Such are the chief points in Vico's quaint reconstruction of the earliest history of man upon the earth, harmonised with the account in sacred history. We shall be less inclined to amusement or ridicule if we reflect upon the tragedy underlying the comedy: the tormented conscience of the believer which in its struggle with the philosopher seeks refuge in these extravagant ideas. At any rate, they gave Vico a series of insecure stepping-stones—the flood, the giants, the dry exhalations—which enabled him to cross the torrent of religious tradition and reach the dry land of critical history, where he found the primary starting-point of his philosophy of mind, the state of nature. It may further be suggested that the contact with Hebrew history—the only one which presented itself to him as a history in the strict sense, a unicum, something absolutely individualised even if in a miraculous manner—suggested to him the few attempts met with in his works to assign to various peoples a special function or mission; thus it sometimes appeared to him that the Hebrews represented mens, the Chaldeans ratio, and the Japhetic races phantasia.
Parallel to this imaginary history of the origin of the human race on the earth is Vico's attempt at Biblical apologetics. He lost no opportunity of adducing proofs from profane sources to confirm the statements of sacred history. For instance, a confirmation of the flood and the giants is supplied by the similar traditions of Greek and other nations. The theocratic government, which is not definitely mentioned by any profane history but merely alluded to obscurely by poets in their tales, is met with in the government of the Hebrews before and after the flood. The Hebrews again knew nothing of divination because they lived in direct contact with the true God, while the Chaldees had a system of magic or divination according to the movements of the stars, and the European peoples a system of augury. One certainly feels in all this something of an effort, a will to see or not to see: a kind of self-interruption and stimulation to belief. It is not infrequent among cultured and scientifically educated believers. Again, in his exposition of the historical genesis of grammatical forms, where he says that verbs began with the imperative, the monosyllabic command given by the father to wife, child or slave (es, sta, i, da, fac, etc.), Vico draws from this an indirect demonstration of the truth of Christianity, because the roots of Hebrew verbs are always found in the third person singular of the past tense; a clear proof that the patriarchs must have given their commands to their families in the name of a single God (Deus dixit). This, in Vico's opinion, is "a lightning to confound all those writers who have believed the Hebrews to be a colony proceeding from Egypt; since from the beginning of its foundation the Hebrew tongue had its origin in a single God." But in truth these lightnings instead of descending upon the head of the unbeliever serve only to illuminate the poverty of the arguments upon which apologetics rest, even with a man like Vico; and, objectively considered, the division introduced by religious scruple between sacred and profane history, and the consequent dogmatic treatment of the one, with its strange hypotheses and defences, and critical treatment of the other, produced and still produces an irresistible impression that the seclusion of sacred history from human science is due to the impotence not of the human science but of the sacred history; its impotence, that is, to preserve itself intact within the limits of science. Seldom has a religious scruple so endangered the cause of religion.
But Vico had far too genuine and exacting a scientific sense added to his natural antipathies to permit him ever to become a Selden or a Bossuet; and hence this apologetic for and harmonisation of sacred history remains in him a mere episode, which it is possible to ignore. And since on the other hand he was not permitted to treat philosophy and history as entirely profane and to represent the complex movement of history according to the fundamental criterion of progress, his only course was to look at the facts from the point of view which his philosophy left open to him, that of flux and reflux, the eternal process and the eternal phases of the mind. Here lay his strength. Here he could recognise the specific, if not strictly the individual, character of laws, customs, poetry and myth, of whole social and cultural formations which history down to his own time had entirely misunderstood. For this reason, in narrating history he was bound to confine himself to emphasising the common aspects of certain groups of facts belonging to various nations and periods. In the New Science, he says, "the whole history of the laws and deeds of Rome and Greece is set forth, not in its particularity and in time, but following the substantial identity of intention and diversity of the modes of expression." Elsewhere he says, "the facts are adduced after the fashion of examples, because they are understood by means of principles," for "to see the principles confirmed by the innumerable host of their consequences is a thing which must await certain other works of ours, which are either as yet unpublished or now in process of publication." In other words, as we know, this science contains on the one hand a philosophical side, and on the other a descriptive or empirical, exemplified in history, in which the Romans figure not as Romans but in virtue of the common nature which they share with Greeks and possibly with Japanese; the history of Rome under the kings or in the early Republican period demonstrates its affinity with that of the earlier centuries of the Middle Ages; and Homer stands not as Homer but as an example of primitive poetry, and across the centuries finds and greets his brother in Dante. It is at once a strength and a limitation, because history emphatically does not fundamentally consist of these resemblances; but without the perception of the resemblances how could we ever determine the differences? Dante is not Homer, the barons are not the "patres," the Athenian Solon is not the Roman Publilius Philo; but certainly Dante is in some respects more closely related to Homer than to Petrarch, the early barons are nearer to the "patres" than to the later courtier-nobles, and Solon is more akin to a Roman tribune or dictator than to any other of the seven sages among whom he is usually placed. To observe these resemblances means denying or rejecting other more superficial ones, and preparing the way for knowledge of individuality by indicating the approximate place where the truth is to be found. Vico classifies, rather than narrates and represents; but there is classification and classification; it may be pressed into the service of a superficial thought or of a profound one. And the historical side of the New Science is one great substitution of profound for superficial classifications.
