state of nature, from which it again passes into a higher barbarism or heroic age, to be followed once more by civilisation.  The dissolution of the Roman Empire and the barbarian invasions are followed by the Middle Ages, in which Dante plays the part of Homer; and the modern period with its strong monarchies corresponds to the Roman Empire.  This is Vico’s principle of reflux.  If the theory were sound, it would mean that the civilisation of his day must again relapse into barbarism and the cycle begin again.  He did not himself state this conclusion directly or venture on any prediction.  It is obvious how readily his doctrine could be adapted to the conception of Progress as a spiral movement.  Evidently the corresponding periods in his cycles are not identical or really homogeneous.  Whatever points of likeness may be discovered between early Greek or Roman and medieval societies, the points of unlikeness are still more numerous and manifest.  Modern civilisation differs in fundamental and far-reaching ways from Greek and Roman.  It is absurd to pretend that the general movement brings man back again and again to the point from which he started, and therefore, if there is any value in Vico’s reflux, it can only mean that the movement of society may be regarded as a spiral ascent, so that each stage of an upward progress corresponds, in certain general aspects, to a stage which has already been traversed, this correspondence being due to the psychical nature of man.

A conception of this kind could not be appreciated in Vico’s day or by the next generation.  The “Scienza nuova” lay in Montesquieu’s library, and he made no use of it.  But it was natural that it should arouse interest in France at a time when the new idealistic philosophies of Germany were attracting attention, and when Frenchmen, of the ideological school, were seeking, like Vico himself, a synthetic principle to explain social phenomena.  Different though Vico was in his point of departure as in his methods from the German idealists, his speculations nevertheless had something in common with theirs.  Both alike explained history by the nature of mind which necessarily determined the stages of the process; Vico as little as Fichte or Hegel took eudaemonic considerations into account.  The difference was that the German thinkers sought their principle in logic and applied it a priori, while Vico sought his in concrete psychology and engaged in laborious research to establish it a posteriori by the actual data of history.  But both speculations suggested that the course of human development corresponds to the fundamental character of mental processes and is not diverted either by Providential intervention or by free acts of human will.

5.

These foreign influences co-operated in determining the tendencies of French speculation in the period of the restored monarchy, whereby the idea of Progress was placed on new basements and became the headstone of new “religions.”  Before we consider the founders of sects, we may glance briefly at the views of some eminent savants who had gained the ear of the public before the July Revolution—­ Jouffroy, Cousin, and Guizot.