INTERNAL STRUCTURE OF THE NEW SCIENCE
The lack of clearness on the relation of philosophy to philology, and the failure to distinguish between the two quite different ways of conceiving the reduction of philology to a science, are at once the consequences and the causes of the obscurity which prevails in the "New Science." By this name we refer to the whole mass of research and theory which Vico was producing from 1720 to 1730, elaborated above all in three works, the De uno universi iuris principio et fine uno and the first and second Scienza Nuova; it attains its maturest and most developed form in the last of these, and this is the most important for reference.
The New Science, agreeably to the various meanings of the terms philosophy and philology and of the relation between them, consists of three groups of investigations, philosophical, historical and empirical. Altogether it contains a philosophy of mind, a history, or group of histories, and a social science. To the first named belong the ideas expressed in various axioms or aphorisms scattered up and down the work, on imagination and the imaginative universal, on the intellect and the logical universal, on myth, religion, the moral judgment, force and law, certitude and truth, the passions, providence, and all the other determinations affecting the course or development of the thought or mind of man. To the second, namely history, belong the sketch of a universal history of primitive peoples from the time of the Flood, and of the origins of the various civilisations: the description of the ancient barbaric or heroic society in Greece and especially in Rome, with regard to religion, customs, law, language and political constitution: the study of primitive poetry, concentrating upon the determination of the genesis and character of the Homeric poems: the history of the social struggles between the patricians and plebeians and the origin of democracy, also studied chiefly in Rome: and the description of the return of barbarism or the Middle Ages, also studied in all aspects of life and compared with primitive barbaric society. Finally, to empirical science belongs the attempt to establish a uniform course of national history, dealing with the succession both of political forms and of other correlative manifestations of life both theoretical and practical, and the series of types successively drawn by Vico of the patriciate, the plebs, feudalism, the patriarchal family, symbolic law, metaphorical language, hieroglyphic writing and so forth.
Now if these three classes of inquiry and theory had been logically distinct in Vico's mind and united and compressed within the limits of a single book for literary reasons alone, the result might have been confused, ill-proportioned, out of harmony, and therefore fatiguing to the reader, but not obscure. But in point of fact it cannot be said that the Scienza Nuova, at least in its second form, the final exposition of his thought given by Vico, lacks a general plan, well enough conceived. The treatise is divided into five books. The first is intended to summarise general principles, that is, philosophy. The second, in addition to a short note on the most ancient universal history, describes the life of barbaric society, to which the third, on the discovery of the true Homer, the most conspicuous example of barbaric poetry, forms an appendix. The fourth is meant to sketch the empirical science of the movement of national history: and the fifth to exemplify the movement of "reflux" in the particular case of the Middle Ages. And yet, in spite of this fine architectonic scheme, the second Scienza Nuova is the most obscure, just as it is the most rich and complete of Vico's works. If on the other hand, while keeping his ideas clear in his mind, Vico had used an unfamiliar terminology or a style of exposition either too compressed or too full of allusions or implicit presuppositions, he would certainly have been a difficult writer, but in this case, as in the other, not obscure. But such a hypothesis does not suit the facts. Vico is very sparing of scholastic language; he prefers living and popular terminology. He is not compressed: in fact, he is fond of repeating his ideas, emphasising them by repetition with great insistence. And he lays all his cards on the table: that is to say, he shows all the material by which his doctrines have been suggested. Finally, it amounts to very little to say that Vico was not fully conscious of his own discoveries: such consciousness is more or less deficient in every thinker, and in fact none could have it more fully. The obscurity, the real obscurity which we find in Vico is not superficial. It does not come either from merely general or from secondary causes. It really consists in the obscurity of his ideas; in his insufficient understanding of certain connections, and the substitution for them of fallacious ones; in the arbitrary element, that is, which he introduces into his thought, or to put it more simply in his own downright errors. One might rewrite the New Science, recasting the order and changing and elucidating the terminology—the present writer has made the attempt for himself—and still the obscurity would remain, or even increase; for in such a translation the work in losing its original form would lose also the turbid but powerful strength which may at times take the place of clarity, and, while it does not illuminate, stirs the reader's mind and generates waves of thought as it were by sympathetic vibrations.
That Vico's obscurity, his mistake or mistakes, is due to the confusion or lack of distinction in his theory of knowledge mentioned above, on the question of the relations between philosophy, history and empirical science—a confusion which exists no less in his actual thought on the problems of the mind and history of man—that this is so can be seen by observing how philosophy, history and empirical science pass into each other by turns in Vico's mind, and vitiating each other in turn produce the perplexities, ambiguities, exaggerations and hasty statements which perturb the reader of the New Science. The philosophy of mind masquerades now as empirical science, now as history: empirical science now as philosophy, now as history: and historical propositions assume the universality of philosophical principles or the generality of empirical schemata. For example, the philosophy of man undertakes to determine the forms, categories or ideal moments of mind in their necessary succession, and in this aspect it well deserves the title or definition of "eternal ideal history" according to which particular histories proceed in time; while no fragment however small of actual history can be conceived in which this ideal history is not present. But, since ideal history is also for Vico the empirical determination of the order in which the forms of civilisations, states, languages, styles, and kinds of poetry succeed one another, it comes about that he conceives the empirical series as identical with the ideal series, and as deriving validity from it. Hence he asserts that this series must always be exactly reproduced in the facts, "even if infinite worlds were produced from time to time through eternity": an assertion which is plainly false, since there is no reason why the empirical fact of Greek or Roman aristocracy should be repeated for ever, with a "must have been, must be now, must be hereafter"; or why civilisations should rise and fall precisely as did those of antiquity. And this very treatment of the empirical course of events as absolute threw a shadow of empiricism over their ideal course; since the latter once identified with the former took over its empirical and temporal character instead of the eternal and extra—temporal character which it had as originally conceived. The same must be said of the various forms of mind which, as ideal and extra—temporal, are always all present in every fact; but Vico, by confusing them with the real and concrete facts which empirical science splits up into its schemata, destroyed them in their ideal form and distinction as soon as he had stated them. It is true that the moment of force is not that of justice; but the empirical type of barbaric society founded upon force, precisely because it is a representative and approximative determination, and is referred to a concrete and total state of things, contains not only force but justice as well; and when this ideal moment and this type of society are interchanged and treated as identical, on the one hand the philosophical concept of force is confused with that of justice and becomes impure, contradictory and incoherent, and finally annuls itself: on the other, the empirical type of barbaric society becomes exaggerated and unduly rigid. The confusion between the philosophic and the empirical is clearly expressed in Vico's aphorism defining the nature of things. "Nature of things is nothing else than their production at certain times and in certain manners: and whenever these latter are of such a kind, then the things produced are of such a kind and no other." Here we see the confusion between time and manner, between ideal and empirical genesis. Similarly, it is perfectly true that history ought to proceed in harmony with philosophy, and that a philosophical absurdity can never be a historical event: but, since the distinction between philosophy and empirical science was not drawn by Vico, when evidence was lacking and philosophy therefore inapplicable he felt no less sure of attaining truth. He merely filled the gap with a conjecture supplied by the schema of empirical science, and persuaded himself that he had fallen back on a "metaphysical proof." Or again, if he found himself faced by uncertain facts, instead of patiently waiting till the discovery of further evidence should dispel the doubt, he cut the knot by accepting the facts, as he put it, in conformity with laws: which always means the empirical schema. A legitimate method, doubtless, when treated as hypothetical. But this hypothesis became in its turn, for Vico, a "truth meditated in the idea": so that the comparison with facts, which none the less he recommends for the sake of confirmation, became strictly speaking superfluous: or, if the comparison showed that the facts disagreed with it, the facts, as mere appearance, must be in the wrong, rather than the hypothesis, which is laid down as philosophical truth, and therefore indubitable. Hence arises the tendency observed in Vico to do violence to the facts.
