Chapter XX

CONCLUSION: VICO AND THE LATER DEVELOPMENTS OF

PHILOSOPHICAL AND HISTORICAL THOUGHT

The reader need not expect that having brought our exposition to a close we shall add a verdict upon Vico's work, or what is known as an "appreciation" of it. If the verdict has not already emerged as a result of the exposition itself, or as identical with it, if description and criticism have been not one and same, the fault lies either with ourselves or with the reader's lack of attention; and in either case it cannot now be repaired by ornamental additions or redundant repetitions.

We confess also that we feel no sympathy with the chapters commonly placed at the conclusion of critical works upon philosophers and narrating the later history of their ideas. For if these "ideas" are understood in an extrinsic sense, in their influence upon society and culture, such a review may indeed have a value of its own,[1] but is foreign to the history of philosophy properly so called: if on the other hand they are considered as real and living philosophical ideas, their later history amounts to neither more nor less than the history of subsequent philosophy, and there is no reason for appending it to a study of one philosopher rather than another. Any other method implies the uncritical theory that ideas are something solid and crystallised, like precious stones handed on from one generation to another, whose shape and glitter can always be recognised unaltered in the new diadems they compose and the new brows they adorn. But in reality ideas are nothing but the unremitting thought of man, and transmission for them is nothing less than transformation.

It is nevertheless a fact that no one has written on Vico without feeling a need of casting his eyes over later years and noting the resemblances and analogies between the Neapolitan philosopher's doctrines and those of fifty or a hundred years after. And further, we ourselves, in spite of the antipathy we admittedly feel, and the methodical criteria we professedly employ, yet recognise now the same necessity. Why is this? Because Vico in his own day passed for an eccentric and lived as a recluse; because the later development of thought was almost entirely untouched by his direct influence; because even to-day, though well enough known in certain restricted circles, he has not taken the place he deserves in the general history of thought. How then can we show the manner in which his doctrines, true or false, respond to the deepest needs of the mind, more simply than by recording the similarity of the ideas and attempts which later appeared in such profusion and intensity as to stamp their individuality upon the philosophical and historical labours of a whole century? And even if after our intrinsic examination of his thought this comparison with the facts of later history seems unnecessary, it will at least be granted that if our discourse like any other must have its rhetorical conclusion, no peroration occurs more naturally than one consisting in a rapid review of subsequent philosophy and philology and emphasising their points of contact with the thought of Vico.

We might even adopt the method by which he compares the second barbarism with the first, and present the later history of thought as a "reflux" of Vico's ideas. In the first place his criticism of Descartes' immediate knowledge recurs, together with his conversion of the true with the created, in the speculative movement beginning with Kant and Hegel and culminating in the doctrine of the identity of truth and reality, thought and existence. His unity of philosophy and philology recurs in the vindication of history against the scepticism and intellectualism of the eighteenth century due to Cartesianism; in the à priori synthesis of Kant which reconciles the real and the ideal, experience and the categories; and in the historical philosophy of Hegel, the greatest exponent of nineteenth-century historical tendencies. This unity of philosophy and philology, a unity with Vico sometimes confused and impure in method, recurred in its faulty aspects also in the Hegelian school; so that this mental tendency might with justice be entitled "Vicianism." The limitation which Vico tried to impose on the value of mathematics and exact science recurred, as did his criticism of the mathematical and naturalistic conception of philosophy, in Jacobi's critique of Spinozistic determinism and Hegel's of the abstract intellect; and in the case of mathematics in particular Dugald Stewart and others recognised that its validity lay not in the postulates but in the definitions, and the "fictions" of which Vico speaks reappear in the modern terminology of the philosophy of these sciences. His poetical logic or science of the imagination passes into Aesthetic, so ardently studied by the philosophers, literary men and artists of Germany in the eighteenth century, brought by Kant into great prominence by his criticism of the Leibnitian doctrine of intuition as confused conception, and further advanced by Schelling and Hegel, who place art among the pure forms of the mind and so approach the position of Vico. Romanticism too, especially in Germany but also more or less in other countries, was Vician, emphasising as it did the original function of the imagination. His doctrines of language recurred when Herder and Humboldt treated it not intellectualistically as an artificial system of symbols, but as a free and poetic creation of the mind. The theory of religion and mythology abandoned the hypotheses of allegory and deception, and with David Hume recognised that religion is a natural fact, corresponding to the beginnings of human life in its passionate and imaginative state; with Heyne, that mythology is "symbolic speech," a product not of arbitrary invention but of necessity and poverty, of the "lack of words," which finds expression "in comparisons with things already known" (per rerum iam tum notarum similitudines); and with Ottfried Müller, that it is impossible to understand mythology without entering into the very heart of the human soul, where we may see its necessity and spontaneity. Religion was regarded no longer as something extraneous or hostile to philosophy, as a piece of stupidity or of deception practised by the unscrupulous upon the simple, but according to Vico's own doctrine as a rudimentary philosophy; so that the whole content of reasoned metaphysic was already to a certain extent implicit in poetical or religious metaphysic. Similarly, poetry and history were no longer kept distinct or set face to face to destroy each other; and as one of the great inspirers of the new German literature, Hamann (who in many ways resembles Vico in tendency, though unequal to him in mental power), had already foreseen when he uttered the warning, "if our poetry is worthless, our history will become leaner than Pharaoh's kine," a breath of poetry revived the historical study of the nineteenth century; once colourless, it became picturesque: once frigid, it regained warmth and life. The criticism of Hobbes' and Locke's utilitarianism, and the affirmation of the moral consciousness as a spontaneous sense of shame and a judgment entirely free from reflection reappeared in full panoply with the Critique of the Practical Reason; and that of their social atomism and consequent contractualism in Hegel's Philosophy of Right. The liberty of conscience and religious indifferentism professed and inculcated by the publicists of the seventeenth century were negated as a philosophical doctrine; and a nation without God seemed to Hegel, as it did to Vico, a phenomenon not to be found in history and existing only in the gossip of travellers in unknown or little-known lands. Carrying on the work of the Reformation, which Vico could neither grasp nor truly appreciate, the idealistic philosophy of Germany aimed not at exterminating religion, but at refining it, and at giving philosophy itself the spiritual value of religion. The certitude, the hard certitude which Vico distinguished from truth in the sphere of law, formed the subject of thought from Thomasius to Kant and Fichte and so on to the most recent writers, who have sought even if they have never found the distinctive criterion of the two forms; all or nearly all show a vivid consciousness of what is called "constraint" or "compulsion," a fact which had been almost forgotten in the old superficial and rhetorical moral theory. The historical school of law, in its reaction against the abstract revolutionary and reformatory tendencies of the eighteenth century, was bound to recall Vico's polemic against the Platonic or Grotian theory of an ideal republic or a natural law above and outside history and serving as a standard for history, and to recognise with Vico that law is correlative to the whole social life of a people at a given moment of its history and capable of being judged only in relation to it; a living and plastic reality, in a continual process of change like that of language. Finally, Vico's providence, the rationality and objectivity of history, which obeys a logic different from that attributed to it by the fancies and illusions of the individual, acquires a more prosaic name, but without changing its nature, in the "cunning of the reason" formulated by Hegel: it appeared again, ingeniously but perversely treated, in Schopenhauer's "cunning of the species," and again, treated with little ingenuity on a purely psychological method, in Wundt's so-called law of the "heterogenesis of ends."

