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poetic story must be "wholly ideal": "by means of idea, the poet breathes reality into things otherwise unreal; masters of poetry claim that their art must be wholly compact of imagination, like a painter of the ideal, not imitative like a portrait-painter: whence, from their likeness to God the Creator, poets and painters alike are called divine." And against those who blame poets for telling stories which, they say, are untrue, Vico protests: "The best stories are those approximating most nearly to ideal truth, the eternal truth of God: it is immeasurably more certain than the truth of historians who often bring into play caprice, necessity or fortune; but such a Captain as, for instance, Tasso's Godfrey is the type of a captain of all times, of all nations, and so are all personages of poetry, whatever difference there may be in sex, age, temperament, custom, nation, republic, grade, condition or fortune; they are nothing save the eternal properties of the human soul, rationally discussed by politicians, economists and moral philosophers, and painted as portraits by the poet."2 Referring to an observation made by Castelvetro, and approving it in part, to the effect that if poetry is a presentiment of the possible it should be preceded by history, imitation of the real, yet finding himself confronted by the difficulty that, nevertheless, poets invariably precede historians, Vico solves the problem by identifying history with poetry primitive history was poetry, its plot was narration of fact, and Homer was the first historian; or rather "he was a heroic character amongst Greek men, in so far as they poetically narrated their own history." Poetry and history, therefore, are originally identical; or rather, undifferentiated. "But inasmuch as it is not possible to give false ideas, since falsity arises from an embroiled combination of ideas, so is it impossible to give a tradition, however fabulous, that has not had, at the beginning, a basis of truth." Hence we gain

1 Scienza nuova pr. bk. iii. ch. 4.

2 Letter to Solla, January 12, 1729; cf. Scienza nuova sec. Elem. xliii. 3 Scienza nuova sec. bk. iii. 4 Scienza nuova pr. bk. iii. ch. 6.

an entirely new insight into mythology: it is no longer an arbitrary calculated invention, but a spontaneous vision of truth as it presented itself to the spirit of primitive man. Poetry gives an imaginative vision; science or philosophy intelligible truth; history the consciousness of certitude.

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Language and poetry are, in Vico's estimation, sub- Poetry and language. stantially the same. In refuting the "vulgar error of grammarians" who maintain the priority of the birth of prose over that of verse, he finds "within the origin of Poetry, so far as it has been herein discovered," the origin of languages and the origin of letters." This discovery was made by Vico after "toil as disagreeable and overwhelming as we should undergo had we to strip off our own nature and enter into that of the primæval men of Hobbes, Grotius, or Puffendorf; creatures possessing no language at all, by whom were created the languages of the ancient world." 2 But his painful labour was richly repaid by his refutation of the erroneous theory that languages sprang from convention or, as he said, "signified at will," whereas it is evident that "from their natural origin words must have had natural meanings; this is plainly seen in common Latin . . . wherein almost all words have arisen by natural necessity, either from natural properties or from their sensible effects; and in general, metaphor forms the bulk of language in the case of every people." This argument strikes a blow at another common error of the grammarians, “ that the language of prose writers is correct, that of poets incorrect." 4 The poetic tropes grouped under the heading of metonymy seem to Vico to be "born of the nature of primitive peoples, not of capricious selection by men skilled in poetic art";5 stories told " by means of simili

1 Scienza nuova sec. bk. ii., Corollari d' intorno all' origine della locuzion poetica, etc.

2 Scienza nuova pr. bk. iii. ch. 22.

3 Scienza nuova sec. bk. ii., Corollari d' intorno all' origini delle lingue, etc.

Op. cit. bk. ii., Corollari d' intorno a' tropi, etc., § 4.

Scienza nuova pr. bk. iii. ch. 22.

Q

Inductive and formalistic

logic.

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tudes, imagery and comparisons," result "from lack of the genera and species required to define things with propriety," and are therefore, by reason of natural necessities, common to entire peoples." The earliest languages must have consisted of "dumb gestures and objects which had natural connexions with the ideas to be expressed." 2 He observes very acutely that to these figurate languages belong not only hieroglyphics but the emblems, knightly bearings, devices and blazons which he calls "mediæval hieroglyphics." 3 In the barbarous Middle Ages "Italy was forced to fall back on the mute language . . . of the earliest gentile nations in which men, before discovering articulate speech, were obliged like mutes to use actions or objects having natural connexions with the ideas, which at that time must have been exceedingly sensuous, of the things which they wished to signify; such expressions, clad in almost vocal words, must have had all the lively expressiveness of poetic diction." 4 Hence arise three kinds or phases of language: dumb show, the language of the gods; heraldic language, or that of the heroes; and spoken language. Vico also looked forward to a universal system of etymology, a “dictionary of mental words common to all nations."

