These inconsistencies and errors which we have briefly reviewed are due partly to Vico's insufficient power of distinguishing and elaborating, partly--and this is the greater part--to that fundamental fault which we have already seen to exist in the structure of the New Science. In this case the fault is, more precisely, Vico's confusion between the philosophical concept of the poetic form of the mind, and the empirical concept of the barbaric form of civilisation. "This earliest age of the world," as he himself says, "can be truly said to have concerned itself exclusively with the primary activity of the mind." But the earliest age of the world, composed as it was of men of flesh and blood, not of philosophical categories, cannot have been concerned with one solitary activity of the mind. This single activity may have preponderated, as we generally say: the very word reveals the quantitative and approximative nature of the conception: but all the others must have been at work simultaneously, imagination and intellect, perception and abstraction, will and morality, song and arithmetic. Vico could not shut his eyes to this obvious fact, and introduced into this phase of civilisation not only the poet, but also the theologian, the physicist, the astronomer, the _pater-familias,_ the warrior, the politician, and the lawgiver; but he tried to regard the activities of all these as "poetical" in character, as he called it, by a metaphor drawn from the alleged preponderance of the imaginative form of the mind; and the whole system he called "poetic wisdom." The metaphorical nature of the terminology is suggested, in fact leaps to the eye, in certain characteristic passages, as where the "arts," that is, the mechanical crafts which produce objects of practical utility, are called "poetry with a certain kind of reality," and where ancient Roman law, because of the abundance of formulae and ceremonies with which it was adorned, is said to be a "serious dramatic poem." But the metaphors are dangerous, since, as in the case of the New Science, they light upon a soil favourable to their growth into concepts: and in point of fact the historical phase of barbarism, metaphorically expressed as poetic wisdom, soon turned in Vico's mind into the ideal phase of poetry, and transferred all its own attributes to this ideal phase. The former included theologians, and accordingly Vico regarded poetry as theology, but an imaginative theology: teachers, and poetry became a teacher, but of the common people: natural scientists, and it became science, but the science of an imaginary world. And since these barbarians, uncultivated as they were and confined to the world of images, could not think in concepts, the imaginations of poetry, individualised and particular, and its judgments, always expressed in material form, were falsely interpreted as "imaginative universals," supposed to be something intermediate between the individualising intuition and the