THE IMAGINATIVE FORM OF KNOWLEDGE
(POETRY AND LANGUAGE)
The chief, almost indeed the only, forms of the mind studied by Vico in
the New Science are the inferior, individualising activities to which
he gives the general name of "certitude." These are, in the region of
theoretic mind, imagination: in that of the practical mind, power or
will: and in the empirical science corresponding to the philosophy
of mind, the barbaric society and poetic wisdom whose examination
occupies, in his own words, "almost the whole bulk of the work."
His deep interest in these lower forms, and in the primitive societies
and barbaric histories which display them, is further illustrated
and explained, among his external circumstances, by the studies he
undertook in Roman law and its expressions and rhetorical figures:
by the still living tradition of Italian humanism: by the recently
stimulated pursuit of the archaeological sciences: by his own desire
to investigate the earliest civilisation of Italy, and so forth. But
many of his contemporaries and countrymen were handling the same
materials without acquiring any of his taste for and comprehension of
imagination, simplicity and force: indeed Vico himself, when he wrote
the _De antiquissima,_ had the taste for these things but as yet no
comprehension of them. The full reason for this interest is seen when
we consider the development of Vico as a philosopher, without losing
sight of the complexity of his nature in all its opposition to the
Cartesian type of mind. Cartesianism, with its attention confined to
the universalising and abstractive forms, ignored the individualising:
and this necessarily attracted Vico all the more towards them as
towards a mysterious problem. Cartesianism shrank in horror from
the tangled forest of history: Vico plunged eagerly into that very
department of history where the historical flavour, so to speak, is
strongest; namely, that which is furthest and psychologically most
different from civilised periods. Cartesianism extended the psychology
of civilisation to all periods and nations: Vico was led to investigate
in all their profound divergencies and contradictions the modes of
feeling and thought proper to various times.
The great effort which had to be made, and actually was made by Vico,
in order to penetrate through modern intellectualism and recapture the
point of view of primitive psychology, is expressed in his language
about the "grave difficulties" entailed by his "labour of fully
twenty-five years" in the attempt to "stoop from these civilised
natures of ours to those absolutely wild and savage minds, which we
cannot picture to ourselves at all, and can only understand with great
toil." It is expressed again, rather differently, by his insistence
on the impossibility, now that, even with the common people, the
mind of man is too completely separated from the senses, accustomed
to the free use of abstract terms, sharpened by the art of writing,
and spiritualised so to speak by the employment of numbers,--the
impossibility of entering into the chaotic fancy of primitive man,
whose mind was the very reverse of abstract, acute or spiritual; but
rather sunk in the senses, blunted by passion, and buried in the body:
and of grasping such ideas as that of the "sympathy of nature." This
necessary effort--a painful one, but successful--was another reason
for his feeling that his science was "new." He says indeed that this
study of the ideal form and the historic period of certitude was
entirely lacking to Greek philosophy as a whole. Plato had attempted it
in the _Cratylus,_ but unsuccessfully, because he knew nothing of the
language of the first legislators, the heroic poets, and was deceived
by the altered and modernised forms under which the laws existed in
his time after continual revision at Athens. Among the moderns, J. C.
Scaliger, Francisco Sanchez and Gaspar Schopp had fallen into a similar
mistake when they attempted to explain language by the principles of
logic, and indeed of Aristotelian logic, in spite of its having arisen
centuries after language itself. Grotius, Selden, Puffendorf and the
other writers on natural rights also studied human nature as civilised
by religion and law; so that in retracing the course of history they
began in the middle: that is to say, they confined themselves to the
intellect, ignoring the imagination, and to the will under moral
restraint, passing over the undisciplined passions. Vico himself, while
he had shown his interest in this problem by undertaking to investigate
the "most ancient wisdom of Italy," was yet led astray in his study by
following the lead of the author of the _Cratylus._
In its philosophical aspect, the New Science might, owing to this
prominence given to the study of the individualising forms, above all
the imagination (since the doctrine that primitive man is a poet and
thinks in poetic images is in Vico's words the "master key" of the
work) be called, without undue paradox, a philosophy of Mind with
special attention to the Philosophy of Imagination or Aesthetic.