These examples are enough to indicate the deep-seated fault in the structure of the New Science, and to establish one point in our exposition and criticism of Vico's thought, in the course of which many other examples of the same point will arise of themselves, and those already given will become more clear. But another point which must be well established is that this fault is the fault of an organism in the highest degree healthy, and that the different species of inquiry between which Vico failed to distinguish were composed of investigations of extraordinary originality, truth, and importance. It is in fact the fault often found in highly original and inventive intellects, which seldom work out their discoveries in accurate detail, while less inventive minds are generally more precise and logical. Depth and acuteness do not always flourish equally side by side: and Vico, however much he fell short in acuteness, was always profoundly deep.
Light and shade, truth and error, which alternate and interweave at almost every point in the New Science, are variously distinguished according to the various temperaments of readers and critics: and in conspicuous cases, like that of Vico, such variations assume the most sharply defined form. Some minds are self-willed and suspicious, quick to mark any trifling contradiction, merciless in demanding proof of every statement, and indefatigable in wielding the forceps of dilemma to dismember an unfortunate great man. For them Vico's work, like many others of the same kind, is a closed book. At most, it will provide them with a theme for what is known as a "refutation": an easy and congenial task, yet hardly a successful one, since the man they have demolished generally emerges from the slaughter more alive than before. But there is another type of mind, which, at the first word which reaches the heart, at the first ray of truth which dawns upon the eyes, opens its whole self in desire, abandons itself in faith, and grows wild with enthusiasm; which refuses to hear of faults and never sees difficulties, or the difficulties at once vanish, and the faults find the easiest of justifications: and when it commits itself to writing, its writings appear in the guise of "defences." For such a mind we fear that the New Science is a book all too open. No doubt, if these two attitudes were the only alternatives, if no third choice were open, one would have to choose the fault of love rather than that of cold indifference; the excess of faith, which may yet enrich us by one or two aspects of the truth, rather than the absence of faith which never lets us realise one. But a third attitude is possible to, and indeed incumbent on the critic; namely, that which never takes its eyes off the light, but yet does not conceal the shade; which transcends the letter to attain the spirit, yet not ignoring the letter, but always returning to it, always endeavouring to play the part of a free but not a fanciful interpreter, a warm lover but not a blind one.
The two points above established, the strength and weakness essential to Vico's intellect, his tendency to confusion or his confusion of tendencies, supply us with a kind of general canon of interpretation; namely, that of separating analytically at every step his pure philosophy from the empiricism and history with which he mixes, and in which so to speak he embodies it, and on the other hand separating the latter from the former: and of observing, in the process, the causes and effects of the mixture. The dross cannot be treated as non-existent, bound up as it is with the gold in its natural state: but it must not hinder us from recognising and purifying the gold. Or, to drop the metaphor, the history must be indeed a history, but that it can only be if guided by intelligence.
[CHAPTER IV]
THE IMAGINATIVE FORM OF KNOWLEDGE
(POETRY AND LANGUAGE)
The chief, almost indeed the only, forms of the mind studied by Vico in the New Science are the inferior, individualising activities to which he gives the general name of "certitude." These are, in the region of theoretic mind, imagination: in that of the practical mind, power or will: and in the empirical science corresponding to the philosophy of mind, the barbaric society and poetic wisdom whose examination occupies, in his own words, "almost the whole bulk of the work."
His deep interest in these lower forms, and in the primitive societies and barbaric histories which display them, is further illustrated and explained, among his external circumstances, by the studies he undertook in Roman law and its expressions and rhetorical figures: by the still living tradition of Italian humanism: by the recently stimulated pursuit of the archaeological sciences: by his own desire to investigate the earliest civilisation of Italy, and so forth. But many of his contemporaries and countrymen were handling the same materials without acquiring any of his taste for and comprehension of imagination, simplicity and force: indeed Vico himself, when he wrote the De antiquissima, had the taste for these things but as yet no comprehension of them. The full reason for this interest is seen when we consider the development of Vico as a philosopher, without losing sight of the complexity of his nature in all its opposition to the Cartesian type of mind. Cartesianism, with its attention confined to the universalising and abstractive forms, ignored the individualising: and this necessarily attracted Vico all the more towards them as towards a mysterious problem. Cartesianism shrank in horror from the tangled forest of history: Vico plunged eagerly into that very department of history where the historical flavour, so to speak, is strongest; namely, that which is furthest and psychologically most different from civilised periods. Cartesianism extended the psychology of civilisation to all periods and nations: Vico was led to investigate in all their profound divergencies and contradictions the modes of feeling and thought proper to various times.
