The book of Vico was now a hundred years old.  I did not mention him in his chronological place, because he exercised no immediate influence on the world.  His thought was an anachronism in the eighteenth century, it appealed to the nineteenth.  He did not announce or conceive any theory of Progress, but his speculation, bewildering enough and confused in its exposition, contained principles which seemed predestined to form the basis of such a doctrine.  His aim was that of Cabanis and the ideologists, to set the study of society on the same basis of certitude which had been secured for the study of nature through the work of Descartes and Newton. [Footnote:  Vico has sometimes been claimed as a theorist of Progress, but incorrectly.  See B. Croce, The Philosophy of Giambattista Vico (Eng. tr., 1913), p. 132—­an indispensable aid to the study of Vico.  The first edition of the Scienza nuova appeared in 1725; the second, which was a new work, in 1730.

Vico influenced Ballanche, a writer who enjoyed a considerable repute in his day.  He taught the progressive development of man towards liberty and equality within the four corners of the Christian religion, which he regarded as final.  His Palingenesie sociale appeared in 1823-30.]

His fundamental idea was that the explanation of the history of societies is to be found in the human mind.  The world at first is felt rather than thought; this is the condition of savages in the state of nature, who have no political organisation.  The second mental state is imaginative knowledge, “poetical wisdom”; to this corresponds the higher barbarism of the heroic age.  Finally, comes conceptual knowledge, and with it the age of civilisation.  These are the three stages through which every society passes, and each of these types determines law, institutions, language, literature, and the characters of men.

Vico’s strenuous researches in the study of Homer and early Roman history were undertaken in order to get at the point of view of the heroic age.  He insisted that it could not be understood unless we transcended our own abstract ways of thinking and looked at the world with primitive eyes, by a forced effort of imagination.  He was convinced that history had been vitiated by the habit of ignoring psychological differences, by the failure to recapture the ancient point of view.  Here he was far in advance of his own times.

Concentrating his attention above all on Roman antiquity, he adopted—­not altogether advantageously for his system—­the revolutions of Roman history as the typical rule of social development.  The succession of aristocracy (for the early kingship of Rome and Homeric royalty are merely forms of aristocracy in Vico’s view), democracy, and monarchy is the necessary sequence of political governments.  Monarchy (the Roman Empire) corresponds to the highest form of civilisation.  What happens when this is reached?  Society declines into an anarchical