It may well be granted that Vico was more in sympathy with the seventeenth-century rhetoricians, in whom we have detected a premonition of æsthetic science. For Vico, as for them, wit (referring to imagination and memory) was "the father of all invention": judgement concerning poetry was for him a "judgement of the senses," a phrase equivalent to "taste" or "good taste," expressions never used by him in this connexion. There is no doubt he was familiar with the writers of treatises on wit and conceits, for, in a dry rhetorical manual written for the use of his school (in which one looks in vain for a shadow of his own personal ideas), he quotes Paolo Beni, Pellegrini, Pallavicino and the Marquis Orsi.[40] He highly esteems Pallavicini's treatise on _Style_ and has knowledge of the book _Del bene_ by the same author;[41] perhaps too his mind was not unaffected by the flash of genius which had enabled the Jesuit for one instant to perceive that poetry consists of "first apprehensions." He does not name Tesauro, but there is no doubt he knew him; indeed the _Scienza nuova_ includes a section, besides that on poetry, upon "blazons," "knightly bearings," "military banners," "medals," and so forth, precisely similar in method to that of Tesauro when he treats of" figurate conceits" in his _Cannochiale aristotelico_.[42] For Tesauro such conceits are merely metaphorical ingenuities, like any other; for Vico they are wholly the work of imagination, for imagination expresses itself not in words only, but in the "mute language" of lines and colours. He knew something also of Leibniz; the great German and Newton were by him described as" the greatest wits of the time"[43]; but he seems to have remained in complete ignorance of the æsthetic attempts of the Leibnitian school in Germany. His "Logic of poetry" was a discovery independent of, and earlier than, Bülffinger's Organon of the inferior faculties, the _Gnoseologia inferior_ of Baumgarten, and the _Logik der Einbildungskraft_ of Breitinger. In truth, Vico belongs on one side to the vast Renaissance reaction against formalism and scholastic verbalism, which, beginning with the reaffirmation of experience and sensation (Telesio, Campanella, Galileo, Bacon), was bound to go on by reasserting the function of imagination in individual and social life: on the other side he is a precursor of Romanticism. [Sidenote: _Æsthetic in the "Scienza nuova."_]