Almost all the leading doctrines of nineteenth-century idealism, we have seen, may be regarded as refluxes of Vician doctrines. Almost all; for there is one of which we find in Vico not the premonition but the necessity, not a temporary filling but a gap to be filled. Here the nineteenth century is no longer a reflux of, but an advance upon Vico; and discordant voices of warning or reproach rise up against him. His distinction of the two worlds of mind and nature, to both of which the criterion of his theory of knowledge, the conversion of the truth with the thing created, was applicable, but applicable to the former by man himself because that world is a world created by man, and therefore knowable by him, to the second by God the Creator, so that this world is unknowable by man; this distinction was not accepted by the new philosophy, which, more Vician than Vico, made the demigod Man into a God, lifted human thought to the level of universal mind or the idea, spiritualised or idealised nature, and tried to understand it speculatively in the "Philosophy of Nature" as itself a product of mind. As soon as the last remnant of transcendence was in this way destroyed, the concept of progress overlooked by Vico and grasped and affirmed to some extent by the Cartesians and their eighteenth-century followers in their superficial and rationalistic manner shone out in its full splendour.

But if in this point Vico cannot stand the comparison with later philosophy, the failure is amply atoned by the full agreement between his historical discoveries and the criticism and research of the nineteenth century. Above all, he agrees with his successors in his rules of method, his scepticism as regards the narrative of ancient historians, his recognition of the superiority of documents and monuments over narrative, his investigation of language as a store-house of primitive beliefs and customs, his social interpretation of mythology, his emphasis on spontaneous development rather than external communication of civilisation, his care not to interpret primitive psychology in the light of modern psychology; and so on. In his actual solutions of historical problems he also agrees with later historians. These restated the archaic and barbaric character of primitive Greek and Roman civilisation, and the aristocratic and feudal tendency of its political constitution: they took up the view of ancient legal ceremonial as a dramatic poem containing allusions to the actions of fighting: the transformation of the Roman heroes into heroes of democracy came to an end with the Jacobins in France and their imitators in Italy and elsewhere; Homer was considered great in proportion to his ruggedness; the history of Rome was reconstructed chiefly on the basis of Roman law, and the names of the seven kings appeared as symbols of institutions and the traditional origin of Rome as a late invention derived from Greece or from Greek models: the substance of this history was seen to consist in the economic and juridical struggle between patriciate and plebs, and the plebs was derived from the famuli or clients: the struggle of the classes, which Vico was the first to illuminate clearly, was recognised as a criterion of wide application to the history of all time and serving as an explanation of the most sweeping social revolutions: the Middle Ages, especially during the Restoration which followed the Napoleonic period, exercised a powerful appeal to sentiment and influence on thought, being admired and regretted as the antithesis of the rationalistic bourgeois society, and understood in consequence as the religious, aristocratic and poetical period discovered by Vico, the youth of modern Europe. Thus Italy rediscovered the greatness of her own Dante, and the criticism of that poet which Vico had initiated was carried to completion by De Sanctis. In the same way, Niebuhr and Mommsen brought to maturity his view of Roman history; Wolf, his theory of Homer; Heyne, Müller and Bachhofen, his interpretation of mythology; Grimm and other philologists his projected reconstruction of ancient life by means of etymology; Savigny and the historical school, his study of the spontaneous development of law, and his preference for custom rather than statute and code: Thierry and Fustel de Coulanges in France, Troya in Italy and a host of scholars in Germany his conception of the Middle Ages and of feudalism: Marx and Sorel his idea of the struggle of classes and the rejuvenation of society by a return to a primitive state of mind and a new barbarism: and lastly the superman of Nietzsche recalls in some degree Vico's hero. These are merely a few names picked without care and almost at random; for to mention all, and each in his right place, would mean writing the whole history of the latest phase of European thought, a history which is not yet finished, though it has undergone, under the name of "positivism," a parenthetical recurrence of the abstract and materialistic thought of the eighteenth century, a parenthesis which now however seems to be at an end.

