human race, fashioned things out of their ideas.... This nature
of human things has bequeathed that eternal property which Tacitus
elucidated with a fine phrase when he said, not without reason, that men
in their terror _fingunt simul creduntque_."

And then, passing from the age of imagination, Vico proceeds to show us
the age of reason, this age of ours in which the mind, even the popular
mind, is too remote from the senses, "with so many abstractions of which
all languages are full," an age in which "the ability to conceive an
immense image of such a personage as we call sympathetic Nature is
denied to us, for though the phrase 'Dame Nature' may be on our lips,
there is nothing in our minds that corresponds with it, our minds being
occupied with the false, the non-existent." "To-day," Vico continues,
"it is naturally impossible for us to enter into the vast imagination of
these primitive men." But is this certain? Do not we continue to live by
the creations of their imagination, embodied for ever in the language
with which we think, or, rather, the language which thinks in us?

It was in vain that Comte declared that human thought had already
emerged from the age of theology and was now emerging from the age of
metaphysics into the age of positivism; the three ages coexist, and
although antagonistic they lend one another mutual support.
High-sounding positivism, whenever it ceases to deny and begins to
affirm something, whenever it becomes really positive, is nothing but
metaphysics; and metaphysics, in its essence, is always theology, and
theology is born of imagination yoked to the service of life, of life
with its craving for immortality.

Our feeling of the world, upon which is based our understanding of it,
is necessarily anthropomorphic and mythopeic. When rationalism dawned
with Thales of Miletus, this philosopher abandoned Oceanus and Thetis,
gods and the progenitors of gods, and attributed the origin of things to
water; but this water was a god in disguise. Beneath nature (_phhysist_)
and the world (_khosmos_), mythical and anthropomorphic creations
throbbed with life. They were implicated in the structure of language
itself. Xenophon tells us (_Memorabilia_, i., i., 6-9) that among
phenomena Socrates distinguished between those which were within the
scope of human study and those which the gods had reserved for
themselves, and that he execrated the attempt of Anaxagoras to explain
everything rationally. H