Almost more miraculous than this conception of poetry is the fact that Vico saw into the true nature of language, a problem much less canvassed and investigated, and no more satisfactorily solved, by ancient and modern philosophy down to the present day. Language was as a rule alternately confused with logic and debased into a mere external and conventional sign, or else in despair referred to a divine origin. Vico realised that the divine origin was in this case a mere refuge of indolence; that language is neither logic nor convention, and, like poetry, is neither esoteric wisdom nor due to a decision or agreement. Language arises naturally. In its first form, men express themselves "by mute actions," or by signs, and "by bodies having natural connexions with the ideas which they wish to indicate," _i.e._ by means of symbolic objects. But in the case both of articulated languages and of common speech, all philologists have, "with an excess of good faith," which means a deficiency of insight, accepted the view that meanings are decided at pleasure: whereas at the so-called origin of language meanings must have been natural, and every common word must certainly have started from one single individual of one nation, and been derived from the primitive language of gestures and objects. In Latin, as in other tongues, it is to be noticed that almost all the words are formed to express natural properties, or used by transference: and the greater part of every language, in every nation, is metaphorical. The opposite opinion was due to the ignorance of grammarians, who, meeting with a great number of words expressing confused and indistinct ideas, and not knowing their origin, which had formerly made them lucid and distinct, invented for their own peace of mind the conventional theory; and dragged in Aristotle and Galen as against Plato and Iamblichus. The serious objection generally brought against the natural origin of language and in favour of the conventional, namely the variations in the common speech among different nations, is solved by considering that owing to diversities of climate, temperament and custom nations looked at the same useful or necessary objects in different aspects, and hence produced different languages. This is also seen in the case of proverbs; which are substantially identical maxims of human life, but expressed in as many different forms as there are, or have been, different nations. The insistence, then, with which Vico claims to have discovered the true origin of languages "in the principles of poetry" is of especial importance. On the one hand, it entails the assertion of the spontaneous and imaginative origin of language, and on the other it tends implicitly if not explicitly to suppress the dualism between poetry and language.