1. Philosophische Schriften, ed. Gerhardt, III, 567 f.
2. On Conti see J. G. Robertson: Studies in the Genesis of Romantic Theory in the Eighteenth Century, Cambridge, 1923, ch. IV.
3. “Vita … da lui stesso descritta.” In our translation of the Autobiography we use the convenient modern term for similar circumlocutions.
4. Below, pp. 113, 182.
5. The Philosophy of Giambattista Vico, London, 1913, p. 266.
6. English Works, ed. Molesworth, I, viii, ix.
7. The recent histories of historical writing by Harry Elmer Barnes and James Westfall Thompson, and the earlier works of European scholars, arc useful only as bibliographical guides. Friedrich Meinecke’s Entstehung des Historismus, München and Berlin, 1936, and Croce’s various writings on historiography, are penetrating and provocative. The chapter on history in Leo Strauss: Political Philosophy of Hobbes, Oxford, 1936, is an example of the kind of work that must still be done.
8. Advancement of Learning (ed. W. A. Wright), I. iv. 5; iv. 2.
9. Decline and Fall, ed. Bury, VI, 444 n. 87.
10. Philosophische Schriften, ed. Gerhardt, III, 270; V, 452; VI, 198.
11. Quoted by Strauss, p. 82, n. 4.
12. Lives, tr. North, Temple Classics ed., I, 9 f.
13. Advancement of Learning, II. xx. 3; xxii. 3, 4, 5.
14. II. xxii. 4, 6; xxiii. 8; i. 2.
15. II. vii. 6.
16. Paris, 1566, p. 8.
17. Latin Works, I, xxiv.
18. English Works, VIII, viii.
19. By W. Nichols; see John Laird: Hobbes, London, 1934, p. 6.
20. English Works, VIII, vi, vii, viii, xxii.
21. English Works, IV, 30; III, 203; I, 10 f.; Latin Works, III, 66.
22. Oeuvres, ed. Adam & Tannery, VI, 6 f., 12 f.; X, 502 f.
23. Autobiographies, ed. John Murray, London, 1896, pp. 143, 235.
24. Civil History of the Kingdom of Naples, tr. Ogilvie, London, 1731, II, 842, in a chapter on “The State of our Jurisprudence, and of the other Arts and Sciences which flourished among us in the End of the seventeenth Century, and continue so at this time” (1723). See also Gilbert Burnet: Some Letters, containing an account of what seemed most remarkable in travelling through Switzerland, Italy, some parts of Germany, &c., in the years 1685 and 1686, written … to the Honourable R[obert] B[oyle], 3d ed., Rotterdam, 1687, esp. pp. 195 ff. Fausto Nicolini: La giovinezza di G. B. Vico, 2d ed., Bari, 1932; Aspetti della vita Italo-Spagnuola nel cinque e seicento, Napoli, 1934, ch. IV; and article cited in n. 25 below.
25. Nicolini: “Sulla vita civile, letteraria e religiosa napoletana alla fine del Seicento,” Atti della R. Accademia di scienze morali e politiche di Napoli 52 (1928), 175–255, esp. 203–230, 249–255.
26. Vita di Pietro Giannone scritta da lui medesimo, ed. Nicolini, Napoli, 1905, p. 31.
27. H. C. Lea: The Inquisition in the Spanish Dependencies, New York, 1908, ch. II, esp. pp. 98–108.
28. See the translation by H. P. Adams: The Life and Writings of Giambattista Vico, London, 1935, pp. 223 ff.
29. In the preface he contributed to Belli’s Italian translation of Fracastonus: Syphilis, quoted by Croce in: Rivista di Filosofia n.s. 1 (1940), 144.
30. On Vico and Descartes see Nicolini: Giovinezza, pp. 116–120.
31. Opere, I, 35 f. (Laterza edition).
32. I, 274.
33. II–2, 318.
34. I, 85.
35. I, 136.
36. I, 150.
37. I, 136 f. On Vico’s theory of knowledge see Robert Flint: Vico, 1884, pp. 86–111.
38. Kritik der reinen Vernunft, Vorrede zur zweiten Auflage, pp. xiii f.
39. English Works, VII, 183 f. Nicolini (Fonti e riferimenti storici della seconda Scienza Nuova, Bari, 1931, pp. 30, 46) thinks Vico had not read Hobbes but depended on the account in G. Pasch: De novis inventis, Leipzig, 1700, pp. 190–203. Some of Vico’s direct references to Hobbes are not in Pasch, however, and it would seem that he must have known Hobbes’s Latin works.
40. On Vico and Lucretius see Nicolini: Giovinezza, pp. 120–124.
41. Biblioteca Nazionale di Napoli, cod. seg. I. AA. 32, fol. 1; a deposition by a witness for the Inquisition.
42. On Vico and Bacon see Nicolini in Atti della R. Accademia di scienze morali e politiche 52 (1928), 136–145.
43. Opere, V, 155.
44. II–1, 33. Vico elsewhere speaks of Augustine as his “particular protector”: V, 377.
45. Advancement of Learning, II. ii. 7.
46. Opere, IV–1, 117 f., §331.
47. Among previous interpretations of the New Science, the nearest approach to that offered here will be found in C. E. Vaughan: Studies in the History of Political Philosophy, Manchester, 1925, I, 207–253; see also his lecture, “Giambattista Vico: An Eighteenth Century Pioneer,” Bulletin of the John Rylands Library 6 (1921–22), 266–288. In lieu of documentation, which would require a reference for nearly every sentence, the reader is referred to the sixty-page analytic index in Nicolini’s three-volume critical edition of the Scienza nuova, Bari, 1911–1916. See also Thomas Whittaker, “Vico’s New Science of Humanity,” Mind 35 (1926), reprinted in his: Reason and Other Essays, Cambridge, 1934, pp. 133–189; an essay based on Nicolini’s edition.
