By the side of national conceit Vico placed the "conceit of the learned," who desire their own knowledge to be as old as the world, and consequently delight in fancying an inaccessible esoteric wisdom among the ancients, coinciding miraculously with the opinions professed by each one of themselves, which they dress in the garb of antiquity in order to enforce their acceptance. Such was the mistake not only of Plato, especially in the researches of the _Cratylus,_ but of all historians, ancient and modern: Vico himself had fallen into it, and was therefore able to study it closely in his own case, when in the _De antiquissima_ he believed himself to have found in the etymologies of Latin words the proof of an Italian metaphysic exactly agreeing with his own doctrines of the conversion of the _veruni_ with the _factum_ and of metaphysical points. From these three prejudices, especially from the conceit of the learned, follows the fourth, here called that of the "sources" or "channels of culture," ironically called by Vico the theory of "scholastic succession among nations." Upon this theory Zoroaster for instance instructed Berosus for Chaldaea, Berosus in his turn Mercurius Trimegistus for Egypt, Mercurius taught Atlas the Ethiopian lawgiver, Atlas Orpheus the Thracian missionary, and finally Orpheus established his school in Greece. Long journeys these, and easy forsooth to those primitive nations which, scarcely out of the state of savagery, lived perched on mountains in almost inaccessible situations, unknown even to their neighbours! And these long journeys were undertaken with the object of spreading discoveries, which any nation could make for itself. If, when nations came to know each other through wars and treaties, they were found to agree, that was because they all contained some motive of truth and sprang from the same needs of man. Was it necessary to suppose the Athenian or Mosaic law to have affected that of the Romans, as did these "comparers" or delivers of laws, in order to explain the origin of the right recognised in Palestine, Athens and Rome to kill the thief by night? Was it necessary for Pythagoras to travel spreading the doctrine of the transmigration of souls, which we find as far afield as India?