As the cognitive mind passes from feeling without noticing to noticing with disturbed and confused faculties, and thence to the reflection of the clear mind, so analogously the volitional mind passes from the state of nature to practical certitude and thence to practical truth. In the correlative empirical science, the transition is more or less that from the savage to the heroic or barbaric condition and from the latter to the civilised. In these three types of society, all the manifestations of life correspond: thus there are three kinds of character, three kinds of manners and customs, three kinds of law and therefore of states, three kinds of language and writing, three kinds of authority, reason and justice, and three divisions of history. Confused and sometimes self-contradictory though Vico may be in fixing the particulars of these various correspondences, his general idea is plain. Where reflection is at a low ebb and imagination flourishes, the passions also flourish, habits are violent, governments aristocratic or feudal, families subjected to strict paternal rule, laws severe, legal procedure symbolical, language couched in metaphor and writing in hieroglyphics. Where on the other hand reflection predominates, poetry becomes either separate from or charged with philosophy, manners and customs lose their violence, the passions are brought into subjection, the people take the government into their own hands, all members of the family are alike citizens of the state, law is mitigated by equity and its procedure simplified, language loses its metaphorical clothing and writing becomes alphabetical. Mixed forms, which some politicians aim at producing artificially, would be abortions: and though we do find natural hybrid forms which retain a tinge of the earlier, each one, by reason of its own unity, always tries so far as possible to divest its subject of every property belonging to other forms. Which of the various social types forms the foundation of the others and supplies the criterion for judging them? or what is the criterion and standard by which they must all alike be judged? For Vico, such a question is meaningless. Governments, he says, must adapt themselves to the nature of the people governed: the school of princes is the morality of nations. We may shudder at war, at the law of the stronger, at the reduction of the conquered to slavery, that is, to chattels: but the society which expressed itself in these customs was necessary and therefore good. The worship of strength, as we have said, occupied the position and discharged the function of the as yet impossible rule of reason. Later came the period of fully developed human reason, when men no longer valued each other by the standard of force, but by virtue of their rational nature, which is the true and eternal human nature, recognised one another as equals. The change of time brought change of customs: and the new were no less good, but no more so, than the old.