48. Opere, IV–1, 113, §314.
49. III, 5.
50. IV–2, 164, §1108.
51. IV–1, 125, §342.
52. IV–1, 128, §349.
53. IV–2, 163, §1107.
54. IV–1, 28, §34.
55. IV–1, 123 f., §338.
56. IV–2, 125 f., § 1040–§ 1043.
57. IV–1, 78, § 146.
58. IV–2, 119, title.
59. IV–2, 171, §1119.
60. For continental Europe, the indispensable guide to such research is Croce’s great Vico bibliography and its supplements, of which seven have so far appeared. Bibliografia Vichiana raccolta di tre memorie presentate all’ Accademia Pontaniana di Napoli nel 1903, 1907 e 1910, con appendice di Fausto Nicolini, Bari, 1911. “Nuove ricerche sulla vita e le opere del Vico e sul Vichianismo,” La Critica 15 (1917), 290–299; 16 (1918), 148–158, 214–216; 17 (1919), 109–111, 307–311; 18 (1920), 164–166, 229–235, 353–361; 19 (1921), 47–49, 107–108. “Quarto Supplemento alla Bibliografia Vichiana,” Atti della R. Accademia di scienze morali e politiche di Napoli 51 (1927) 3–28. “Quinto Supplemento,” ibid. 55 (1932), 5–39. G. F. Finetti: Difesa dell’ Autorità della Sacra Scrittura contro Giambattista Vico, dissertazione del 1768 con introduzione di Benedetto Croce, unitovi il sesto supplemento alla Bibliografia Vichiana (pp. 95–108), Bari, 1936. “Settimo Supplemento,” Rivista di Filosofia n.s. 1 (1940), 117–137. See also Croce’s masterly sketches in: The Philosophy of Giambattista Vico, tr. Collingwood, London, 1913, ch. XX and app. II. The present survey breaks fresh ground in sections D, E, and F, and here and there in the earlier sections.
61. Croce in Atti della Accademia Pontaniana 33 (1903), 26–28. Hugh Quigley: Italy and the Rise of a New School of Criticism in the 18th Century, Perth, 1921, pp. 36 ff., 42 and passim. For Vico’s influence on Pagano in particular see Croce in La Critica 17 (1919), 109–111.
62. Lezioni di economia politica (1757), in: Scrittori Classici Italiani di Economia Politica 8 (Milano, 1803), 273 n.
63. G. Natali: Storia letteraria d’Italia: Il settecento I (1928), 319.
64. Max Ascoli: “La filosofia giuridica di Emanuele Duni,” Annali dell’ Università di Camerino 2 (Sezione giuridica, Roma, 1929), 137–159.
65. Croce’s introduction to a reprint of Finetti’s Difesa dell’ Autorità della Sacra Scrittura contro Giambattista Vico, Bari, 1936.
66. Origine e progressi del cittadino, Roma, 1763, II, 405–409.
67. Saggio di giurisprudenza universale, Roma, 1760, p. 5.
68. Elio Gianturco: Joseph de Maistre and Giambattista Vico, Columbia University thesis, 1937.
69. Storia della Storiografia Italiana nel secolo decimonono, 2a ed., Bari, 1930, I, 11 f.
70. Quoted by Croce in La Critica 18 (1920), 230.
71. Marcel Grilli: “The Nationality of Philosophy and Bertrando Spaventa,” Journal of the History of Ideas 2 (1941), 339–371, esp. 361, 368.
72. M. H. Fisch: “Croce and Vico,” in the forthcoming Croce volume in The Library of Living Philosophers, edited by Paul Arthur Schilpp.
73. Mario Palmieri: The Philosophy of Fascism, Chicago, 1936, ch. XIII, esp. p. 192. Cf. Aline Lion: The Pedigree of Fascism, London, 1927. But good work untouched by Fascism went on, e.g. Donati’s cited in n. 86.
74. J. G. Hamann: Schriften, ed. Roth, V, 267 f.
75. J. F. Herder: Werke, ed. Suphan, XVIII, 245 ff.
76. R. Haym: Herder, 1885, II, 409.
77. Italienische Reise, under date of March 5, 1787.
78. F. H. Jacobi: Von den göttlichen Dingen und ihrer Offenbarung, Leipzig, 1811, pp. 121–123; cf. Vico: Opere, I, 150.
79. Schweizerisches Museum 1 (1816), 184 ff.
80. Vermischte Schriften, IV, 217 f.
81. Kantstudien, Ergänzungsheft 38 (1916), 17 ff.
82. Walter Witzenmann: Politischer Aktivismus und sozialer Mythos: Giambattista Vico und die Lehre des Faschismus, Berlin, 1935.
83. Paul Hazard: “La pensée de Vico, III. Les influences sur la pensée française,” Revue des cours et conférences 33 (1931), 127–143.
84. Nicolini: “La teoria del linguaggio in Giambattista Vico e Giangiacomo Rousseau,” Revue de littérature comparée 10 (1930), 292–298.
85. Revue de littérature comparée 12 (1932), 829–837.
86. G. Monod: La vie et la pensée de Jules Michelet, Paris, 1923, chs. VI–VIII. Benvenuto Donati: Nuovi studi sulla filosofia civile di G. B. Vico, Firenze, 1936, pp. 469–527. W. P. Dismukes: Michelet and Vico, University of Illinois thesis, 1936.
