More profitable than collecting these second-hand formulae would be to collect the many acute observations of moral psychology found here and there in his writings, expressed in his gem-like style; or to recall his little-known theory of laughter, which he derives from disappointed expectation and from the weakness of the mind, and therefore denies the faculty both to animals and to the perfect man, considering a man who laughs to be a satyr or faun, intermediate between a brute and a man. But abstaining from such a collection, which forms no part of our plan, we would rather observe that even in the commonplace distinctions and classifications mentioned above Vico shows a certain merit: he recognises, even while he propounds them, the necessary confusion and identification of all or many of these distinctions. Thus after distinguishing the two kinds of justice, the three kinds of virtue and the three kinds of law, he ends by declaring that these dualities, triplicities and multiplicities each form a unity. Justice and virtue also, for Vico, form a unity, since that power of truth, or human reason, which is virtue in so far as it struggles with selfishness, is also justice in so far as it directs or equates utilities. This implies that Vico does not distinguish, at least in the systematic exposition of the _Diritto universale,_ between law and morality: a distinction which indeed received little emphasis in the doctrine of natural rights, and is barely indicated in Grotius, for instance, as one between a greater and less degree of morality. Vico's doctrine of punishment is also purely moral, and deduced from the ethical concept of remorse. It is inflicted, he says, by the law, and is nothing but a social reinforcement of the individual conscience, in the case where the offender does not himself expiate his crime by means of remorse and internal punishment. But the more the problem of the relation between law and morality is absent in Vico's theoretical formulation and systematic treatment, the more present it is in his particular observations; indeed it may be said to pervade the whole of the New Science. Nor could it be otherwise, seeing that this relation refers to the distinction between the moral will and the inferior or earlier forms of will; and we know that all Vico's tendencies were towards exploring the lower and obscure region of the mind, both cognitive and practical, in the sphere alike of imagination, will and passion.