Pagina 33 - BCSV, XXXV, 2005

THE IMAGINATIVE UNIVERSAL 33
Thus thè use of ingenium and its connection with an established art of
topics in these earlyworks is part of a critique of culture and educational
practice in a certain historical age. If this is so, and if this were thè con­
cept of ingenium which is involved in Vico’s account of thè formation of
poetic man’s belief, then it would seem that Vico’s view would be
anachronistic, for poetic man could hardly have had an art of topics of
thè sort described in thè earlier work.
On thè other hand, it must be said that thè manner in which Vico
writes about ingenium in De antiquissima does not suggest that he was
thinking of it solely as a method of correcting thè limited view of mind
presented by Descartes. It is presented, like thè faculties of sense, mem-
ory and imagination, as part of thè constitution of thè human mind: it is
said to be «synonymous with nature» and is «thè power proper to
man»54. It is to be found in children and, when it is allowed to develop
through its free use in problems of everyday life or in thè physical sci-
ences, rather than in accord with mechanical precepts of method, it be-
comes thè power «necessary for discovery, since thè effort and work of
making new discoveries belongs to ingenuity alone»55. These ways of de-
scribing it suggest that, at least at thè time of De antiquissima, he took it
to be an essential component of thè human mind, not to be limited in its
application to a specific developmental phase of mind and language.
The second question to be raised is how, if this is a theory that Vico
presupposed in thè later writings, it would impinge on Vico’s account of
thè poetic mentality and poetic language. Although there are no ex-
tended sections devoted to ingenium in these writings, there are many
references to thè related subject of topics56, although this is conceived in
a different way from thè art of topics to be found in De Antiquissima.
The most developed reference to ingenium itself comes in an interesting
passage in thè 1744 New Science, in book II, chapter II entitled «Poetic
Physics concerning Man or Heroic Nature». The chapter begins with an
account of how poetic man thought of his human capacities, and is very
closely related to thè theory of human nature outlined in De antiquissi­
ma, which, of course, Vico claimed to have discovered embedded in thè
as evidence that he thinks that thè misuse of criticai rationalism is a vice that arises only in thè
third age, i.e. in an age in which conceptual thinking has already bcen developed.
54«[...] ingenium et natura idem» and «ingenium propria hominis natura» (Deaut., p. 117).
55 «Undc ingenio ad inveniendum necesse est: cum ex genere nova invenire unius ingenii
et opera et opus sit» (ibid., p. 123).
56 Sn44, §§ 494-508, in which Vico provides his most extensive account of a ‘sensory top-
ics’ (una topica sensibile), which is meant to function in poetic society in a way somewhat anal-
ogous to that in which topics later functions in a more developed society.