The sympathy with experimental methods which as we have seen estranged Vico from the French tendency of thought, that is from Cartesianism, and directed him towards the Italian and English schools of Galileo and Bacon, led him on the other hand to a hostile attitude towards Aristotelianism and scholasticism. Inculcating as he did the pursuit of the particular and the use of inductive methods, asserting that man possessed an inexhaustible wealth of physical knowledge which, thanks to fire, machinery, and tools, was able to issue in the creation of objects resembling the special products of nature, and praising his own metaphysic as one subservient to (_ancillantem_) the ends of experimental science, he was bound to realise how well deserved was the too universal discredit, as he calls it, into which Aristotelian science had fallen. If he disapproved of the introduction by Descartes of physical forms into metaphysics, and of his resulting materialistic tendencies, he accused Aristotle and the schoolmen of the opposite error of introducing metaphysical forms into natural science. Like Bacon he held that the syllogism and sorites produce nothing new, and only repeat what was already contained in their premisses. He emphasised the many ill effects of the Aristotelian universal in every department of knowledge; in jurisprudence, where empty generalities crush legislative wisdom; in medicine, which aims rather at propping up systems than at healing the sick; and in practical life, in which he describes the abusers of universals by the mocking title of "Thematists." The use of universals results in homonymies or equivocations which cause all kinds of errors. As against this distrust of universals in the sense of general or abstract conceptions, Vico showed a corresponding reverence for the Platonic ideas, the metaphysical forms, or as he also called them, kinds; the eternal and infinitely perfect patterns of things. A nominalist in mathematics, Vico was suspicious of nominalism in all other fields of knowledge. He asserts the reality of the forms or ideas, and tells how from his youth up he was attracted by this doctrine, which he learnt from a teacher of his, who as a Scotist was a follower of the scholastic system most akin to Plato's.