The great effort which had to be made, and actually was made by Vico, in order to penetrate through modern intellectualism and recapture the point of view of primitive psychology, is expressed in his language about the "grave difficulties" entailed by his "labour of fully twenty-five years" in the attempt to "stoop from these civilised natures of ours to those absolutely wild and savage minds, which we cannot picture to ourselves at all, and can only understand with great toil." It is expressed again, rather differently, by his insistence on the impossibility, now that, even with the common people, the mind of man is too completely separated from the senses, accustomed to the free use of abstract terms, sharpened by the art of writing, and spiritualised so to speak by the employment of numbers,—the impossibility of entering into the chaotic fancy of primitive man, whose mind was the very reverse of abstract, acute or spiritual; but rather sunk in the senses, blunted by passion, and buried in the body: and of grasping such ideas as that of the "sympathy of nature." This necessary effort—a painful one, but successful—was another reason for his feeling that his science was "new." He says indeed that this study of the ideal form and the historic period of certitude was entirely lacking to Greek philosophy as a whole. Plato had attempted it in the Cratylus, but unsuccessfully, because he knew nothing of the language of the first legislators, the heroic poets, and was deceived by the altered and modernised forms under which the laws existed in his time after continual revision at Athens. Among the moderns, J. C. Scaliger, Francisco Sanchez and Gaspar Schopp had fallen into a similar mistake when they attempted to explain language by the principles of logic, and indeed of Aristotelian logic, in spite of its having arisen centuries after language itself. Grotius, Selden, Puffendorf and the other writers on natural rights also studied human nature as civilised by religion and law; so that in retracing the course of history they began in the middle: that is to say, they confined themselves to the intellect, ignoring the imagination, and to the will under moral restraint, passing over the undisciplined passions. Vico himself, while he had shown his interest in this problem by undertaking to investigate the "most ancient wisdom of Italy," was yet led astray in his study by following the lead of the author of the Cratylus.
In its philosophical aspect, the New Science might, owing to this prominence given to the study of the individualising forms, above all the imagination (since the doctrine that primitive man is a poet and thinks in poetic images is in Vico's words the "master key" of the work) be called, without undue paradox, a philosophy of Mind with special attention to the Philosophy of Imagination or Aesthetic.
Aesthetic may in fact be considered as a discovery of Vico's, though with the reservations to which the determination of discoveries and discoverers is always subject; and although he did not deal with it in a separate treatise or give it the happy title with which Baumgarten christened it ten years or so later. It is interesting however to notice that the terminology of the New Science lights upon a name similar to one of the equivalents for Aesthetic which Baumgarten passes in review; namely that of "the Logic of Poetry." But ultimately the name matters little: what does matter is the fact: and the fact is that Vico adopted a theory of poetry which was then and was still for a time to be a bold and revolutionary innovation. At that time, as is well known, the old practical or didactic theory held the field: the theory which, starting late in the history of the ancient world, persisting through the Middle Ages, and transplanted into the Renaissance, regarded poetry as an ingenious disguise for the popularising of lofty philosophical and theological ideas. Beside this theory, though inferior in authority, stood another, which considered poetry as the product of or means to diversion and pleasure. These views had come to alter the original meaning of the Aristotelian treatise on poetry, so as to be at last introduced into it and discovered there as if Aristotle himself had held and written them. Nor was this mistake corrected by Cartesianism, which, as we should expect from its general direction, rather tended to enfeeble and annul the very object of these definitions, as a thing of no value, or practically none. At a time when philosophers were trying to reduce metaphysics and ethics to a mathematical form, and despised concrete intuition: when men were devising a literature and a poetry suited to disseminate science among the common people or the world of fashion: when experiments were being made in the construction of artificial, logical languages, superior to those of past or present usage: when, finally, it was thought possible to lay down rules for composing musical airs without being a musician, and poems without being a poet: in this atmosphere of detachment, coolness, hostility and mockery, only a miracle could arouse a different and indeed opposite feeling—a warm and vivid consciousness of the real nature of poetry in its original function: and this miracle was worked by the keen, restless and stormy mind of Giambattista Vico.
He criticised at once the three doctrines of poetry as a means of adorning and communicating intellectual truth, as merely subservient to pleasure, and as a harmless mental exercise for those who can do it. Poetry is not esoteric wisdom: it does not presuppose the logic of the intellect: it does not contain philosophical judgments. The philosophers, in finding these things in poetry, have simply put them there themselves without realising it. Poetry is produced not by the mere caprice of pleasure, but by natural necessity. It is so far from being superfluous and capable of elimination, that without it thought cannot arise: it is the primary activity of the human mind. Man, before he has arrived at the stage of forming universals, forms imaginary ideas. Before he reflects with a clear mind, he apprehends with faculties confused and disturbed: before he can articulate, he sings: before speaking in prose, he speaks in verse: before using technical terms, he uses metaphors, and the metaphorical use of words is as natural to him as that which we call "natural." So far from being a fashion of expounding metaphysics poetry is distinct from and opposed to metaphysics. The one frees the intellect from the senses, the other submerges and overwhelms it in them: the one reaches perfection in proportion as it rises to universality, the other, as it confines itself to the particular: the one enfeebles the imagination, the other strengthens it. The one takes precautions against turning the mind into body, the other delights in giving body to the mind. The judgments of poetry are composed of sense and emotion, those of philosophy are composed of reflection, which if introduced into poetry makes it frigid and unreal: and no one in the whole course of history has ever been at once a great poet and a great metaphysician. Poets and philosophers may be called respectively the senses and the intellect of mankind: and in this sense we may retain as true the scholastic saying "there is nothing in the intellect which was not first in the senses." Without sense, we cannot have intellect: without poetry, we cannot have philosophy, nor indeed any civilisation.
Almost more miraculous than this conception of poetry is the fact that Vico saw into the true nature of language, a problem much less canvassed and investigated, and no more satisfactorily solved, by ancient and modern philosophy down to the present day. Language was as a rule alternately confused with logic and debased into a mere external and conventional sign, or else in despair referred to a divine origin. Vico realised that the divine origin was in this case a mere refuge of indolence; that language is neither logic nor convention, and, like poetry, is neither esoteric wisdom nor due to a decision or agreement. Language arises naturally. In its first form, men express themselves "by mute actions," or by signs, and "by bodies having natural connexions with the ideas which they wish to indicate," i.e. by means of symbolic objects. But in the case both of articulated languages and of common speech, all philologists have, "with an excess of good faith," which means a deficiency of insight, accepted the view that meanings are decided at pleasure: whereas at the so-called origin of language meanings must have been natural, and every common word must certainly have started from one single individual of one nation, and been derived from the primitive language of gestures and objects. In Latin, as in other tongues, it is to be noticed that almost all the words are formed to express natural properties, or used by transference: and the greater part of every language, in every nation, is metaphorical. The opposite opinion was due to the ignorance of grammarians, who, meeting with a great number of words expressing confused and indistinct ideas, and not knowing their origin, which had formerly made them lucid and distinct, invented for their own peace of mind the conventional theory; and dragged in Aristotle and Galen as against Plato and Iamblichus. The serious objection generally brought against the natural origin of language and in favour of the conventional, namely the variations in the common speech among different nations, is solved by considering that owing to diversities of climate, temperament and custom nations looked at the same useful or necessary objects in different aspects, and hence produced different languages. This is also seen in the case of proverbs; which are substantially identical maxims of human life, but expressed in as many different forms as there are, or have been, different nations. The insistence, then, with which Vico claims to have discovered the true origin of languages "in the principles of poetry" is of especial importance. On the one hand, it entails the assertion of the spontaneous and imaginative origin of language, and on the other it tends implicitly if not explicitly to suppress the dualism between poetry and language.