Aesthetic may in fact be considered as a discovery of Vico's, though
with the reservations to which the determination of discoveries and
discoverers is always subject; and although he did not deal with it in
a separate treatise or give it the happy title with which Baumgarten
christened it ten years or so later. It is interesting however to
notice that the terminology of the New Science lights upon a name
similar to one of the equivalents for Aesthetic which Baumgarten passes
in review; namely that of "the Logic of Poetry." But ultimately the
name matters little: what does matter is the fact: and the fact is that
Vico adopted a theory of poetry which was then and was still for a time
to be a bold and revolutionary innovation. At that time, as is well
known, the old practical or didactic theory held the field: the theory
which, starting late in the history of the ancient world, persisting
through the Middle Ages, and transplanted into the Renaissance,
regarded poetry as an ingenious disguise for the popularising of
lofty philosophical and theological ideas. Beside this theory, though
inferior in authority, stood another, which considered poetry as the
product of or means to diversion and pleasure. These views had come
to alter the original meaning of the Aristotelian treatise on poetry,
so as to be at last introduced into it and discovered there as if
Aristotle himself had held and written them. Nor was this mistake
corrected by Cartesianism, which, as we should expect from its general
direction, rather tended to enfeeble and annul the very object of
these definitions, as a thing of no value, or practically none. At a
time when philosophers were trying to reduce metaphysics and ethics to
a mathematical form, and despised concrete intuition: when men were
devising a literature and a poetry suited to disseminate science among
the common people or the world of fashion: when experiments were being
made in the construction of artificial, logical languages, superior to
those of past or present usage: when, finally, it was thought possible
to lay down rules for composing musical airs without being a musician,
and poems without being a poet: in this atmosphere of detachment,
coolness, hostility and mockery, only a miracle could arouse a
different and indeed opposite feeling--a warm and vivid consciousness
of the real nature of poetry in its original function: and this miracle
was worked by the keen, restless and stormy mind of Giambattista Vico.
He criticised at once the three doctrines of poetry as a means of
adorning and communicating intellectual truth, as merely subservient
to pleasure, and as a harmless mental exercise for those who can do
it. Poetry is not esoteric wisdom: it does not presuppose the logic
of the intellect: it does not contain philosophical judgments. The
philosophers, in finding these things in poetry, have simply put them
there themselves without realising it. Poetry is produced not by the
mere caprice of pleasure, but by natural necessity. It is so far
from being superfluous and capable of elimination, that without it
thought cannot arise: it is the primary activity of the human mind.
Man, before he has arrived at the stage of forming universals, forms
imaginary ideas. Before he reflects with a clear mind, he apprehends
with faculties confused and disturbed: before he can articulate, he
sings: before speaking in prose, he speaks in verse: before using
technical terms, he uses metaphors, and the metaphorical use of words
is as natural to him as that which we call "natural." So far from being
a fashion of expounding metaphysics poetry is distinct from and opposed
to metaphysics. The one frees the intellect from the senses, the other
submerges and overwhelms it in them: the one reaches perfection in
proportion as it rises to universality, the other, as it confines
itself to the particular: the one enfeebles the imagination, the other
strengthens it. The one takes precautions against turning the mind into
body, the other delights in giving body to the mind. The judgments
of poetry are composed of sense and emotion, those of philosophy are
composed of reflection, which if introduced into poetry makes it frigid
and unreal: and no one in the whole course of history has ever been at
once a great poet and a great metaphysician. Poets and philosophers
may be called respectively the senses and the intellect of mankind: and
in this sense we may retain as true the scholastic saying "there is
nothing in the intellect which was not first in the senses." Without
sense, we cannot have intellect: without poetry, we cannot have
philosophy, nor indeed any civilisation.
