Vico and the Continuity of Science: The Relation of His Epistemology to Bacon and Hobbes

Author(s): Jeffrey Barnouw

Source: Isis, Vol. 71, No. 4 (Dec., 1980), pp. 609-620
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NOTES & CORRESPONDENCE
VICO AND THE CONTINUITY OF SCIENCE:
THE RELATION OF HIS EPISTEMOLOGY TO BACON AND HOBBES

By JeffreyBarnouw*

In his two main early works, De nostri temporis studiorum ratione (1709) and
De antiquissima Italorum sapientia (1710), Giambattista Vico presented a cri-
tique of the Cartesian foundation of science in "clear and distinct ideas"; he
proposed a contrary criterion, the verum factum, which eventually provided the
basis for his own "new science." This has often been interpreted as the renewal
of an orientation proper to humanistic learning and the civil-prudential tradition
in resistance to the encroachment of methods and modes of thought which are
supposedly appropriate only to the natural sciences. But Vico's development,
rightly understood, rather supports the view that the "new science" of the seven-
teenth century, from Galileo on, provided the crucial inspiration and model for
the formation of the human sciences and thus effected a fundamental break with
humanistic and prudential orientations. A careful reading of Vico's early works
reveals a deep commitment to the continuity of science.'
Vico's opposition to Cartesianism was not meant to limit the natural-scientific
approach to knowledge or question its value as a model for sciences of the
historical and civil world. In the first place, Vico does not regard Descartes's
proposed foundation of science as the sole authoritative such foundation in his
time, as many of his commentators do. He does not grant the Cartesian ap-
proach validity in its own sphere and then argue for separate but equal status for
a complementary idea of "human science." He meets Descartes on his own
ground and disputes his conception of science, even as applied to mathematical
physics, and he proposes a divergent conception which itself has roots in the
non-Cartesian philosophy of the scientific revolution, above all that of Francis
Bacon and Thomas Hobbes.
In the second place, like Bacon and Hobbes (and Descartes2), Vico claims
that his conception of science, derived from the mathematical, constructive, and
experimental "natural science" of the preceding century, can be carried over
into the study of socially and historically constituted realities. He recognizes the
"continuity of science" as a shared intellectual commitment that links the tri-
umph of the "new science" in the 1600s to the emergence of sciences of the
man-made world. This historical continuity of motivation or scientific attitude
means that one branch of science can borrow prestige as well as particular ap-
proaches and methods from another branch, and that, even when the branches
are to be differentiated one from the other as to their methods, the common
commitment to science as a distinct way of knowledge (as opposed to humanistic

*Department of Modem Foreign Languages and Literatures, Boston University, Boston, Massa-
chusetts 02215.
'This essay, dealing mainly with the 1710 work, is drawn from a longer paper, "Vico, Dilthey and
the Continuity of Science," presented at the Vico Congress, Venice, August 1978. A complementary
essay from the same source will treat De nostri temporis studiorum ratione and deal with contrary
interpretations of Vico's early work.
2See Robert McRae, The Problem of the Unity of the Sciences: Bacon to Kant (Toronto:
University of Toronto Press, 1961), pp. 46-67.
Isis, 1980, 71 (No. 259) 609

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610 JEFFREY BARNOUW

and civil-prudential traditions) must be maintained. For the continuity of science

also concerns the coherence of the culture.

I. THE LINKING OF OPERATIO AND RATIO IN BACON AND HOBBES

In different but essentially related ways, Bacon and Hobbes supported the con-
ception of science as a knowledge of (and by way of) efficient or productive
causes by grounding it in an active initiative mode of experience.3 This they
contrasted to a passive mode associated with naive induction, custom, and pru-
dence. Active experience is focused and formalized in experiment but has a
broader potential range, for it encompasses the various forms of social practice
otherwise governed by tradition and authority. It was through criticizing the tacit
practical framework of prevailing modes of knowledge that Bacon and Hobbes
argued for the basic importance and broad scope of the new science for human
life generally.
By integrating the mathematical and the empirical, what is known with cer-
tainty and what is known through experience, modern science undermined an
ontological distinction that had been essential to the classical idea of scientia.
The separation of a sphere of being where things were what they were by neces-
sity and thus could be known in their essence and necessarily, from a sphere of
contingency, chance, and change, where knowledge depended on custom and
conjecture and never reached beyond probability, was overridden in the scienti-
fic revolution by the idea that the gap between opinion, authority, or "proba-
bility" and knowledge-through-insight was not ontologically grounded and could
be overcome by attention to method.4
For Bacon and Hobbes the key to the new method was its deliberate orienta-
tion of thought to operation. One whose knowledge is based in passive experi-
ence is restricted to inference from given appearances or effects to possible
causes and tied to past experience in framing an idea of what is possible. One whose
knowledge is geared to operation is in a position to conclude from causes within
one's control to their effects and thus achieve certainty-rational necessity-and
acquire a new sense of possibility. Not only did the new method thereby make
experience-as undertaken rather than undergone-relevant to questions of
rational knowledge; it also made rationality newly relevant to human practice,
complementing the critique of prudence.
In the Preface to the Great Instauration Bacon writes that the received logic,
or dialectic, is "properly applied to civil business and to those arts which rest in
discourse and opinion," but "is not nearly subtle enough to deal with nature."
This would seem to imply that Bacon provided for a division of labor between
the old organon and the new, defending the emergent natural sciences from the
encroachment of an established method appropriate only to moral and civil
matters. But in the Proem Bacon claims that his Instauration would be "a total
reconstruction of sciences, arts, and all human knowledge, raised upon proper
foundations. "5

