a fanciful interpreter, a warm lover but not a blind one. The two points above established, the strength and weakness essential to Vico's intellect, his tendency to confusion or his confusion of tendencies, supply us with a kind of general canon of interpretation; namely, that of separating analytically at every step his pure philosophy from the empiricism and history with which he mixes, and in which so to speak he embodies it, and on the other hand separating the latter from the former: and of observing, in the process, the causes and effects of the mixture. The dross cannot be treated as non-existent, bound up as it is with the gold in its natural state: but it must not hinder us from recognising and purifying the gold. Or, to drop the metaphor, the history must be indeed a history, but that it can only be if guided by intelligence. CHAPTER IV THE IMAGINATIVE FORM OF KNOWLEDGE (POETRY AND LANGUAGE) The chief, almost indeed the only, forms of the mind studied by Vico in the New Science are the inferior, individualising activities to which he gives the general name of "certitude." These are, in the region of theoretic mind, imagination: in that of the practical mind, power or will: and in the empirical science corresponding to the philosophy of mind, the barbaric society and poetic wisdom whose examination occupies, in his own words, "almost the whole bulk of the work." His deep interest in these lower forms, and in the primitive societies and barbaric histories which display them, is further illustrated and explained, among his external circumstances, by the studies he undertook in Roman law and its expressions and rhetorical figures: by the still living tradition of Italian humanism: by the recently stimulated pursuit of the archaeological sciences: by his own desire to investigate the earliest civilisation of Italy, and so forth. But many of his contemporaries and countrymen were handling the same materials without acquiring any of his taste for and comprehension of imagination, simplicity and force: indeed Vico himself, when he wrote the _De antiquissima,_ had the taste for these things but as yet no comprehension of them. The full reason for this interest is seen when we consider the development of Vico as a philosopher, without losing sight of the complexity of his nature in all its opposition to the Cartesian type of mind. Cartesianism, with its attention confined to the universalising and abstractive forms, ignored the individualising: and this necessarily attracted Vico all the more towards them as towards a mysterious problem. Cartesianism shrank in horror from the tangled forest of history: Vico plunged eagerly into that very department of history where the historical flavour, so to speak, is strongest; namely, that which is furthest and psychologically most different from civilised periods. Cartesianism extended the psychology of civilisation to all periods and nations: Vico was led to investigate