These innumerable reappearances of the work of an individual in the work of several generations, this parallelism between a man and a century, justify a fanciful phrase with which we might draw from the later developments in order to describe Vico; namely that he is neither more nor less than the nineteenth century in germ. The description may serve to summarise our reconstruction and exposition of his doctrines, and to contribute towards a right understanding of his place in the history of modern philosophy. He may rightly be placed side by side with Leibniz, with whom he has so often been compared; but not, as has been believed, because of any resemblance (the comparisons made in this belief have been shown to be false or superficial) but precisely because he is unlike him and in fact his very opposite. Leibniz is Cartesianism raised to its highest power; an intellectualist, in spite of the petites perceptions and the confused knowledge; a mechanicist, in spite of his dynamism, which perhaps exists in his fancy rather than in his actual thought; hostile to history, in spite of his immense historical erudition; blind to any knowledge of the true nature of language, though deeply interested in language all his life; devoid of dialectic, in spite of his attempt to explain the evil in the universe. In relation to later idealism, the Leibnitian philosophy stands as the most complete expression of the old metaphysic which had to be transcended: that of Vico is the sketch of the new metaphysic, only needing further development and determination. The one spoke to his own century, and his century crowded round him and echoed his words far and wide. The other spoke to a century yet to come; and the place in which he cried was a wilderness that gave no answer. But the crowd and the wilderness add nothing to and take nothing from the intrinsic character of a thought.

APPENDICES

APPENDIX I

ON THE LIFE AND CHARACTER OF G. B. VICO[1]

I

The transformation, half rhetorical, half mythical, which the heat of the national reawakening effected in poets, philosophers, and almost every character of any importance in Italian history, representing them as patriots, liberals, and in open rebellion or secret revolt against the throne and the altar, tried for a time to touch with its magic wand and to work its will upon Giambattista Vico. It was said, among other things, that Vico, conscious of the severe blow dealt by his thought to the traditional beliefs of religion, and warned by his friends, took pains to plunge the New Science into such obscurity that only the finest intellects could perceive its tendencies. But though this legend, energetically spread as it was by the patriots and republicans of 1799, was believed here and there, it could not long stand out against criticism or even against common sense; and Cataldo Iannelli was right to pass over it with a few words of contemptuous irony.[2] It is certain from an objective point of view that Vico's doctrines implicitly contained a criticism of Christian transcendence and theology as well as of the history of Christianity. From the subjective point of view it may be that Vico during his youth (of which we know very little) was the victim of religious doubts. Such doubts may have been suggested to him not only by his reading, but by the society of young men of his own age, among whom "libertines," or as contemporary literature still called them "epicureans" or "atheists," were not uncommon.[3] In a letter of 1720 to Father Giacchi, he says that at Naples the "weaknesses and errors dating from his early youth" are remembered against him, and that these, fixed in the memory, became as often happens "eternal criteria for the judgment of everything beautiful and complete which he subsequently succeeded in doing."[4] What can these errors and weaknesses have been?

Again when the De universi iuris uno principio et fine uno appeared, or rather the "Synopsis" which announced its programme, "the first voices" which Vico heard raised against him "were tinged with an assumed piety." He found protection and consolation in the face of such criticism in religion itself, that is to say in the approval of Giacchi, "the leading light of the strictest and most holy order of religious."[5] But just as we possess no detailed information as to the criticisms levelled against him on this head, so we have no certain knowledge even of the most general kind as to the religious doubts that may have troubled him. All Vico's writings show the Catholic religion established in his heart, grave, solid and immovable as a pillar of adamant; so solid and so strong that it remained absolutely untouched by the criticism of mythology inaugurated by himself. Nor was Vico an irreproachable Catholic in external demonstration only. He not only submitted every word he ever printed to the double censorship, public and private, of ecclesiastical friends, and led his life as a philosopher and writer among priestly vestments and monastic cowls no less than among legal gowns; he was even scrupulous enough to desist from his commentary on Grotius, thinking it unseemly that a Catholic should annotate a Protestant writer;[6] and so delicate was his sense of Catholic honour that he refused to admit polemic upon matters of religious feeling. "As to this difficulty," he says to his critics of the Giornale dei letterati, "like that which you propound to me concerning the immortality of the soul, where it appears that you have in hand seven distinct arguments, if they had not been prepared for me by you, I should judge that they go deeper and penetrate to a region which is not only protected and secured by my life and conduct, but which to defend is to outrage. But let us return to our subject."[7] His Catholicism was untainted by the superstition so general and so deeply rooted at the time, especially at Naples, where St. Januarius intervened as an actor and director in every event of public and private life. It was the Catholicism of a lofty soul and mind, not the faith of a charcoal-burner. But Vico never assumed the part of censor of superstitions. He was content with not speaking of them, as one keeps silence concerning the failings of persons or institutions which command one's respect.

II

Vico's attitude towards social and political life resembles in more than one respect his attitude towards religion. There is in him no trace of the missionary, the propagandist, the agitator or the conspirator as there was in some of the Renaissance philosophers, notably Giordano Bruno and Campanella, whom although—perhaps because—a Neapolitan, Vico never mentions. Certainly, his age and his country were not the time or place for heroes; there was none of that rapid social change and revolution from which heroes spring. Political parties however were active in favour of Austria and France, and men were arising who devoted their labours and their lives to one or other of these parties, or were persecuted and fled into exile: and above all this was the period in which culminated the struggle between Church and State, between Naples and Rome, in the person of Pietro Giannone, a man of whom Vico never speaks, just as he never mentions and in fact seems to ignore the entire movement. Political life rolled past over his head, like the sky and its stars, and he never wasted his strength in a vain attempt to reach it. Political and social controversy, like religious, was outside the sphere of his activity. He was indeed a non-political person. We cannot describe it as a fault or a weakness, for every one has his limitations; one struggle excludes another, and one labour makes others impossible.

