Vico. By Robert Flint. (Blackwood and Sons.)—The name of Vico
will be strange to most students ; but Professor Flint's account of the man and his work is not the less interesting because it takes us into unfamiliar scenes. Vico was a professor in the University of Naples for nearly half a century (1697-1744). There is probably no more obscure period or place in the whole history of European culture from the Revival of Letters. But Vico was out of keeping with his surroundings. His habits of thought were such as bring him into rapport with the present generation. His academie orations touch on the controversy still undecided, and probably long to remain so, be- tween letters and science as instruments of education. His meta- physics remain still an interesting contribution to a science of which it may, perhaps, be said that no speculations become obsolete, so strange are the revivals which occur in it. As a theorist on law, he has a distinctive place of his own. It is this part of his work, probably, that determines his right to be in. eluded in a series of "Philosophical Classics." We must not, however, underrate the importance of the fourth of the divisions into which his work, as a thinker, may be distributed, what he called "The New Science," and is now denominated the "Philosophy of History." The personality of Vico, as it is described by Professor Flint, is somewhat disappointing. Better than his surroundings-- and Naples in the first half of the eighteenth century was not a favourable scene for vigour and independence of thought—he could not rise entirely superior to them. He was a man of letters in the days of patronage, and, as Professor Flint says, the only choice for him was between servile literary work and starvation. Accordingly he wrote panegyrics on people more or less undeserving of them, describing, as it has been put, a "very sharp curve," more than once, in blessing what he had once cursed. His domestic circumstances were, for the most part, unhappy; and his f (Torsi was disturbed by a disgraceful quarrel between a religious society and his fellow-professors about the right to carry the bier. He seems to have missed one only of Johnson's catalogue of literary evils, "Toil, envy, want, the patron, and the gaol."
Previous page
