Pagina 20 - BCSV, XLI, 2

LEON POMPA 20
This trio of stages of mental functioning displays a clear direction of
development, which provides the underlying modes of thought in the
poetic, heroic and human periods of human history. This is shown
much more fully in the summary given in Book IV, where he provides
an excellently clear account of these three kinds of natures, poetic,
heroic and human13, which underlie and govern the character of all the
political institutional and cultural practices of each period. Thus he
gives the main features of three successive kinds of natures, to each of
which correspond three different kinds of customs three kinds of nat-
ural law, of natural law, of governments and so on, for all the matters
belonging to the life of an historical society, which are expounded in
detail in the main body of the work.
To gain a clearer idea of the first originating state, I want now to
attend in detail to the way in which, having conveniently and wisely
removed the early Christian world from consideration, Vico proceeds
in the following well-known description of the founders of the gentile
world:
From these first men, stupid, insensate and horrible beasts, all the philoso-
phers14 and philologians should have begun their investigations of the ancient
gentiles, i.e. from the giants in the proper sense in which we have just taken
them15 […]. And they should have begun with metaphysics, which seeks its
proofs not in the external world but within the mind of him who meditates it.
For, since this world has certainly been made by men, it is within these modi-
fications that its principles should have been sought. And human nature, so far
as it is like that of animals, carries with it this property, that the senses are its
sole way of knowing things16.
Hence poetic wisdom, the first wisdom of the gentile world, must have begun
with a metaphysics not rational and abstract like that of learned men now, but
felt and imagined as that of the first men must have been who, without power
of ratiocination were all robust sense and vigorous imagination. This meta-
13 Ivi, 916-918.
14 This includes, of course, the three princes of natural law.
15 This is a reference to Vico’s claim that, after their renunciation of the true reli-
gion practiced by Noah, the descendents of Ham, Japhet and Noah, abandoned the
practice of marriage and lived in conditions of communal promiscuity, leading to their
failure to provide their off-spring with any form of mental and physical education, as a
result of which, for purely physical reasons after the Flood, they grew to the dispropor-
tionate size of giants.
16 Ivi, 375.