These sayings indicate very various ideas about poetry, of which some are compatible with the central doctrine but thrown out in a disconnected manner and therefore not in fact reconciled with it: others are quite incompatible. Vico might have been cited in turn, on the testimony of single passages, as a supporter of the moralistic theory of art, the didactic theory, the abstract or typical theory, the mythological theory, the animistic theory, and so on. And if he neither falls back into the old theories he hated, nor loses himself among the new fallacies which followed him, it is due to the fact that all these waverings and inconsistencies were continually submerged by the thought that poetry is the primary form of the mind, prior to intellect and free from reflection and reasoning. Just as he was unable by the use of his leading principle to distinguish and reconcile the other theories on the nature of poetry which already existed or had been invented by himself, so he did not succeed in escaping from the tyranny of old or new empirical classifications. He struggled to reduce these in their turn to philosophical form, and tried to deduce successively the various kinds of poetry, epic, lyric and dramatic: the kinds of verse and metre, spondaic, iambic and prose: the kinds of figurative language, metaphor, metonymy, synecdoche and irony: the parts of speech, onomatopoeism, interjection, pronoun, particle, noun and verb: the moods and tenses of the verb (in which connexion he refers to a case of aphasia observed by himself in Naples, "a gentleman seized with a severe apoplexy, who utters nouns but has completely forgotten verbs"): the kinds of writing, hieroglyphic, symbolic and alphabetical: and of languages, according to their increasing complexity, from monosyllables to compound words and from a preponderance of vowels and diphthongs to a preponderance of consonants. In the course of these attempts he frequently offered new and sometimes correct interpretations of isolated facts: but he did not and could not connect them into a scientific system. Moreover he never realised the relation between poetry and the other arts. On the one hand, he unites them, as when he considers painting and poetry to be fundamentally identical and notes a number of analogies between the poetry and painting of the Middle Ages: on the other, he separates them sharply, as when he asserts that delicacy in art is the outcome of philosophy, and that painting, sculpture, casting and intaglio are the most delicate arts because they are compelled to abstract the surface of the material objects they represent.