The eternal code, considered in its essentials, is a Utopia: and since the first and greatest of Utopias is Plato's Republic, it is important, in order better to decide the point at issue, to examine Vico's attitude towards the political scheme of Plato. If we may listen to his own words, the _Republic_ was another of his many incentives and examples when he conceived the New Science. With the study of Plato began the unconscious awakening in him of "the thought of conceiving an ideal eternal law, to be expressed in a universal state built on the idea or plan of providence, on which idea, indeed, are founded all the states of every period and race: an ideal Republic like that which Plato ought, as a consequence of his divine metaphysic, to have conceived." He ought, but could not, owing to his "ignorance of the first man's fall"; ignorance, that is, of the original state of nature and of the exclusively poetic or "common" wisdom which followed it: an ignorance maintained by the error, common to the minds of all men, of measuring by oneself the almost unknown nature of other people, as Plato exalted the rude and barbaric beginnings of Gentile man to the perfect state of his loftiest esoteric knowledge of the divine, and fancied these earliest men to possess a high degree of this esoteric wisdom, whereas on the contrary they were really "brutes, all stupidity and ferocity." In consequence of this learned error Plato, instead of conceiving an eternal Republic and the laws of an eternal justice by which Providence governs the nations of the world and directs it by means of the common needs of mankind, by which it is led to the common consciousness of the whole human race, "conceived an ideal Republic and a merely ideal justice, by which nations are not guided at all." In fact, they ought not to be guided by it: since among the determinations of the perfect state there are some which are dishonourable and detestable, such as the community of wives. Thus Vico took from Plato the idea of an eternal state, but entirely inverted it by the reservation which he added to it, that the true eternal republic is not the abstract state of Plato, but the course of history in all its phases, including the brutes at one end and Plato at the other. This is the "republic of mankind," the "great state of mankind," the "universal republic" (_generis humani respublica, magna generis humani civitas, respublica universa_) of which he means to investigate the "form, ranks, societies, occupations, laws, crimes, punishments, and science of jurisprudence" (_formam ordines societates negotia leges peccata poenas et scientiam in ea tractandi iuris_) and to follow the development of all these "from their origin, the beginnings of humanity, under the control of divine Providence, national custom and authority" (_a suis usque primis humanitatis originibus, divina providentia moderante, moribus gentium ac proinde auctoritate_), that