Ten years prior to the publication in Germany of Baumgarten's first treatise, there had appeared in Naples (1725) the first _Scienza nuova,_ which developed ideas on the nature of poetry outlined in a former work (1721), _De constantia iurisprudentis,_ outcome of "twenty-five years' continuous and harsh meditation."[1] In 1730 Vico republished it with fresh developments which gave rise to two special books (_Della sapienza poetica_ and _Della discoperta del vero Omero_) in the second _Scienza Nuova._ Nor did he ever tire of repeating his views and forcing them upon the attention of his hostile contemporaries at every opportunity, seizing such occasion even in prefaces and letters, poems on the occasion of weddings or funerals, and in such press notices as fell to his duty as public censor of literature. And what were these ideas? Neither more nor less, we may say, than the solution of the problem stated by Plato, attacked but not solved by Aristotle, and again vainly attacked during the Renaissance and afterwards: is poetry rational or irrational, spiritual or brutal? and, if spiritual, what is its special nature and what distinguishes it from history and science? As we know, Plato confined it within the baser part of the soul, the animal spirits. Vico re-elevates it and makes of it a period in the history of humanity: and since history for him means an ideal history whose periods consist not of contingent facts but of forms of the spirit, he makes it a moment in the ideal history of the spirit, a form of consciousness. Poetry precedes intellect, but follows sense; through confusing it with the latter, Plato failed to grasp the position it should really occupy and banished it from his Republic. "Men at first feel without being aware; next they become aware with a perturbed and agitated soul; finally they reflect with an undisturbed mind. This Aphorism is the Principle of poetical sentences which are formed by the sense of passions and affections; differing thereby from philosophical sentences which are formed by reflexion through ratiocination; whence the latter approach more nearly to truth the more they rise towards the universal, while the former have more of certainty the more they approach the individual."[2] An imaginative phase of consciousness, but one possessed of positive value. [Sidenote: _Poetry and Philosophy: imagination and intellect._]