Almost more miraculous than this conception of poetry is the fact
that Vico saw into the true nature of language, a problem much less
canvassed and investigated, and no more satisfactorily solved, by
ancient and modern philosophy down to the present day. Language was
as a rule alternately confused with logic and debased into a mere
external and conventional sign, or else in despair referred to a
divine origin. Vico realised that the divine origin was in this
case a mere refuge of indolence; that language is neither logic nor
convention, and, like poetry, is neither esoteric wisdom nor due to
a decision or agreement. Language arises naturally. In its first
form, men express themselves "by mute actions," or by signs, and
"by bodies having natural connexions with the ideas which they wish
to indicate," _i.e._ by means of symbolic objects. But in the case
both of articulated languages and of common speech, all philologists
have, "with an excess of good faith," which means a deficiency of
insight, accepted the view that meanings are decided at pleasure:
whereas at the so-called origin of language meanings must have been
natural, and every common word must certainly have started from one
single individual of one nation, and been derived from the primitive
language of gestures and objects. In Latin, as in other tongues, it
is to be noticed that almost all the words are formed to express
natural properties, or used by transference: and the greater part of
every language, in every nation, is metaphorical. The opposite opinion
was due to the ignorance of grammarians, who, meeting with a great
number of words expressing confused and indistinct ideas, and not
knowing their origin, which had formerly made them lucid and distinct,
invented for their own peace of mind the conventional theory; and
dragged in Aristotle and Galen as against Plato and Iamblichus. The
serious objection generally brought against the natural origin of
language and in favour of the conventional, namely the variations in
the common speech among different nations, is solved by considering
that owing to diversities of climate, temperament and custom nations
looked at the same useful or necessary objects in different aspects,
and hence produced different languages. This is also seen in the case
of proverbs; which are substantially identical maxims of human life,
but expressed in as many different forms as there are, or have been,
different nations. The insistence, then, with which Vico claims to have
discovered the true origin of languages "in the principles of poetry"
is of especial importance. On the one hand, it entails the assertion of
the spontaneous and imaginative origin of language, and on the other
it tends implicitly if not explicitly to suppress the dualism between
poetry and language.
In these principles of poetry Vico found not only the origin of
languages, but also that of letters or writing. He pronounced the
separation of the two Origins, connected as they were by nature and
appearing, in the primitive dumb language of signs and objects, as
identical, to be a mere mistake of the grammarians. Here again, it
is no case of esoteric wisdom or convention. Hieroglyphics were not
invented by philosophers as a means of concealing the mysteries of
their lofty thoughts: they were a universal and natural necessity to
all primitive peoples: and only the alphabetic scripts arose among
nations by a free agreement. In other words Vico drew a distinction
(though in a confused manner) within the so-called scripts, between
those which are true scripts and therefore conventional, and
others which are directly expressive and are therefore language,
story-telling, poetry and painting. These expressive scripts or
languages are characterised by the inseparability of content from
form. They are poetical just in the sense that the story and its
expression are one and the same thing, namely a metaphor common to
poetry and painting, so that it could be depicted by a dumb man without
verbal expression. As examples, Vico quotes traditional anecdotes;
for instance, the five "real words" (the frog, the mouse, the bird,
the ploughshare and the bow) sent by Idanturas king of the Scythians
to Darius when the latter had declared war on him: and the parable of
the tall poppies which King Tarquin enacted before the eyes of his son
Sextus's ambassador, concerning the means of ruling Gabii--methods
of expression parallel to practices still found among savages and
the lower classes:--and in addition to these, heraldry, flags, and
the emblems upon medals and coins. There is a frivolous legend which
belittles and degrades the true value of heraldry by asserting it to
have been invented in German tournaments as a custom of gallantry
by young men seeking to win the love of noble maidens. But in the
Middle Ages heraldry was a serious thing. It was, so to speak, the
hieroglyphic script of the period: a wordless language to eke out the
poverty of ordinary speech and alphabetic writing. It was only later,
in times of culture, that it became a sport and a pleasure, and gallant
and learned blazonings were adopted which had to be enlivened by means
of mottoes because their own meaning was now merely analogical; while
primitive and natural heraldry was dumb, or rather spoke without
needing an interpreter. Even in the days of culture a few such
expressive forms retained this simplicity and naturalness. Flags or
ensigns for instance form a kind of armed language with which nations,
as if deprived of speech, make themselves understood in the wider
affairs of the natural rights of peoples; wars, alliances and commerce.
