religion as a form of ignorance, and omit the wisdom of the ignorance, or religion as truth. CHAPTER VI THE MORAL CONSCIOUSNESS Vico's other doctrines on the theoretical reason, that is to say on the logic of philosophy, of physical and mathematical science and of historical study, have been expounded above in the statement of his theory of knowledge, and are drawn almost entirely from his early works, since in the New Science the phase of the "completely developed mind" hardly appears except as a limit of the field of study. Here it will suffice to mention that he also touches upon the problem of the relation of poetry to history: but, still because of the confusion of philosophy with social science, he fails fully to solve it. From one point of view it seems to Vico that history is prior to poetry, because the latter, as he says, presupposes reality and contains an "imitation of the second degree": from another, poetry is the primary form, because among primitive peoples history is poetry, and the first historians are poets. At any rate he insists upon the poetic element essential to history: of Herodotus, the father of Greek history, he observes that not only are "his books full, for the most part, of fables," but "the style retains a very great Homeric element, a feature which all subsequent historians retained, using as they did a phraseology intermediate between the poetic and the colloquial": "almost the words of the poets," _verba ferme poetarum,_ as he says elsewhere in a phrase borrowed from Cicero. Nor are the relations between theory and practice, intellect and will, explained in detail by Vico, although on the whole he suggests the general idea that as in God intellect and will coincide, so it is in man, God's image; whose mind is not divided into thought and will--thought proceeding according to one method and will according to another--but his thought and will interpenetrate and form one single whole: a view far superior to that of the contemporary philosophy of Leibniz, which retained the idea of a divine arbitrament and therefore of irrationality. Another view, peculiar to Vico, might be taken by a hasty interpreter to imply the priority of practice to theory. He says that philosophers arrive at their conceptions thanks to experience of social institutions and laws in which men agree as a kind of universals: that Socrates and Plato, for instance, presupposed the Athenian democracy and law-courts. But the succession of religions producing republics, republics producing laws, and laws producing philosophical ideas, which he calls "a fragment of the history of philosophy philosophically narrated," is really a theory of sociological, not of philosophical value.