Thus we need not invent or demand a heroic Vico, looking for him in the life of religion, society or politics. The true hero is the Vico who stands before us, the hero of the philosophic life. Others beside ourselves have noticed his love for the word "hero" and all its derivatives, "heroism," "heroic," and so on: and the continual use and varied application he makes of it. Heroism was for him the mighty virgin force which appears in the beginning and reappears in the reflux of history. This force he must surely have felt in himself as he laboured for the truth and, overthrowing obstacles of every kind, opened up new paths of science. It was this force that enabled him to overcome the youthful uncertainties, fears and defeats which sometimes plunged him in a profound individual and cosmic pessimism, visible in the poem entitled "Feelings of One in Despair," to rise to the certainty of scientific method enunciated in the _De nostri temporis studiorum ratione_ and his first attempt at philosophico-historical research represented by the _De antiquissima Italorum sapientia_; and from this point, abandoning in part his own thought and weaving a new tissue of what remained, led him to the _De uno universi iuris principio et fine uno_ and to the _Scienza Nuova_ "after twenty-five years," as he says of the discoveries contained in that work, "of unremitting and toilsome thought." The work completed by this poor teacher of grammar and rhetoric, by this pedagogue whom a contemporary satirist saw "lean, with a rolling eye, ferule in hand,"[22] by this unhappy _paterfamilias,_ is amazing and almost terrifying; such is the mass of mental power compressed into it. It is a work at once reactionary and revolutionary: reactionary in relation to the present, by its attachment to the traditions of the ancient world and the Renaissance; revolutionary as against the present and the past in laying the foundations of that future later to be known as the Nineteenth century.