87. Vico, Edinburgh, 1884, p. 230.
88. Werner Kaegi: Michelet und Deutschland, Basel, 1936.
89. Opere IV–1, 214, §499; V, 265; I, 269; IV–2, 187 f., §1178; IV–1, 128, §347.
90. Nicolini: Aspetti della vita Italo-Spagnuola, Napoli, 1934, pp. 320 f.
91. The Life, Unpublished Letters, and Philosophical Regimen of Anthony Earl of Shaftesbury, ed. B. Rand, 1900, p. 479; cf. p. 497. See Croce: “Shaftesbury in Italia,” La Critica 23 (1925), 1–34.
92. Fraser: Life and Letters of George Berkeley, 1871, pp. 78–85, 571–574.
93. Francesco Lomonaco: Vite degli eccellenti Italiani, Lugano, 1836, II, 296.
94. Opere, V, 55, n. 3.
95. René Wellek: The Rise of English Literary History, Chapel Hill, 1941, pp. 74, 86, and passim.
96. 3d ed., London, 1768, pp. 182, 204, 280, 286.
97. Details and documentation in M. H. Fisch: “The Coleridges, Dr. Prati, and Vico,” Modern Philology 41 (1943–44), 111–122.
98. Lionel Trilling: Matthew Arnold, 1939, pp. 50 f.
99. C. C. J. Bunsen: God in History, London, 1870, III, 273, 275.
100. In 1848 Robert Blakey, in the third volume of his History of the Philosophy of Mind, devoted some seven pages to a summary of Vico’s doctrines, not without mistakes, and probably at second hand. A shorter summary, partly repeated from this one, was offered in his Historical Sketch of Logic in 1851. And D.C. Heron in his Introduction to the History of Jurisprudence in 1860 included a deadly fifty-page digest of Vico. Neither Blakey nor Heron made any attempt to place Vico in the general movement of modern thought.
101. Life of Frederick Denison Maurice, 1884, I, 185.
102. Lottres inédites de J. S. Mill à A. Comte, ed. Lévy-Bruhl, 1899, pp. 383 ff.
103. System of Positive Polity, tr. Congreve, 1877, IV, calendar facing p. 348, and pp. 483–489; cf. III, 1876, 503 f.
104. J. H. Bridges: Illustrations of Positivism, ed. Jones, Chicago, 1915, pp. 352–358 at 353; cf. Vico: Opere, IV–1, 86, §180; 148, §377; 164 f., §405.
105. P. 473, n. 1; cf. Vol. II, p. 215, n. 1.
106. Ed. J. M. Robertson, London, 1904, p. 466 n. 131, p. 500, and p. 91 n. 8.
107. A Memoir of the Right Hon. William Edward Hartpole Lecky, by his Wife, New York, 1909, pp. 68 f.
108. J. M. Robertson: A History of Freethought in the Nineteenth Century, 1930, II, 355, 359 n. I.
109. Mind 20 (1911), 442.
110. Flint: Vico, 1884, p. 230.
111. Since these two volumes on the philosophy of history have not been superseded, and since neither has an index, a list of references to Vico in them may be useful. 1874: 26, 77, 98 n. 1, 206, 286–287, 289, 299, 320–321, 324, 351 n. 1. 1894: 77, 124, 126, 158, 211, 227, 255–256, 264, 265–266, 321, 352, 382, 383, 389–390, 480, 526, 530–532, 536, 568, 677, 684.
112. Form in Modern Poetry, New York, 1933, pp. 36–38; In Defence of Shelley & Other Essays, London, 1936, pp. 150–156.
113. Samuel Beckett: “Dante … Bruno. Vico. . Joyce,” in: An Exagmination of James Joyce, 1939, pp. 3–22; Herbert Gorman: James Joyce, 1939, pp. 332–335; Harry Levin: James Joyce, 1941, index s.n. Vico. William Butler Yeats: Wheels and Butterflies, 1935, pp. 16 ff.; A Vision, 1938, pp. 261 f.; On the Boiler, 1938, p. 22; Louis MacNcice: The Poetry of W. B. Yeats, 1941, pp. 125 f.; Joseph Hone: W. B. Yeats, 1943, pp. 393 f., 444.
114. Croce in La Critica 18 (1920), 166.
115. E.g., Everett, A. H., “Progress and Limits of Social Improvement,” North American Review 38 (1834), 502–538 at 513; unsigned, “State of Historical Science in France,” Eclectic Magazine 1 (1844), 161–181, esp. 163.f. (reprinted from the British and Foreign Review); O., “Inductive Theory of Civilization,” American Review 6 (1847), 381–398 at 390; Farrar, C. C. S., ‘‘The Science of History,” De Bow’s Review 5 (1848), 58–64, 127134, 211–220, 346–357, 445–454, esp. 58 f., 133 f., 211–214; Wright, O. W., “Primary Law of Political Development in Civil History,” North American Review 88 (1859), 387–429; Giles, Henry, “The Leading Theories on the Philosophy of History,” ibid. 95 (1862), 163–188, esp. 167–170.
116. Hawkins, R. L.: Auguste Comte and the United States, 1936, pp. 119, 126. Parker, Theodore, in The Christian Examiner, March, 1858; reprinted in his Works, vol. XII, and in his The American Scholar, ed. G. W. Cooke, 1907, 364 ff. Clark, J. S.: Life and Letters of John Fiske, 1917, I, 285. Fiske: Works, XIV, 182, n. 1; XX, 138.
