The period of historical research which preceded the life of Vico was, as we have said, by no means credulous or uncritical. The day was past when "chronicles of the world" were compiled, when any fable and any falsification however gross was accepted as history: and the seed sown by a few humanists had borne fruit in the Italian men of learning, the French juridical school, the school of Scaliger mentioned above, and all the great chronologists, epigraphists, archaeologists, topographers and geographers who in the seventeenth century formed the first immense critical collections of sources for ancient history. While the philologists were thus improving and perfecting their methods, detecting impostures and bridging lacunae, Bayle, Fontenelle, Saint-Évremond and many others were engaged in spreading a scepticism or historical Pyrrhonism as it was also called, due to the intellectualistic philosophy; and thus anticipating the polemic against the truth and utility of history which was to arise with immense vigour in the following century. This latter tendency was hypercritical rather than critical, its end being the destruction of history in general: and since historical scepticism was very apt to assume the character of a paradox adapted to the needs of elegant society and the wits, its influence on the progress of research was very small, or at most it succeeded in producing strong reactions, one of which is represented by Vico, in favour of tradition and authority. It is on the other hand only proper to observe the failings of the first seriously scientific efforts of philologists and antiquaries. They rehabilitated witnesses, laid bare falsifications, reconstructed lists of rulers and magistrates, connected chronology and contradicted certain legends: but, whether owing to the tendencies of thought usual among pure scholars and philologists or because of the general atmosphere of their century's culture, they neither had nor conveyed a feeling for the antique and the primitive. Strong in detail, they were weak in essentials. When one of the most brilliant grasped, for instance, the importance of ballad-literature as a means of transmitting history at a period when the use of writing was unknown or uncommon, he did not receive from this observation and others like it such a shock as might stimulate him to recast from top to bottom his intuition and conception of primitive life, as was the case with Vico, who almost in a flash grasped the philosophical form of certitude and the two periods of mental and social life corresponding to it in actual history: the periods of obscurity and of legend.