CHAPTER XX. Conclusion: Vico and the Later Developments of Philosophical and

CONCLUSION: VICO AND THE LATER DEVELOPMENTS OF PHILOSOPHICAL AND HISTORICAL THOUGHT

The reader need not expect that having brought our exposition to a close we shall add a verdict upon Vico's work, or what is known as an "appreciation" of it. If the verdict has not already emerged as a result of the exposition itself, or as identical with it, if description and criticism have been not one and same, the fault lies either with ourselves or with the reader's lack of attention; and in either case it cannot now be repaired by ornamental additions or redundant repetitions.

We confess also that we feel no sympathy with the chapters commonly placed at the conclusion of critical works upon philosophers and narrating the later history of their ideas. For if these "ideas" are understood in an extrinsic sense, in their influence upon society and culture, such a review may indeed have a value of its own, but is foreign to the history of philosophy properly so called: if on the other hand they are considered as real and living philosophical ideas, their later history amounts to neither more nor less than the history of subsequent philosophy, and there is no reason for appending it to a study of one philosopher rather than another. Any other method implies the uncritical theory that ideas are something solid and crystallised, like precious stones handed on from one generation to another, whose shape and glitter can always be recognised unaltered in the new diadems they compose and the new brows they adorn. But in reality ideas are nothing but the unremitting thought of man, and transmission for them is nothing less than transformation.

It is nevertheless a fact that no one has written on Vico without feeling a need of casting his eyes over later years and noting the resemblances and analogies between the Neapolitan philosopher's doctrines and those of fifty or a hundred years after. And further, we ourselves, in spite of the antipathy we admittedly feel, and the methodical criteria we professedly employ, yet recognise now the same necessity. Why is this? Because Vico in his own day passed for an eccentric and lived as a recluse; because the later development of thought was almost entirely untouched by his direct influence; because even to-day, though well enough known in certain restricted circles, he has not taken the place he deserves in the general history of thought. How then can we show the manner in which his doctrines, true or false, respond to the deepest needs of the mind, more simply than by recording the similarity of the ideas and attempts which later appeared in such profusion and intensity as to stamp their individuality upon the philosophical and historical labours of a whole century? And even if after our intrinsic examination of his thought this comparison with the facts of later history seems unnecessary, it will at least be granted that if our discourse like any other must have its rhetorical conclusion, no peroration occurs more naturally than one consisting in a rapid review of subsequent philosophy and philology and emphasising their points of contact with the thought of Vico.

We might even adopt the method by which he compares the second barbarism with the first, and present the later history of thought as a "reflux" of Vico's ideas. In the first place his criticism of Descartes' immediate knowledge recurs, together with his conversion of the true with the created, in the speculative movement beginning with Kant and Hegel and culminating in the doctrine of the identity of truth and reality, thought and existence. His unity of philosophy and philology recurs in the vindication of history against the scepticism and intellectualism of the eighteenth century due to Cartesianism; in the à priori synthesis of Kant which reconciles the real and the ideal, experience and the categories; and in the historical philosophy of Hegel, the greatest exponent of nineteenth-century historical tendencies. This unity of philosophy and philology, a unity with Vico sometimes confused and impure in method, recurred in its faulty aspects also in the Hegelian school; so that this mental tendency might with justice be entitled "Vicianism." The limitation which Vico tried to impose on the value of mathematics and exact science recurred, as did his criticism of the mathematical and naturalistic conception of philosophy, in Jacobi's critique of Spinozistic determinism and Hegel's of the abstract intellect; and in the case of mathematics in particular Dugald Stewart and others recognised that its validity lay not in the postulates but in the definitions, and the "fictions" of which Vico speaks reappear in the modern terminology of the philosophy of these sciences. His poetical logic or science of the imagination passes into Aesthetic, so ardently studied by the philosophers, literary men and artists of Germany in the eighteenth century, brought by Kant into great prominence by his criticism of the Leibnitian doctrine of intuition as confused conception, and further advanced by Schelling and Hegel, who place art among the pure forms of the mind and so approach the position of Vico. Romanticism too, especially in Germany but also more or less in other countries, was Vician, emphasising as it did the original function of the imagination. His doctrines of language recurred when Herder and Humboldt treated it not intellectualistically as an artificial system of symbols, but as a free and poetic creation of the mind. The theory of religion and mythology abandoned the hypotheses of allegory and deception, and with David Hume recognised that religion is a natural fact, corresponding to the beginnings of human life in its passionate and imaginative state; with Heyne, that mythology is "symbolic speech," a product not of arbitrary invention but of necessity and poverty, of the "lack of words," which finds expression "in comparisons with things already known" (per rerum iam tum notarum similitudines); and with Ottfried Müller, that it is impossible to understand mythology without entering into the very heart of the human soul, where we may see its necessity and spontaneity. Religion was regarded no longer as something extraneous or hostile to philosophy, as a piece of stupidity or of deception practised by the unscrupulous upon the simple, but according to Vico's own doctrine as a rudimentary philosophy; so that the whole content of reasoned metaphysic was already to a certain extent implicit in poetical or religious metaphysic. Similarly, poetry and history were no longer kept distinct or set face to face to destroy each other; and as one of the great inspirers of the new German literature, Hamann (who in many ways resembles Vico in tendency, though unequal to him in mental power), had already foreseen when he uttered the warning, "if our poetry is worthless, our history will become leaner than Pharaoh's kine," a breath of poetry revived the historical study of the nineteenth century; once colourless, it became picturesque: once frigid, it regained warmth and life. The criticism of Hobbes' and Locke's utilitarianism, and the affirmation of the moral consciousness as a spontaneous sense of shame and a judgment entirely free from reflection reappeared in full panoply with the Critique of the Practical Reason; and that of their social atomism and consequent contractualism in Hegel's Philosophy of Right. The liberty of conscience and religious indifferentism professed and inculcated by the publicists of the seventeenth century were negated as a philosophical doctrine; and a nation without God seemed to Hegel, as it did to Vico, a phenomenon not to be found in history and existing only in the gossip of travellers in unknown or little-known lands. Carrying on the work of the Reformation, which Vico could neither grasp nor truly appreciate, the idealistic philosophy of Germany aimed not at exterminating religion, but at refining it, and at giving philosophy itself the spiritual value of religion. The certitude, the hard certitude which Vico distinguished from truth in the sphere of law, formed the subject of thought from Thomasius to Kant and Fichte and so on to the most recent writers, who have sought even if they have never found the distinctive criterion of the two forms; all or nearly all show a vivid consciousness of what is called "constraint" or "compulsion," a fact which had been almost forgotten in the old superficial and rhetorical moral theory. The historical school of law, in its reaction against the abstract revolutionary and reformatory tendencies of the eighteenth century, was bound to recall Vico's polemic against the Platonic or Grotian theory of an ideal republic or a natural law above and outside history and serving as a standard for history, and to recognise with Vico that law is correlative to the whole social life of a people at a given moment of its history and capable of being judged only in relation to it; a living and plastic reality, in a continual process of change like that of language. Finally, Vico's providence, the rationality and objectivity of history, which obeys a logic different from that attributed to it by the fancies and illusions of the individual, acquires a more prosaic name, but without changing its nature, in the "cunning of the reason" formulated by Hegel: it appeared again, ingeniously but perversely treated, in Schopenhauer's "cunning of the species," and again, treated with little ingenuity on a purely psychological method, in Wundt's so-called law of the "heterogenesis of ends."

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.

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