Vico's frequent claim to have constructed the science of human affairs on "a strict geometric method" might seem to indicate a change of opinion as to the applicability of that method. But his continual warnings, during the same period and in the same works, against the use in physical and moral questions of the mathematical method, which, "where there are no figures either of lines or numbers, either gives us no conclusiveness, or else, instead of demonstrating the truth, may often give an appearance of demonstration to falsehood," would flatly contradict the supposed change of front were it not that we could interpret it so as completely to restore the coherence of Vico's thought. This interpretation is quite simple. Once the power of converting the true with the created is seen to attach to the moral sciences no less than to geometry, these sciences could and indeed must develop on a method analogous to the synthetic method of geometry, the method which proceeds from a truth to its immediate consequence. In this manner they follow the progress of the world of man from its ideal origin to its perfect development; so that the student must not hope to be able to investigate these sciences _per saltum,_ but must traverse them from beginning to end in detail, without refusing to accept unforeseen conclusions any more than he can refuse to do so in geometry; but concentrating his attention on the firmness of the bond between premisses and conclusion. Thus the method could be called geometric by analogy or synecdoche; in fact, however, it was essentially speculative, and not to be confused with the application of mathematics to questions of morals, of which the Cartesians and Spinoza have left examples. Nor can we agree without reservation to the opinion of certain commentators that Vico, in asserting the existence of a single science of man, to be studied in the modifications of the human mind, was retreating to the position of a follower of Descartes. This opinion is often reinforced by another statement of Vico's, namely, that to conceive his New Science it would be well to return to a state of absolute ignorance, as if no philosophers, philologists, nor books had even existed in the world. It is true that with the new form of his theory of knowledge Vico himself joined the ranks of modern subjectivism, initiated by Descartes. In a sense, indeed, he had already done so in his activistic doctrine of truth as the reconstruction of the created. In this quite general sense Vico might himself be called a Cartesian. Nevertheless, if he was still behind Descartes in making his subjectivism a principle not of the whole of knowledge but of the knowledge of the world of man only, in another way he was ahead of the French philosopher, in that for him the truth attained in the world of man was not static but dynamic, not a discovery but a product, not consciousness but science.