Not that he avoided all contact with political life and its representatives. Only too often he was compelled to pay his respects to both, in the form of histories, speeches, verses and epigrams in Latin and Italian; and these alone would be sufficient material for the reconstruction of Neapolitan history in all its vicissitudes from the end of the seventeenth century to the middle of the eighteenth: the Spanish viceregency, the conspiracy and revolution attempted by the partisans of Austria, the reaction and re-establishment of the Spanish viceregency, the Austrian conquest, the Austrian viceregency, the Spanish reconquest and the reign of Charles Bourbon. But Vico, "very pliant because of his necessity"[8] and as professor of eloquence in the royal university, was compelled to supply the literary compositions required by the solemnities of the day, just as the draper supplied hangings and the plasterer volutes and arabesques. And what hangings and arabesques he produced! The Spanish style of the seventeenth century was still predominant in literature; and this fact is alone almost enough to explain the extravagance and ornateness, as it seems to us, of Vico's flood of panegyrics. The indifference and innocence of his own attitude may be illustrated by the passage in his autobiography where after mentioning the Panegyricus Philippo V inscriptus composed by himself to the order of the Spanish viceroy, the Duke of Ascalona, he goes on as if it was a mere nothing, with no connexion but a simple "soon after": "soon after, this kingdom having passed under the rule of Austria, the lord Count Wirrigo of Daun, at that time governor of the imperial armies in this country, ordered me" to compose inscriptions for the expiatory monuments to Guiseppe Capece and Carlo di Sangro,[9] the two rebels against Philip V. executed by the previous government some years before in the suppression of the conspiracy of Macchia described by Vico from the Bourbon point of view in his De Parthenopea coniuratione.

But this implies no baseness of character on Vico's part. It must be said that in these writings of his, orator and panegyrist though he is, he can never be called a flatterer. The flatterer, the man without a conscience, reviles and calumniates the enemies of the man he is praising, or even strikes the conquered: and this is servility. But Vico, who though he knew who the Italian or Neapolitan was that sent to the Acta Lipsiensia the note injurious to himself, and might easily have ruined him, since the note was anti-Catholic in tendency, generously refused to reveal his name,[10] gave no doubt his services as professor of eloquence but refrained from trafficking in the interests of the patrons whom he praised. Of the Life of Antonio Carafa which he composed for a commission and married one of his daughters on the proceeds, he says that the work was "tempered by honour towards the subject, reverence towards princes and the just claims of truth."[11] And to return to the case of Capece and Sangro mentioned above, when he spoke in the De Parthenopea coniuratione of the death of these two enemies to the triumphant party, he shows here too in various details the nobility of his spirit: of Capece, who refused to surrender to the Spanish soldiers, he writes "exposing his breast to death, and demanding death with his warlike arms, he fell unrepentant, a most valiant manner of death, were it only honoured in its cause" (ostentans pectus neci eamque infensis armis efflagitans, inexoratus occubuit, fortissimum mortis genus si causa cohonestasset). Of Sangro too, having reported the rumour that Louis XIV. sent him a reprieve which arrived too late, he adds: "whence the condemned man, who had already suffered the penalty, is the more to be pitied" (unde maior damnati qui iam poenas persolverat, miseratio).[12]

He must have known, and doubtless did know, that most of the persons whose praises he composed were of very little worth. To read his panegyrics, one would suppose that Naples was adorned with a nobility resplendent in its virtue, cultivation and learning: and yet, in giving Father De Vitry the information he desired upon the condition of studies in Naples, Vico did not conceal the facts: "the nobles slumber amid the enjoyments of a life of pleasure."[13] His pupil Antonio Genovesi has preserved to us one of his satirical expressions upon this nobility, often in extreme poverty but always proud and ready to go hungry at home in order to drive abroad in coaches sumptuously dressed.[14] With reference to the literary duke of Laurenzano, he formulated the theory that "noble" writers could not fail of excellence:[15] and yet I have discovered among his papers the manuscript of a book by this duke, rewritten from end to end by the same Vico.[16] Such are the contradictions and the transactions into which a poor man falls when the pressure of want has made him timid and cautious; so that it is not easy to determine how far his admiration was merely assumed at command or by complaisance, or how far his feeling of social inferiority developed into a real admiration for those above him in the scale, who possessed riches and dignity and everything he lacked and were the "seigneurs."

III

For, as is well known, his financial state was always of the gloomiest. The son of a small Neapolitan bookseller, he was at first compelled to go as a private tutor to a wild town of the Cilento; later, returning to Naples, he tried in vain to obtain the position of secretary of the city, and having in 1699 been elected to the chair of rhetoric, he held that position for thirty-six years at an annual stipend of a hundred ducats (£17). His attempt to pass to a chair of greater importance in 1723 failed, whether owing to ill-luck or to inability—he recognised that he was a "man of little spirit in matters of utility,"[17]—he was compelled to give up hopes of academic advancement. He was therefore obliged to eke out his resources by literary work such as we have mentioned, and still more by private lessons; he not only kept school at his own house as well as at the university, but he went up and down other men's steps to teach grammar to youths or even to children. His family fife was not a happy one. His wife was illiterate, and had not the qualities with which her sex sometimes compensates the defect; she was incapable of any domestic employment whatever, so that her husband had to take her place. Of his children, one girl died after a long illness and the heavy expenses which embitter the diseases of the poor; one boy showed such strong vicious tendencies that the father was compelled to seek the intervention of the police and place him in a house of correction. So sublimely irrational was his fatherly affection that upon this occasion when he saw from the window the police officers he had called in, coming to take his miserable and beloved son away, he ran to him crying, "my son, flee!"[18]

