581) where it is declared impossible "perfecte cognoscere quis quae non creavit; nec Deus creare potuisset nec creata regere quae non perfecte precognovisset"[23](that one should know perfectly things which he has not created: nor could God have been able to create nor after creating them to control things which He had not perfectly foreknown).

But need we continue to look for it in the guise of a casual remark or an isolated proposition, devoid of philosophical connexion, in the works of philosophers or the lecture-rooms of the schools? Did it not simply form a part of the common thought which daily declares that the man who has made a thing knows it better than he who has not made it? Probably a little attention would reveal it in many and dissimilar treatises; and for my own part, while reading theChroniconof Otto of Freising the other day, I came across it in the introduction to the third book, where the chronicler, writing as is well known under the influence of St. Augustine'sCivitas Dei,is arrested by the objection that God's designs in history are inscrutable, and delivers himself of the following reflections: "What then shall we do? If we cannot understand, shall we hold our peace? Then who will reply to those who flatter, repel those who attack, and by the reason and might of his words confute those who would destroy the faith that is in us? So we cannot understand the secret counsels of God, and yet we are often compelled to give a reasonable account of these things. What? Shall we reason about things which we do not understand? We can give reasons, but human reasons, when yet we cannot understand the divine reasons. And thus it happens that when we speak of theological matters, lacking the right words for them, we being men use our own words; and in speaking of so great a God in human language, we use our words the more boldlyquo ipsum figmentum nostrum cognoscere non dubitamus,because we never doubt that we know the thing we have ourselves formed:quis enim melius cognoscit quam qui creavit?for who knowsa thing better than he who has created it?"[24]The logic of the Abbot of Freising at this point may be thought a trifle sophistical: but the fact remains that he refers to a common opinion that he knows things who has made them.

But probably Vico was stimulated to the establishment of his criterion less by certain tendencies of Scotism or by current opinions than by the philosophers of the Renaissance, which he considered the golden age of metaphysical study, when shone, as he says, "Marsilio Ficino, Pico della Mirandola, Augustino Nifo and Augustino Steuco, Jacopo Mazzoni, Alessandro Piccolomini, Matteo Acquaviva and Francesco Patrizio."[25]In Ficino, whose name he couples with those of Plato and Plotinus,[26]and especially in hisTheologia Platonica,Vico could read a magnificent description of the productive character of the divine wisdom and its parallelism with that of the geometrician. Nature, says Ficino, which is divine art, differs from human art in that it produces its creations from within, by living reasons: and "it does not touch the surface of matter by means of a hand or any other external instrument, as the soul of a geometer touches the dust when he describes figures upon the earth, butperinde ut geometrica mens materiam intrinsecus phantasticam fabricat,it operates like the mind of a geometer creating an imaginary matter from within itself. For as the geometer's mind, while it considers within itself the nature of figures, forms internally by pictures the image of figures, and by means of this image forms an imaginary spirit without any toil or design, so in the divine art of nature a wisdom of some kind by means of intellectual processes endows with natural seeds the life-giving and motive force itself which is its companion."[27]Vico must have recalled this passage in Ficino when in his inaugural lecture of 1699 he compared God, "the artist of nature," to the human mind which "we may without impiety call the God of art," just as he must have remembered it in theDe antiquissimawhere he compares God to the geometrician.[28]Vico might however have found thoughts of this kind in various Renaissance philosophers, not only in Ficino: among others, in Girolamo Cardano, who contrasts divine and human knowledge, though with a different conclusion; and restricts the one to finite objects ("for understanding is brought about by a kind of proportion,proportione quaderni fit,and there is no proportion between the infinite and the finite"), denying that man can know God, for as Vico said later in almost the same words, "if I knew God, I should be God,"si scirem Deus essem.Thus he postulated "other sciences, and other modes of understanding, entirely different from this of ours; more true, more solid, more firm, as a body is than its shadow: and again other principles which we can by no reason apprehend." And not only did he postulate them, but among the human sciences he observed one which as opposed to the natural sciences reached not merely the surfaces of things but almost the things themselves, namely mathematics. "The human soul, situated in the body, cannot attain to the substances of things, but wanders about upon their surfaces by the help of the senses, examining measurements, actions, resemblances and doctrines. But the knowledge of the mind, which creates the fact, is in a sense itself the fact, just as even among human sciences the knowledge of a triangle, that it has three angles equal to two right angles, is practically identical with the truth itself (scientia vero mentis, quae res facit, est quasi ipsa res, veluti etiam in humanis scientia trigoni, quod habeat tres angulos duobus rectis aequales, eadem ferme est ipsi veritati), whence it is clear that there is in us a natural science of a different kind from true science."[29]Here, in the definition of divine knowledge and of the procedure of human knowledge in the case of mathematics, as opposed to that of physical science, is implicit the principle that true knowledge consists in the identity of thought with its object.