3The continuity of orientation from Bacon to Hobbes has rarely been recognized. I trace its roots
and ramifications in a forthcoming book on Bacon and Hobbes, anticipated in Jeffrey Barnouw,
"Bacon and Hobbes: The Conception of Experience in the Scientific Revolution," STTH: Science!
Technology & the Humanities, 1979, 2:92-110.
4See Ian Hacking, The Emergence of Probability (London: Cambridge University Press, 1975),
and review by J. Barnouw in Eighteenth-Century Studies, 1979, 12:438-443.
5The Works of Francis Bacon, ed. J. Spedding, R. L. Ellis, and D. D. Heath (London, 1857-
1859), Vol. IV, pp. 17, 8. For further documentation and detailed discussion see Jeffrey Barnouw,
"Active Experience vs. Wish-Fulfillment in Francis Bacon's Moral Psychology of Science," The
Philosophical Forum, 1977 (? 1978), N.S. 9:78-99.

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 VICO AND THE CONTINUITYOF SCIENCE 611

Bacon's apparent concession to the old logic does not allow that civic hu-
manism and natural philosophy may coexist, but rather sees them as opposed in
the same way that opinion or appearances are opposed to the "nature of things"
or reality. The distinction is epistemological, not ontological, and implies not
only that the old logic is deficient but also that a progression is possible from
opinion to knowledge, in whatever field of inquiry. The decisive difference
between the two logics is that Bacon refers science to operation. His logic,
unlike the old, leads to the "invention not of arguments but of arts, . . . not of
probable reasons, but of designations and directions for works." "In dealing
with the nature of things [natura reruml I use induction throughout," he writes,
"that form of demonstration which ... comes to the very brink of operation,
if it does not actually deal with it." Bacon's new form of induction will "analyse
experience and take it to pieces, and by a due process of exclusion and rejec-
tion lead to an inevitable conclusion," so that his approach only establishes
provisionally certain degrees of assurance for use and relief until the mind shall
arrive at a knowledge of causes in which it can rest."S6
To be able to demonstrate knowledge of causes requires having undertaken an
active initiative investigation of them. As the famous third aphorism of the New
Organon puts it, "Human knowledge and human power meet in one.... that
which in contemplation is as the cause is in operation as the rule." Bacon
affirms the "position that 'true knowledge is knowledge by causes,"' and asserts
that the important causes are not the immediate efficient and material causes,
but what he misleadingly calls "formal causes" or "forms": "For though in
nature nothing really exists besides individual bodies, performing pure individual
acts according to a fixed law, yet in philosophy this very law, and the investi-
gation, discovery, and explanation of it, is the foundation as well of knowledge
as of operation. And it is this law with its clauses that I mean when I speak of
forms." Interpretation of Bacon has suffered from general ignorance, or ignor-
ing, of the rational element of his logic of science grounded in operatio.7
While Bacon was critical of a "topical" orientation (from the classical topica
or commonplace arguments of Aristotle), which like "dialectic" is tied to opin-
ions, he thought that "topics" might play a subordinate role in the experimental
pursuit of scientific knowledge. This adaptation of the ancients' correlation of
topica with invention as a preliminary to judgment (critica) was taken over by
Vico, who suggested that topical (positive, given) and critical (rational, truth-
oriented) were interrelated elements within every branch of science. This is quite
different from the idea often mistakenly attributed to him, that topica and critica
characterize separate branches of knowledge.
Redefining the function of orientation to topoi or commonplaces is part of a
new conception of knowledge, one that emphasizes continuous development from
the reliance on custom, opinion, authority, appearances, and probability to
scientific knowledge. Thomas Hobbes presented a critique of prudence as part
of his conception of science and justified the extension of science into the moral,
legal, and political sphere, but he also recognized the fundamental importance of
what he called "prudence" in a broad sense, as the natural mode and matrix of
experience.
According to Hobbes's analysis of his early work, Human Nature, experience
begins with the perception that certain appearances succeed or accompany
others, which leads us instinctively to take the one as a sign of the other.
Hobbes emphasizes that such "natural signs" are only "conjectural," "their

'Works of Francis Bacon, Vol. IV, pp. 24-25, 32.