117. Sanborn, Frank B.: “Social Science in Theory and in Practice,” Journal of Social Science 9 (1878), 1–13, esp. 2–3, and “Social Science in the Nineteenth Century,” ibid. 30 (1892), 1–11 at 1.
117a. Gianturco, Elio: “Suarez and Vico,” Harvard Theological Review 27 (1934), 207–210; another article on Suarez and Vico abstracted in Italica 13 (1936), 116: a review ibid. 132; and a review in Journal of Modern History 9 (1937), 514–516.
118. Lassalle: Nachgelassene Briefe und Schriften, ed. G. Mayer, III, 387 f.
119. Marx/Engels Gesamtausgabe, 3 Abt., III, 63.
120. Volksausgabe, Berlin and Moscow, 1922, I, 389 n. 89.
121. 2 (1896), 785–817, 906–941, 1013–1046. See also his essay, “Was man von Vico lernt,” Sozialistischen Monatsheften, 1898, e. g. p. 270: “Of all the philosophers who wrote on history before Marx, there is none whose work is so much worth study as Vico’s.”
122. Le systéme historique de Renan, Paris, 1906.
123. Réflexions sur la violence, Paris, 1908.
124. The Philosophy of Giambattista Vico, p. 243.
125. The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte (1852), 2d par. of ch. I.
126. Croce in La Critica 36 (1938), 38, 39.
127. Le déterminisme économique: la méthode historique de Karl Marx, Paris, 1907, ch. III; Die Neue Zeit IX–1 (1890), 15.
128. Quinto supplemento alla Bibliografia Vichiano, p. 38.
129. Actually 1668. (Vico’s errors in dating are corrected in our Chronological Table, and some of his omissions are there supplied.) He was born in a room over his father’s small bookshop at 31 Via San Biagio dei Librai. His father was Antonio di Vico of Maddaloni (e. 1636–1708), a farmer’s son who had come to Naples about 1656. His mother was Candida Masullo of Naples (1633–e. 1695), daughter of Giambattista Masullo, a carriage maker. She was Antonio’s second wife, and Giambattista Vico was the sixth of the eight children she bore him.
130. Probably when reaching for a book on the top shelf of his father’s shop.
131. Which he was attending before his fall.
132. I.e., in the De institutione grammatica of the Portuguese Jesuit Manuel Alvarez (1526–83). In the Jesuit schools the “lower studies” comprised three grades of grammar (chiefly Latin, with some Greek) and two of “humanity” and rhetoric; the “higher studies” included two or three years of philosophy (beginning with logic) and four of theology.
133. The Academy of the Infuriati, founded in the second decade of the seventeenth century and maintained until 1672, was revived in 1690 only to be transformed in 1692 into the Academy of the Uniti, of which Vico was shortly made a member on Valletta’s motion. Vico here antedates its revival by about seven years. It was the Academy of the Investiganti that was revived in 1683, and Vico may have been invited to some of its meetings at that time. If that was the source of his early inspiration, the memory was suppressed after his alienation from the movement it represented, and by a Freudian substitution the Uniti took the place of the Investiganti.
134. In institutiones iuris civilis a Iustiniano compositas commentarius.
135. Father of Vico’s close friend the Jesuit poet Nicola Partenio Giannettasio (1648–1715).
136. Summa iuris canonici in quatuor institutionum libros contracta, Ingolstadt, 1625.
137. On the Rocca family, its estate at Vatolla, and Vico’s sojourn there, see Nicolini in Archivio storico italiano, serie VII, vol. 6 (1926), 61–111; Adams: Life and Writings of Giambattista Vico, ch. III.
138. I.e., the French Jesuit Étienne Deschamps (1613–1701), who under the pseudonym of Antonius Richardus wrote a Disputatio de libero arbitrio (1645) and the De haeresi ianseniana ab apostolica sede proscripta (1654). Vico’s somewhat forced interpretation was probably not worked out until the decade 1710–20.
139. Vico’s transition to Platonism (or rather Neoplatonism) did not long precede his Ancient Wisdom of the Italians (1710); his theory of justice was a still later development. Both arc here antedated.
140. See n. 169 below.
141. Ingegno (Latin ingenium) is difficult to render. Perception, invention, the faculty of discerning the relations between things, which issues on the one hand in analogy, simile, metaphor, and on the other in scientific hypotheses.
142. As Adams (pp. 55 f.) remarks, “the plain meaning of this passage is, not that Vico came afterwards to see that the atomists were wrong, but that he never thought they were right. But he certainly undersates the extent of his intercourse” with the young Epicureans of Naples. It is scarcely too much to say that he was himself one of them. See our introduction, pp. 34–36 above.
143. Henricus Regius (Henri Du Roy): Fundamenta physices (1646), though largely plagiarized from Descartes, was repudiated by him in the preface to the French version of his Principia.
144. See Raffaele Cotugno: Gregorio Caloprese, Trani, 1910.
145. A poetess, later godmother of one of Vico’s daughters, and through his influence elected a shepherdess of Arcadia. Adams, p. 101.
146. For what Vico saw in these writers see Adams, pp. 34–39.
147. On Di Capua and Cornelio, and on the intellectual atmosphere of Naples in the latter half of the seventeenth century, see M. H. Fisch: “The Quarrel of Ancients and Moderns at Naples,” to appear shortly in the Bulletin of the Medical Library Association.
