Vico's conception of history thus became truly objective, freed from divine arbitrament, but freed equally from the rule of trifling causes and gossiping explanations, and acquiring a knowledge of its own essential end, which is to understand the nexus of facts, the logic of events; to be the rational reconstruction of a rational fact. Historical study at this time suffered less from the first of these errors (the theological conception had been ever since the beginning of the Italian Renaissance falling into universal decay) than from that form of history which was just then acquiring the name of "pragmatic," which restricted itself to the personal aspect of events, and failing by these means to reach full historical truth tried to gain warmth and life by means of political and moral instruction. A monument of pragmatic history arose in Vico's own country and contemporaneously with the _Scienza Nuova:_ Pietro Giannone's _Civil History of the Kingdom of Naples._ The author was a man of his own district and age, and wrote a great work in the sphere of polemic, and even in certain respects of history: but such that all its greatness only serves to emphasise the greatness of Vico's book. If Vico had had to describe the origins of ecclesiastical property and power in the Middle Ages, he would have been able to write of something very different from the guile of popes, bishops and abbots, and the simplicity of dukes and emperors. And as we shall see, whenever he undertook to investigate any part of history he actually did discover in it something very different from these things. CHAPTER XI THE LAW OF REFLUX The mind, after traversing its course of progress, after rising from sensation successively to the imaginative and the rational universal and from violence to equity, is bound in conformity with its eternal nature to re-traverse the course, to relapse into violence and sensation, and thence to renew its upward movement, to commence a reflux. This is the philosophical meaning of Vico's "reflux," but not the exact manner in which we find it expressed in his writings, where the eternal circle is considered almost exclusively as exemplified in the history of nations, as a reflux in the civil affairs of man. Civilisation comes to an end in the "barbarism of reflection," which is worse than the primitive barbarism of sensation; for while the latter was not without a wild nobility, the former is contemptible, untrustworthy and treacherous; and thus it is necessary that this evil subtlety of malicious intellect should rust away through the long centuries of a new barbarism of sensation. We must however withdraw and purge the conception of "reflux" from historical facts and the sociological scheme, not only to explain the absolute and eternal character which Vico attributes to it, but also to justify the historical representation and sociological law founded upon it, and drawing their cogency primarily from it.