Almost all the leading doctrines of nineteenth-century idealism, we have seen, may be regarded as refluxes of Vician doctrines. Almost all; for there is one of which we find in Vico not the premonition but the necessity, not a temporary filling but a gap to be filled. Here the nineteenth century is no longer a reflux of, but an advance upon Vico; and discordant voices of warning or reproach rise up against him. His distinction of the two worlds of mind and nature, to both of which the criterion of his theory of knowledge, the conversion of the truth with the thing created, was applicable, but applicable to the former by man himself because that world is a world created by man, and therefore knowable by him, to the second by God the Creator, so that this world is unknowable by man; this distinction was not accepted by the new philosophy, which, more Vician than Vico, made the demigod Man into a God, lifted human thought to the level of universal mind or the idea, spiritualised or idealised nature, and tried to understand it speculatively in the "Philosophy of Nature" as itself a product of mind. As soon as the last remnant of transcendence was in this way destroyed, the concept of progress overlooked by Vico and grasped and affirmed to some extent by the Cartesians and their eighteenth-century followers in their superficial and rationalistic manner shone out in its full splendour.
But if in this point Vico cannot stand the comparison with later philosophy, the failure is amply atoned by the full agreement between his historical discoveries and the criticism and research of the nineteenth century. Above all, he agrees with his successors in his rules of method, his scepticism as regards the narrative of ancient historians, his recognition of the superiority of documents and monuments over narrative, his investigation of language as a store-house of primitive beliefs and customs, his social interpretation of mythology, his emphasis on spontaneous development rather than external communication of civilisation, his care not to interpret primitive psychology in the light of modern psychology; and so on. In his actual solutions of historical problems he also agrees with later historians. These restated the archaic and barbaric character of primitive Greek and Roman civilisation, and the aristocratic and feudal tendency of its political constitution: they took up the view of ancient legal ceremonial as a dramatic poem containing allusions to the actions of fighting: the transformation of the Roman heroes into heroes of democracy came to an end with the Jacobins in France and their imitators in Italy and elsewhere; Homer was considered great in proportion to his ruggedness; the history of Rome was reconstructed chiefly on the basis of Roman law, and the names of the seven kings appeared as symbols of institutions and the traditional origin of Rome as a late invention derived from Greece or from Greek models: the substance of this history was seen to consist in the economic and juridical struggle between patriciate and plebs, and the plebs was derived from the famuli or clients: the struggle of the classes, which Vico was the first to illuminate clearly, was recognised as a criterion of wide application to the history of all time and serving as an explanation of the most sweeping social revolutions: the Middle Ages, especially during the Restoration which followed the Napoleonic period, exercised a powerful appeal to sentiment and influence on thought, being admired and regretted as the antithesis of the rationalistic bourgeois society, and understood in consequence as the religious, aristocratic and poetical period discovered by Vico, the youth of modern Europe. Thus Italy rediscovered the greatness of her own Dante, and the criticism of that poet which Vico had initiated was carried to completion by De Sanctis. In the same way, Niebuhr and Mommsen brought to maturity his view of Roman history; Wolf, his theory of Homer; Heyne, Müller and Bachhofen, his interpretation of mythology; Grimm and other philologists his projected reconstruction of ancient life by means of etymology; Savigny and the historical school, his study of the spontaneous development of law, and his preference for custom rather than statute and code: Thierry and Fustel de Coulanges in France, Troya in Italy and a host of scholars in Germany his conception of the Middle Ages and of feudalism: Marx and Sorel his idea of the struggle of classes and the rejuvenation of society by a return to a primitive state of mind and a new barbarism: and lastly the superman of Nietzsche recalls in some degree Vico's hero. These are merely a few names picked without care and almost at random; for to mention all, and each in his right place, would mean writing the whole history of the latest phase of European thought, a history which is not yet finished, though it has undergone, under the name of "positivism," a parenthetical recurrence of the abstract and materialistic thought of the eighteenth century, a parenthesis which now however seems to be at an end.
These innumerable reappearances of the work of an individual in the work of several generations, this parallelism between a man and a century, justify a fanciful phrase with which we might draw from the later developments in order to describe Vico; namely that he is neither more nor less than the nineteenth century in germ. The description may serve to summarise our reconstruction and exposition of his doctrines, and to contribute towards a right understanding of his place in the history of modern philosophy. He may rightly be placed side by side with Leibniz, with whom he has so often been compared; but not, as has been believed, because of any resemblance (the comparisons made in this belief have been shown to be false or superficial) but precisely because he is unlike him and in fact his very opposite. Leibniz is Cartesianism raised to its highest power; an intellectualist, in spite of the petites perceptions and the confused knowledge; a mechanicist, in spite of his dynamism, which perhaps exists in his fancy rather than in his actual thought; hostile to history, in spite of his immense historical erudition; blind to any knowledge of the true nature of language, though deeply interested in language all his life; devoid of dialectic, in spite of his attempt to explain the evil in the universe. In relation to later idealism, the Leibnitian philosophy stands as the most complete expression of the old metaphysic which had to be transcended: that of Vico is the sketch of the new metaphysic, only needing further development and determination. The one spoke to his own century, and his century crowded round him and echoed his words far and wide. The other spoke to a century yet to come; and the place in which he cried was a wilderness that gave no answer. But the crowd and the wilderness add nothing to and take nothing from the intrinsic character of a thought.
[1] See Appendix II.