7Francis Bacon, Novum Organum, Bk. I, Aphorism 3; Bk. II, Aphorism 2 (Works of Francis
Bacon, Vol. IV, pp. 47, 119-120).

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612 JEFFREY BARNOUW

assurance is. . . never full and evident." The gap between science and "this
taking of signs by experience" or "conjecture from experience" which is pru-
dence, is that "experience concludeth nothing universally." Universality, which
distinguishes science, is a property not of things but of terms or, more properly,
of propositions. Accordingly Hobbes sees science as based in a distinct sort of
experience, the "experience men have from the proper use of names in lan-
guage." This "knowledge of the truth of propositions, ... derived from under-
standing," is later crucial to Vico's early conception of science.8
Hobbes here construes the transition from prudence to science in terms of the
integration of artificial sign relations into the positive (and conjecturally ex-
tended) knowledge of natural sign relations. Science combines the truth that is
proper to propositions, or the relations of terms, with "evidence" or a grasp of
the meaning of terms that is rooted ultimately in sense experience. In this sense
science can be defined as "evidence of truth, from some beginning or principle
of sense: for the truth of a proposition is never evident, until we conceive the
meaning of the words or terms whereof it consisteth, which are always concep-
tions of the mind: nor can we remember those conceptions without the thing
that produced the same by our senses." As "evidence of truth," science (also
referred to here as "sapience" or "wisdom") is accordingly contrasted with
prudence, now defined as "experience of fact," but the former is also necessarily
based in the latter. As Hobbes writes in Leviathan, the use of artificial signs and
the unequivocal understanding of them make it possible to "turn the reckoning
of the consequences of things imagined in the mind, into a reckoning of the
consequences of appellations," or rational knowledge.9
The passive and past-oriented character of prudence can at the same time be
transformed by active initiative. The "natural sign" relations which are taken
from or by experience remain conjectural because they involve inferred causal
connections. Hobbes contrasts the inference from given effect to possible (con-
jectural) cause with the contrary way of concluding from cause to possible
(producible) effect, and thus construes the transition from prudence to science in
ter-ms of a rotation of the causal axis presupposed by experience, so as to bring
about a conscious correlation of cause-and-effect with means-and-end relations.
Being able to reorient experience from a prudential to an experimental cast
gives us the insight into causality (causes within our power) that founds a
knowledge no longer conjectural, but demonstrative, necessary, and universal.'0
The operational conception of science converges with the conception of science
as "evidence of truth"-the rational understanding of propositions whose mean-
ing is secured by conventional (agreed upon) definition-when Hobbes explains
that reason is not "born with us; nor gotten by experience only, as prudence is;
but attained by industry; first in apt imposing of names; and secondly by getting
a good and orderly method" to reckon consequences. "Science is the knowledge
of consequences, and dependence of one fact upon another; by which, out of
that we can presently do, we know how to do something else when we will."'"I

8
The English Works of Thomas Hobbes, ed. W. Molesworth (London, 1839-1845), Vol. IV,
pp. 17-18, 27. The more recent edition of Human Nature in Hobbes, The Elements of Law Natural
and Politic, ed. Ferdinand Tonnies (London, 1889), pp. 16, 24, reads rather: "this taking of signs
from experience," and "the experience men have of the proper use of names in language."
9Hobbes, Human Nature, Ch. 6, ?4 (English Works, Vol. IV, pp. 28-29); Thomas Hobbes,
Leviathan, Ch. 4 (English Works, Vol. III, p. 21). For the identification of science with sapience (as
contrasted with prudence) see also Leviathan, Ch. 5 (English Works, Vol. III, p. 37). Cf. Vico, De
nostri temporis studiorum ratione, Ch. 7 (cit. n. 17 below).
'?Hobbes, Leviathan, Ch. 3 (English Works, Vol. III, p. 13).
"Hobbes, Leviathan, Ch. 5 (English Works, Vol. III, p. 35). In De cive, Ch. 17, ?28 (translated
as Philosophical Rudiments concerning Government and Society in English Works, Vol. II, pp.