In this process, which constitutes the strength of Vico's treatment of history, the deficiencies and errors come not from outside the limits of the process but from causes at work within these limits themselves. It has been alleged in defence of Vico that a great part of his errors is due to the scantiness and inadequacy of the materials at his disposal. But the materials for any study are always scanty and inadequate compared to our thirst for knowledge; and in judging a historian the question is not this, but the method, cautious or incautious, on which he employs the materials that are at his disposal. Again, it has been said that Vico has the faults of his age; but this is to forget that he was born in the century which saw the development of the highly critical philology of Joseph Scaliger and the whole Dutch school, and that Zeno, Maffei and Muratori were his contemporaries in Italy. The truth is that just as the attitude of thought already described in Vico confused pure philosophical method with the determinations of empirical science and historical data, so it confused historical research with the mixture of philosophy and empirical science. Vico was in a state similar to that of drunkenness; confusing categories with facts, he felt absolutely certain a priori of what the facts would say: instead of letting them speak for themselves he put his own words into their mouth. A common illusion with him was to seem to see connexions between things where there was really none. This made him turn every hypothetical conjunction into a certainty, and read in other writers instead of their actual words things that they had never written, but which were internally spoken by himself unawares and projected into the writings of others. Exactitude was for him an impossibility, and in his mental excitement and exaltation he almost despised it: what harm can ten, twenty, a hundred errors do to what is substantially true? Exactitude, "diligence," as he says, "must lose itself in arguments of any size, because it is a minute, and because minute also a slow-footed virtue." Fanciful etymologies, daring and groundless mythological interpretations, changes of name and date, exaggerations of fact, false quotations are met with throughout his pages, and many may be found noted in the fine edition of the second Scienza Nuova by Nicolini. Thus, as we observed in speaking of his philosophy that Vico's was not an acute mind, so now in speaking of his historical work we must say that it was not critical. But as while we denied him acuteness on a small scale we acknowledged his profundity or acuteness on a large scale, so here also we ought to add that if Vico lacked the critical sense in small matters, in great matters he had abundance of it. Careless, headstrong and confused in detail; cautious, logical and penetrative in essentials; he exposes his flank or rather his whole body to the attacks of the most miserable and mechanical pedant, and over-awes and inspires respect in every critic and historian however great. And, totus mens though he is and all absorbed by his own discoveries, often he does not give his power of investigation and observation time and room to develop, and instead of history he invents myths and investigates romances; but when he allows the power free play, it does wonders in the field of history too, as we shall try to show in the following chapters.
But to judge the historical views of Vico by confronting them, as many have done, with those of modern historical research and praising or depreciating them accordingly would hardly be conclusive. Where the two terms of the comparison agreed the agreement might be fortuitous: where they diverged, the later doctrine might be but a development or consequence of the earlier attempt, and in any case the modern state of historical knowledge by no means provides an absolute standard. On the other hand it would be out of place, as well as beyond our power, to rehandle all the problems dealt with by Vico to see what there is of truth and falsehood in his conclusions. That would mean no less than writing a third Scienza Nuova more adapted to our own times. Our task is merely to indicate the principal historical problems which Vico set before himself, to state the solutions he gave, and always to keep in mind the state of knowledge not in our own day but in Vico's, so as to determine what progress in historical study may be set down to his influence.
[CHAPTER XIV]
NEW PRINCIPLES FOR THE HISTORY OF OBSCURE AND LEGENDARY PERIODS
The period of historical research which preceded the life of Vico was, as we have said, by no means credulous or uncritical. The day was past when "chronicles of the world" were compiled, when any fable and any falsification however gross was accepted as history: and the seed sown by a few humanists had borne fruit in the Italian men of learning, the French juridical school, the school of Scaliger mentioned above, and all the great chronologists, epigraphists, archaeologists, topographers and geographers who in the seventeenth century formed the first immense critical collections of sources for ancient history. While the philologists were thus improving and perfecting their methods, detecting impostures and bridging lacunae, Bayle, Fontenelle, Saint-Évremond and many others were engaged in spreading a scepticism or historical Pyrrhonism as it was also called, due to the intellectualistic philosophy; and thus anticipating the polemic against the truth and utility of history which was to arise with immense vigour in the following century.