In these principles of poetry Vico found not only the origin of languages, but also that of letters or writing. He pronounced the separation of the two Origins, connected as they were by nature and appearing, in the primitive dumb language of signs and objects, as identical, to be a mere mistake of the grammarians. Here again, it is no case of esoteric wisdom or convention. Hieroglyphics were not invented by philosophers as a means of concealing the mysteries of their lofty thoughts: they were a universal and natural necessity to all primitive peoples: and only the alphabetic scripts arose among nations by a free agreement. In other words Vico drew a distinction (though in a confused manner) within the so-called scripts, between those which are true scripts and therefore conventional, and others which are directly expressive and are therefore language, story-telling, poetry and painting. These expressive scripts or languages are characterised by the inseparability of content from form. They are poetical just in the sense that the story and its expression are one and the same thing, namely a metaphor common to poetry and painting, so that it could be depicted by a dumb man without verbal expression. As examples, Vico quotes traditional anecdotes; for instance, the five "real words" (the frog, the mouse, the bird, the ploughshare and the bow) sent by Idanturas king of the Scythians to Darius when the latter had declared war on him: and the parable of the tall poppies which King Tarquin enacted before the eyes of his son Sextus's ambassador, concerning the means of ruling Gabii—methods of expression parallel to practices still found among savages and the lower classes:—and in addition to these, heraldry, flags, and the emblems upon medals and coins. There is a frivolous legend which belittles and degrades the true value of heraldry by asserting it to have been invented in German tournaments as a custom of gallantry by young men seeking to win the love of noble maidens. But in the Middle Ages heraldry was a serious thing. It was, so to speak, the hieroglyphic script of the period: a wordless language to eke out the poverty of ordinary speech and alphabetic writing. It was only later, in times of culture, that it became a sport and a pleasure, and gallant and learned blazonings were adopted which had to be enlivened by means of mottoes because their own meaning was now merely analogical; while primitive and natural heraldry was dumb, or rather spoke without needing an interpreter. Even in the days of culture a few such expressive forms retained this simplicity and naturalness. Flags or ensigns for instance form a kind of armed language with which nations, as if deprived of speech, make themselves understood in the wider affairs of the natural rights of peoples; wars, alliances and commerce.
Thus in the light of Vico's aesthetical idea poetry, words, metaphors, writing and graphic symbols are all illuminated and spring to life: great things and small, epic poetry and heraldry. The doctrine of imaginary forms was quite a new departure in the history of ideas: for while Vico opposed his own conceptions to those of the contemporary schools, especially the Cartesian, he by no means attached himself to any other more or less remote school or tradition. He himself felt that he was opposed not to a particular school but to all who had ever formulated doctrines on the subject. He says that he has "overturned" all the theories about poetry held by Plato, Aristotle, and so on down to Patrizio, Scaliger and Castelvetro in modern times, all of whom had lost themselves in ineptitudes which "even to mention makes one ashamed." Patrizio made poetry begin with the songs of birds and the whistling of the wind! As regards language, he had been ultimately dissatisfied both with Plato and with the moderns Wolfgang Latius, Scaliger and Sanchez. As regards writing, once the theory of divine origin supported by Mallinkrot and Ingewald Eling was refuted, or rather interpreted in his own way, which came to the same thing, he made an attempt to discredit the futile, vague, ill-founded, misshapen, pompous and absurd opinions which derived it from the Goths and through them from Adam and personal instruction from God, or more directly from the Earthly Paradise, or from a Gothic Mercury as inventor. Finally, as to heraldry, he remarks that the writers on the subject have never understood anything about it, and have only by a mere random guess let fall a hint of the truth in calling it "heroic."
In fact it would be hard to find real and true precedents for Vico's aesthetic conceptions. At most, we might indicate vague suggestions contained in various scattered statements which he collects: a certain immediate stimulus in the discussions of the seventeenth century on the distinctions between intellect and genius, reason and imagination, dialectic and rhetoric: and a certain convergence of external particulars, such as the collection of rhetorical subtleties expressed in subtleties of language, made by Tesauro, a rhetorician of the time.
These conceptions, however, produced as they were by a remarkable stroke of originality, no sooner passed from general outline to particular determinations, from the first idea or inspiration to concrete development, than they appear to become confused, fluctuating and unstable. We may set aside the various opinions successively held by Vico, and bound up with the historical growth of his mind, upon the subjects of poetry, language or metaphor, beginning with his academic orations, passing thence by way of the De ratione and De antiquissima to the Diritto universale, from these to the first and thence to the second Scienza Nuova: a study of these might supply subject-matter for a special essay, but does not come within the scope of our treatise. But even in the final form of his aesthetic thought, contradictory doctrines exist side by side. He is not content with saying, as he does say, that poetical form is the primary activity of the mind; that it is composed of feelings of emotion; and that it is entirely imaginative and devoid of concepts and reflection. He goes on to add that poetry, as opposed to history, "represents reality in its best idea," and therefore fulfils the justice and gives every man the reward or punishment which he does not always get in history, governed as the latter often is by caprice, necessity and chance. Again, he says that the end of poetry is "to give life to the lifeless," since its most sublime task is the attempt to give life and sensation to insensible objects. He says that poetry is "nothing but imitation"; that children, with their great imitative powers, are poets; and that primitive races, the children of mankind, were also sublime poets. He says that poetry has for its special subject-matter "the impossible made credible": for instance, it is impossible that body should be mind, and yet it was believed that the thundering sky was Jupiter. Hence the miracles performed by magicians by means of incantations were a favourite subject of poetry. He says that poetry is due to "poverty," that is, that it is a pathological product of the mind. Since uncivilised man is of low brain-power and cannot satisfy the thirst he feels for the general and the universal, he fills their place by inventing imaginary genera, poetical universals or characters. Consequently the truth of the poet is identical with the truth of the philosopher: the one abstract, the other clothed in images: the one a metaphysic of reason, the other a metaphysic of feeling and fancy, suited to the understanding of the people. From poverty also, that is from inability to articulate, arises song, and therefore mutes and stammerers utter sounds which are songs: and metaphor arises from inability to express things in an accurate manner. He says, finally, that the aim of poetry is to teach the people to act virtuously.
