the race. They may have come without reason; but on that very account they were held with all the more obstinacy and passion. They sank into man's inmost self, they became part of the very fibre and tissue of his being. Nothing henceforth could tear them from him. Indeed, the real danger lay in the opposite direction: it was that he would cling with unyielding stubbornness to the highly specialised, and consequently imperfect, form under which they had first come to him; that he would never throw off the fanaticism of superstition,' the 'inhuman humanity,' with which his first acceptance of them was bound up. And a thousand indications are there to show how slow man has in fact been to wean himself either from the cyclopean discipline of the Family, or from the purely material conception of God, from which he originally started. There, if anywhere, lies the tragedy of his early history: indeed, so far as his conception of God is concerned, of a great part of his later history also.

Progress, however, there has certainly been: even the blindest must admit it. And if we ask, How has that progress come about? and what is the instrument by which it has been accomplished? the only possible answer is that which the Scienza nuova offers. It is the work of reason which, step by step, has risen to a fuller consciousness of itself, step by step has reformed the errors in which man had been entangled by his unguarded imagination; and step by step has rebuilt the world of inward belief, both religious and moral, by the new lights which from time to time have dawned upon him: with the world of inward belief, remodelling also that of the outward institutions in which it is embodied. In the first making of those worlds reason, in the sense of conscious deliberation, had no part nor lot; imagination was all in all. It is only as reason comes to life, as reason slowly grows in strength, that little by little they are recast and, in recasting, purged of the defects inseparable from the manner of their first making.1

How great these defects are, Vico makes no attempt to conceal. On the contrary, he is never weary of returning on them and enforcing them. Barbarism, savagery, a very fanaticism of superstition such are the terms with which he brands the beliefs and customs that man first shaped for himself under the spell of an overmastering imagination. Yet the other side of the picture is no less present to his mind: the mildness and clemency-comparative at least-which is the ideal, if not always the practice, of the modern world. And if he heightens the colours of the one, it is in order to give relief and vividness to the other. More than that: if his

1 'Gli uomini prima sentono senz' avvertire; da poi avvertiscono con animo perturbato e commosso; finalmente riflettono con mente pura' (S.N. ii. 112; compare ib. 162-9).

first task is to insist upon the contrast between the one and the other, his second and more cherished concern is to prove how inseparably they are united. It is to prove that the later stage would have been impossible without the earlier: that the earlier contains-and contains in the only shape that could have come home to primitive man-the germs which slowly ripened into the full fruit of the later. In this very barbarism and fanaticism, he argues, lay the whole promise of the future. Harsh, crude and cruel as they now seem, they yet enshrined ideas and beliefs without which man is no better than the brutes; but, with which, he has already planted his feet upon the rock, has already established the certainty of becoming, and becoming in ever fuller and fuller measure, ‘a reasonable being and a man.'

The first step of man's advance may seem, at first sight, unpromising enough: brute force the sole claim which the Gods have upon his reverence; brute force the apparent basis of the bond which binds him to his fellow-men. But there are two new elements which have now entered into his experience: two things which irrevocably alter the whole character of his being. Beneath the appearance of brute force, a moral relation has for the first time been set up between him and his fellows; and that moral relation, hidden beneath the semblance of brute force, has its source and sanction in religion. The inevitable result is that force, which in his unregenerate state had the first and last word in the matter, is now thrust down into the second place; that, so far from being the ruling principle of his dealings with others, it is henceforth no more than an external support, an outer shell to protect the growth of another principle which is higher and more vital. As that growth advances, as the higher principle slowly gathers strength, the external support is doomed to fall away, the outer shell to burst asunder; until in the fulness of time, the plant stands in its own strength, the fruit casts aside its withered husk and offers to man its nourishment in the present, its seed of promise for the future. Everywhere death gives place to life: the dead weight of force to the vital play of self-sacrifice and love.

And this leads us to another idea that lies at the root of the whole theory. If the primitive history of man shows this continuous advance, this unbroken progress, from the less to the more conscious, from the less to the more complete, apprehension of truth and justice, that can only be because there is an unseen force by which at first unconsciously, then with ever-increasing consciousness he is impelled along the path that, on looking back, we can see that he has prevalently followed. In other words, it can only be because, through all his errors, through all his apparent failures, he has never ceased to be guided by Providence, has always,

consciously or unconsciously, been an instrument in the hands of God. And the same thing, though in a different form, holds good of his later history also. If it is true of those early days in which the advance is from an imaginative intuition to a reasoned conception, it is no less true of the succeeding ages, in which it is from a less to a more fully awakened reason. The mental process is slightly different; but the guiding principle, the overruling Providence, is the same.

Divina providentia, tanquam muro, circumagitur mundus. So runs the sentence with which Augustine's disciple opens his History of the World. Such also, but with a difference, is the faith of Vico. The difference is this. To Orosius, as his simile implies, the action of Providence is mechanical and from without. To Vico, it is the vital force which shapes man's destiny from within. God orders the course of history; but he orders it through purely human instruments, through the natural needs and impulses which he has implanted in man from the beginning. Of special interventions, of chosen peoples,' Vico will have nothing: or rather, when his orthodoxy compels him to admit them, it is to the doubtful glory of unaccountable exceptions—almost, of freaks-which lie wholly apart from the main stream of progress, which have nothing to teach us of man's nature, nor indeed, for aught that concerns any but the Jewish race, of God's either. Thus in his Providence there is nothing of the supernatural: nothing that is not entirely natural and human. His God works solely through the agency of man. More than that: not so much through the few picked men who stand out above their fellows, as through whole communities and nations; not so much through the special qualities which mark out one man from another, as through the humbler faculties which are common to all: through the common impulses, the common aspirations which bind all men together; through the common sense' which guides all men along a common path and which-just because it works instinctively, without any need to analyse, or even consciously to realise, the manner of its workingis the common property of all.