He was indeed of an extremely affectionate disposition; a fact which may be gathered for instance from the noble and touching speech he composed on the death of his friend Donna Angela Cimini, from the tone of pity and indignation with which in the Scienza Nuova he spoke of the oppressed plebeians whose history he is investigating or of the tragic figures of Priam and Polyxena, the romance of which he feels keenly; and finally, from certain stylistic details scattered here and there, such as the aphorism (no. xl.) where he says that witches in order to solemnise their rites "slay without pity and cut in pieces most lovely and innocent children," quite upset, in the most inopportune but significant fashion, by the fate of these little persons, whom his excited imagination adorns with a superlative loveliness. His greatest domestic happiness came from his daughter Luisa, a cultured and poetical soul, and his son Gennaro, who shared with him and ultimately succeeded to his chair. When, in his panegyric on the Countess of Althann, he calls ironically upon the philosophers who dispute as they walk in pleasant gardens or beneath painted porticoes, free from the agony and weariness of "wives in travail" and "children wasting away with disease,"[19] we feel that he is speaking from his own experience and smarting under the memory of domestic troubles.

We often meet, especially in these days, with men of some talent who consider themselves freed from this or that humble duty: and we ought the more to admire this man of genius who on the contrary accepted them every one, and (to use a phrase of Flaubert's) while thinking the thought of a demigod lived the life of a townsman or even that of a man of the people. He had acquired the habit of reading, writing, thinking and composing his works "while discussing matters with his friends amid the uproar of his children."[20]

His health was never very good: his friends called him "Mastro Tisicuzzo":[21] very weak in youth, he was in his old age afflicted with ulcers in the throat and pains in his thighs and legs. In a word, the repose, the peace, the tranquillity which other philosophers enjoy all their life or for long periods together was always lacking to Vico. He was forced to play both Martha and Mary: working at every moment for his own and his family's practical needs and working at the same time to fulfil the mission to which he was devoted from his birth and to give concrete form to the spiritual world that moved within him.

IV

Thus we need not invent or demand a heroic Vico, looking for him in the life of religion, society or politics. The true hero is the Vico who stands before us, the hero of the philosophic life. Others beside ourselves have noticed his love for the word "hero" and all its derivatives, "heroism," "heroic," and so on: and the continual use and varied application he makes of it. Heroism was for him the mighty virgin force which appears in the beginning and reappears in the reflux of history. This force he must surely have felt in himself as he laboured for the truth and, overthrowing obstacles of every kind, opened up new paths of science. It was this force that enabled him to overcome the youthful uncertainties, fears and defeats which sometimes plunged him in a profound individual and cosmic pessimism, visible in the poem entitled "Feelings of One in Despair," to rise to the certainty of scientific method enunciated in the De nostri temporis studiorum ratione and his first attempt at philosophico-historical research represented by the De antiquissima Italorum sapientia; and from this point, abandoning in part his own thought and weaving a new tissue of what remained, led him to the De uno universi iuris principio et fine uno and to the Scienza Nuova "after twenty-five years," as he says of the discoveries contained in that work, "of unremitting and toilsome thought."

The work completed by this poor teacher of grammar and rhetoric, by this pedagogue whom a contemporary satirist saw "lean, with a rolling eye, ferule in hand,"[22] by this unhappy paterfamilias, is amazing and almost terrifying; such is the mass of mental power compressed into it. It is a work at once reactionary and revolutionary: reactionary in relation to the present, by its attachment to the traditions of the ancient world and the Renaissance; revolutionary as against the present and the past in laying the foundations of that future later to be known as the Nineteenth century.

Within the domain of science, this humble man of the people became an aristocrat: and the "lordly style"[23] which he falsely ascribed to the wretched writings of the proud nobles and pompous prelates of his day was in reality his own. He loathed the polite and social literature which was gradually spreading in France and Italy and other European countries, the "ladies' books."[24] But he avoided no less that other class of treatise which we nowadays call "handbooks," which explain in detail elementary definitions and facts ascertained by others; books useless except to the young.[25] Vico, who suffered quite enough from the young within the circle of his school, saw no need to sacrifice to them any part of his own inviolable life of science. The public towards which he looked was not composed of boys, lords and ladies. When he wrote, his first practical thought was, "what would a Plato, a Varro or a Quintus Mucius Scaevola think of the fruits of his thought?" and secondly, "what will posterity think?"[26] Among his contemporaries he looked only at the republic of letters, the brotherhood of scholars, the Academies of Europe: a public which did not require him to repeat what had been already discovered and stated in the course of the history of science, and was perfectly familiar to him, but only demanded the exposition of such thoughts as constituted a real advance of knowledge: not voluminous works, but "little books, all full of original things."[27] His public was an ideal one, which sometimes in his simplicity he confused with the actual professional scholars and the critics of literary reviews: and the mistake often caused him surprise. Short books on metaphysical subjects seemed to him to have a peculiar power, as in fact they have; he compares them very justly with religious meditations "which briefly set forth a small number of points" and are more valuable for the development of the Christian spirit than "the most eloquent and lucid sermons of the most gifted preachers."[28] This love of brevity inspires his refusal to burden with many books the republic of letters, which, he says, is already sinking beneath the weight. He left his discourses unpublished, only printed his De ratione out of a sense of duty, and often expressed a desire that the Scienza Nuova alone should survive him, as the work which summed up in itself the concentrated and perfected fruits of all his earlier efforts.

