Note 277 — Chapter V · ÆSTHETICS AND THEIR INFLUENCE.

I may observe that Vico, though an extremely consistent thinker in reality, is apt to lay such stress on the particular side of his thought prominent at the moment, that it may deceive the unwary and must furnish the unscrupulous with handles. Compare, as one example of many, the attack on the notion of poets being “natural Theologians,” at De Const. Jurisp. iii. 277, with the argument for their being “political Theologians” a few pages later (pp. 295, 296), comparing also with both his later passage on “Teologia Poetica” in the second Scienza (v. 155).