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.
[CHAPTER VI]
THE MORAL CONSCIOUSNESS
Vico's other doctrines on the theoretical reason, that is to say on the logic of philosophy, of physical and mathematical science and of historical study, have been expounded above in the statement of his theory of knowledge, and are drawn almost entirely from his early works, since in the New Science the phase of the "completely developed mind" hardly appears except as a limit of the field of study. Here it will suffice to mention that he also touches upon the problem of the relation of poetry to history: but, still because of the confusion of philosophy with social science, he fails fully to solve it. From one point of view it seems to Vico that history is prior to poetry, because the latter, as he says, presupposes reality and contains an "imitation of the second degree": from another, poetry is the primary form, because among primitive peoples history is poetry, and the first historians are poets. At any rate he insists upon the poetic element essential to history: of Herodotus, the father of Greek history, he observes that not only are "his books full, for the most part, of fables," but "the style retains a very great Homeric element, a feature which all subsequent historians retained, using as they did a phraseology intermediate between the poetic and the colloquial": "almost the words of the poets," verba ferme poetarum, as he says elsewhere in a phrase borrowed from Cicero.
Nor are the relations between theory and practice, intellect and will, explained in detail by Vico, although on the whole he suggests the general idea that as in God intellect and will coincide, so it is in man, God's image; whose mind is not divided into thought and will—thought proceeding according to one method and will according to another—but his thought and will interpenetrate and form one single whole: a view far superior to that of the contemporary philosophy of Leibniz, which retained the idea of a divine arbitrament and therefore of irrationality. Another view, peculiar to Vico, might be taken by a hasty interpreter to imply the priority of practice to theory. He says that philosophers arrive at their conceptions thanks to experience of social institutions and laws in which men agree as a kind of universals: that Socrates and Plato, for instance, presupposed the Athenian democracy and law-courts. But the succession of religions producing republics, republics producing laws, and laws producing philosophical ideas, which he calls "a fragment of the history of philosophy philosophically narrated," is really a theory of sociological, not of philosophical value.