And then, passing from the age of imagination, Vico proceeds to show us the age of reason, this age of ours in which the mind, even the popular mind, is too remote from the senses, “with so many abstractions of which all languages are full,” an age in which “the ability to conceive an immense image of such a personage as we call sympathetic Nature is denied to us, for though the phrase ‘Dame Nature’ may be on our lips, there is nothing in our minds that corresponds with it, our minds being occupied with the false, the non-existent.”  “To-day,” Vico continues, “it is naturally impossible for us to enter into the vast imagination of these primitive men.”  But is this certain?  Do not we continue to live by the creations of their imagination, embodied for ever in the language with which we think, or, rather, the language which thinks in us?

It was in vain that Comte declared that human thought had already emerged from the age of theology and was now emerging from the age of metaphysics into the age of positivism; the three ages coexist, and although antagonistic they lend one another mutual support.  High-sounding positivism, whenever it ceases to deny and begins to affirm something, whenever it becomes really positive, is nothing but metaphysics; and metaphysics, in its essence, is always theology, and theology is born of imagination yoked to the service of life, of life with its craving for immortality.

Our feeling of the world, upon which is based our understanding of it, is necessarily anthropomorphic and mythopeic.  When rationalism dawned with Thales of Miletus, this philosopher abandoned Oceanus and Thetis, gods and the progenitors of gods, and attributed the origin of things to water; but this water was a god in disguise.  Beneath nature (phhysist) and the world (khosmos), mythical and anthropomorphic creations throbbed with life.  They were implicated in the structure of language itself.  Xenophon tells us (Memorabilia, i., i., 6-9) that among phenomena Socrates distinguished between those which were within the scope of human study and those which the gods had reserved for themselves, and that he execrated the attempt of Anaxagoras to explain everything rationally.  His contemporary, Hippocrates, regarded diseases as of divine origin, and Plato believed that the sun and stars were animated gods with their souls (Philebus, cap. xvi., Laws, x.), and only permitted astronomical investigation so long as it abstained from blasphemy against these gods.  And Aristotle in his Physics tells us that Zeus rains not in order that the corn may grow, but by necessity (ex anharchest).  They tried to mechanize and rationalize God, but God rebelled against them.