[4] See above, [pp. 247-9].
[APPENDIX III]
THE SOURCES OF VICO'S THEORY OF KNOWLEDGE[1]
My statement, that the criterion of knowledge contained in Vico's formula of the conversion of the true with the created is an original and modern principle, has been contradicted by certain Catholic editors; who state that this doctrine, however true, is not original to Vico, and is indeed far from modern, being a purely Scholastic doctrine. If I thought otherwise, this was only due to my insufficient knowledge of Scholasticism.
I might indeed ask at the outset how such complete ignorance of scholasticism were possible: an ignorance not of its manifold varieties and the tangled forest of its distinctions—that would be comprehensible: but of no less a matter than the fundamental criterion of its theory of knowledge, the starting-point of modern thought and as such, it would seem, inevitably familiar to every student of the elements of philosophy. But since it is always useful to suspect oneself of ignorance, or even to believe oneself more ignorant than one really is, I will make so far as concerns myself a voluntary display of humility. I find it less easy, I confess, to extend the accusation of ignorance to all who, like myself, have failed to run Vico's criterion to earth in the scholastic lumber-room: Jacobi for instance, who on reading it as expressed in the De antiquissima, sees in it the first manifestation of Kantianism and absolute idealism:[2] or the Catholic theologian Baader, who finds its later development in Schelling's philosophy of identity:[3] or the learned and subtle Spanish Thomist, Jaime Balmes, who treats it as a unique idea and attacks it from the scholastic point of view:[4] or the equally learned Catholic Bertini, who accepts and develops Jacobi's observation:[5] or the eminent historian of philosophy Wilhelm Windelband, who, while unacquainted with Vico's doctrines, on coming across indications of a similar thought in Sanchez's Quod nihil scitur was greatly struck by it and endorsed its value by the assertion that it was to bear fruit at a later date and in the hands of a greater philosopher, Immanuel Kant:[6] or again the specialist in the history of scholasticism, Karl Werner, the author of a careful monograph on Vico,[7] who nowhere notices the alleged scholastic character of Vico's theory of knowledge. Scholasticism must indeed be a difficult and mysterious doctrine, if it is inaccessible to all these students, qualified and bound though they are to understand it.
But we cannot pause on the threshold to speculate: we must plunge straight into the argument. In what part of scholasticism can we find Vico's criterion converting knowledge with creation?
The Thomistic saying, "truth and reality are convertible," ens et verum convertuntur, has been quoted:[8] but quotations of this kind are perhaps more calculated to confuse by words than to convince by facts. The same value attaches to the statement that Vico himself confessed the scholastic origin of his principle, since the very first chapter of the De antiquissima begins with the words "in Latin, the truth and the fact reciprocate, or, as the scholastic mob says, convert," "Latinis verum et factum reciprocantur, seu, ut scholarum vulgus loquitur, convertuntur." Here it is perfectly clear to any one on a moment's thought that Vico, Latinist as he was, meant simply to substitute the Ciceronian "reciprocari" for the barbarous "converti."
St. Thomas explained the meaning of his formula quite clearly, especially in the Summa Theologica, Part I. question xvi. art. 3. Here he asks whether the truth and the reality are convertible, utrum verum et ens convertantur; to which he replies as follows: "that as the good is of the nature of the desirable, so the truth has the nature of knowledge. But in so far as a thing has existence in itself, thus far it is knowable. And for this reason it is said in De anima, Bk. III. text. 37 (431 b 21) that 'the soul is in a sense all things' according to sense and intellect. And hence as the good is convertible with the existent, so is the true. But yet as the good adds to existence the nature of the desirable, so also the truth adds a reference to the intellect." (Quod sicut bonum habet rationem appetibilis, ita verum habet ordinem cognitionis. Unumquodque autem in quantum habet de esse, in tantum est cognoscibile. Et propter hoc dicitur in 3 de Anima, text. 37, quod 'anima est quodammodo omnia' secundum sensum et intellectum. Et ideo sicut bonum convertitur cum ente, ita et verum. Sed tamen sicut bonum addit rationem appetibilis supra ens, ita et verum comparationem ad intellectum.) Nothing then can be known except what exists, and nothing can exist but what is good: existence, truth and goodness are all convertible. Thus, too, things are called good in so far as they correspond to the idea in their Creator's mind. "Each single thing partakes of the truth of its own nature in so far as it imitates the knowledge of God, like an artefact in so far as it agrees with the art": "the knowledge of God is the cause of things": "the knowledge of God is the measure of things." (Unumquodque in tantum habet de veritate suae natura, in quantum imitatur Dei scientiam sicut artificiatum in quantum concordat arti I. xiv. 12. Scientia Dei est causa rerum I. xiv. 12. Scientia Dei est mensura rerum I. xiv. 12.) But truth and goodness, the objects of intellect and will respectively, if on the one hand they are "convertible in reality," convertentur secundum rem, on the other they are "distinguishable in thought," diversificantur secundum rationem (I. lix. 2). What have these thoughts in common with Vico's idea that the condition of knowing a truth is to create it? In fact, what is here stated is that the condition of making a thing is to know it, or as St. Thomas says in the same place (I. xiv. 8) in St. Augustine's words (De Trinitate xv. 13) "Universas creaturas et spirituelles et corporales non quia sunt ideo novit Deus, sed ideo sunt quia novit." (God does not know all His creatures corporeal and spiritual because they exist: but they exist because He knows them.)