Benedetto Croce

“ Do we find the doctrine that the fundamental objects of mathematics, the unit of arithmetic and the point of geometry, are unreal or fictitious, propounded before Vico's time? Do we find it—this is the chief point—propounded not as a casual remark or an intuition of a truth, but as a consciously reasoned concept from which legitimate consequences are drawn as to the limitations of mathematics and its inability to furnish real knowledge of mind, nature and history?
All through the Middle Ages the Aristotelian theory of mathematics is continually enunciated. ”

“ But we certainly have the right to smile if this same scholastic goes on to warn us that "in studying a philosopher, in investigating and reconstructing his thought, it is absolutely necessary to bring to the task a mind free from preconceptions and hostile to prejudices"; while all the time he is trying to pass off his scholastic opinions and religious beliefs under the banner of objectivity, sincerity and freedom from prejudice. "Philosophers"—I have seen this assertion too—"are unfitted for writing the history of philosophy, because they have ideas of their own." ”

“ The intervention of God cannot save him: God has withdrawn himself to his chosen people, and has no dealings with the rest of mankind, the Gentiles. But this "brute" is still a man: God, while abandoning him, has left a spark of his own essence at the bottom of his heart. See! the sky lightens: the wild creature stands awestruck and afraid: in his mind arises the shadowy idea of something greater than he, something divine. So he conceives or rather imagines a first God, a Sky-god, a thundering Jupiter: and to this deity he turns to appease his wrath or invoke his aid. ”

“ An unprejudiced reader of the Iliad and Odyssey is at every step aware of and baffled by extravagant and inconsistent statements. The life portrayed is inconsistent: it takes us now here, now there, over a long period of time; on the one hand we find Achilles the hero of force, on the other Ulysses the hero of wisdom: on the one hand, cruelty, barbarism, ferocity and brutality, on the other the luxury of Alcinous, the delights of Calypso, the pleasures of Circe, the songs of the Sirens and the pastimes of suitors who tempt and even win over the chaste Penelope. ”

“ We shall be less inclined to amusement or ridicule if we reflect upon the tragedy underlying the comedy: the tormented conscience of the believer which in its struggle with the philosopher seeks refuge in these extravagant ideas. At any rate, they gave Vico a series of insecure stepping-stones—the flood, the giants, the dry exhalations—which enabled him to cross the torrent of religious tradition and reach the dry land of critical history, where he found the primary starting-point of his philosophy of mind, the state of nature. ”

“ What was the meaning of reducing philology, or history, which is the same thing, to a science or philosophy? Strictly speaking, the reduction is impossible: not because they deal with subject-matter different in kind, but because their subject-matter is in point of fact homogeneous. History is already essentially philosophy. It is impossible to make the most insignificant historical statement without moulding it with thought, that is with philosophy. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Where was now the wise man, the real "sapiens" whom Vico had found in history, first in the barbaric figure of the theologian-poet, then in the civilised and rational figure of Greek philosopher and Roman jurist, the man whom for to-day he hoped to find in the master of eloquence like himself, called to give unity, life and power to all knowledge? Wisdom is indeed not this or that science, nor yet the sum total of [Pg 235] science; it is the faculty which rules over all studies and by which all the sciences and arts that go to make humanity are acquired. ”

“ Progress, deduced from the immanent providence and introduced into the New Science, would have accentuated the difference within the uniformity, the origin at every moment of something new, the perpetual enrichment of the flux at every reflux: it would have changed history from an orderly traversing and retraversing of the line drawn by God under the eye of God to a drama whose ratio essendi is contained within itself: it would have enmeshed and drawn with it the whole universe and realised the thought of infinite worlds. ”

“ Certitude, the truth of consciousness, is not science; but it is not on that account false. Vico was careful not to call the theories of Descartes false: his intention was only to lower them from complete truth to fragmentary truth, from science to consciousness. Cogito ergo sum is very far from false. That we find it expressed by Plautus's Sosia is an argument not for rejecting it, but for accepting it; only, as a truth of simple consciousness. Thought is not the cause of my existence, and as such is not the ground of scientific knowledge of that existence. ”

“ 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. ”

“ The funeral speech for Angela Cimini contained a kind of hymn to anger, the "heroic wrath which in noble spirits disturbs and shakes to the depths by its boiling all those evil thoughts of the mind, which beget the vile swarm of fraud, deceit and falsehood, and renders the hero frank, truthful and loyal; and thus making him a partisan of truth, arms him as the valiant knight of reason to do battle with wrong and offence." ”

“ Light and shade, truth and error, which alternate and interweave at almost every point in the New Science, are variously distinguished according to the various temperaments of readers and critics: and in conspicuous cases, like that of Vico, such variations assume the most sharply defined form. Some minds are self-willed and suspicious, quick to mark any trifling contradiction, merciless in demanding proof of every statement, and indefatigable in wielding the forceps of dilemma to dismember an unfortunate great man. ”

