Vico is the most Italian of Italy’s thinkers. Yet a close survey of his ideas reveals in his works, besides the most Italian of intellectual heritage, the presence of the deepest and richest tendencies of the modern philosophy of Europe, be it French, English, or German. He is thus the best illustration of his own theory. In the man of genius the most concrete historical determinations blend with the broadest universality of ideas. But his critics have usually chosen to look exclusively to either of these according to their own nationality; and this way of abstracting from one of his qualities has made him obscure and baffling. While his countrymen lived upon the contribution of France and England, Vico, to the naturalistic intuition of atomism, which implies individualism in morals and politics, opposed the idealistic intuition of history as the developing process of mankind. To the abstract contemplation of clear ideas that were a matter of mathematical intuitions and deductions he opposed the self-generated progress of mankind that goes on creating its own world. In this he revealed himself as a direct son of the Italian Humanism and Renaissance, an anachronism, and the fact was nearly fatal to his fame, as this put him, as a writer, in a position of great inferiority to Locke or Descartes. He never deals with the question he had sat down to treat, because he never realised beforehand where he was going, and it was only on his way that his mind became properly fixed on the point that was obscurely tormenting him. One ought not to read either the titles or prefaces of his books, for he usually starts on a traditional and even stale matter. Thus it is that starting as a good Platonist to write what Michelet took his Scienza Nuoa to be, that is to say a philosophy of history, he got stranded in the deepest speculation on the nature of man’s mind quite in contradiction to the doctrine of Plato. He had begun by considering the origin of man’s intellectual activity. The difficulty was great, but he casually observes that whatever the difficulty of the problem and its obscurity, one always has the steady light of the conviction that _the world of the Gentile nations is the achievement of men; and that the principles of it must be found in the nature of our human mind and in the force of our understanding_.