148. Institutiones linguae graecae, 1596 and many later editions.
149. Hadrianus Junius (de Jonch) (1511–1575): Nomenclator omnium rerum, Antwerp, 1567 and many later editions.
150. Paolo Giovio (1483–1552): Historiarum sui temporis libri XLV, of which the first ten books were never written. That the first six were lost in the sack of Rome (1527) seems to have been a story put in circulation by Giovio himself in order that his work might seem like Livy’s even in fragmentariness. By a characteristic slip, Vico assigns the History to Bernardo Navagero (1507–65).
151. On Francesco d’Andrea see Adams, pp. 46 f.; on Gaetano, ibid., 61 f. Gennaro was counselor of the Sacro Real Consiglio and later regent of the Collaterale.
152. The Accademia Palatina or Academy of the Royal Palace, more commonly called the Accademia Medinaccli. Adams, pp. 64 f. Inaugurated March 20, 1698, suspended in September, 1701, because of the conspiracy of Macchia, and disbanded in February, 1702.
153. On Doria see Flint: Vico, pp. 78–80; Adams, pp. 65 f.
154. The inaugural orations summarized in the following paragraphs were first published in 1868, and may be found in Opere, I, 5–67. Good accounts of them in Flint, ch. V, and Adams, ch. VI. Some of Vico’s dates have been corrected in our chronological table.
155. It must have been the third rather than the fourth oration which was attended by Lanzina Ulloa of Salamanca, who died March 30, 1703. The episode which led to the advancement of the future Clement XI took place not at the Academy of the Umoristi, but at the Roman residence of Christina of Sweden.
156. De nostri temporis studiorum ratione, Napoli, Felice Mosca, 1709. Opere, I, 69–121; Flint, pp. 58–63; Adams, ch. VII.
157. Diego Vincenzo Vidania of Hucsca (1631–1732), lecturer in the Universidad Sertoriana, then grand inquisitor at Barcelona and in Sicily, and finally chaplain major of the Kingdom of Naples and ex officio prefect of the University, wrote a treatise on the Justinian Code of which in 1713 he published anonymously a part which was highly praised by Brenckmann. The latter was in Naples in 1712 and probably made Vico’s acquaintance there, for Vico had sent him at Florence in 1710 an inscribed copy of the De antiquissima. Rinaldi had gone to Florence at the instance of Vico’s friend Basilio Giannelli to look after the interests of the Duchess of San Giovanni, whom Vico misremembers as “un napoletano magnate.”
158. Domenico Aulisio, Hebrew, Greek and Latin scholar, jurist, philosopher, mathematician, physician, professor of law in the University of Naples, teacher of Pietro Giannone, one of the most learned men of his time.
159. This contest, provoked by Di Capua’s claim that under certain conditions the complete circle of the rainbow could be seen, and by Aulisio’s answering epigram, was an offshoot of the larger contest between the Capuists (or anti-Galenists) and Anti-Capuists, on which see the article by M. H. Fisch cited in n. 147 above.
160. As in the published first book of the De antiquissima (n. 168 below) Vico attributes to the ancient inhabitants of Italy his own epistemology and metaphysics, so in this sketch of the second book he attributes to the ancient Egyptians his own pantheistic physics.
161. At the time of which he speaks Vico still believed in the historicity of Pythagoras and his voyages in search of wisdom.
162. I.e., natura and ingenium were synonyms. Elsewhere (Opere, I, 212) Vico had said that as nature or the divine ingenium generates physical things, so the human ingenium generates mechanical objects or artifacts. For this parallel the New Science had later substituted that between the world of nature created by God and the world of nations created by men.
163. From the “acuteness” (acutezza in the metaphorical sense) of the human ingenium (cf. n. 141 above) Vico leaps to the “acuteness” (acutezza in the physical sense) of the cuneiform or wedge-shaped burin, the form assumed by feminine air when fecundated by masculine ether. (This whole passage derives ultimately from the Orphic theogony as interpreted by Stoicism and Neoplatonism and familiar to Vico in the Philosophia perennis of Agostino Steuco, bk. VII, ch. 10.)
164. In the Giornale italiano for October 6, 1804, Vincenzo Cuoco, reviewing rival British and French claims to the discovery that a magnetic sphere floating in mercury revolves on its axis in such a way as to indicate latitude and longitude, cited this paragraph as an anticipation of the principle involved. See his Scritti vari, ed. Cortese & Nicolini, Bari, 1924, pp. 243 f.
165. L’homme and Description du corps humain, passim; and (Vico’s immediate source) Henri Du Roy: Philosophia naturalis, Amsterdam, 1661, bk. V, passim.
166. Regimen in acute diseases, Loeb Classical Library ed., vol. II.
167. If in ancient Latin ruptum was the generic term for diseases, must there not have been (stemming from Pythagoras and influenced by Egyptian medicine) an ancient Italian medical school which held that diseases were caused by a rupture of some blood vessel (vizio di solidi) and derived the word corruptum (= cum ruptum) from the simultaneous (cum) rupture of all the blood vessels? Cf. Opere, IV–1, 336, §698.
168. The Liber metaphysicus or first book of the De antiquissima. Vico projected the De antiquissima as a complete system of philosophy in three books: (1) metaphysics (with an appendix on logic); (2) physics or philosophy of nature; (3) ethics. The first book (without the appendix on logic) was published in 1710. From his notes for the second book Vico put together in 1713 a manuscript De aequilibrio corporis animantis, referred to in the next paragraph below as having been dedicated to Aulisio. The third book was never drafted. The De Aequilibrio was laid aside for more than twenty years, but toward the end of 1735 Vico composed a fresh dedication for it, this time addressed to Charles of Bourbon. Not until the end of the eighteenth century, however, was it postumously published in the Neapolitan periodical Scelta Miscellanea, and read by Cuoco, who noted its parallels with John Brown’s popular Elementa medicinae (1780), and urged in 1808 the publication of a “second edition.” This did not materialize; the manuscript has since been lost; and no copies of the issues of the Scelta in which it was printed are known to be extant.
