vital germ of the conception of the human race as an organism, studied and explained in the same manner that one studies and explains any organic compound, thanks to the increased acquaintance with life, may be found not only in the Scienza Nuova, but also in the Latin works of Vico, especially in chapter twelve of De Constantia Philologiae.[1] The merits of Vico may be summed up in two principal conceptions: he has demonstrated a law, uniform and general, according to which the course of human and historical facts proceeds, and has therefore used a method not simply historical but historico-psychological, thus distinguishing himself from both the theologians and the idealists.
For Vico the human race is the genus homo, a single genus, not on account of its arising from a single or multiple original stock, but on account of a common and identical nature. This is the scientific part of the great Darwinian epic, that is, the communis natura between the lower animals and man; and it is one of the more original ideas of La Scienza Nuova. This work presents, therefore, the genesis of the historical and the sociological process, and the problem of La Scienza Nuova is the same as that which is discussed in the works of Lamarck, Cuvier, Geoffroy de Saint-Hilaire, Herbert, Matthew, d'Amalius, d'Halay, Rafineique, Schaffhausen, and Hooker; that is, the problem of basing sociological principles upon the principles of anthropology, or humanity, as they were called in the time of Vico. But what value to the mind of Vico had these principles of humanity? "Whoever wishes to know them, must study the natural history of man, and he will then see that two sciences essentially practical lift themselves above all others: Law and Morals. Two great powers divide the kingdom of laws, the political and the religious; personified in state and church, and which are constantly at war with each other. The struggle increases when the third power, science, enters the field. Vico saw this battle and making use of philology, of mythology and of comparative legislation tried to demonstrate historically that
- ↑ Siciliani Socialismo Darwinismo So i legia moderna. ed. 1885, p. 5.
