To resolve the contradiction it was necessary to separate poetry from poetic wisdom: and we do find some signs of this separation in Vico. He sometimes admits, almost against his will, the lack of correspondence between the philosophical category and the type of society, and in dealing with the latter is compelled to fall back upon such phrases as "very nearly" and "more or less." He says, for instance, that primitive man consisted "exclusively of strong imagination, with no, or very little, reason": that he was "almost all body, with hardly any reflection": or again, after making a show of philosophical distinction between the three languages of gods, heroes and men, he goes on to observe that "the language of the gods was almost all dumb, and very little articulate; the language of heroes was composed of equal quantities of articulation and dumb-show; the language of men was almost all articulated, and very little in dumb-show." He admits again in a fine simile that poetic speech out-lived poetic wisdom and survived far into the historic and civilised period, "as great and rapid rivers run far out into the sea and keep their waters fresh as they bear them along with the force of their flow." Even in modern times we cannot afford entirely to neglect imaginative speech: "to describe the operations of the pure mind, we must avail ourselves of poetic language, of metaphors drawn from the senses." It appears that poetry does not end with barbarism, for poets arise even in civilised times: and if it is said that the poets of the earliest times were naturally imaginative, those of later days artificially so, that is, according to Vico, by deliberately forgetting the proper use of words, freeing themselves from philosophy, filling their minds with childish and vulgar prejudices and submitting to the bondage of conventions like the use of rhyme--all these restrictions, besides being easily refuted, are merely an unsuccessful attempt to diminish the weight of the fact above mentioned, namely that poetry belongs to all ages, not merely to that of barbarism: it is an ideal category, not a historic fact. But the restrictions prove, as also do the infrequency and the unemphatic nature of the passages quoted, that Vico was not in a position to effect the separation of poetry from poetic wisdom, hampered as he was by the hybrid character of the concept and of the actual method of the New Science.