I was but thinking how this city, The immemorial green of Juda's realm, Is falling, vanquished; whose unhappy fate I have in vain endeavoured to repel. Here the precedents are easily found; Hector parting from Andromache and foreseeing the unhappy fate of Ilion, Priam and all his people (ἒσσεται ἧμαρ, etc., _II._ vi. 448-9); or Aeneas as he gazes upon its downfall (_ruit alto a culmine Troia: ... si Pergama dextra,_ etc., _Aen._ ii. 290-92). And yet the tragic melancholy of Argante is an entirely new creation, and altogether original to Tasso. Ficino, Cardano, Tommaso Cornelio, Scotus and Occam, and any others who have been or shall be added to the list, have or may have anticipated this or that element of Vico's formula: and yet when we turn from their statements to the _De antiquissima_ and the polemics that follow it, and read the definition of science, of true science, as the conversion of the true with the created, it strikes us as an entirely original theory. The fact is that Vico had not to face the same opponents and to solve the same problems that were faced and solved by the schoolmen, nominalists and mystics of the Middle Ages or by the Platonists and naturalists of the Renaissance, nor yet those of Descartes in his _Discours sur la méthode;_ and the saying that "he alone knows things who creates them" acquires a new value, a new meaning (and this is its proper meaning) from its being used to refute the Cartesian _cogito_ and the doctrine of immediate knowledge. Vico takes an old rusty sword and makes of it at least a glittering and trenchant weapon. For the same reason the phrase is no longer a mere accident or incident, but the starting-point of a special study, the foundation of a new philosophy, and Vico could quite well describe it as something not learnt from another but thought out and established by himself. And when he wants to find some original for it, he invents a history which is really a fiction or a myth; namely the history of ancient Italian wisdom which used this criterion as its supreme guide and left a trace of it in the Latin language in the synonymity of the words _verum_ and _factum._