refers to the spontaneous creative activity of the human mind. The point at issue is however precisely the empirical aspect of this law, not the philosophical: and the true reply seems to us to be, as we have already suggested, that Vico could not take and ought not to have taken other circumstances into account, just as--to recall one instance--any one who in studying the various phases of life describes the first manifestations of the sexual craving in the vague imaginations and similar phenomena of puberty, does not take into account the ways in which the less experienced may be initiated into love by the more experienced, since he is setting out to deal not with the social laws of imitation but with the physiological laws of organic development. If it is said that even without imitation or sophistication the sexual craving arises no less and demands satisfaction, such a statement doubtless merely asserts the incontrovertible truth of a certain very ancient Eastern tale included by Boccaccio in the _Decameron_: but at the same time it supplies the most complete parallel to the famous and much controverted aphorism of Vico. Nor is the Vician law of reflux necessarily opposed, as has often been thought, to the conception of social progress. It would be so opposed if instead of being a law of mere uniformity it were one of identity, in agreement with the idea of an unending cyclical repetition of single individual facts which has been adopted by certain extravagant minds of both ancient and modern times. The reflux of history, the eternal cycle of the mind, can and must be conceived, even if Vico does not so express it, as not merely diverse in its uniform movements, but as perpetually increasing in richness and outgrowing itself, so that the new period of sense is in reality enriched by all the intellect and all the development that preceded it, and the same is true of the new period of the imagination or of the developed mind. The return of barbarism in the Middle Ages was in some respects uniform with ancient barbarism; but it must not for that reason be considered as identical with it, since it contains in itself Christianity, which summarises and transcends ancient thought.