Thus in the light of Vico's aesthetical idea poetry, words, metaphors,
writing and graphic symbols are all illuminated and spring to life:
great things and small, epic poetry and heraldry. The doctrine of
imaginary forms was quite a new departure in the history of ideas: for
while Vico opposed his own conceptions to those of the contemporary
schools, especially the Cartesian, he by no means attached himself to
any other more or less remote school or tradition. He himself felt
that he was opposed not to a particular school but to all who had ever
formulated doctrines on the subject. He says that he has "overturned"
all the theories about poetry held by Plato, Aristotle, and so on down
to Patrizio, Scaliger and Castelvetro in modern times, all of whom
had lost themselves in ineptitudes which "even to mention makes one
ashamed." Patrizio made poetry begin with the songs of birds and the
whistling of the wind! As regards language, he had been ultimately
dissatisfied both with Plato and with the moderns Wolfgang Latius,
Scaliger and Sanchez. As regards writing, once the theory of divine
origin supported by Mallinkrot and Ingewald Eling was refuted, or
rather interpreted in his own way, which came to the same thing, he
made an attempt to discredit the futile, vague, ill-founded, misshapen,
pompous and absurd opinions which derived it from the Goths and through
them from Adam and personal instruction from God, or more directly from
the Earthly Paradise, or from a Gothic Mercury as inventor. Finally,
as to heraldry, he remarks that the writers on the subject have never
understood anything about it, and have only by a mere random guess let
fall a hint of the truth in calling it "heroic."
In fact it would be hard to find real and true precedents for Vico's
aesthetic conceptions. At most, we might indicate vague suggestions
contained in various scattered statements which he collects: a certain
immediate stimulus in the discussions of the seventeenth century on
the distinctions between intellect and genius, reason and imagination,
dialectic and rhetoric: and a certain convergence of external
particulars, such as the collection of rhetorical subtleties expressed
in subtleties of language, made by Tesauro, a rhetorician of the time.
These conceptions, however, produced as they were by a remarkable
stroke of originality, no sooner passed from general outline to
particular determinations, from the first idea or inspiration to
concrete development, than they appear to become confused, fluctuating
and unstable. We may set aside the various opinions successively held
by Vico, and bound up with the historical growth of his mind, upon
the subjects of poetry, language or metaphor, beginning with his
academic orations, passing thence by way of the _De ratione_ and _De
antiquissima_ to the _Diritto universale,_ from these to the first and
thence to the second _Scienza Nuova_: a study of these might supply
subject-matter for a special essay, but does not come within the scope
of our treatise. But even in the final form of his aesthetic thought,
contradictory doctrines exist side by side. He is not content with
saying, as he does say, that poetical form is the primary activity of
the mind; that it is composed of feelings of emotion; and that it is
entirely imaginative and devoid of concepts and reflection. He goes on
to add that poetry, as opposed to history, "represents reality in its
best idea," and therefore fulfils the justice and gives every man the
reward or punishment which he does not always get in history, governed
as the latter often is by caprice, necessity and chance. Again, he
says that the end of poetry is "to give life to the lifeless," since
its most sublime task is the attempt to give life and sensation to
insensible objects. He says that poetry is "nothing but imitation";
that children, with their great imitative powers, are poets; and that
primitive races, the children of mankind, were also sublime poets. He
says that poetry has for its special subject-matter "the impossible
made credible": for instance, it is impossible that body should be
mind, and yet it was believed that the thundering sky was Jupiter.
