resistance and adapting and assimilating them to one's own nature: and all the internal functions of the soul were ascribed to the head, the breast or the heart. Cosmographical ideas were narrow, confined as they were to the life of these societies. The first heaven was placed no farther off than the tops of the mountains, where the giants saw the lightning play: the lower world was no deeper than a ditch, and was only by degrees enlarged and sunk into the valleys as opposed to the sky, that is to say to the mountain-tops; the earth was identified with the limits of the cultivated fields. In the course of time the sky, the object of contemplation from which auguries were drawn, was lifted to a greater height, and with it the gods and heroes who were attached to the planets and constellations; and thus arose poetical astronomy. Geographical knowledge extended no farther than the country inhabited by each nation; and this is the reason why peoples travelling into foreign and distant lands gave to the new cities and to the mountains, hills, passes, islands and promontories the same names which were borne by those of their native land. Asia or India was at first for the Greeks the eastern part of Greece itself, Europe or Hesperia its western, and Thrace or Scythia its northern district. But we will not enter into further details; indeed we have omitted much already. It is not the detail that gives its value to Vico's picture of the heroic age. His etymologies, his mythical interpretations, the genesis and chronological succession of his gods, the genesis and succession of his phonetic, metrical and stylistic forms--each, taken by itself, may be contested; but taken as a whole they are rich with a truth which transcends the single propositions. This truth is the mighty effort to recall a form of humanity and society still doubtless living in surviving records and monuments, still recognisable here and there in a fragmentary form in various parts of the modern world; but for centuries, even in Vico's days, buried beneath a mass of irrelevant fancies, conventional types, and prejudices of every kind, which prevented its true characteristics from appearing. CHAPTER XVI HOMER AND PRIMITIVE POETRY The poet of primitive society was Homer: and if such was his character, he could not have enjoyed the profound wisdom, the delicate and lofty sense of morality, and the supreme knowledge of all the sublimest arts and sciences which ancient philosophers and writers fancied him to possess, and the common opinion of literary men and critics still attributed to him in the seventeenth century.