It would be impossible to decide either which of these two meanings of philology reduced to history is that of Vico himself, since both are included in his thought: or which is the prevailing one, since in point of fact now one, now the other prevails: although the second, or empirical, signification is the more often formulated. We might even say that when Vico entitled his treatise _Scienza Nuova,_ the principal meaning he attached to this "invidious" name referred precisely to this empirical science, the science, that is, which was to be at once a philosophy and a history of man: the ideal history of the eternal laws which govern the course of all nations' deeds in their rise, progress, points of rest, decline and fall. The fact is, Vico did not and could not unify the two different meanings; he maintained the duality which, simply because it was never made explicit, presented an appearance of unity. Thus each of the tendencies shown by his interpreters is partially justified: one group of whom maintain that Vico laid down and employed the speculative method; another, that his procedure was both in intention and in effect empirical, inductive and psychological: the former believing that he aimed at a systematic philosophy of man, the latter that he was bent upon a scheme of sociology or social psychology. Both views are one-sided, but the second more so than the first. If there actually were in Vico elements both of Bacon and of Plato, of the empiricist and the philosopher, yet when we look at his intellectual personality as a whole, when we penetrate into the depths of his mind and share in his difficulties and his colossal labours, we must recognise that whatever he meant and believed Vico was of the stuff of a Plato and not a Bacon: that even the Bacon of whom he speaks is in part his own invention, a Bacon tinged with Platonism: and that the New Science seemed so new to him fundamentally, not because it was an empirical structure on Bacon's lines--indeed in that case no science could be older: we need only cite Aristotle's _Politics_ and Machiavelli's _Discourses,_ --but because it was impregnated throughout by a new philosophy, which did in truth break into it on every side, through all his empiricism. CHAPTER III INTERNAL STRUCTURE OF THE NEW SCIENCE The lack of clearness on the relation of philosophy to philology, and the failure to distinguish between the two quite different ways of conceiving the reduction of philology to a science, are at once the consequences and the causes of the obscurity which prevails in the "New Science." By this name we refer to the whole mass of research and theory which Vico was producing from 1720 to 1730, elaborated above all in three works, the _De uno universi iuris principio et fine uno_ and the first and second _Scienza Nuova_; it attains its maturest and most developed form in the last of these, and this is the most important for reference.