Cousin sat at the feet of Hegel. At
the same time a new master, full of suggestiveness for those who were
interested in the philosophy of history, was discovered in Italy. The
"Scienza nuova" of Vico was translated by Michelet.

The book of Vico was now a hundred years old. I did not mention him in
his chronological place, because he exercised no immediate influence on
the world. His thought was an anachronism in the eighteenth century, it
appealed to the nineteenth. He did not announce or conceive any theory
of Progress, but his speculation, bewildering enough and confused in its
exposition, contained principles which seemed predestined to form
the basis of such a doctrine. His aim was that of Cabanis and the
ideologists, to set the study of society on the same basis of certitude
which had been secured for the study of nature through the work of
Descartes and Newton. [Footnote: Vico has sometimes been claimed as a
theorist of Progress, but incorrectly. See B. Croce, The Philosophy of
Giambattista Vico (Eng. tr., 1913), p. 132--an indispensable aid to the
study of Vico. The first edition of the Scienza nuova appeared in 1725;
the second, which was a new work, in 1730.

Vico influenced Ballanche, a writer who enjoyed a considerable repute
in his day. He taught the progressive development of man towards liberty
and equality within the four corners of the Christian religion, which he
regarded as final. His Palingenesie sociale appeared in 1823-30.]

His fundamental idea was that the explanation of the history of
societies is to be found in the human mind. The world at first is felt
rather than thought; this is the condition of savages in the state of
nature, who have no political organisation. The second mental state is
imaginative knowledge, "poetical wisdom"; to this corresponds the higher
barbarism of the heroic age. Finally, comes conceptual knowledge, and
with it the age of civilisation. These are the three stages through
which every society passes, and each of these types determines law,
institutions, language, literature, and the characters of men.

Vico's strenuous researches in the study of Homer and early Roman
history were undertaken in order to get at the point of view of the
heroic age. He insisted that it could not be understood unless we
transcended our own abstract ways of thinking and looked at the world
with primitive eyes, by a forced effort of imagination. He was convinced
that history had been viti