Hence the miracles performed by magicians by means of incantations
were a favourite subject of poetry. He says that poetry is due to
"poverty," that is, that it is a pathological product of the mind.
Since uncivilised man is of low brain-power and cannot satisfy the
thirst he feels for the general and the universal, he fills their place
by inventing imaginary genera, poetical universals or characters.
Consequently the truth of the poet is identical with the truth of the
philosopher: the one abstract, the other clothed in images: the one
a metaphysic of reason, the other a metaphysic of feeling and fancy,
suited to the understanding of the people. From poverty also, that is
from inability to articulate, arises song, and therefore mutes and
stammerers utter sounds which are songs: and metaphor arises from
inability to express things in an accurate manner. He says, finally,
that the aim of poetry is to teach the people to act virtuously.
These sayings indicate very various ideas about poetry, of which
some are compatible with the central doctrine but thrown out in a
disconnected manner and therefore not in fact reconciled with it:
others are quite incompatible. Vico might have been cited in turn, on
the testimony of single passages, as a supporter of the moralistic
theory of art, the didactic theory, the abstract or typical theory, the
mythological theory, the animistic theory, and so on. And if he neither
falls back into the old theories he hated, nor loses himself among
the new fallacies which followed him, it is due to the fact that all
these waverings and inconsistencies were continually submerged by the
thought that poetry is the primary form of the mind, prior to intellect
and free from reflection and reasoning.
Just as he was unable by the use of his leading principle to
distinguish and reconcile the other theories on the nature of poetry
which already existed or had been invented by himself, so he did
not succeed in escaping from the tyranny of old or new empirical
classifications. He struggled to reduce these in their turn to
philosophical form, and tried to deduce successively the various kinds
of poetry, epic, lyric and dramatic: the kinds of verse and metre,
spondaic, iambic and prose: the kinds of figurative language, metaphor,
metonymy, synecdoche and irony: the parts of speech, onomatopoeism,
interjection, pronoun, particle, noun and verb: the moods and tenses of
the verb (in which connexion he refers to a case of aphasia observed
by himself in Naples, "a gentleman seized with a severe apoplexy,
who utters nouns but has completely forgotten verbs"): the kinds of
writing, hieroglyphic, symbolic and alphabetical: and of languages,
according to their increasing complexity, from monosyllables to
compound words and from a preponderance of vowels and diphthongs
to a preponderance of consonants. In the course of these attempts
he frequently offered new and sometimes correct interpretations of
isolated facts: but he did not and could not connect them into a
scientific system. Moreover he never realised the relation between
poetry and the other arts. On the one hand, he unites them, as when he
considers painting and poetry to be fundamentally identical and notes
a number of analogies between the poetry and painting of the Middle
Ages: on the other, he separates them sharply, as when he asserts
that delicacy in art is the outcome of philosophy, and that painting,
sculpture, casting and intaglio are the most delicate arts because they
are compelled to abstract the surface of the material objects they
represent.
