[1] See my preface to Sorel's Reflections on Violence (Italian tr., Bari, 1909). pp. xxii-xxvii.
[CHAPTER XIX]
VICO AND THE TENDENCIES OF CONTEMPORARY CULTURE
Having reached, in his review of the course of history, his own time, a time of civilisation spread over all nations, Vico gives a rapid description of the contemporary world and then says no more: perhaps unsatisfied, at any rate uncertain or cautious. As he was not led to embark upon the New Science by the direct call of political problems,1 at least in the ordinary meaning of the phrase, he never descends from the contemplations of the New Science to: the practical life, even in the form which it most usually takes with a philosopher, a work or short treatise criticising laws and institutions or suggesting improvements. Even when he does dimly conceive the idea of a "practical aspect" of his science, he never supposes that so far as he is concerned it could ever exist except "within the academies."
Practical philosophy "within the academies," that is to say, within the sphere of culture, is however still practical and political; and it is assuredly not the least important branch of politics. And a historian or philosopher can never entirely avoid it, though he can emphasise it more or less and develop it more or less fully.
Vico does emphasise and develop it freely. The first expression of his scientific life was precisely an examination of modern methods of study and education as compared with those of the ancients: an examination which after various attempts and uncertainties in his first discoveries, took form in his University inaugural lecture of 1708, De nostri temporis studiorum ratione. In the following years, engaged as he was upon the New Science, he gave no further public demonstration of his discontent with the prevailing tendency of studies; but he expressed his feelings on the subject all the more often and all the more strongly in private letters, and did not wish to pass over the question in his autobiography. We need not then infer his polemical attitude from hints and chance phrases of his chief work; since he has himself more than once converted these hints into explicit statements and these chance phrases into leading propositions.
This polemic occupies two closely-related spheres corresponding to the double aspect of the New Science as a Philosophy of Mind and a Generalising Science. Under the first aspect Vico had vindicated the claims of imagination, the imaginative universal, probability, certitude, experience and authority, and therefore also of poetry, religion, history, observation of nature, scholarship and tradition. Under the second, he had traced a scheme of the natural development of the mind both in the history of mankind and in that of the individual, which he brings into constant relation with the phases of history. Hence his examination was bound to extend on the one hand to the mental condition of his own time and on the other to the way in which the education of children and young people was conceived and undertaken. In both spheres Vico saw the same defects; he was met by the same and intellectualism which had made impossible the process of thought and had mutilated and falsified the truth of human history.
On emerging from grammar-schools, boys were immediately plunged into logic. The logic studied might be, according to the teacher's taste, either the scholastic or more often that composed by Arnauld and called the Port-Royal Logic, itself in substance Aristotelian and Scholastic, but full of dry judgments concerning abstruse subjects in advanced sciences and far removed from common knowledge; overloaded in fact with examples drawn from such sciences. Such a discipline was meant to make boys critical and to eradicate from their minds not only false, but even probable and plausible opinions. As a matter of fact it eradicated nothing, since their minds were still empty or scantily furnished, and unable to make any use of criticism for lack of matter to criticise. They were to be taught to judge before being taught to apprehend, an order false to the natural course of ideas, which are first apprehended, then judged, and finally reasoned. The result was that minds educated in this way became arid and unfruitful in development, and believed themselves capable of judging everything, while able to create nothing. They remained all their lives intensely acute in formal thinking, but incapable of any great labour; critical, in fact, but sterile. This caused not only unsoundness and arrogance of judgment but incapacity in practical life, dealings with men, and civil eloquence, which is founded less upon criticism than upon plausibility, and attains its end by making opportune remarks, understanding the psychology of one's inter-locutor and acting in a manner adapted to it. Vico himself had suffered from the logico-critical method of education. One of his first teachers, the Jesuit Del Balzo, had put into his hands the works of the epitomist Paulus Venetus: and his mind, being too weak as yet to cope with this kind of Chrysippean logic, almost broke down under the strain; so that having given up his studies in despair it was eighteen months before he resumed them. He preserved a happier memory of his youthful essays in poetry in the wildest style of the Neapolitan school of Marino: a form of diversion, he says, almost necessary to the mind of the young when metaphysic has rendered it too subtle and too rigid in precisely those years when the ardour of youth ought to lead the mind into errors, so as to save it from becoming chilly and dry. This age, the "barbarism of intellect," vigorous in imagination and also, through the close connexion that exists between the two, in memory, requires to be nourished and exercised by the reading of poetry, history and rhetoric as well as by the study of languages. The art which it ought to learn is not criticism but "topic," the true art of the "ingenium" or faculty of invention. By means of this art children acquire materials which enable them to form sound judgments in later life; for sound judgment depends upon a complete knowledge of its subject-matter, and "topic" is the art of discovering the whole content of any given thing. In this way young people simply by following the course of nature become at once philosophers and good speakers.