The idea of the opposition of mathematics to physical science, in the certainty of the one and the uncertainty of the other, persisted in the Neapolitan philosophers and scientistsof Vico's youth, even if they lost sight of the reason of this opposition. Tommaso Cornelio in his "progymnasma"De ratione philosophandi(1661) after reviewing the errors produced by the illusions of sense in physical science, says, "the contemplations of mathematics are not subjected to errors of this kind, dealing as they do with things whose images are not introduced into the mind by the senses; for the mind can by itself adequately conceive figures and numbers, whose properties and analogies are examined by mathematicians, without aid from sense."[30]This ought to be emphasised, since it seems highly probable that Vico was stimulated to the establishment of his general theory of knowledge by reflection upon mathematics and the contrast between it and physical science. In fact the Latin speeches, our earliest documents for his studies, though they show the influence of Ficino and a certain amount of Cartesianism,[31]are never dominated by this general criterion. It is only in the last of these speeches, that of 1707, that the distinction between mathematics and natural science begins to appear; in the next year it is clearly stated in theDe ratione studiorum,where it takes the form of a general criterion. "We demonstrate geometry because we make it: if we could demonstrate physical facts, we should be creating them. For the true forms of things exist only in God the greatest and best, and to these the nature of them conforms" (geometrica demonstramus quia facimus: si physica demonstrare possemus, faceremus. In uno enim Deo Opt. Max. sunt verae rerum formae, quibus earundem est conformata natura). And this theory attained its full development in 1710 in theDe antiquissima.

Such are the probable precedents, or as the common but inaccurate metaphor expresses it, "sources" of Vico's theory of knowledge. I do not think that the formation of this theory can have been influenced by the propositions of Geulinx and Malebranche which have been pointed out to me,[32]namely that "no one can make that which he does not know," and that "God alone knows his works, because he foreknows his action." In these propositions the old Thomistic doctrine issubstantially summarised. Much more tenable would be a connexion or at least a comparison with Spinoza; we may recall the Spinozistic identification of theordo et connexio idearumand theordo et connexio rerum.Another ingenious, but I think, inaccurate view is that "the analytic geometry of Descartes was the introduction of the genetic principle into the study of geometrical objects," so that the principleverum ipsum factum"before being formulated by Vico had been practised by Descartes"; and Vico in theDe antiquissima"adopted the scientific method of Descartes, which he stated as the convertibility of the true with the created," raising it "from a certitude to a criterion."[33]We are dealing here not with practice, but simply with the theory of method: for this method, conceived in its universality, just so far as it is practical has always been practised; not by Descartes alone, and not only by analytic geometry.

We should certainly be better informed as to the precedents of Vico's criterion if we knew more of his studies preparatory to theDe antiquissima,and if in general we had more literary evidence about his youth. Perhaps even the precedents I have indicated, which I only called probable, are not quite free from an element of chance; they may be connexions only imagined by myself and non-existent for Vico's mind, while others not accidental may perhaps be still unknown, or await discovery by a student more fortunate than myself. But it may not be out of place to remark that the search for "precedents" does nothing to explain the new thought that followed them; much less does it detract from the value of that thought. Such information, though on the one hand it enriches our knowledge of the history of philosophy, on the other hand has absolutely no effect upon the determinate thought under examination. It is valuable in the biography of a philosopher, but valueless for the comprehension of the proper meaning of the new theory, which must be sought essentially in the new problem which it faces and attempts to solve. In the history of philosophy the same principles hold good as in that of literature. Take for example the episode of Argante and Tancred in canto xix. of "Jerusalem Delivered"; Argante, while taking up his position for the fight with his adversary, turns "as if in doubt" to the "afflicted city," towards Jerusalem attacked by the crusaders; andwhen Tancred brutally mocks him, asking whether he does this out of fear, he replies:—

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