A man with ideas of this sort about imagination, language and poetry could not say he was satisfied with formalistic and verbal Logic, whether Aristotelian or scholastic. The human mind (says Vico) "makes use of intellect when from things which it feels by sense it gathers something that does not fall under sense this is the true meaning of the Latin intelligere." 5 In a rapid outline of the history of Logic, Vico wrote: "Aristotle came and taught the syllogism, a method more suited to expound universals in their particulars than to unite particulars by the discovery of universals: then came Zeno with his sorites, which corresponds with modern 1 Scienza nuova sec. bk. iii., Pruove filosofiche. Scienza nuova pr. bk. iii. ch. 22. 4 Letter to De Angelis, cit.

3 Op. cit. bk. iii. chs. 27-33. 5 Scienza nuova sec. bk. ii. introd.

philosophic methods and refines, without sharpening, the wits; and no advantage whatever was reaped from either by mankind at large. With great reason, therefore, does Verulam, equally eminent as politician and philosopher, propound, commend and illustrate induction in his Organum he is followed by the English with excellent results to experimental philosophy."1 From this source is derived his criticism of mathematics, which have always, but especially in his day, been considered as the type of perfect science.

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In all this, Vico is not only a thorough revolutionary, Vico opposed but is quite conscious of being so he knows himself to to all former theories of be in opposition to all previous theories on the subject. poetry. He says that his new principles of poetry are wholly opposed to, and not merely different from, all which have been imagined from the time of Plato and his disciple Aristotle to Patrizzi, Scaliger and Castelvetro among the moderns; poetry is now discovered to have been the first language used by all nations alike, even the Hebrew." 2 In another passage he says that by his theories "is overthrown all that has ever been said of the origin of poetry, beginning from Plato and Aristotle, right down to our own Patrizzi, Scaliger and Castelvetro; and it is found that poetry arising through defect of human ratiocination is as sublime as any which owes its being to the later rise of philosophy and the arts of composition and criticism; indeed, that these later sources never gave rise to any poetry that could equal, far less surpass it." 3 In the Autobiography he boasts of having discovered other principles of poetry than those found by Greeks and Latins and all others from those times down to the present day; on these are founded other views on mythology."

"4

These ancient principles of poetry "laid down first by Plato and confirmed by Aristotle" had been the

1 Scienza nuova sec. bk. ii., Ultimi corollari, § vi.

2 Scienza nuova pr. bk. iii. ch. 2.

8 Scienza nuova sec. bk. ii., Della metafisica poetica, etc.
▲ Vita scritta da sè medesimo, in Opere, ed. cit. iv. p. 365.

Vico's judgements of the grammarians and linguists who preceded

him.

anticipation or prejudice which had misled all writers on poetic reason (among whom he cites Jacopo Mazzoni). Statements " even of most serious philosophers such as Patrizzi and others " upon the origin of song and verse are so inept that he "blushes even to mention them." 1 It is curious to see him annotating the Ars Poetica of Horace, with a view to finding some plausible sense in it by applying the principles of the Scienza nuova.2

It is probable that he was familiar with the writings of Muratori among contemporaries, for he quotes him by name, and of Gravina, who was a personal acquaintance; but if he read the Perfetta Poesia and the Forza della fantasia he could not have been satisfied by the treatment meted out to the faculty of imagination, so highly valued and respected by himself; and if Gravina influenced him at all it must have been by provoking him to contradiction. In this latter (if not directly in such French writers as Le Bossu) he may have met with the fallacy of regarding Homer as a repository of wisdom, a fallacy which he combated with vigour and pertinacity. In his estimation, among the gravest faults of the Cartesians was their inability to appreciate the world of imagination and poetry. Of his own times he complained they were benumbed by analytical methods and by a philosophy which sought to deaden every faculty of soul which reached it through the body, especially that of imagination, now held to be mother of all human error ": times "of a wisdom which freezes the generous soul of the best poetry," and prevents all understanding of it.3

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It is just the same with the theory of language. "The manner of birth and the nature of languages has been the cause of much painful toil and meditation: nor, from the Cratylus of Plato, in which in our other works we have falsely delighted and believed" (he alludes to the doctrine followed by him in his own first book, De antiquissima Italorum sapientia), "down to Wolfgang

1 Scienza nuova pr. bk. iii. ch. 37.

2 Note all' Arte poetica di Orazio, in Opere, ed. cit. vi. pp. 52-79. 3 Letter to De Angelis, cit.

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