These sayings indicate very various ideas about poetry, of which some are compatible with the central doctrine but thrown out in a disconnected manner and therefore not in fact reconciled with it: others are quite incompatible. Vico might have been cited in turn, on the testimony of single passages, as a supporter of the moralistic theory of art, the didactic theory, the abstract or typical theory, the mythological theory, the animistic theory, and so on. And if he neither falls back into the old theories he hated, nor loses himself among the new fallacies which followed him, it is due to the fact that all these waverings and inconsistencies were continually submerged by the thought that poetry is the primary form of the mind, prior to intellect and free from reflection and reasoning.
Just as he was unable by the use of his leading principle to distinguish and reconcile the other theories on the nature of poetry which already existed or had been invented by himself, so he did not succeed in escaping from the tyranny of old or new empirical classifications. He struggled to reduce these in their turn to philosophical form, and tried to deduce successively the various kinds of poetry, epic, lyric and dramatic: the kinds of verse and metre, spondaic, iambic and prose: the kinds of figurative language, metaphor, metonymy, synecdoche and irony: the parts of speech, onomatopoeism, interjection, pronoun, particle, noun and verb: the moods and tenses of the verb (in which connexion he refers to a case of aphasia observed by himself in Naples, "a gentleman seized with a severe apoplexy, who utters nouns but has completely forgotten verbs"): the kinds of writing, hieroglyphic, symbolic and alphabetical: and of languages, according to their increasing complexity, from monosyllables to compound words and from a preponderance of vowels and diphthongs to a preponderance of consonants. In the course of these attempts he frequently offered new and sometimes correct interpretations of isolated facts: but he did not and could not connect them into a scientific system. Moreover he never realised the relation between poetry and the other arts. On the one hand, he unites them, as when he considers painting and poetry to be fundamentally identical and notes a number of analogies between the poetry and painting of the Middle Ages: on the other, he separates them sharply, as when he asserts that delicacy in art is the outcome of philosophy, and that painting, sculpture, casting and intaglio are the most delicate arts because they are compelled to abstract the surface of the material objects they represent.
These inconsistencies and errors which we have briefly reviewed are due partly to Vico's insufficient power of distinguishing and elaborating, partly—and this is the greater part—to that fundamental fault which we have already seen to exist in the structure of the New Science. In this case the fault is, more precisely, Vico's confusion between the philosophical concept of the poetic form of the mind, and the empirical concept of the barbaric form of civilisation. "This earliest age of the world," as he himself says, "can be truly said to have concerned itself exclusively with the primary activity of the mind." But the earliest age of the world, composed as it was of men of flesh and blood, not of philosophical categories, cannot have been concerned with one solitary activity of the mind. This single activity may have preponderated, as we generally say: the very word reveals the quantitative and approximative nature of the conception: but all the others must have been at work simultaneously, imagination and intellect, perception and abstraction, will and morality, song and arithmetic. Vico could not shut his eyes to this obvious fact, and introduced into this phase of civilisation not only the poet, but also the theologian, the physicist, the astronomer, the pater-familias, the warrior, the politician, and the lawgiver; but he tried to regard the activities of all these as "poetical" in character, as he called it, by a metaphor drawn from the alleged preponderance of the imaginative form of the mind; and the whole system he called "poetic wisdom." The metaphorical nature of the terminology is suggested, in fact leaps to the eye, in certain characteristic passages, as where the "arts," that is, the mechanical crafts which produce objects of practical utility, are called "poetry with a certain kind of reality," and where ancient Roman law, because of the abundance of formulae and ceremonies with which it was adorned, is said to be a "serious dramatic poem." But the metaphors are dangerous, since, as in the case of the New Science, they light upon a soil favourable to their growth into concepts: and in point of fact the historical phase of barbarism, metaphorically expressed as poetic wisdom, soon turned in Vico's mind into the ideal phase of poetry, and transferred all its own attributes to this ideal phase. The former included theologians, and accordingly Vico regarded poetry as theology, but an imaginative theology: teachers, and poetry became a teacher, but of the common people: natural scientists, and it became science, but the science of an imaginary world. And since these barbarians, uncultivated as they were and confined to the world of images, could not think in concepts, the imaginations of poetry, individualised and particular, and its judgments, always expressed in material form, were falsely interpreted as "imaginative universals," supposed to be something intermediate between the individualising intuition and the universalising concept. Poetry, which ought to represent sense and nothing else, came to represent a sense already intellectualised; and the saying that nothing is found in the intellect that has not already been in the sense, acquired the meaning, that the intellect is nothing but the sense clarified, and the sense nothing but the intellect confused. Thus there was no further need for the added caution "except the intellect itself" (nisi intellectus ipse). Conversely, barbaric civilisation became a kind of mythological or allegorical representation of the ideal phase of poetry, and primitive tribes were transformed into crowds of "sublime poets" just as, in the ontogenesis corresponding to this philogenesis, children had been made into poets. The concept of the "imaginative universal" unites in itself the double contradiction of the doctrine; since to the imaginative element must be joined, in this mental construction, the element of universality which taken by itself would be a true and proper universal, rational and not imaginative. Hence arises a petitio principii by which the origin of the rational universal, the point requiring explanation, is already presupposed. On the other hand, if the imaginative universal is interpreted as freed from the element of universality, that is, as a mere imagination, Vico's aesthetic doctrine would certainly become once more consistent: but his "poetic wisdom" or barbaric civilisation would be deprived of an indispensable portion of its organism in parting with every kind of concept: for concepts are, so to speak, the skeleton of the body.
