all we can know of particulars is their common properties, which is merely another manner of saying that we have no science save of universal. Thus it is precisely the same if we say the object of poetry is science or the universal; which is the doctrine of Navagero, following Aristotle."[10] The "imaginative universals of Signor Vico" (with whom he had interchanged some letters) opened no new views for him: he notes that Signor Vico "talks a great deal about them" and "holds that the most uncivilized men, having framed them not from any wish to please or serve others, but from the necessity of expressing their feelings as nature taught them, spoke in poetical language the elements of a theology, a physics, and an ethics wholly poetical." Conti excuses himself from immediate examination of "this critical question" and only opines that "it can be shown in many ways that these imaginative universals are the material or object of poetry, in so far as they contain within them sciences or things considered in themselves"[11]--a conclusion diametrically opposed to that which "Signor Vico" meant to express. Conti is next obliged to ask himself how it is possible that poetry's object should be not the true but the probable, when the universal of poetry is the same as that of science. He answers by coming down to the commonplace level of a Baumgarten: "When sciences receive a particular colouring, we pass from the true to the probable." Imitation means giving the impression of truth; that is done by selecting a few of its features only; and this is the procedure in which the probable just consists. If you wish to describe the rainbow poetically, a great part of the Newtonian optics must be thrown overboard; thus "many circumstances of mathematical demonstration" will be neglected in poetical descriptions, and the rest, which is utilized, will form the probable or that particular "which awakens the universal idea, slumbering in the minds of the learned." The great art of poetry consists "in selection of the image containing the greatest number of points of universal doctrine which, by being inserted in the example, may so colour the precept that I may find it without seeking it, or recognize it through its connexion with events described."[12] Hence poetry cannot be content with imitation; allegory too is needed: "in ancient poetry one thing is read and another is meant." Here follows the inevitable instance of the Homeric poems, in which Conti certainly finds elements which cannot be reduced to instruction and allegory and therefore to some extent deserve the Platonic condemnation.[13] He recognizes a species of imagination differing from passive sensibility, "which Father Malebranche calls active imagination, and Plato the art of imagery; it comprises all that is meant by wit, sagacity, judgement and good taste, which teach a poet to use or not to use at a given time or place the rules and licences of art, and to control the extravagance