169. “Zeno, the founder of Stoicism, was currently represented in the time of Vico as having taught that the materia prima was composed of indivisible parts; Zeno, the Eleatic, had employed the notion of infinite divisibility in the construction of those famous puzzles on which Aristotle and so many subsequent philosophers have exercised their ingenuity; and Vico, in some inexplicable manner, fancied that these two were one, and so created for himself a Zeno who explained the origination of the many from the One by the hypothesis of indivisible metaphysical points.”—Flint: Vico, p. 115; see pp. 115–129, and Croce: The Philosophy of Giambattista Vico, ch. XII, on this doctrine of metaphysical points.
170. Opere, I, 195–279.
171. On the Life of Caraffa, Adams, ch. IX; an essay by Croce in Uomini e cose della vecchia Italia, serie I, Bari, 1928, pp. 248–264; and one by Nicolini in: Scritti vari dedicati a Mario Armanni, Milano, 1938. On Gravina, J. G. Robertson: Studies in the Genesis of Romantic Theory in the Eighteenth Century, ch. II.
172. Coleridge used this sentence as a motto in his Aids to Reflectton.
173. Constantia means both constancy or perpetuity and consistency or rigorously scientific character; similarly in the titles of Vico’s De constantia iurisprudentis and of its two parts, De constantia philosophiae and De constantia philologiae, cited below.
174. So that if Vico succeeded in this he would be founding a new science.
175. This prospoctus, printed without title, is known as the Sinopsi del Diritto universale. Opere, II—1, 1–16.
176. Hüber had been dead since 1694. Thomasius was still living, but Gemmingen was merely citing their works, not conveying their criticisms of the synopsis. See his letter, with Vico’s marginalia, in Opere, V, 151 f.
177. For the parts of this letter which Vico here omits, see Opere, V, 42 f.
178. A copy was sent to Le Clerc, with a letter which may be found in Opere, V, 102 ff. There was no reply; cf. n. 188. The three volumes (De uno, De constantia, Notae) of which this was the third are printed in Opere, II–1, II–2, II–3, under the general title: Il Diritto Universale. Cf. Adams, chs. X–XI.
179. Actually the chair had been vacated in 1717, and Vico wrote the Universal Law to qualify himself for it, or for one of the seven other vacancies in the law faculty.
180. Digest 19.5.1. The other two titles were 6.1 and 15.1. (The Digestum vetus included books 1 through 24.2.)
181. The “new science in negative form,” on which see Adams, pp. 143 f.
182. Giulio Nicola Torno (1672–1756), canon of the Naples cathedral, was ecclesiastical censor of all Vico’s works from the Universal Law on. In 1723 he wrote a lengthy treatise against the Civil History of Giannone, which, though unpublished, may have given rise to Giannone’s estrangement from Vico.
183. Corsini’s failure to keep his promise.
184. The “first New Science.“ Adams, ch. XIII.
185. sette de’ tempi. Cf. Whittaker: Reason and Other Essays, p. 169, n. 2: “What is meant is that the characteristic modes of feeling and acting in each age are as if derived from the doctrinal rule of a philosophical or religious sect concerning what is right or wrong, good or evil.” Perhaps the most nearly equivalent English phrase is “climate of opinion.”
186. It was not Giuseppe Attias of Leghorn, but Giuseppe ben Abraham Attias of Cordova, who published the famous edition of the Hebrew text of the Old Testament.
187. Vico notes that Attias must have reference to Le Clerc’s review of the Universal Law.
188. The latter guess was the right one. Cf. n. 178.
189. Capece and Sangro were the outstanding leaders of the conspiracy of Macchia, whose history Vico had written. Cf. Adams, pp. So f.; Croce: The Philosophy of Giambattista Vico, pp. 250 f. Laudati was later Vico’s ecclesiastical censor for the De antiquissima and for the two Risposte al Giornale de’ letterati.
190. This blow of adverse fortune was the erection of another’s inscriptions after Vico had been given the commission.
191. Filomarino, later Neapolitan ambassador to Spain, had been a pupil of Vico, who expounded the principles of the New Science at a gathering in his home in 1722. Croce has resided since 1911 in the Filomarino palace.
192. For an account of this case see Nicolini: Vicende e traversie giudiziarte di Giambattista Vico, Napoli, 1934 (estratto da Il Tribunale), 10–16.
193. On the Cimmino (or Cimini) salon see Adams, pp. 180f., and the note in Opere, V, 122 f.
194. Opere, V, 89–91.
195. Opere, III, 291–322, with text of Acta notice on p. 295.
196. Bk. III, chs. 30, 38, 43; Opere, III, 185 ff., 204 ff., 216 f.
197. Opere, IV–2, pp. 275–306.
198. Probably a conciliatory letter from Lodoli.
199. Spinelli (1686–1752) had been a private pupil of Vico, and so were his sons after him. See his autobiography in: Raccolta d’opuscoli scientifici e filologici 49 (1753), 465–526.
