Vico, scarcely ever read by the philosophical historians, although they play with a few of his phrases, which they interpret badly as often as they repeat them, formulated in his Scienza nuova certain fundamental laws of history.

He lays down as a general law of the development of societies that all nations, whatever their ethnic origin and their geographical habitat, traverse the same historic roads: thus, the history of any nation whatever is a repetition of the history of another nation which has attained a higher degree of development.

"There exists", he says, "an eternal ideal history traversed on earth by the histories of all nations, from whatever status of civilize savagery, barbarism and ferocity men set out to themselves", to domesticate themselves, ad addimesticarsi, according to his expression. (Scienza nuova; libr. II, §5)*.

Morgan, who probably had no knowledge of Vico, arrived

The verb civilization probably did not exist in the Italian language in Vico's time; it is not until the eighteenth century that it was used in France to indicate the march of a nation along the path of progress. The sense was so recent that the French Academy does not include the Fourier word civilisation in its Directory until the edition of 1835. employed it only to designate the modern capitalist period.

We meet again in natural science the "ideal eternal history" of Vico. It is curious and interesting to note that parallelism of thought in

at a conception of the same law, which he formulates in a more positive and complete fashion. The historic uniformity of the different nations which the Neapolitan philosopher attributed to their development according to a preëstablished plan the American anthropologist assigns to two causes, to the intellectual resemblance of men and to the similarity of the obstacles which they have had to surmount in order to develop their societies. Vico also believed in their intellectual resemblance. "There necessarily exists", he said, "in the nature of human affairs, a universal mental language, common to all nations, which designs uniformly the substance of the things playing an active part in the social life of men and expresses it with as many modifications as there are different aspects which these things can take on. We recognize its existence in proverbs, those maxims of popular wisdom, which are of the same substance in all nations ancient and modern, although they are expressed in so many different ways". (Ib Degli Elem. XXII.)*

"The human mind", says Morgan, "specifically the same in all the tribes and nations of mankind, and limited in the range of its powers, works and must work, in the same uniform channels, and within narrow limits of variation. Its results in disconnected regions of space, and in widely separated ages of time, articulate in a logically connected chain of common experiences. t Elsewhere in this book Morgan shows that

the natural and historical philosophies. Aristotle and the deists admit the existence of a preëstablished plan, by which God creates animal species and which man can discover by the study of comparative morphology. "He thus thinks over again the divine thought." The philosophers of Nature, submitting this for God, attributed to it a sort of unconscious plan or rather a model, a type immaterial and unrealized according to which the real forms realize themselves; for some it is a prototype, an original form, upon which the real beings are gradual improvements, for others it is an archetype of which they are varied and imperfect copies.

Aristotle likewise attached great importance to proverbs; several writers speak of a collection of popular maxims which he had composed and which is lost. Synesius mentions it in his "Panegyric on Baldness": "Aristotle," he says, "considers proverbs as the debris of the philosophy of past ages wrecked in the revolutions which men have passed through; their piquant conciseness has saved them from the shipwreck. Proverbs and the ideas which they express thus carry the same authority as the ancient philosophy from which they have come to us, and whose noble imprint they preserve, for. in the centuries which have rolled by, the truth was grasped far better than to-day." The Christian bishop, nourished on Pagan authors reproduces the opinion of antiquity, which thought men degenerated instead of improving. This idea, contained in Greek mythology and reproduced in many passages of the Iliad, was shared by the Egyptian priests, who, according to Herodotus, divided past age into three periods: the age of the gods, of heroes and of men.

Man. since he emerged from the communism of the gens, has always believed that he was degenerating, and that happiness, the earthly paradise, the age of gold, was in the past. The idea of human perfectability, of social progress,took shape in the eighteenth century, when the bourgeoisie was approaching its power, but like Christianity it relegated happiness to Heaven.

Utopian socialism made it descend to earth. "Paradise is not behind us but before us," said Saint-Simon.

+ Lewis H. Morgan.-Ancient Society, Part II. Ch. IX, P. 262.

like successive geological formations the tribes of humanity may be superimposed in successive layers according to their development: classed in this way, they reveal with a certain degree of exactness the complete march of human progress from savagery to civilization; for the paths of human experiences in the several nations have been almost parallel. Marx, who studied the path of economic "experiences", confirms Morgan's idea. The country most developed industrially, he says in the preface to "Capital", shows those which follow it on the industrial ladder the image of their own future.

Thus, then, the "ideal eternal history", which according to Vico the different peoples of humanity must traverse each in their turn, is not an historic plan preëstablished by a divine intelligence, but an historic plan of human progress conceived by the historian who, after having studied the stages traversed by every people, compares them in progressive series according to their degrees of complexity.