Once again, therefore, Vico throws himself back upon the 'popular wisdom' which, for practical purposes, is a far surer guide than the abstruse wisdom' of the philosophers and without which that abstruse wisdom could never have come to fruit. The hand of God is visible in both of them; in the former, however, more directly and more clearly than the latter. More directly, because the matter on which the philosophers work is itself laid ready to their hand by the common sense of the whole race; because it is the function of abstruse wisdom not to create in its own strength, but to interpret, to lay bare, the inner mind, the hidden purpose,

of that which popular wisdom has long ago created and put in practice. More clearly, because the common sense of the whole race, if taken in sufficiently large masses and over sufficiently long periods, is incapable of error-to us, at any rate, it is the ultimate authority, the court of final appeal, which cannot be questioned without presumption-while the work of the philosophers, being the work of individuals, is always open to the intrusion of personal bias, always liable to be vitiated, in whole or in part, by individual short-sightedness, by individual caprice.

Thus, for the fulfilment of the divine purpose, nothing more is needed than the natural instincts of man, acting on and, in turn, acted on by the purely natural operation of circumstance and physical condition. In the history of man, everything is mysterious, but nothing is either arbitrary or supernatural. From the first step to the last, everything is at the same time natural and providential. It was a divine-but, none the less, a strictly human -necessity which in the first instance drove him into the rude fellowship of the monastic' Family. It is a divine-but, none the less, a strictly human-necessity which has prompted every further step on his road towards ever closer and higher forms of union with his kind, towards an ever fuller and clearer knowledge of God. Ipsis rebus dictantibus, as the Roman jurist asserted, regna condita. And to the same dictation-that of circumstances from without, that of his own nature from within-are due all the subsequent advances that man's history records. On this crucial matter, let Vico speak for himself:

'The will of man, by its very nature wavering and uncertain, finds assurance and determination in the common sense which in all matters of man's necessity or convenience-and these are the only two sources of natural Right-is the guide of the whole race. This common sense is a judgement formed entirely without reflection and shared in common by a whole Order, a whole Nation, the whole Race. . . . This common sense of the whole race is the organ of judgement which divine Providence has granted to all nations, so as to make them capable of arriving at certitude in all that concerns the natural Rights of men. And such certitude is attained when men discern the substantial points of agreement in which, despite variations of detail, all nations are at one.' 1

1 'L'umano arbitrio, di sua natura incertissimo, egli si accerta e determina col senso comune degli uomini d' intorno alle umane necessità o utilità: che son i due fonti del Diritto natural delle Genti. Il senso comune è un giudizio senz' alcuna riflessione, comunemente sentito di tutto un ordine, da tutto un popolo, da tutta una nazione, o da tutto il gener umano. . . . Il senso comune del gener umano è il criterio insegnato alle nazioni dal Provedenza divina, per diffinire il certo d' intorno al Diritto

...

Here, in brief, we have Vico's whole theory of Right; and with it-for, in his view, the two things are inseparable-his whole theory of progress and of Providence. To him, as to Burke, the rights of men are their advantages.' Only, as their advantages, their interests, are perpetually changing with time and circumstance, so their rights also are constantly expanding, constantly demanding and receiving a wider and ever widening interpretation. At first confined to the individual, they are then at the height of intensity, but at the height also of exclusiveness. With the formation of the Family, however, the horizon of man necessarily begins to widen; and as it spreads from the individual to the Family, from the Family to the Order, from the Order to the Nation, so his interpretation of his rights little by little loses its primitive intensity: and, at the same time, its primitive narrowness and exclusiveness. He no longer thinks only of his personal interests, but of those which belong to his whole Family, to his whole Order, to his whole Nation. Eventually, the rights of the Nation itself are seen to be imperfect, to carry with them a contradiction which, until the horizon is still further opened, it is impossible to do away. And this brings man, at least in theory, to the final stage of his progress: to the acknowledgement that nothing short of mankind, as a whole, will meet his requirements; that nothing less than man, as man, can offer any satisfaction to his inborn, yet constantly broadening sense of justice. That is the history of Roman jurisprudence; and in this, as in other matters, the history of Rome is, on a small scale, the history of the whole world.

And what does this mean but that the conception of rights-a conception, by its very nature, partial and imperfect-is gradually merged in that of Right? the sense of individual claims and interests, of justice to the self-it may be the narrower, or the wider self-slowly replaced by the sense of justice to all of the duty which lies on every man to take thought for the whole race? Only, let it never be forgotten that the wider conception would have been impossible without the narrower; that the last stage could never have been reached except through those that went before it. Justice to all is doubtless the final goal of man's endeavours. But the Family, the Order, the State are the successive 'schoolmasters to bring him' thither: or even to give him that distant vision of it which is all he has hitherto attained.

In all this there is the closest analogy with that doctrine of

natural delle Genti: del quale le nazioni si accertano, con intendere l' unità sostanziali di cotal Diritto, nelle quali, con diverse modificazioni, tutte convengono (S.N. ii. 98-9; compare ib. 143-8).