To resolve the contradiction it was necessary to separate poetry from poetic wisdom: and we do find some signs of this separation in Vico. He sometimes admits, almost against his will, the lack of correspondence between the philosophical category and the type of society, and in dealing with the latter is compelled to fall back upon such phrases as "very nearly" and "more or less." He says, for instance, that primitive man consisted "exclusively of strong imagination, with no, or very little, reason": that he was "almost all body, with hardly any reflection": or again, after making a show of philosophical distinction between the three languages of gods, heroes and men, he goes on to observe that "the language of the gods was almost all dumb, and very little articulate; the language of heroes was composed of equal quantities of articulation and dumb-show; the language of men was almost all articulated, and very little in dumb-show." He admits again in a fine simile that poetic speech out-lived poetic wisdom and survived far into the historic and civilised period, "as great and rapid rivers run far out into the sea and keep their waters fresh as they bear them along with the force of their flow." Even in modern times we cannot afford entirely to neglect imaginative speech: "to describe the operations of the pure mind, we must avail ourselves of poetic language, of metaphors drawn from the senses." It appears that poetry does not end with barbarism, for poets arise even in civilised times: and if it is said that the poets of the earliest times were naturally imaginative, those of later days artificially so, that is, according to Vico, by deliberately forgetting the proper use of words, freeing themselves from philosophy, filling their minds with childish and vulgar prejudices and submitting to the bondage of conventions like the use of rhyme—all these restrictions, besides being easily refuted, are merely an unsuccessful attempt to diminish the weight of the fact above mentioned, namely that poetry belongs to all ages, not merely to that of barbarism: it is an ideal category, not a historic fact. But the restrictions prove, as also do the infrequency and the unemphatic nature of the passages quoted, that Vico was not in a position to effect the separation of poetry from poetic wisdom, hampered as he was by the hybrid character of the concept and of the actual method of the New Science.
If, on the other hand, the idea of poetry as pure imagination had not remained firmly at the foundation of Vico's thought, in spite of all the confusions and inconsistencies in which it became involved, and had not been at work underground, so to speak, in the New Science, it would have been difficult or perhaps impossible to understand the leading conception which dominates his philosophy of mind, closely connected as it is with that idea. This is the conception of the mind as a development, or, to use Vico's own words, a progress or unfolding (corso, spiegamento); a conception which improved upon, though it did not explicitly contradict, the ordinary view which was almost exclusively confined to the enumeration and classification of the mind's faculties. The doctrine of imaginative universals as spontaneous mental products, rudimentary universals but not without an element of truth in them, was at least an adequate weapon against the empirical theory which made civilisation the outcome of a highly developed and rational practical wisdom and the personal labour of God or of wise men who must have sprung from the earth or fallen from heaven in some unaccountable manner.
Vico clearly stated the dilemma between the two, and only two, possible explanations of the origin of society. Either it came from the reflection of wise men, or from a certain human feeling and instinct among brutish men. He accepted the latter solution, that of "brutes" which gradually became human: the theory, that is, of the evolution of thought from the imaginative to the rational universal, and the progress of social relations from force to equity. But was this an adequate foundation for "ideal history" or the philosophy of mind? In the philosophy of mind, it could be translated into a similar if not identical view—the doctrine which, owing to Cartesianism and a certain recrudescence of the Scholasticism of Duns Scotus, lasted down to Vico's own times and expressed the life of the mind by the successive stages of the concept, obscurity, confusion, clarity and distinctness. Leibniz, as is well known, made a special study of obscure and confused perceptions, the "petites perceptions." The doctrine was essentially intellectualistic, since the concepts, however confused or obscure, were never anything else than concepts: and hence it was unable to account either for poetry or even for mental development, the dialectic of which cannot be understood if it is regarded as consisting of merely quantitative differences. Such differences are in reality not differences at all, but identities and therefore the negation of change: and in fact the whole of this school of thought was anti-aesthetic and static, devoid both of a true theory of imagination and a true theory of development. Vico's thought, on the other hand, was averse to intellectualism and in sympathy with imagination: it was entirely dynamic and evolutionary. For Vico, mind is an eternal drama: and since drama demands antithesis, his philosophy of mind is rooted in antithesis, that is in the real distinction and opposition between imagination and thought, poetry and metaphysic, force and equity, passion and morality; although he seems sometimes, for the reasons given above, to mistake its nature; or rather, although he actually does sometimes confuse it with empirical inquiries and doctrines, and with the determinations of history.
[CHAPTER V]
THE SEMI-IMAGINATIVE FORM OF KNOWLEDGE
(MYTH AND RELIGION)
Vico's doctrine of mythology, while no less original and profound than that of poetry, is also, like the latter, not entirely lucid: for the relations between poetry and myth are so close that the shadow cast upon the one must of necessity extend to some degree over the other.
In proceeding to inquire, as we have hitherto done and shall continue to do, into the state of contemporary knowledge of the several sciences and problems with which Vico set out to deal, we may briefly recall à propos of the study of mythology not only the great literary collections of myths formed during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, of which Boccaccio had already given an example in the fourteenth century, but also the learned defences of the two explanatory theories, already known to classical antiquity and not entirely unknown in the Middle Ages. These were, first, the theory of myth as allegory of philosophical truths (moral, political and so forth), and secondly, the theory of myth as the history of actual persons and events, adorned by the fancy which made heroes into gods (Euhemerism). The former tendency inspired among other works the Mythologiae sive explanationis fabularum libri decem of Natale Conti (1568) and Bacon's De sapientia veterum (1609); in which, however, this system had been advanced with a certain hesitation, and with the explicit caution that, even if it were not valid as historical interpretation, it would always be of value as moralisation (aut antiquitatem illustrabimus aut res ipsas: "we shall explain either antiquity or the facts themselves"). The latter was authoritatively represented by John Leclerc (Clericus), the learned Dutch Genevese for whom Vico expressed so much respect and gratitude for the attention he had deigned to bestow upon his Diritto universale. His edition of Hesiod's Theogony marked an epoch in the study of mythology, and he was followed among others by Banier, author of the work Les Fables expliquées par l'histoire(1735). A third system, also not without some ancient precedent, derived myths from particular nations, the Egyptians or the Hebrews, or from the original works of individual philosophers and poets. This view, when it neither resolved itself into a pure and simple historical supposition as to the origin of some or all myths, nor appealed to divine revelation, clearly involved the theory that myth is not an eternal form but a contingent product of the mind, born at a certain time and capable of dying or already dead.
