Art, or as he calls it, poetry, is not born through the caprice of man to give pleasure or clothe philosophic sayings. It was born out of natural necessity, it is in short the first operation of man’s mind. Man, before he can conceive a notion, such as table or dog, realises them with an operation not of the intellect, but of his imagination. Before he can reflect with a pure mind, he perceives with emotion. Before he can speak in prose he speaks in verses. The nearer poetry gets to the particular, the better it is; the higher reflection rises towards the universal the more perfect it is. Yet if one can say that the poet is the sense of mankind and philosophy its intellect, one’s conclusion coincides with the saying of Scholasticism, _Nihil est in intellectu qui prius non fuerit in sensu_, since without poetry it is impossible to have philosophy and civilisation. After many views on the subject, often contradictory, his real idea is undoubtedly that the first form of mind is poetry, anterior to the intellect and free from reflection and reason. Myths, he holds, do not refer inevitably to real men, they are essentially historical truth under the form it is wont to take in primitive minds. Any myth is an individual, as Hercules, and accomplishes individual actions—as he kills the Hydra or cleanses the stables—but it is also a concept, the notion of useful and glorious activity. It is, therefore, both a universal as the expression of a concept and a creation of man’s imagination as a particular fancy. Passing to morality and to society, although he reacted against rationalism, Vico’s assertion of the irrational has nothing to do with Rousseau’s. He took for his ground history, literature, archæology and above all, law. Thus his first discovery led him to substitute for the Golden Age that had been postulated as the initial stage of mankind, “the natural state of man,” an obscure period in which man did not differ much from the wild beasts and was at best an irrational and non-intellectual being. He was to develop the great and immortal notion that lay hidden at the core of “jus naturalism,” the notion of society as immanent in man, which had been in the air since Thomas Aquinas had spoken of it as of a sixth sense of man.