really mind, to be a true unity. For while we may doubt whether the distinction of the two attributes or two providences, the natural and the human, is a well-grounded and inevitable consequence of conceiving substance as mind and thought, it is impossible to deduce the evolutionary transition from one to the other as a tendency implicit in Vico's conception of thought. There is certainly particular documentary evidence for this latter particular tendency: but it is scanty and unconvincing, and occurs not in the system of the New Science but rather in the chronologically earlier system. For the metaphysic laid down by Vico in the earlier phase of his thought is not, as it has seemed to some, and as it may at first sight appear, entirely devoid of significance and value. It shows the same aversion to materialism and the same love of idealism which inspire the meditations of the New Science. The philosophy of Epicurus, which takes as its starting-point matter already formed and divided into ultimate particles of various shapes, composed of other parts which are supposed to be indivisible owing to the absence of void between them, seemed to him a philosophy such as to satisfy the naïve mind of a child or the uncritical mind of a woman; and the delight with which he followed the explanation of the forms of material nature according to this philosopher, in the poem of Lucretius, was equalled by the amusement and pity with which he watched him forced by stern necessity to lose himself in countless ineptitudes and follies in trying to explain the phenomena of thought. Vico accused the Cartesian physics no less than the Epicurean of a "false position," since it also takes ready-formed matter as its starting-point, differing from the Epicurean matter in that, while the latter limits the divisibility of matter at the atoms, the former makes its elements infinitely divisible; that the one places motion in the void, the other in the solid; the one initiates the shaping of its infinite worlds by a casual declination of atoms from the downward path of their own weight and gravitation, the other generates its indefinite vortices from an impetus imparted to a section of inert and therefore not yet divided matter, which on receiving this motion divides into fragments, and, hampered by its mass, necessarily makes an effort to move in a straight line, and being unable to do so through its solidity begins, divided as it is into fragments, to move about the centre of each fragment. In this way while Epicurus entrusted the world to chance, Descartes subjected it to fate; and it was in vain that to save himself from materialism he superimposed upon his physics a quasi-Platonic metaphysic, by which he attempted to establish two substances, the one extended and the other intelligent, and to make room for an immaterial agent; for these two parts were not reconciled in his system, since his mechanical physics