This polemic occupies two closely-related spheres corresponding to the double aspect of the New Science as a Philosophy of Mind and a Generalising Science. Under the first aspect Vico had vindicated the claims of imagination, the imaginative universal, probability, certitude, experience and authority, and therefore also of poetry, religion, history, observation of nature, scholarship and tradition. Under the second, he had traced a scheme of the natural development of the mind both in the history of mankind and in that of the individual, which he brings into constant relation with the phases of history. Hence his examination was bound to extend on the one hand to the mental condition of his own time and on the other to the way in which the education of children and young people was conceived and undertaken. In both spheres Vico saw the same defects; he was met by the same and intellectualism which had made impossible the process of thought and had mutilated and falsified the truth of human history. On emerging from grammar-schools, boys were immediately plunged into logic. The logic studied might be, according to the teacher's taste, either the scholastic or more often that composed by Arnauld and called the Port-Royal Logic, itself in substance Aristotelian and Scholastic, but full of dry judgments concerning abstruse subjects in advanced sciences and far removed from common knowledge; overloaded in fact with examples drawn from such sciences. Such a discipline was meant to make boys critical and to eradicate from their minds not only false, but even probable and plausible opinions. As a matter of fact it eradicated nothing, since their minds were still empty or scantily furnished, and unable to make any use of criticism for lack of matter to criticise. They were to be taught to judge before being taught to apprehend, an order false to the natural course of ideas, which are first apprehended, then judged, and finally reasoned. The result was that minds educated in this way became arid and unfruitful in development, and believed themselves capable of judging everything, while able to create nothing. They remained all their lives intensely acute in formal thinking, but incapable of any great labour; critical, in fact, but sterile. This caused not only unsoundness and arrogance of judgment but incapacity in practical life, dealings with men, and civil eloquence, which is founded less upon criticism than upon plausibility, and attains its end by making opportune remarks, understanding the psychology of one's inter-locutor and acting in a manner adapted to it. Vico himself had suffered from the logico-critical method of education. One of his first teachers, the Jesuit Del Balzo, had put into his hands the works of the epitomist Paulus Venetus: and his mind, being too weak as yet to cope with this kind of Chrysippean logic, almost broke down under the strain; so that having given up his studies in despair it was