Now Vico could not advance even to this position without relaxing to some extent part of his humility, and taking over something of Descartes's confidence: without introducing into his Catholic turn of mind some trace of the leaven of that Protestantism he thought so dangerous, and venturing to conceive a philosophy rather less worthy of man's weakness and correspondingly more worthy of man, a creature at once strong and weak, at once man and God. This advance is to be seen in the next phase of his thought.
[1] In the appendix to his Opera Medica (Tolosae Tectosagum, 1636, p. 110). Windelband draws attention to this thought, Gesch. der neueren Philosophie, 3rd ed. i. p. 23.
[CHAPTER II]
VICO'S THEORY OF KNOWLEDGE: SECOND PHASE
The will to believe, which in Vico's case was very strong, and the complete sway which the Catholicism of his country and age held over his mind, bound him firmly down to the Christian Platonic metaphysic and theory of knowledge; a theory whose inherent contradictions were prevented by the above psychological facts from coming explicitly before his mind. The idea of God at once dominated and supported him; he neither had the audacity nor realised the necessity to probe to the bottom such problems as the validity of revelation, the conceivability of a God apart from the world, or the possibility of affirming the existence of God without in some sense demonstrating and therefore creating him. For Vico to open up and partially traverse a new path, which should lead the human mind to transcend that of the Christian Platonists, providence—to use for the moment an idea of his own which we shall explain later on—had perforce to deceive him; to lead him by a long and circuitous way to the commencement of the new path without letting him suspect where it would end.
The writings in which Vico expounds his first theory of knowledge, De ratione studiorum and De antiquissima Italorum sapientia, together with the polemical works bearing upon them, belong to the four years from 1708 to 1712. In the following decade Vico was gradually led to devote himself more and more to research in the history of law and of the State. He read Grotius as a preparation for writing the life of Antonio Carafa, and plunged into the controversy on Natural Rights. He pursued his studies of Roman law and the science of law in general, in order to fit himself for a chair of jurisprudence at Naples University. He pondered upon the origins of languages, religions, and states, out of dissatisfaction with his own historical theories as set forth in the Be antiquissima; perhaps also his convictions were shaken by a well-directed criticism by the editor of the Giornale dei letterati. His profession, the teaching of rhetoric, gave him continual opportunities for meditating upon the nature and relations of poetry and the forms of language. Thus even if it is inaccurate to say that Vico was led to his later position culminating in the Scienza Nuova by a philological, not a philosophical process (since clearly a philosophical position can only come into being through a process no less philosophical), it is at least certain that the material and stimulus for his new thought were supplied by philological studies.
These studies seem to have impressed upon him a fact of great importance; namely, that this subject-matter could only be and had actually been worked over by his thought through the aid of certain necessary principles, appearing on every page of the history which he had chosen for investigation. He had once believed that the moral sciences, as compared with the mathematical method, took the lowest place as regards certainty. But now, in his daily acquaintance with these sciences, he had come to hold the opposite view; namely, that nothing could be firmer than the foundation of the moral sciences!