These inconsistencies and errors which we have briefly reviewed are due
partly to Vico's insufficient power of distinguishing and elaborating,
partly--and this is the greater part--to that fundamental fault which
we have already seen to exist in the structure of the New Science. In
this case the fault is, more precisely, Vico's confusion between the
philosophical concept of the poetic form of the mind, and the empirical
concept of the barbaric form of civilisation. "This earliest age of the
world," as he himself says, "can be truly said to have concerned itself
exclusively with the primary activity of the mind." But the earliest
age of the world, composed as it was of men of flesh and blood, not of
philosophical categories, cannot have been concerned with one solitary
activity of the mind. This single activity may have preponderated,
as we generally say: the very word reveals the quantitative and
approximative nature of the conception: but all the others must have
been at work simultaneously, imagination and intellect, perception and
abstraction, will and morality, song and arithmetic. Vico could not
shut his eyes to this obvious fact, and introduced into this phase of
civilisation not only the poet, but also the theologian, the physicist,
the astronomer, the _pater-familias,_ the warrior, the politician,
and the lawgiver; but he tried to regard the activities of all these
as "poetical" in character, as he called it, by a metaphor drawn from
the alleged preponderance of the imaginative form of the mind; and
the whole system he called "poetic wisdom." The metaphorical nature
of the terminology is suggested, in fact leaps to the eye, in certain
characteristic passages, as where the "arts," that is, the mechanical
crafts which produce objects of practical utility, are called "poetry
with a certain kind of reality," and where ancient Roman law, because
of the abundance of formulae and ceremonies with which it was adorned,
is said to be a "serious dramatic poem." But the metaphors are
dangerous, since, as in the case of the New Science, they light upon
a soil favourable to their growth into concepts: and in point of fact
the historical phase of barbarism, metaphorically expressed as poetic
wisdom, soon turned in Vico's mind into the ideal phase of poetry, and
transferred all its own attributes to this ideal phase. The former
included theologians, and accordingly Vico regarded poetry as theology,
but an imaginative theology: teachers, and poetry became a teacher,
but of the common people: natural scientists, and it became science,
but the science of an imaginary world. And since these barbarians,
uncultivated as they were and confined to the world of images, could
not think in concepts, the imaginations of poetry, individualised and
particular, and its judgments, always expressed in material form,
were falsely interpreted as "imaginative universals," supposed to be
something intermediate between the individualising intuition and the
universalising concept. Poetry, which ought to represent sense and
nothing else, came to represent a sense already intellectualised; and
the saying that nothing is found in the intellect that has not already
been in the sense, acquired the meaning, that the intellect is nothing
but the sense clarified, and the sense nothing but the intellect
confused. Thus there was no further need for the added caution
"except the intellect itself" (_nisi intellectus ipse_). Conversely,
barbaric civilisation became a kind of mythological or allegorical
representation of the ideal phase of poetry, and primitive tribes were
transformed into crowds of "sublime poets" just as, in the ontogenesis
corresponding to this philogenesis, children had been made into poets.
The concept of the "imaginative universal" unites in itself the double
contradiction of the doctrine; since to the imaginative element must
be joined, in this mental construction, the element of universality
which taken by itself would be a true and proper universal, rational
and not imaginative. Hence arises a _petitio principii_ by which the
origin of the rational universal, the point requiring explanation, is
already presupposed. On the other hand, if the imaginative universal is
interpreted as freed from the element of universality, that is, as a
mere imagination, Vico's aesthetic doctrine would certainly become once
more consistent: but his "poetic wisdom" or barbaric civilisation would
be deprived of an indispensable portion of its organism in parting with
every kind of concept: for concepts are, so to speak, the skeleton of
the body.
