"as of a mere society of shopkeepers." These utilitarian doctrines, with their libels upon human nature, seemed to Vico only fit for men without hope, too insignificant ever to have a share in the state or proud enough to believe themselves repressed and denied access to the positions of which in their arrogance they thought themselves worthy. Among these he counted the unfortunate Spinoza, who, he thinks, having as a Jew no country of his own, was moved by envy to devote himself to the construction of a metaphysic "intended to overthrow all the nations of the world." He passes stern judgment upon the state of contemporary ethics, which was all that it could be on the basis of a mechanistic and materialistic metaphysic without a gleam of finalism. Descartes produced nothing at all in this field, since his few written remains on the subject do not amount to a doctrine, and his treatise of the Passions belongs rather to medicine than to morals. Malebranche and Nicole were equally sterile, and Pascal's _Pensées,_ the one exception, are "but scattered lights." Of the Italians, Pallavicino's treatise _Del bene_ offers no very profound depths of ethics: and Muratori's attempt in his _Filosofia Morale_ was a very unsuccessful one. Utility is not the explanatory principle of morality, because it proceeds from man's bodily nature, and on that account is subject to change, while morality, _honestas,_ is eternal. To derive morality from utility is to confound the occasion with the cause, to confine oneself to the surface and to offer no explanation at all of the facts. None of the various modes in which philosophers have successively called the utilitarian principle to life, fraud or imposture, force, desire,--none of these accounts for differentiation, that is, for the social organism. What fraud could ever have seduced and deceived the supposed simple and frugal first owners of the land, living as they did perfectly contented with their lot? What force could have succeeded, if the rich, the alleged usurpers, were few, and the poor, the robbed, were many? Such explanations are ridiculous, and unworthy of a serious problem. These strong and powerful men were really powerful with something other than mere strength: thus they became protectors of the weak and enemies of destructive and anti-social tendencies: their rule was one of force, it is true, but "imposed by a more powerful character" (_a natura praestantiori dictata_); a fact which the barbarian Brennus may be pardoned for not knowing, but not so a philosopher. The force which created and organised the earliest states was nothing but "noble human nature," to which states must always hark back, although they may have been won by fraud and force, in order to subsist and maintain themselves: which agrees with Machiavelli's advice to hark back to the beginnings, but with the implication that the deepest beginnings are to be found in mercy and justice. Men are