His aristocratic ideal was accompanied by the loftiest dignity and the profoundest loyalty in his conception of the life of science. From his polemics we might compile a whole catechism on the right method of conducting literary controversy. We must aim at victory, he says, not in the controversy but in the truth; hence he desires that it should be conducted "in the calmest manner of reasoning," because "he who is strong does not threaten, and he who is right does not use insults"; the dispute must at any rate be interspersed with peaceful words "showing that the minds of the disputants are placid and tranquil, not excited and perturbed." To opponents whose objections are vague he replies, "the judgment is in too general terms: and serious men never deign to reply except to particular and determinate criticisms made upon them." When these same opponents appeal to the "refined taste of the age, which has banished," etc., etc., he replies contemptuously, "a grave criticism this, in truth: it is no criticism at all. In thus taking refuge from one's opponents before the tribunal of one's own judgment, by saying that what they say is a thing of which one has no idea, from an opponent one becomes the judge." He refused to rely upon his authorities, but yet did not undervalue them; authority ought to "make us attentive to seek the causes which could have induced authors, especially the most weighty, to adopt such and such opinions." Again, accused of attributing errors to philosophers so as to be able to refute them with ease, like Aristotle, he protests with dignity: "I would rather enjoy my own small and simple stock of knowledge than be compared in bad faith with a great philosopher." His moderation may be illustrated by his splendid eulogy of Descartes, though he spent the best part of his mental powers in opposing him. His loyalty is shown by his prompt recognition of his own errors: "I admit," he says at one point to the critics of the Giornale dei letterati, "that my distinction is faulty."[29] "The reader must not think it ostentatious in us" (he writes in the second Scienza Nuova), "that not satisfied with the favourable judgments of such men as these upon our works, we yet disapprove and reject these works. On the contrary, it is a proof of the high veneration and respect in which we hold these men. For rude and haughty writers uphold their works even against the just accusations and reasonable corrections of others: some, who by chance are of a small spirit, sate themselves with the favourable judgments they receive and because of these go no further towards perfection: but in our case the praise of great minds has increased our courage to amend, to complete, and even to recast in a better form this work of ours."[30]

His scientific life was upright, worthy of a serious searcher after truth; his emotional life disturbed and restless, worthy of one who sees face to face the truth he has long sought and desired, and rejoices in the power of laying it before mankind. Hence his lofty poetry, expressed not in verse but in prose, and especially in the Scienza Nuova. "Vico is a poet," writes Tommaseo: "he brings fire from smoke, and lively images from metaphysical abstractions: he reasons as he narrates and depicts while he reasons: over the mountain-tops of thought he does not walk, he flies; and in one sentence he often compresses more lyrical feeling than may be found in many an ode."[31] De Sanctis saw in the Scienza Nuova the progress of a poem, almost a new Divina commedia. Sublime like Dante, he was more severe than Dante himself; if the lips of the Ghibelline show at times the flicker of "a passing smile," Vico looks at history with a face "that never smiles." Moreover, the man whose style has been so often criticised is not a commonplace writer; he was as careful a student of pure Tuscan[32] as he was a fine connoisseur, according to Capasso, of Latin phraseology.[33] But he was faulty in the arrangement of his books, because his mind did not master all the philosophical and historical material it had accumulated; he wrote carelessly because wildly and as if possessed by a demon: and hence arise the lack of proportion and the confusion in the various parts of his work, within single pages and single paragraphs. He often gives the impression of a bottle of water quickly inverted, in which the liquid trying to issue forth so presses against the narrow opening "that it comes out painfully, drop by drop." Painfully, by fragments, and disjointedly. One idea while he is expressing it recalls another, that a fact, and that another fact: he tries to say everything at once, and parenthesis branches off into parenthesis in a manner to make one's brain reel. But these chaotic periods, weighted as they are with original thoughts, are no less woven of striking phrases, statuesque words, phrases full of emotion, and picturesque images. A bad writer, if you will, but his is the kind of bad writing of which only great writers possess the secret.

V

The philosophical heroism of Vico asserts itself not only in the internal struggle with himself for the elaboration of his science. It was exposed to other and sterner trials. The position reached by his thought, opposed as it was to the present, and while apparently reactionary turned in reality towards the future, inevitably prevented him from being understood. No doubt this is the fate of every man of genius: his inmost thought is never understood, even when social fortune seems to favour him, even when he arouses enthusiasm and finds a host of disciples and imitators. The words which Hegel is said to have uttered on his deathbed—"one only of my pupils understood me, and he misunderstood me"—admirably express this historical necessity: the man whom his age fully understands dies with his age. And yet the disproportion between the value of a man's thought and his contemporaries' failure to understand it has seldom if ever been greater than in Vico's case. If he had been free from other causes of discontent, this alone would have been sufficient. The "desire for praise," which in other than commonplace minds is a desire to see what they think true and good shared, approved and universalised among other minds, was always with him a "vain desire."

He was the more afflicted by this misunderstanding and indifference because, as we may well suppose, he was fully conscious of the importance of his own discoveries. He knew that Providence had entrusted to him a lofty mission: he knew himself to be "born for the glory of his country, and therefore in Italy; since, being born there and not in Morocco, he became a scholar."[34] When he published the Scienza Nuova, he believed that he had fired a mine whose loud explosion he expected every minute. Nothing happened: nobody mentioned it to him: so that he wrote some days later, to a friend: "In publishing my work in this city I seem to have launched it upon a desert. I avoid all public places, so as not to meet the persons to whom I have sent it, and if by chance I do meet them, I greet them without stopping; for when this happens, these people give me not the faintest sign that they have received my book, and so confirm my impression of having published it in a wilderness."[35] He had frankly expected a swift and immediate effect: he had hoped to find, among his contemporaries and acquaintances at Naples, minds ready and intellects open to receive and bear fruit of his thoughts: and he hoped this of monks engaged in composing and learning by rote wordy sermons, poetasters rhyming in sonnets and advocates compiling second-hand speeches!