200. These notes, expanded and multiplied, became the “Third Corrections, Meliorations and Additions,” completed in August, 1731. A fourth set, incorporating parts of the third, was written in 1733 or 1734, and made the basis of a revision of the entire work in 1735 or 1736, the “third New Science,” which Vico was seeing through the press at the time of his death in 1744.
201. A Jesuit father who wrote the couplet printed below Vico’s portrait in the third edition of the New Science, and who on receiving a copy of the second edition had sent Vico a little wine from the cellar and a little bread from the oven of the Jesuit house of the Nunziatella, together with a graceful letter (Opere, V, 229) begging the author to accept “these trifles, simple as they arc, since the infant Jesus himself did not refuse the rude offerings of rustic shepherds,” and suggesting that at the side of the alphabet in the symbolie frontispiece a little dwarf should be added, dumb with astonishment like Dante’s mountaineer, and that beneath him should be written, “with a significant diaeresis,” the name Lodo-Vico (“I praise Vico”).
202. On Vico as teacher, and on his personal appearance at this time, see the passages from Solla’s life of him translated by Adams, pp. 181 f., and the notes in Opere, V, 127–129.
203. Phacdrus 3.9.
204. Corsini’s letter is in Opere, V, 183 f.
205. On Vico’s wife and children see Nicolini: “G. B. Vico nella vita domcstica,” Archivio storico per le province napoletane 50 (1925), 227–298.
206. Ignazio, who was a customs official at the time of his death in 1736.
207. Angela Teresa.
208. Vico’s letter of application for this post is in Opere, V, 240 ff.; cf. Adams, pp. 197 f.
209. Vico’s letter of petition is in Opere, V, 273 f. On Gennaro Vico see Giovanni Gentile: “Il figlio di G. B. Vico c gl’inizi dell’ insegnamento di letteratura italiana nella Università di Napoli,” La Critica 3 (1905), reprinted in: Studi Vichiani, Messina, 1915, 2d ed., Firenze, 1927. Gcnnaro’s appointment was due not to Nicola de Rosa but to Celestino Galiani, who had been responsible also for Vico’s appointment as royal historiographer; details in Opere, V, 131, 304–307; cf. Adams, pp. 199 f.
210. Villarosa’s account of Vico’s infirmities must be discounted in the light of the facts that within the last fourteen months of his life Vico composed two sonnets, continued to revise the manuscript of the “third New Science” and began to correct the printer’s proofs (making slight additions here and there), wrote out instructions for the frontispiece portrait, corresponded with Cardinal Troiano d’ Acquaviva for permission to dedicate the work to him, and, only twelve or thirteen days before his death, wrote or dictated the dedication.
211. Palazzuolo had died in 1735. Vico entrusted the funeral arrangements to his father confessor, Don Nicola Merola. A document of March 2, 1744, clearing Merola of blame for the unseemly strife that delayed the funeral, is printed as an appendix in Raffaele Cotugno’s La sorte di Giovan Battista Vico, Bari, 1914, pp. 235–241, and summarized in Opere, V, 132 f.
212. Vico died in the night between January 22 and 23, 1744. Besides debts and household goods, he left a collection of about a hundred paintings of the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries, including a portrait of himself by Francesco Solimena. This was destroyed by fire in 1819, but Villarosa had had a copy made for the Academy of Arcadia. This copy still survives, and a photographic reproduction of it serves as frontispiece to Opere, V, from which our frontispiece in turn was taken.
A. In the eighteen years since our first edition appeared, Vichian studies have flourished. A revision extensive enough to take full account of the scholarship of those years was not practicable; and piety toward this first fruit of our collaboration would in any case have deterred us from changes that would make it no longer recognizable as a work of 1944. For the convenience of students, however, we mention here the major works of scholarship and of interpretation. Of scholarship: Fausto Nicolini’s reworking and expansion of Croce’s great bibliography of Vico (hereafter N:BV; see note T below), and his Commento storico alla seconda Scienza nuova (2 vols., Rome, 1949). Of interpretation: Franco Amerio, Introduzione allo studio di G. B. Vico (Turin, 1947; Catholic realist); Enzo Paci, Ingens Sylva (Milan, 1949; existentialist); Nicola Badaloni, Introduzione a G. B. Vico (Milan, 1961; Marxist); A. Robert Caponigri, Time and Idea: The Theory of History in Giambattista Vico (Chicago, 1953; reviewed by M. H. Fisch, Journal of Philosophy 54 [1957], 648–652). A few other works are mentioned in the following notes (nos. in parentheses after initial letters refer to pages, lines and notes of the present volume: 170.3fb means p. 170 I. 3 from bottom; 220.179 means p. 220 n. 179).
B ([v].22–26). The 1929 text and notes that we used are now superseded by those in Nicolini’s one-volume Opere of Vico in the series La letteratura italiana, vol. 43 (Milan and Naples, 1953; hereafter N’53).
C (vi.11–12). Our translation of the New Science was published by Cornell University Press in 1948 and, abridged and revised and with a new introduction, by Anchor Books in 1961. See notes G and S below.
D (8–10, 220.179). We relied here on the notes in the 1929 edition, but from a letter of Vico’s discovered after that date (N’53, 114 f.) and from other evidence not known to us in 1944, it appears that the first morning chair of civil law was held by Domenico Campanile from 1689 until his death late in 1722, and that it was not from that chair but from one of canon law that Capasso was promoted in 1717 to the first afternoon chair of civil law, which Aulisio had held since 1694. The “first” chairs of law carried not only higher salaries but permanent tenure; the others, like Vico’s chair of rhetoric, were subject to quadrennial reappointment. Aulisio’s death and Capasso’s promotion in 1717 gave Vico his first hope for a chair of law with tenure, and by the time of Campanile’s death in 1722 Vico had reason to think himself qualified for the fulfillment of that hope. Nicolini has reconstructed his concourse speech in Opere, VIII, 288–297.
