Page:Mind (Old Series) Volume 9.djvu/592

 580 E. FLINT'S vico. in the attempt to apply in philosophy the methods of mathe- matics and the natural sciences, in the use of the abstract theory of contract to explain political society, and in the attitude of antagonism or of ignorance to the great Greek philosophers and to the ideas and ideals of the middle ages. Even Kant, who initiates a new epoch, is strikingly deficient in the "historic sense ". Vico, however, was an Italian ; and the Italians, alone among the people of Europe, had never lost a feeling of the con- tinuity between the old and the new civilisations. The Benais- sance was to them not a breach with their past history but a renewal of it. Vico declared himself "neither an ancient nor a modern "; he was both. Again, Vico was a Neapolitan ; he belonged to that Magna Graecia which produced some of the most famous of early Greek philosophies. Whether or not the race of [the Hellenic colonists still influenced Southern Italy, it was Southern Italy which gave birth to the first prophets of modern thought. Further, as Vico's race linked him with the ancient, his religion connected him with the mediaeval world. Although he wisely did not allow theological prejudice to influence his critical judg- ment, yet his attitude to Catholicism is very different from that of Descartes. Descartes' Catholicism one feels to be incon- sistent with the tendencies of his method. Though Cartesianism passed from heresy to orthodoxy, yet in its beginning it was a revolt, and part of the same movement with Protestantism itself. On the other hand, though, as Professor Flint says, "it is altogether erroneous to represent Vico's philosophy as a Eoman Catholic philosophy" (in the sense that his conclusions were determined by a desire to vindicate any specific Catholic dog- mas), yet "he may have got, and probably did get from Catho- licism, as well as from classical antiquity, a portion of his aver- sion to individualism, and of his appreciation of authority and of common sense or collective reason " (p. 70). The sympathetic and constructive study of early traditions which we find in Vico is very unlike the negative and abstract criticism which we usually consider characteristic of the eighteenth century ; and is nearly a hundred years in advance of his time. " In spite of many faults and defects, many fanciful and disfiguring traits, Vico's picture of the heroic age must be pronounced a work of great, of unique genius. It surpassed all Greek and Eoman fame, .showing how little the classical world had comprehended even its own Homer, and how far from having been exhausted was the significance of that world itself. It displayed a combination of critical and constructive power, of sceptical courage and imaginative realisation, of which there had been no previous allows that Leibniz made no historical application of his views except perhaps in his theory of optimism. But surely Leibniz's very phrase " best of all possible worlds " shows a mathematical rather than a historical way of thinking. The philosopher who is influenced by history considers what is and has been, not what might have been if.