Instead of this, he found many sceptical and indifferent, and several inclined to laugh. His Diritto universale had been as Metastasio informs us[36] generally "blamed for obscurity" on its publication; it was not widely read and was hastily criticised for the extravagances which an inattentive and superficial reading revealed at every point.[37] Father Paoli, to whom the author had given a copy, wrote in it a couplet making a joke of its unintelligibility.[38] The Scienza Nuova was in an even worse case. We know that Nicola Capasso, a scholar and well disposed towards Vico, on trying to read it fancied he had lost his wits, and by way of a joke hurried off to his doctor Cirillo, to have his pulse felt.[39] A Neapolitan nobleman when asked by Finetti at Venice what opinion was held of Vico at Naples, said that for a time he had passed for a really learned man, but that later his strange opinions had won him the reputation of an eccentric. "And when he published the Scienza Nuova?" insisted Finetti. "Oh, by then," replied the other, "he was quite mad!"[40] His detractors even attacked him in the modest profession by which he earned his living; they said he was "good at teaching youths who had completed their course, that is to say when they already knew all they needed," or again, more insidiously, that he was fitted less for teaching than for "giving good advice to the teachers themselves;"[41] so that they recognised his superiority only to use it in damaging his private interests.

VI

The indifference of the public and the insincerity or malignity of critics could not for Vico be compensated by the friends and appreciative readers of whom Vico had a certain number. How indeed could it have been otherwise, when he cultivated them artificially with such care and anxiety? Consider for instance the way in which he cultivated the friendship of Giacchi the Capucin. He praised his "admirable works," his "most divine talents," the "rare sublimity" of his "marvellous and divine ideas." He tells him that he has given to the scholars of the city the eulogistic letter sent to him by Giacchi and that they all admire "the sublime workmanship of the conception"; and yet he himself used to rewrite in scholar's Latin the inscriptions Giacchi composed in monk's Latin![42] On another occasion he wrote that the praises of a Giacchi had excited envy and had in certain quarters been described as flatteries. He took no less pains to propitiate the Archbishop of Bari, Muzio di Gaeta, a conceited creature full of his own merits and incapable of speaking except about himself. Muzio wrote a panegyric on Pope Benedict XIII., a work of which, though Vico praised it again and again, he had never heard enough, and was always covertly or openly demanding new praises. So Vico used to besprinkle him patiently with the desired fluid: "the marvellous work of Your Excellency"; his "lordly diction"; his "demosthenic digressions"; his eloquence, that philosophic speech employed in Greece by the Academic school, in Rome by Cicero, and "among the Italians by none but Your Excellency!" To the advocate Francesco Solla, who had been his pupil and had subsequently retired into the country, he hinted that the Scienza Nuova looked towards him as one of the few men in the world possessed of a mind penetrating enough to receive it unhampered by any prejudices concerning the origin of mankind.[43] Such were the guileless artifices and the pitiful little schemes by which he contrived to give an illusory satisfaction to his thirst for recognition and praise, and a narcotic to his overwrought nerves. But the final results were miserable enough. Giacchi's letters contain not a word to show that he had ever grasped one of Vico's doctrines or even that he had examined them with any serious interest. Monsignor di Gaeta, after a labyrinth of circumlocutions, admits that he "admired more than he understood" of Vico's works;[44] and possibly he was so much occupied in admiring his own prose that he never read them at all. Solla, in whom Vico placed such hopes, thought the discourse on the death of Angela Cimini superior to all the author's other works, including the Scienza Nuova itself. Vico received a no less incautious compliment from another admirer; though a warm and affectionate one,—Esteban.[45] Compliments of a vague and unintelligent kind sometimes reached him in return for the copies of his works which he sent not only to Neapolitan scholars but to those of Rome, Pisa, Padua and even Germany, Holland and England: he sent a copy to Isaac Newton.[46] Generally, however, these gifts were received in contemptuous silence. At most, Vico acquired the reputation of a scholar among hundreds of scholars, a man of letters among thousands of similar men; a learned man, but nothing more.

Among the modest, the insignificant, and the young, Vico no doubt had strong admirers. Among these were the poet, later a sacred orator, Gherardo de Angelis, Solla and Esteban whom we have mentioned, the monk Nicola Concina of Padua, and some more. But though their affection was strong their intelligence was weak. Even Concina admitted while rhapsodising his enthusiasm that he did not very clearly comprehend his master: "Oh, what fruitful and sublime lights are here! If only I had the talent to make use of them, to comprehend their depth and the wonderful art of which I seem to catch a glimpse!"[47] The best service that these friends could do him was to soothe with kindly words Vico's embittered spirit, if they could not do so by following his inmost thoughts. This is what Esteban does at the close of the letter in which he excuses himself for his foolish remark on the funeral speech of Angela Cimini in phrases he must have gathered from the master's lips: "Be confident, Sir, that Providence, through channels unimagined by yourself, will cause to spring up for you a perennial fountain of immortal glory!"[48] The Jesuit Father Domenico Lodovico, who wrote the couplet inscribed beneath Vico's portrait, on receiving the Scienza Nuova sent to the author with much sound sense a little wine from the cellar and a little bread from the oven of the Jesuit house of the Nunziatella, together with a graceful letter begging the author to accept "these trifles, simple as they are, since the infant Jesus himself did not refuse the rude offerings of pastoral peasants." He suggested too that at the side of the alphabet in the symbolic frontispiece to the work a little dwarf should be added in the posture of one dumb with astonishment like Dante's mountaineer, and that beneath him should be written, "with a significant diaeresis," the name Lodo-vico![49] Among the young men of his school there were some who, nourished upon his doctrines, were ready to defend their master with their swords;[50] but we all know the value of these youthful enthusiasms. If these scholars had really assimilated Vico's doctrines or any part of them, we should have found traces of it in the literature or culture of the next generation after Vico; but such traces are entirely absent. Hardly a single one of his formulae, his historical statements, or conceptions even superficially understood is to be found in Conti at Venice, Concina at Padua, Ignazio Luzan in Spain—though the last named was living at Naples when the Scienza Nuova was published;[51] or even, within the author's own neighbourhood, in Genovesi or Galiani.