E (9–11). On the value of the Universal Law in its own right, see M. H. Fisch, “Vico on Roman Law,” in Essays in Political Theory Presented to George H. Sabine (Cornell University Press, 1948), 62–88.
F (38–46). See Arthur Child, “Making and Knowing in Hobbes, Vico, and Dewey,” Univ. of Calif. Pubs. in Philosophy, 16 (1953), 271–310.
G (48). A somewhat different, and we believe a more accurate, account of Vico’s diritto naturale delle genti is given in the Anchor Book edition of the New Science, pp. xxx–xxxv. For reasons there given, we now render the phrase “natural law of the gentes”; and we recommend that the reader substitute “gentes” for “peoples” in this phrase above on pages 48 (twice), 53, 166 (twice), 169 (twice), 171, 187, 192, and for “nations” on 119 (but let “nations” stand on 167 and 172 where it translates nazioni); and substitute “gentes” for “peoples” at 170.5fb and for “races” at 170.3fb.
H (67 f.). Robert T. Clark, Jr., “Herder, Cesarotti and Vico,” Studies in Philology, 44 (1947), 645–671, shows that some of Vico’s ideas reached Herder as early as 1770 through Denis’s German translation of Ossian with notes translated by Denis from Cesarotti.
I (69, 83, 214.97). The Scottish historian John Gillies refers to Vico in his History of Ancient Greece (1786), I, 42 n.; A View of the Reign of Frederick II of Prussia (1789), 30; The History of the World (1807), I, 652 n. See Duncan Forbes in The Cambridge Journal 7 (1954), 658 f.
J (72). Paul Hazard, La pensée européenne au xviiième siècle (Paris, 1946), 333, says, “Montesquieu in his personal notes was struck by a theory of Vico’s, that of the corsi and ricorsi,” but withholds his evidence.
K (85–87). For some further details and a correction, see Duncan Forbes, The Liberal Anglican Idea of History (Cambridge University Press, 1952), 17, 156 f. But Arnold’s letter to Ellis (155) may refer to the second volume of Ellis’s Outlines of General History (1830), pages 33, 37, 44, 45.
L (104–107). N:BV 704–705, 713–715, points out minor inexactnesses and finds the spiritual gulf between Vico and Marx greater, and the historical connections more tenuous, than is here acknowledged.
M (117.23–27). It is now agreed that this sentence does not belong in the text. Read: “… coherent in all its parts. For, though already …”
N (121.10fb). Following N’53, read “physical” for “metaphysical.”
O (139, 154, 155). See Guido Fasso: I “quattro auttori” del Vico (Milan, 1949). The “new edition” of Grotius (155.14) has been identified by Dario Faucci in Giornale storico della letterotura itoliano 136 (1959), 97–104.
P (144.12). Read: “invites and incites us” etc.
Q (157.11). Read: “published in 1720 a prospectus” etc.
R (180.4). N’53 reads tanta, great, in place of santa, saintly.
S (211.46; 212.48, 50–59). See the correspondingly numbered paragraphs of our translation of the New Science, preferably in the Anchor Book edition, in which we more frequently render cose “institutions,” as we would now do above at 58.2 (in place of “things”); 139.5 (in place of “affairs”); 155.8 (read: “on the one hand the history, whether fabulous or certain, of institutions, and on the other hand the history of the three languages” etc.); 155.4fb and 3fb (in place of “things”); 156.8fb (read: “divine and human institutions I shall also treat: their origin” etc.); 157.4 (in place of “matters”); 165.4 and 167.5 (read: “various institutions that arose” etc.); 169.5fb (in place of “affairs”). We would now translate stoti “maturity” instead of “acme” above at 55.3fb, 139.5, 169.9.
T (212.60). The bibliography and its supplements have been incorporated, rewritten, and expanded in Benedetto Croce, Bibliogrofia Vichiana accresciuta e rielaborata da Fausto Nicolini (2 vols., Naples, 1947–1948).
U (213.72). The plan for this volume was abandoned and the essay here referred to remains unpublished.
V (214.93). N:BV 238 f. thinks Lomonaco’s story is incompatible with Vico’s own statement at the bottom of p. 182 above, and guesses that in the oral tradition of the episode London was at some point substituted for Venice. (To 214.94 add: VIII, 264, 301.)
W (215.115). Add: Encyclopaedia Americana (1832), article on Vico; James M. Walker, review of Michelet’s translations, Southern Quarterly Review 2 (1842), 404–416; George F. Holmes, “Schlegel’s Philosophy of History,” ibid. 3 (1843), 263–317, at 274–279; Orestes A. Brownson, “The Philosophy of History,” Democratic Review, 1843, reprinted in his Works, IV, 361–423, at 393–401; Charles Sumner, The Law of Human Progress (Boston, 1849), 14–15.
X (215.128). See the essay on Vico by M. Lifshitz in Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 8 (1948), 391–414.
Y (217.147; 218.159). The promised essay appeared as “The Academy of the Investigators” in Science, Medicine and History (Oxford University Press, 1953), I, 521–563. See also Biagio de Giovanni, Filosofia e diritto in Francesco D’Andrea (Milan, 1958), and Badaloni (note A above).
Z (220.191 ). Croce died in 1952, but the Istituto Italiano per gli Studi Storici, using his library, lives on in the palace.