possible to reclaim philology to philosophical principles; and the philologists for their part, instead of marshalling facts for a display of learning, ought to strive to make them the aim of science. Philology must be reduced to a science. This was Vico's idea of the relation of certitude to truth, or philology to philosophy. What was the meaning of reducing philology, or history, which is the same thing, to a science or philosophy? Strictly speaking, the reduction is impossible: not because they deal with subject-matter different in kind, but because their subject-matter is in point of fact homogeneous. History is already essentially philosophy. It is impossible to make the most insignificant historical statement without moulding it with thought, that is with philosophy. But since the existence of this philosophical basis of philology was not at that time realised, indeed it was none too often realised in later times, and in consequence easily denied; and since most people, as we have seen, imagined either an aristocratic geometrical philosophy, hating and avoiding the "profane mob" of facts, or else, as at first Vico did, a philosophy and a history equally devoid of cogency, and merely matters of opinion: for these reasons Vico, after the change of his philosophical point of view, now that he had attained to the consciousness of the speculative method in the science of man, and understood more deeply the human mind, was bound to see how much current history stood in need of reform and extension; to feel the lack of an improved philology as a consequence of the improved philosophy, and to express it in terms of the theory of knowledge by the formula reuniting philology to philosophy: "that this second science, as is fair, should be the consequence of the first" (_ut haec posterior, ut par est, prioris sit consequentia_). He was bound, in other words, to rescue history from its condition of inferiority, where it was a mere slave to caprice, vanity, moralising and precept-making, and other irrelevant aims, and to recognise its own true end as a necessary complement of eternal truth. Philosophy nowadays is full of and intimate with historical fact: and this gives it greater breadth and a more lively sense of dealing with concrete reality. This is no doubt one meaning of Vico's formula concerning the union of philosophy and philology, and the reduction of the latter to a science.