universalising concept. Poetry, which ought to represent sense and nothing else, came to represent a sense already intellectualised; and the saying that nothing is found in the intellect that has not already been in the sense, acquired the meaning, that the intellect is nothing but the sense clarified, and the sense nothing but the intellect confused. Thus there was no further need for the added caution "except the intellect itself" (_nisi intellectus ipse_). Conversely, barbaric civilisation became a kind of mythological or allegorical representation of the ideal phase of poetry, and primitive tribes were transformed into crowds of "sublime poets" just as, in the ontogenesis corresponding to this philogenesis, children had been made into poets. The concept of the "imaginative universal" unites in itself the double contradiction of the doctrine; since to the imaginative element must be joined, in this mental construction, the element of universality which taken by itself would be a true and proper universal, rational and not imaginative. Hence arises a _petitio principii_ by which the origin of the rational universal, the point requiring explanation, is already presupposed. On the other hand, if the imaginative universal is interpreted as freed from the element of universality, that is, as a mere imagination, Vico's aesthetic doctrine would certainly become once more consistent: but his "poetic wisdom" or barbaric civilisation would be deprived of an indispensable portion of its organism in parting with every kind of concept: for concepts are, so to speak, the skeleton of the body.