“ Behind a grain of sand lies something which when this particle is divided gives to it and preserves in it an infinite extension and magnitude; so that the whole mass of the universe is included in the grain of sand, if not actually, yet potentially and in capacity. This effort of the universe, underlying each smallest particle of matter, is neither the extension of the particle nor the extension of the universe: it is the thought of God, which, free from all materiality, gives motion and impulse to the whole. Every particular determination of reality agrees with this fundamental truth. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Leibniz is Cartesianism raised to its highest power; an intellectualist, in spite of the petites perceptions and the confused knowledge; a mechanicist, in spite of his dynamism, which perhaps exists in his fancy rather than in his actual thought; hostile to history, in spite of his immense historical erudition; blind to any knowledge of the true nature of language, though deeply interested in language all his life; devoid of dialectic, in spite of his attempt to explain the evil in the universe. ”

“ Which of the various social types forms the foundation of the others and supplies the criterion for judging them? or what is the criterion and standard by which they must all alike be judged? For Vico, such a question is meaningless. Governments, he says, must adapt themselves to the nature of the people governed: the school of princes is the morality of nations. We may shudder at war, at the law of the stronger, at the reduction of the conquered to slavery, that is, to chattels: but the society which expressed itself in these customs was necessary and therefore good. ”

“ But to expound philosophers in this one-sided manner can only serve to perpetuate the mistakes repeated over and over again in the history of thought, when it passes fruitlessly from one error to another, leaving the old only to adopt the new, itself perhaps an old one born again or painted with the colours of youth. The Platonismi agnosticism, or mysticism of Vico is in the fullest sense of the word original, because it forms the accompaniment of doctrines not only not inferior to the average of contemporary thought, but greatly in advance of it. ”

“ A man who believes for instance in the docile innocence of savage races will approach them with a smile on his face, kindly words on his lips and the alphabet and catechism of rights and duties in his hand: one who believes in Vico's "brutes" will adopt somewhat sterner methods, perhaps even fire and the sword. One who, like Vico, believes that "custom is more potent than law" and that "custom changes not at a blow, but gradually and slowly" will not be inclined to hasty legislation, and will not delude himself into thinking he can remodel human nature after an ideal of his own devising. ”

“ Nothing then can be known except what exists, and nothing can exist but what is good: existence, truth and goodness are all convertible. Thus, too, things are called good in so far as they correspond to the idea in their Creator's mind. "Each single thing partakes of the truth of its own nature in so far as it imitates the knowledge of God, like an artefact in so far as it agrees with the art": "the knowledge of God is the cause of things": "the knowledge of God is the measure of things." ”

“ And indeed Europe was never so entirely barren of all poetic growth as it was in the first half of the eighteenth century. Italy was reduced to the drama of Metastasio; France had produced no one to succeed Corneille and Molière; in Spain the national drama, that great outburst of the national spirit, was dead, and a rationalism imitating that of France was taking its place; England seemed to have entirely forgotten that she once gave birth to Shakespear, and even Germany was wasting her time over neo-classical imitations. Not only did nobody create new poetry, but nobody wanted it. ”

“ If it were, since man, as the Cartesians admitted, consists of body and mind, thought would be the cause of the body: a doctrine which would plunge us into all the mazes of the controversy on the mutual effects of mind and matter. The cogito, then, is a mere sign or indication of my existence, and nothing more. The clear and distinct idea cannot serve as a criterion even of the mind itself, to say nothing of other things; since the mind, though it knows itself, does not create itself, and accordingly is ignorant of the genus or mode by which it has this knowledge. ”

“ Shame or the moral consciousness, translated into terms of the corresponding empirical science, becomes that common consciousness of man upon matters of human necessity or utility which is the source of the natural right of nations. This common consciousness, says Vico, is an unreflective judgment, felt in common by a whole class, a whole people, a whole nation and the whole of mankind. An unreflective judgment is not strictly a judgment at all, since reflection is inseparable from judgment: it is not judgment, because it is felt and not thought. ”

“ It is a common observation that to create a given fact is one thing, to know it when created quite another. The knowledge of what a fact really is often comes in the life of the individual years later, in the life of mankind centuries later, than the fact itself. The very persons who are directly responsible for a given fact as a rule do not know it, or know it in a very imperfect and fallacious manner; so much so that the illusions which are said to accompany human activity have passed into a proverb. ”

“ While refusing a fixed code and the draft of a model society, we do not mean to deny the possibility of a practical aspect of the science conceived by Vico, the New Science in its triple form of ideal history, typical history and historical history. Every truth has its practical side, that is to say, its practical consequences: and thinking in this or that way of the nature and development of mankind involves this or that practical line of conduct. ”

“ Death itself does not end his anger at the loss of Briseis, were it not that the beautiful and unhappy princess Polyxena, daughter of the once rich and powerful Priam and now a wretched slave, is sacrificed on his tomb, that the shade glutted with revenge may drink the last drop of her innocent blood; and in the lower world, when Ulysses asks him what state he prefers, Achilles answers that he "would rather be the commonest slave, but alive"! ”

“ The creator of the world of nations "was indeed Mind, since men made it by their intelligence: it was not Fate, because they made it by free choice, nor yet Chance, since to all eternity on doing thus the same results follow."
Vico lights up in the most fanciful ways the comedy of errors formed by man's illusions as to the end of his own actions. ”

“ That to read the great Book of the Universe, the book on whose pages may be found the true philosophy written by God, mathematics are indispensable, will be seen by any one who with noble thoughts aspires to the science of the integral parts and greatest members of this huge body we call the World. The one alphabet, the only characters with which we can read the great manuscript of the divine philosophy in the book of the Universe are those poor figures you see in the text-books of geometry. ”