This point established, it might seem that there can be nothing more to be said of any philosophical importance about Vico's metaphysics. But this is not the case. Since every department of philosophy implies in itself every other, and since we can therefore always deduce from the treatment of one of the so-called particular philosophical sciences the character of the whole, it is legitimate to examine the New Science and to consider what metaphysic is implicit therein; to determine what philosophical complement is logically supported and demanded by this science. The New Science, which asserted the full knowability of human affairs, not merely on the surface, like a psychological treatment, but in the depths of their nature: the New Science, which transcended the individual to attain the conception of the mind which informs all things and is Providence: the Science which with divine pleasure contemplated the eternal cycle of the mind, elevated as it was to such a height, necessarily tended to interpret the whole of reality, both Nature and God, as Mind. That this tendency was objective to the New Science, and not subjective to Vico, in whose mind the science so to speak thought itself out, need hardly be repeated. Vico personally not only did not encourage it but actually curtailed and repressed it so energetically as to leave no trace of it in his works. There was no philosophical doctrine of which he had such terror and against which he so frequently waged war as that of pantheism; and perhaps this polemical preoccupation is the only trace, though quite an involuntary trace, visible in his writings of the tendency which he must have observed in himself. He was, and wished to remain, a Christian and a Catholic; transcendence, the personality of God, the substantiality of the soul, though his science did not lead him towards them, were uncontrollable necessities to his consciousness. But just as this fact allowed Vico to repress but not to eradicate the essential logical tendency of his thought, so it enables us to recognise that tendency in the facts themselves. An Italian critic, Spaventa, is right when he says that in Vico the necessity of a new metaphysic makes itself felt; another, a German Catholic, is equally right in denning his system as "semi-pantheistic." It would perhaps be more dangerous to go on to say, with the Italian above mentioned, that Vico makes an advance on the Cartesian idea of two substances and the Spinozistic of two attributes, and even on the Leibnitian doctrine of the monad, and that he transcends parallelism and pre-established harmony by distinguishing the two providences, the two attributes, nature and mind, in such a way that the one is a step to the other, and by conceiving the point of union and the origin of the opposition as an unfolding or development, so that nature is regarded as the phenomenon and proper basis of mind, the pre-supposition which mind creates to itself in order to be