Envy, insincerity, gossip, calumny and stupidity provoked violent outbursts of anger on Vico's part. He confesses this fault in his autobiography where he says that he inveighed in too severe a manner against the errors of conception or doctrine or the incivility of his literary rivals, when in Christian charity and as a true philosopher he ought to have ignored or pardoned them.[52] But as a matter of fact this fault did not greatly distress him: he thought it rather an ornament. The funeral speech for Angela Cimini contained a kind of hymn to anger, the "heroic wrath which in noble spirits disturbs and shakes to the depths by its boiling all those evil thoughts of the mind, which beget the vile swarm of fraud, deceit and falsehood, and renders the hero frank, truthful and loyal; and thus making him a partisan of truth, arms him as the valiant knight of reason to do battle with wrong and offence."[53]

Although in his writings he guards "with all his power" against falling into this passion[54] we feel a scarcely repressed torrent of wrath in his private letters whenever he denounces the "miserable pedants" who "love learning more than truth," or the common tendency of man to be "all memory and imagination," and so forth. In conversation also, it seems, he could be very violent. When in 1736 Damiano Romano published a work controverting his theory of the Twelve Tables, Vico, although according to Romano himself he had been spoken of as "most learned" and "most famous," together with other titles of respect, "tore the book to pieces with his teeth in a way that made every one present tremble with horror," rinding a sign of the deepest malignity in the fact that "a lad like myself should join issue with him."[55] But his outbursts of wrath were succeeded by fits of the deepest dejection. In a sonnet he speaks of himself as over-whelmed by that fate "which the unjust hate of others often creates," and says that for this reason he has separated himself from human society to live with himself alone. Sometimes he shakes off this torpor for a moment: then, he says:

I draw within myself again, and pressed By heavy cares, return to where I stood:[56] My fate and not my fault I do lament.

VII

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 from passion, 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 on Universal 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 the catharsis of 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 longer disturbs 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.

VIII

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 the Scienza 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, the Scienza Nuova, which work was to demonstrate that his literary life was bound to have been what it was and not different."[65] Vico's Autobiography is, in a word, the application of the Scienza Nuova to 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. The Autobiography itself concludes with a blessing upon the author's hardships, a profession of faith in Providence and a sure expectation of fame and glory.

IX

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 second Scienza 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 duties of 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 soldier exacta 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]

APPENDIX II

THE LATER HISTORY OF VICO'S THOUGHT[1]

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 eighteenth century? 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 the Scienza Nuova without acknowledging his debt. It is now established through Montesquieu's journal that in 1728 Antonio Conti at Venice advised the future author of the Esprit des Lois to 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 the Scienza Nuova is 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 the Scienza Nuova; and the traces of imitation alleged to have been discovered in the Esprit des Lois are very doubtful and in any case of minor importance. It must be said on the other hand that the merit 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 the Prolegomena ad Homerum in 1795 Wolf did not know the Scienza 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 the Gazette littéraire de l'Europe; and further, that the Scienza Nuova was 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 the Prolegomena. 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 in Germany, 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 the Scienza Nuova did fall into the hands of men competent to understand it, a series of insignificant accidents interposed to prevent such an understanding. Hamann procured the Scienza Nuova from 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 the Scienza 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 the Scienza 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 the Scienza Nuova in 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 the Scienza Nuova to Monti, who mentioned it in his inaugural lecture at Pavia in 1803, to Ugo Foscolo, who absorbed many of its ideas into his poem the Sepolcri and his critical essays: to Alessandro Manzoni, who was later to institute in his Discorso sulla storia longobarda a famous comparison between Vico and Muratori: and to others of less importance. Cuoco introduced Vico's work to Degérando, then at work on his Histoire comparée des systèmes philosophiques; another exile, De Angelis, put the Scienza Nuova into the hands of Jules Michelet; Salfi mentioned Vico in articles in the Revue Encyclopédique and in books and minor works in French. It was also through the suggestion of these Neapolitans that the Scienza Nuova was 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 admirable Saggio storico sulla rivoluzione napoletana (1800). Similarly Ballanche some decades later in his Essais 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 work Sulla 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 the De antiquissima, immediately placed himself in the centre of the Vician philosophy by discovering and pointing out in 1811, in his work Über den göttlichen Dingen und ihrer Offenbarung, the close connexion between the principle of the convertibility 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 the Scienza Nuova made 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 the Phenomenology; 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 his Römische Geschichte, he certainly knew it later through Savigny and through the article entitled Vico und Niebuhr published 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 novels and in Flaubert's Bouvard 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 the Diritto 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 the Scienza 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 see clearly 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 the Scienza 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 reawoke within 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 this course 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.

APPENDIX III

THE SOURCES OF VICO'S THEORY OF KNOWLEDGE[1]

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 the De 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 philosophy of 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's Quod nihil scitur was 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 the De antiquissima begins 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, meant simply 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 in De 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 in 3 de 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 arti I. xiv. 12. Scientia Dei est causa rerum I. xiv. 12. Scientia Dei est mensura rerum I. 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 Trinitate xv. 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 formula ens 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 identifying verum with factum, then factum with ens, and finally the verum-factum-ens with the bonum: 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, a perennis 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 that intelligence 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 the Scienza 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 the De antiquissima occupied the lowest position among mere probabilities became in the Scienza Nuova the 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 the De antiquissima to 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]