The only possession of value which grew up day by day in all this poverty was the abstracts, the encyclopaedias, the dictionaries of science which bore the names of such men as Bayle, Hoffmann and Moreri: the idlest and most casual method of learning that could possibly be devised. The genius of the age was more drawn towards expounding second-hand knowledge in an abbreviated form than towards attempting to enlarge its bounds. That seemed impossible: so men went on compiling dictionaries of mathematics. Every one felt a thirst for cheap science. To be thought good, a book must be clear and simple, capable of being discussed with ladies as a pastime; if it demanded wide and copious erudition of the reader, and forced upon him the unpleasant exercise of thought and synthesis, it was condemned as unintelligible. These dictionaries and abstracts recalled to Vico's mind the similar products of the Greek decadence, the anthologies, lexicons and encyclopaedias of Suidas, Stobaeus and Photius. The whole culture of his time seemed to him to be repeating the downfall of Greek science, exhausting itself in a metaphysic either useless or harmful to civilisation and a mathematics engaged in investigating quantities intangible by rule and compass, and incapable of application. Like others among the best minds of his country he was persuaded that the republic of letters was approaching dissolution, if the divine providence failed by one of its innumerable secret paths to infuse new vigour into it. Where was now the wise man, the real "_sapiens_" whom Vico had found in history, first in the barbaric figure of the theologian-poet, then in the civilised and rational figure of Greek philosopher and Roman jurist, the man whom for to-day he hoped to find in the master of eloquence like himself, called to give unity, life and power to all knowledge? Wisdom is indeed not this or that science, nor yet the sum total of science; it is the faculty which rules over all studies and by which all the sciences and arts that go to make humanity are acquired. And since man is both thought and spirit, intellect and will, it must satisfy both these sides of man, the second as a result of the first: it must teach the knowledge of divine things, to bring to perfection things human. The wise man is man in his totality and entirety, the whole man.