Vico strongly opposed the first and third of these views of mythology, namely the allegorical theory and that of historical derivation. On the allegorical view, he mentions Bacon's treatise, which had stimulated him to the study of the subject, out which he considered "more ingenious than sound": on the other school, which regarded myths as sacred history altered and corrupted by the Gentiles and especially by the Greeks, he refers to Vossius's De theologia gentili (1642) and to a dissertation by Daniel Huet. Myths or fables do not contain esoteric wisdom, that is to say, rational concepts, subtly concealed by the veil of fable: hence they are not allegorical. Allegory implies on the one hand the concept or thing signified, on the other the fable or medium of concealment, and between the two, the art by which both are kept in equilibrium. But myths cannot be split up into these three moments, nor even into a thing signified and a thing which signifies it: their meaning is univocal. The theory also implies that a believer in the content does not believe in the form: but the makers of myths believed fully and ingenuously in their own work. Once, for instance, that first divine fable was created, the myth than which none greater was ever afterwards invented, that of Jupiter, king and father of gods and men, in the act of thundering, the very men who had invented him believed in him, and with their religion of terror feared, reverenced and worshipped him.
Myth, in a word, is not fable but history of such a kind as could be constructed by primitive minds, and strictly considered by them as an account of actual fact. The philosophers who arose later made use of myths to expound their doctrines in an allegorical manner; or deceived themselves into thinking that they found them there owing to the feeling of veneration which attaches to antiquity, and increases as our comprehension of it diminishes; or thought it expedient to make use of such things for political purposes, like Plato Homerising, and at the same time Platonising Homer: and in doing this they turned the myths into fables, which they were not originally, and are essentially not. Thus we may say that the philosophers and students of mythology who indulged in such strange fancies about the legends were the real poets, while the primitive poets or myth-makers were the true students, and intended to narrate the actual facts of their time. For the same reason, namely, because myth is an essential part of poetic or barbaric wisdom, and, as such, a spontaneous product of all times and places, it cannot be attributed to one single nation as its inventor, from which it passed to others; as if it were a particular discovery of a particular man or the object of revelation.
This doctrine, superior as it is to the allegorical and historical theories, is another aspect of Vico's vindication of the non-logical forms of knowledge as against the intellectualism which denied them and merely represented them either as artificial forms or as due to supernatural causes. Nor does the opinion seem acceptable which attaches Vico to the Neo-Euhemeristic school. He does not indeed explicitly combat this school, and we may even grant that he presents certain superficial resemblances to it: but together with the resemblances there is this radical difference, that for Vico the stories are not alterations of actual history, but are essentially history; their supposed alteration is the actual truth as it appeared to the primitive mind.
Vico did not and could not give a more precise determination of the nature of myth, precisely because owing to the fluctuating character of his concept of poetry, itself he was not in a position to lay down the boundary between the two forms. He talks generally of poetry and myth as distinct things, but he does not establish the distinction. And yet Vico was familiar enough with the concept which supplies this distinctive criterion, and had enunciated it: but instead of using it for his doctrine of mythology, he had made of it one or more of his various definitions of poetry. That "poetic character," that "imaginative universal" whose introduction into aesthetic as the explanatory principle of poetry causes so many insuperable difficulties, is really the definition of mythology, and as such provides the science of mythology with the true principle that is required. If the concept of accomplishing great labours for the common welfare cannot be disengaged from the idea of a particular man who accomplished one of these labours, this concept becomes for instance the myth of Hercules: and Hercules is at once an individual man who does individual actions, and kills the Lernaean hydra and the Nemean lion or cleanses the stables of Augeas, and also a concept: just as the concept of beneficent and glorious labour is at once a concept and Hercules: a universal and an imaginary idea: an imaginative universal.
Again, that sublime task which Vico declared proper to poetry, the task of giving life to inanimate objects, belongs properly not to poetry but to myth. Mythology, embodying its concepts in images, which are always individual things, at last animates them like living beings. Thus primitive man, ignorant of the cause of lightning and therefore not possessing the scientific definition of it, was led by the mythological tendency to conceive the sky as a vast living being, who, like man himself when, in the grip of his fierce passions, he shouted, muttered or roared, spoke and meant something by his speech. It is mythology again, not poetry, whose origin must be traced to "poverty," to the weakness of men's minds and their inability to deal with the problems they would solve, in their incapacity for thinking in rational universals and expressing themselves in accurate language, whence arose imaginative universals and metonymy, synecdoche and metaphor of all kinds. The contradictions we have seen in the imaginative universal which make it incapable of acting as the foundation of an aesthetic doctrine are quite in keeping in the doctrine of myth: for myth consists precisely of these contradictions: it is a concept trying to be an image and an image trying to be a concept, and hence a kind of poverty, or even of powerful impotence,—a contrast, a mental transition where white no longer exists and black has not yet come into being. Finally, poetic wisdom, that is, the theology, science, cosmography, geography, astronomy and the whole system of other ideas and beliefs of primitive nations as Vico describes them, was really mythology, not, as he says, poetry, for the good reason, given by himself, that these things were their history: and poetry is poetry and not history, even more or less imaginary history. The Homeric poems are poetry in so far as they express the aspirations of Hellenism: the same poems, in so far as they were recited and heard as accounts of actual facts, are history: the two things being forms of mental products which, though they seem to be materially united in a single work, are not for that reason to be identified.
All this was both seen and not seen, or rather, sometimes realised and sometimes overlooked, by Vico: and hence he cannot be said to have succeeded in determining satisfactorily the distinction, and solving the problem of the relation, between mythology and poetry. Another problem of importance relating to the science of mythology, and still the subject of controversy, namely, the question whether myth belongs to philosophy or to history, might be supposed to have been decisively solved by Vico: since he repeats over and over again that myths contain the historical judgments of primitive peoples, not the philosophical. But in reality when we examine the point closely it appears that he neither solved the problem nor even propounded it. The historical judgments of which Vico is speaking are contrasted strictly not with philosophical judgments in general but with the "mystical judgments of the earliest philosophy" and the "judgments of analogy" which the writers criticised by Vico found in mythology. Thus on the one hand his words repeat the criticism of the allegorical theory and, on the other, controvert that fallacious method of historical interpretation which ascribes the ideas and customs of to-day to the nations of antiquity. The fact is that Vico's theory is just as much in agreement with the theory connecting myth with philosophy as with that which connects it with history; and as much with the eclecticism which admits both these elements as with the speculative view which also admits them both, but because philosophy and history both in themselves and as constituents of myth are at bottom one and the same.