Researches, continued for a century on the savage tribes and ancient and modern peoples, have triumphantly proved the exactness of Vico's law. They have established the fact that all men, whatever their ethnic origin or their geographical habitat, had in their development gone through the same forms of family, property and production, as well as the same social and political institutions. The Danish anthropologists were the first to recognize the fact and to divide the prehistoric period into successive ages of stone, bronze and iron, characterized by the raw material of the tools manufactured and consequently by the mode of production. The general histories of the different nations, whether they belong to the white, black, yellow or red race, and whether they inhabit the temperate zone, the equator or the poles, are distinguished from each other only by Vico's stage of ideal history, only by Morgan's historic stratum, only by Marx's round of the economic ladder to which they have attained. Thus, the most developed people shows to those which are less developed the image of their own future.

The productions of intelligence do not escape Vico's law. The philologists and grammarians have found that for the creation of words and languages men of all races have followed the same rules. Folklorists have gathered the same tales among savage and civilized peoples. Vico had already recognized among them the same proverbs. Many of the folklorists instead of considering the similar tales as the productions of nations. which preserve them only through oral tradition think that they were conceived in only one center, from which they were scattered over the earth. This is inadmissible and contradicts what has been observed in the social institutions and other productions, intellectual as well as material.

The history of the idea of the soul and the ideas to which it has given birth is one of the most curious examples of the remarkable uniformity of the development of thought. The idea of the soul, which is found in savages, even the lowest, is one of the first intellectual inventions. The soul once invented, it was necessary to fit it out with a dwelling place, under the earth or in the sky to lodge it after death, in order to prevent it from wandering without domicile and pestering the living. The idea of the soul, very vivid in savage and barbarous nations, after having contributed to the manufacture of the idea of the Great Spirit and of God, vanishes among nations arrived at a higher degree of development, to be reborn with a new life and force when they arrive at another stage of evolution. The historians, after having pointed out in the historic nations of the Mediterranean basin the absence of the idea of the soul, which nevertheless had existed among them during the preceding savage period, recognize its rebirth some centuries before the Christian Era, as well as its persistence until our own days. They content themselves with mentioning these extraordinary phenomena of the disappearance and reappearance of so fundamental an idea, without attaching importance to them and without thinking of looking for the explanation which, however, they would not have found in the field of their investigations and which we can only hope to discover by applying Marx's historical method, by seeking it in the transformations of the economic world.

The scientists who have brought to light the primitive forms of the family, property and political institutions, have been too much absorbed by the labor of research to have time to inquire into the causes of their transformations: they have only made descriptive history and the science of the social world. must be explanatory as well as descriptive,

create

Vico thinks that man is the unconscious motive power of history and that it is not his virtues but his vices which are the active forces. It is not "disinterestedness, generosity and' humanity, but ferocity, avarice and ambition" which and develop societies; "these three vices which lead the human race astray produce the army, commerce and political power, and consequently the courage, wealth and wisdom of republics: so that these three vices, which are capable of destroying the human race on the earth, produce civil felicity."

This unexpected result furnished to Vico the proof of "the existence of a divine providence, a divine intelligence, which, out of the passions of men, absorbed entirely by their private interests, which might make them live in solitudes like fierce beasts, organizes civil order, thus permitting us to live in a human society."

The divine providence which directs the evil passions of men

is a second edition of the popular axiom: man proposes and God disposes. This divine providence of the Neapolitan philosopher and this God of popular wisdom who leads man by the aid of his vices and his passions, what are they?

The mode of production, replies Marx.

Vico, in accordance with the popular judgment, affirms that man alone furnishes the motive power of history. But his passions, bad and good, and his needs are not invariable quantities as the idealists suppose, for whom man has remained always the same. For example, maternal love, that heritage from the animals, without which man in the savage state could not have lived and perpetuated himself, diminishes in civilization to the point of disappearing in the mothers of the rich classes, who from its birth relieve themselves of the child and entrust it to the care of hirelings; other civilized women feel so little need of maternity that they make vows of virginity (*); paternal love and sexual jealousy, which cannot show themselves in savage and barbarous tribes during the polyandrous period, are on the contrary highly developed among civilized people; the sentiment of equality, vivid and imperious in savages and barbarians, who live in communities, to the point of forbidding any one the possession of an object which the others could not possess, has become so fully obliterated since man has lived under the system of individual property, that the poor and the wage workers of civilization accept resignedly and as a divine. and natural destiny their social inferiority.

Thus, then, in the course of human development, fundamental passions are transformed, reduced and extinguished, while others arise and grow. To seek only in man the determining causes of their production and evolution would be to admit that although living in nature and society, he does not submit to the influence of the surrounding reality. Such a supposition cannot arise even in the brain of the most extreme idealist, for he would not dare to assume that we should meet the same sentiment of modesty in the respectable mother of the household and the unfortunate earning her living with her sex; the same swiftness of calculation in the bank clerk and the philosopher; the same agility of the fingers of the professional pianist and the ditch digger. It is thus undeniable that man on the physical, intellectual and moral sides is subject unconsciously, but profoundly, to the action of the environment in which he moves.

The same phenomenon is observed in the insects which have succeeded in creating for themselves a social environment: the queen bee, who is the mother of the hive, does not concern herself with her progeny and kills her daughters provided with sexual organs, whom the neuter workers are obliged to protect from her maternal fury. Certain breeds of domestic fowls have lost the instinct of maternity; although excellent layers, they never sit.