To resolve the contradiction it was necessary to separate poetry from
poetic wisdom: and we do find some signs of this separation in Vico. He
sometimes admits, almost against his will, the lack of correspondence
between the philosophical category and the type of society, and in
dealing with the latter is compelled to fall back upon such phrases
as "very nearly" and "more or less." He says, for instance, that
primitive man consisted "exclusively of strong imagination, with no,
or very little, reason": that he was "almost all body, with hardly
any reflection": or again, after making a show of philosophical
distinction between the three languages of gods, heroes and men, he
goes on to observe that "the language of the gods was almost all dumb,
and very little articulate; the language of heroes was composed of
equal quantities of articulation and dumb-show; the language of men
was almost all articulated, and very little in dumb-show." He admits
again in a fine simile that poetic speech out-lived poetic wisdom and
survived far into the historic and civilised period, "as great and
rapid rivers run far out into the sea and keep their waters fresh as
they bear them along with the force of their flow." Even in modern
times we cannot afford entirely to neglect imaginative speech: "to
describe the operations of the pure mind, we must avail ourselves of
poetic language, of metaphors drawn from the senses." It appears that
poetry does not end with barbarism, for poets arise even in civilised
times: and if it is said that the poets of the earliest times were
naturally imaginative, those of later days artificially so, that is,
according to Vico, by deliberately forgetting the proper use of words,
freeing themselves from philosophy, filling their minds with childish
and vulgar prejudices and submitting to the bondage of conventions like
the use of rhyme--all these restrictions, besides being easily refuted,
are merely an unsuccessful attempt to diminish the weight of the fact
above mentioned, namely that poetry belongs to all ages, not merely to
that of barbarism: it is an ideal category, not a historic fact. But
the restrictions prove, as also do the infrequency and the unemphatic
nature of the passages quoted, that Vico was not in a position to
effect the separation of poetry from poetic wisdom, hampered as he was
by the hybrid character of the concept and of the actual method of the
New Science.
If, on the other hand, the idea of poetry as pure imagination had not
remained firmly at the foundation of Vico's thought, in spite of all
the confusions and inconsistencies in which it became involved, and
had not been at work underground, so to speak, in the New Science,
it would have been difficult or perhaps impossible to understand the
leading conception which dominates his philosophy of mind, closely
connected as it is with that idea. This is the conception of the mind
as a development, or, to use Vico's own words, a progress or unfolding
(_corso, spiegamento_); a conception which improved upon, though it
did not explicitly contradict, the ordinary view which was almost
exclusively confined to the enumeration and classification of the
mind's faculties. The doctrine of imaginative universals as spontaneous
mental products, rudimentary universals but not without an element of
truth in them, was at least an adequate weapon against the empirical
theory which made civilisation the outcome of a highly developed and
rational practical wisdom and the personal labour of God or of wise
men who must have sprung from the earth or fallen from heaven in some
unaccountable manner.
Vico clearly stated the dilemma between the two, and only two, possible
explanations of the origin of society. Either it came from the
reflection of wise men, or from a certain human feeling and instinct
among brutish men. He accepted the latter solution, that of "brutes"
which gradually became human: the theory, that is, of the evolution
of thought from the imaginative to the rational universal, and the
progress of social relations from force to equity. But was this an
adequate foundation for "ideal history" or the philosophy of mind? In
the philosophy of mind, it could be translated into a similar if not
identical view--the doctrine which, owing to Cartesianism and a certain
recrudescence of the Scholasticism of Duns Scotus, lasted down to
Vico's own times and expressed the life of the mind by the successive
stages of the concept, obscurity, confusion, clarity and distinctness.
Leibniz, as is well known, made a special study of obscure and
confused perceptions, the _"petites perceptions."_ The doctrine was
essentially intellectualistic, since the concepts, however confused
or obscure, were never anything else than concepts: and hence it was
unable to account either for poetry or even for mental development,
the dialectic of which cannot be understood if it is regarded as
consisting of merely quantitative differences. Such differences are
in reality not differences at all, but identities and therefore the
negation of change: and in fact the whole of this school of thought was
anti-aesthetic and static, devoid both of a true theory of imagination
and a true theory of development. Vico's thought, on the other hand,
was averse to intellectualism and in sympathy with imagination: it was
entirely dynamic and evolutionary. For Vico, mind is an eternal drama:
and since drama demands antithesis, his philosophy of mind is rooted
in antithesis, that is in the real distinction and opposition between
imagination and thought, poetry and metaphysic, force and equity,
passion and morality; although he seems sometimes, for the reasons
given above, to mistake its nature; or rather, although he actually
does sometimes confuse it with empirical inquiries and doctrines, and
with the determinations of history.