Considered as "poverty," myth must be superseded. In the natural effort of the human mind to rejoin God, the true One, from whom it has come, and its inability owing to the exuberant animal nature of primitive man to make use of the faculty, buried as it is beneath his too keen senses, of abstracting from subjects their properties and universal forms,—in these circumstances, it constructs for itself fanciful unities, imaginary genera or myths: but in its subsequent progress and development, it gradually resolves the imaginary genera into intelligible genera, poetic universals into rational, and sets itself free from mythology. Thus the error of myth passes into the truth of philosophy. Vico knew and employed a concept of error, error properly so called, which proceeds from the will, not from thought, which is never in error as regards itself, "for the mind is always put under compulsion by truth, since we can never lose sight of God" (mens enim semper a vero urgetur quia numquam aspectu amittere possumus Deum); the error which consists in the arbitrary conjunction of unmeaning words, "but words very often, by the will of him who is lying, escape the force of truth and desert the mind, or even do violence to the mind and turn away from God" (verba autem saepissime veri vim voluntate mentientis eludunt ac mentem deserunt, immo menti vim aciunt et Deo absistunt); the error, in a word, which exists when, in his own powerful language, "though men speak with their mouth, they have nothing in their minds; since within their minds there is falsity, which is nothing." But he also knows that error is never pure error, simply because there is no such thing as a false idea and falsity consists only in the wrong combination of ideas, and therefore it always contains truth, and every fable has a certain element of truth. Hence, far from despising fables, Vico recognised their value as embryonic forms so to speak of stored-up knowledge or of what will one day develop into philosophy. The poets (which means, in Vico's new sense of the word, myth-makers) are the senses (that is, in its new meaning, rudimentary and imperfect philosophy): the philosophers are the intellect of mankind, that is the more highly developed philosophy which derives from the former. The idea of God evolves by degrees from the God who strikes the imagination of the isolated man, to the God of the family, divi parentum, the God of a social class or country, divi patrii, the God of nations, and finally to the God "who is Jupiter to all men," the God of humanity. The fables stimulated Plato to understand the three divine punishments which not men but only gods could inflict, oblivion, infamy and remorse: the passage through the lower world suggested to him the concept of the purgatorial journey by which the soul is purified of passions, and the arrival in Elysium suggested the journey of union by which the mind comes to unite itself with God by the contemplation of the eternal divine ideas.
From the similes and metaphors of the poets Aesop drew the examples and fables by which he gave advice: and the instance founded upon a single case which satisfies an untutored mind developed into induction, drawing its validity from several similar cases, as taught dialectically by Socrates, and thence the syllogism invented by Aristotle, which cannot exist without a universal. The etymologies of words reveal the truths observed by primitive man and deposited by him in his language: for instance the fact, laboriously proved by modern philosophers, that the senses themselves create the so-called sensible qualities is already suggested in the Latin word olfacere, which implies the idea that the sense of smell "makes" the odour. Vico attaches such importance to this connexion between poetic universals and rational universals, between myth and philosophy, that he is led to assert that such judgments of philosophers as cannot find parallel or precedent in poetic and popular wisdom must be wrong. Here we have another meaning sometimes assigned by him to the relation of philosophy to philology: namely, a reciprocal confirmation of common wisdom by esoteric wisdom and vice versa, both of which are united in the idea of an everlasting philosophy of man.
Simultaneously with his theory of myth and its relation to philosophy, Vico expounds his theory of religion, and the relation it bears to philosophy. Two thoughts on this subject are to be found up and down the New Science. The first is, that religion arises in the phase of weakness and savagery from the mind's need to allay its desire to understand more or less the phenomena of nature and man; for instance, to explain lightning. The second is, that religion is produced in the mind by fear of the person who threatens by lightning. We might describe these two views as theories respectively of the theoretical and practical origin of religion; and since according to Vico's doctrine man consists of nothing but intellect and will, clearly religion can have no other origin than these two. Now, setting aside religion in its practical aspect, to be discussed later, religion in its theoretical aspect is surely nothing else than the imaginative universal, poetic animism, or myth. To it belongs the institution which Vico calls divination; that is, the methods of collecting and interpreting the language of Jupiter, the "real words," gestures and signs of God, formed as imaginative universals and created by the animating fancy. And as from myth come science and philosophy, so in like manner from divination comes the knowledge of ground and cause, philosophic or scientific prediction.
In this way Vico escaped the prejudice which was beginning to prevail in his time—we may recall Van Dale's history of ancient oracles, popularised by Fontenelle, and Banier's book already mentioned—and was to be so powerful for a century, of considering religions as "some one else's imposture": whereas, he says, they were really due to "one's own credulity." The man who refused to admit the artificial origin of myth could not admit it of religion. But just as he denied no less the supernatural or revealed origin of myth, so at the same time he proclaimed neither more nor less than the natural, even the human, origin of religions; and—a fact especially worthy of notice—placed this origin in an inadequate form of the mind, namely the semi-imaginative form identical with mythology. Nor need we attach weight to certain brief and incidental remarks which seem to contradict this theory, as when he says that religion precedes not only philosophy but language itself, which presupposes the consciousness of some community between man and man: such equivocations are due to the invariable confusedness of his method and his habitual lack of clearness. The identification of religion with myth, and its human origin, are ideas not only emphatically expressed, but essential to Vico's whole system. It is a human origin which in his own words does not exclude a different concept of religion, namely as revealed and hence of supernatural origin. In fact he always separates poetic theology, which is mythology, and natural theology, which is metaphysics or philosophy, from revealed theology. But this last concept is admitted by him not because it is connected with the others and derived from a principle common to them, but simply because Vico asserted its existence no less than theirs. The human origin, poetic theology, followed by metaphysical theology, is the form valid for the Gentile portion of mankind, that is the whole human race except the Hebrew people with its privilege of revelation. The motives that led Vico to maintain this dualism and the annoying inconsistencies in which it compelled him to rest will be seen later on in their own place. But precisely because Vico left this dualism without mediation, we must in expounding his thought hold fast both terms of the dualism: and for the time being we will confine ourselves to the merely human origin—religion as a product of the theoretical needs of man in a condition of comparative moral poverty. This conception has only an indirect connexion with Bruno's view of religion as a thing necessary to the ignorant and undeveloped mob, and with Campanula's theory of natural or permanent religion, an eternal rational philosophy coinciding with a Christianity freed from its abuses. Its parallels in contemporary authors are few and distant: even when they mention it in passing, they grasp it only in a superficial way and propound it without connecting it at all with their other ideas: they attack religion as a form of ignorance, and omit the wisdom of the ignorance, or religion as truth.