Setting aside these last doctrines, which are not Vico's own, indeed he scarcely refers to them, the fundamental doctrine of metaphysical points is all his own. His attribution of it to an imaginary Zeno, in whose person were combined and confused the Eleatic and the Stoic (a mistake common in the philosophical literature of the time), can deceive nobody, and did not even deceive Vico himself, who when pressed explained how he had been led to that interpretation of Aristotle's statements about Zeno, and finally says that if the doctrine cannot be accepted as that of Zeno, he will adopt it as his own, without the patronage of any great names. Nor on the other hand can it be traced to the Leibnitian monadology. We cannot be sure that Vico was acquainted with this doctrine. In any case he does not mention it, while Leibniz he does mention in terms of deep respect: and the resemblance is very vague, for the metaphysical points are not monads. The discovery by Leibniz and Newton of the differential calculus may however be said to have influenced him. It was then for the first time becoming known in Italy; and its terminology of maximum infinities, greater and less infinities, and so on would, says Vico, completely baffle the human understanding, since the infinite admits neither of degrees nor of multiplication, but for the help of a metaphysic which shows that all actual extension and actual movement is a power or capacity for extension and motion always equal to itself and infinite. The contributions of Platonic lines of thought (the Platonism of the Renaissance) and those of Galileo, especially the latter, to Vico's conception have been worked out with even more justice: his originality however is in no degree impaired by these facts. The idea in which his originality found expression was, no doubt, fantastic and arbitrary, and in consequence bound to remain undeveloped and without influence on Vico's other conceptions. To the reviewer in the _Giornale dei letterati,_ who called this metaphysic a mere sketch, the author replied that it was quite complete: an abortion in fact, rather than a sketch, and, as such, complete. And in the _Scienza Nuova,_ beside a few references to the refusal to attribute activity to matter, there is one fugitive but interesting attempt at a connexion with a geometrical or arithmetical metaphysic on the model of that described above. In this passage it is stated that upon the order of material and complex civil affairs the order of numbers, which are abstract and absolutely simple, is imposed: and the fact is noted that governments begin with the one, in domestic monarchy, pass to the few in aristocracy, advance to the many and the all in popular republics, and finally return to the one in civil monarchies, so that humanity moves perpetually from the one to the one, from domestic monarchy to civil monarchy.