The opposition to abstractionism had no representatives in the seventeenth century and for a great part of the eighteenth, except among thinkers of but slight systematic powers, with whom it did not progress beyond the logical form of the presentiment and the literary form of the aphorism. In France, Blaise Pascal was one of these, with his anti-Cartesianism, his restriction of the value of mathematics, and his celebration of the reasons of the heart which reason does not know. In Germany there was Hamann, who possessed such a strong sense of tradition, of history, of language, of poetry and of myth, and finally of the truth contained in the principle of the _coincidence of opposites_ which he had met with somewhere in Bruno. The Italian Giambattista Vico was the only great systematic thinker to express opposition to abstractionism and Cartesianism. Prior to and more clearly than Hamann, he perceived the unity of philosophy and history, or as he called it, of _philosophy and philology._ He conceived thought as an _ideal history_ of reality, immanent in the real history which occurs in time; he abolished the distinctions of the concept as separate species and substituted the notion of degrees or moments, which (as Schelling did after him) he called _ideal epochs_; he considered the abstractionist and mathematical century which he saw rising before him, as a period of philosophic decadence, and foretold the evil effects of Cartesian anti-historicism. (His presage was fulfilled.) In this way, he sketched a new Logic, very different from that of Aristotle or of Arnaud which was the most recent, a Logic in which he attempted to satisfy Plato and Bacon, Tacitus and Grotius, the idea and the fact. But if the other opponents of abstractionism had very little effect, because of their immaturity and want of system, Vico also was ineffectual, because he was born in Italy precisely at the time when Italy as a productive country was definitely issuing from the circle of European thought and was beginning passively to accept the more popular forms of foreign thought. Finally, Naples, the little country of Vico, was then becoming encyclopædist and sensationalist, and did not really begin to know until a century later the remedy for such evils composed in anticipation by Vico. [Sidenote: _Empiricist Logic and its dissolution--Locke, Berkeley and Hume._]