y
of Naples). Vico's leading ideas are as follows: Man makes himself the
criterion of the universe, judges that which is unknown and remote by the
known and present. The free will of the individual rests on the judgments,
manners, and habits of the people, which have arisen without reflection
from a universal human instinct. Uniform ideas among nations unacquainted
with one another are motived in a common truth. History is the development
of human nature; in it neither chance nor fate rules, but the legislative
power of providence, in virtue of which men through their own freedom
progressively realize the idea of human nature. The universal course of
civilization is that culture transfers its abode from the forests and huts
into villages, cities, and, finally, into academies; the nature of the
nations is at first rude, then stern, gradually it becomes mild, nay,
effeminate, and finally wanton; at first men feel only that which is
necessary, later they regard the useful, the convenient, the agreeable
and attractive, until the luxury sprung from the sense for the beautiful
degenerates into a foolish misuse of things. Vico divides antiquity into
three periods: the divine (theocracy), the heroic (aristocracy), and the
human (democracy and monarchy). The same course of things repeats itself in
the nations of later times: to the patriarchal dominion of the fanciful,
myth-making Orient correspond the spiritual states of the migrations; to
the old Greek aristocracy, the chivalry and robbery of the period of the
Crusades; to the republicanism and the monarchy of later antiquity, the
modern period, which gives even the citizens and peasants a share in the
universal equality. If European culture had not been transplanted to
America, the same three-act drama of human development would there be
playing. Vico carries this threefold division into his consideration of
manners, laws, languages, character, etc.

[Footnote 1: Vico: _Principles of a New Science of the Common Nature of
Nations_, 1725; _Works_, in six volumes, edited by G. Ferrari, 1835-37,
new ed.. 1853 _seq_. On Vico cf. K. Werner, 1877 and 1879. [Also Flint's
_Vico_, Blackwood's Philosophical Classics, 1884.--TR.]]

If Vico anticipates the Hegelian view of history, Antonio Genovesi
(1712-69), who also taught at the University of Naples, and while the
former was still living, shows himself animated by a presentiment of the
Kantian criticism.[1] Appreciating Leibnitz and Lo