The study of history in Italy during this period was less deeply modified by Vico's influence; chiefly perhaps because the impulse of the national uprising led to the neglect of primitive and Roman history and the devotion of all its best energies to research into the origin and vicissitudes of the Italian republics, a subject Vico had entirely ignored. On the other hand, jurisprudence especially in the south was dominated by his thought; and though it produced in this field no great scientific results, it gave to the jurists a loftiness and breadth of judgment and a concreteness of view which were long remembered and regretted. After 1870, with the decay of philosophy in Italy and elsewhere, the study of Vico also decayed: and for more than forty years there was no demand for a reprint of his works. The monograph by Cantoni in the year 1867, in spite of some valuable passages, already shows unmistakable signs of the decadence, founded as it is upon the idea that Vico's value is greater according as he is less of a metaphysician and more of a psychologist and historian: a position due not so much to the intrinsic weakness ascribed to him by Cantoni in philosophical matters as to the implicit conviction on the critic's part that metaphysic in general is a valueless thing, useful only for rousing enthusiasm in the addled heads of southern Italians. The great idealist of the New Science was subjected, as a final insult, to the praises of the positivists, who in their astonishing ignorance almost amounting to innocence did not--and still do not--hesitate to allege as a confirmation of their formal profession of faith the words "verum ipsum factum," which according to them means that the truth is the fact which we see and touch. Writings making any serious contribution to the knowledge of any particular point on Vico's doctrines were rare. Interest in Vico only reawoke within the last decade with the general reawakening of philosophical studies. Of the two best comprehensive works on Vico published towards the end of last century one is due to the German Catholic Karl Werner (1881) who expounds his philosophical and historical doctrines with great care, judging them from the point of view of speculative theism, a theory evolved under the influence of Baader and the second philosophy of Schelling, and tending much more to the comprehension of Vico than the psychology of Cantoni. The other is the work of an Englishman, Robert Flint (1884), who wrote for the collection of Philosophical Classics a brief monograph upon the subject, accurate in detail, and if not profound at least guided by clear and sound sense. Recently Sorel in France has shown the fruitfulness of certain views of Vico's, especially that of the reflux, by applying them to the history of primitive Christianity and the theory of the modern proletarian movement, while in Germany Biese and Mauthner have brought his conceptions of metaphor and language once more into favour.