taking truth in the infinity of being, and then descends by degrees; through the genera of the substance, eliminating in every species that which the thing is not, till it arrives at the ultimate differentia constituting the essence of the thing we wish to know. Education as a whole was suffering from an excess of mathematics and a lack of concreteness. As if boys, on emerging from academic life, were to enter a human world composed of lines, numbers and algebraic symbols, their heads were crammed with the magnificent phrases "demonstration," "demonstrative truth," and "evidence," and the rule of probability was condemned; though this rule is the only guide of statesmen in their counsels, generals in their campaigns, orators in their treatment of a cause, judges in giving a decision, physicians in treating bodily diseases, and moralistic theologians in treating those of the conscience; the rule which the world accepts, and upon which it rests in all disputes and controversies, in all measures, and in all elections; which are universally determined by unanimity or the majority of votes. Such an education bred up an empty and inflated generation, pedantry without wisdom and argument without truth. The educators themselves, that is to say, the general atmosphere of culture, resembled this scheme of education. Poetry was dead. The analytic methods had "numbed" (to repeat once more a word which Vico uses with great frequency and force) "all the generosity of the better poetry." And indeed Europe was never so entirely barren of all poetic growth as it was in the first half of the eighteenth century. Italy was reduced to the drama of Metastasio; France had produced no one to succeed Corneille and Molière; in Spain the national drama, that great outburst of the national spirit, was dead, and a rationalism imitating that of France was taking its place; England seemed to have entirely forgotten that she once gave birth to Shakespear, and even Germany was wasting her time over neo-classical imitations. Not only did nobody create new poetry, but nobody wanted it. The philosophers, following Descartes and Malebranche, had declared a war of extermination against all the faculties of the mind which depend upon sense, and especially against the imagination, which they hated as the source of every error. They condemned the poets on the false pretext that they told "fables," as if the fables they told were not those eternal properties of the human mind which to the political philosophers, economists and moralists are the subject-matter of reasoning, and to the poets that of representation.