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 VICO AND THE CONTINUITYOF SCIENCE 613

In this brief discussion of Hobbes the most obviously relevant feature of his
theory of science has yet to be mentioned, his reliance on geometry as the
model science, "the only science that it hath pleased God hitherto to bestow on
mankind." '2 A previous study linking Hobbes and Vico with respect to "making
and knowing" found the principal strands of the problem included in a single
passage:

Of arts, some are demonstrable,others indemonstrable;and demonstrableare those

the constructionof the subject whereof is in the power of the artisthimself,who, in
his demonstration,does no more but deduce the consequencesof his own operation.
The reason whereof is this, that the science of every subject is derived from a
precognition of the causes, generation, and constructionof the same; and con-
sequently where the causes are known, there is a place for demonstration,but not
where the causes are to seek for. Geometrythereforeis demonstrable,for the lines
and figures from which we reason are drawn and describedby ourselves;and civil
philosophy is demonstrable, because we make the commonwealthourselves. But
because of naturalbodies we know not the construction,but seek it from the effects,
there lies no demonstrationof what the causes be we seek for, but only of what they
may be.13

In the present context we cannot and need not go into the Hobbesian concep-
tion of civil law and sovereignty, according to which "we ourselves make the
principles-that is, the causes of justice (namely laws and covenants)-whereby
it is known what justice and equity are."'4 But it is worth noting that geometry
provides a model for civil order (as it does in a different way for other sciences)
not because it is purely formal and self-contained, but because it begins from
definitions and principles to which all can agree. The axioms of geometry are
universally accepted because they are not "contrary to any man's right of
dominion, or to the interest of men that have dominion."'5 The idea that we

295-296), Hobbes writes that in "questions of human science, whose truth is sought out by natural
reason and syllogisms, drawn from the covenants of men, and definitions, that is to say, signifi-
cations received by use and common consent of words, . . . truth therefore depends on the compacts
and consents of men." In Leviathan, Ch. 5 (English Works, Vol. III, p. J) the emphasis is on
rendering precise and unambiguous what is accepted or agreed upon: "the light of human minds is
perspicuous words, but by exact definitions first snuffed, and purged from ambiguity."
12Hobbes, Leviathan, Ch. 4 (English Works, Vol. III, p. 23).
13Thomas Hobbes, "The Epistle Dedicatory," Six Lessons to the Professors of the Mathematics
(English Works, Vol. III, pp. 183-184), also quoted in Arthur Child, "Making and Knowing in
Hobbes, Vico, and Dewey," University of California Publications on Philosophy, 1953, 16:271-310, on
pp. 271-272. Child writes that his "paper originated in part from the quotation of this passage by
M. H. Fisch in the introduction to his translation, with T. G. Bergin, of The Autobiography of Giambattista
Vico (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1944), pp. 40f." In turn I am indebted to Child and Fisch.
14Thomas Hobbes, De homine, Ch. 10, ?5, translated in Hobbes, Man and Citizen, ed. Bernard
Gert (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday Anchor, 1972), p. 42. The whole of ??4 and 5 is relevant here,
particularly the distinction of "truth of consequences" (scientia) from "truth of fact" (cognitio),
which leads to a distinction between a priori and a posteriori demonstration. The former is possible
"only of those things whose generation depends on the will of men themselves," such as geometry or
"politics and ethics," whereas the latter must serve in physics, a "mixed mathematical" science in
which nothing can be demonstrated a posteriori (from knowledge of fact) "without something also
being demonstrated a priori."
"5Hobbes, Leviathan, Ch. 11 (English Works, Vol. III, p. 91). Compare this passage on geomet-
rical truth "as a thing that crosses no man's ambition, profit or lust" to the invidious contrast made
between geometricians and moral philosophers in the dedicatory letter of De cive (trans. in English
Works, Vol. III, p. iv): "If the moral philosophers had as happily discharged their duty [as have
geometers], I know not what could have been added by human industry to the completion of that
happiness which is consistent with human life. For were the nature of human actions as distinctly known
as the nature of quantity in geometrical figures, the strength of avarice and ambition, which is sustained
by the erroneous opinions of the vulgar as touching the nature of right and wrong, would presently faint
and languish." See also De corpore, Ch. 6, ?16 (trans. in English Works, Vol. I, pp. 86-87).

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614 JEFFREY BARNOUW

might attempt an analogous indifference to conflicting wills and interests in

determining the principles of civil participation-where common understanding
of the law is essential to its rationality or justice-became a key idea for Vico as
well. This paper, however, concentrates on Vico's conception of rationality or
truth in science and its foundation in various forms of human making.

II. THE LINKINGOF FACTUM AND VERUM IN VICO

In De nostri temporis studiorum ratione Vico compares the methodological

orientations of the classical and the modern intellectual world, explicitly ex-
tending and modifying Bacon's survey. He is particularly concerned to see what
advantages of the ancients' system of arts and sciences might have been sacri-
ficed in the progress of modern science, and whether these might be recovered
or compensated for without detriment to the modern critica.
Vico's partial endorsement of the classical recourse to topica, which contrasts
with the modern "critical" predisposition, must be understood as a function of
his pedagogical focus, that is, his concern with the nurture of young minds whose
progress should recapitulate the cultural development that led from antiquity to
modernity. Many scholars, particularly in Germany, read this text incorrectly as
calling for a rehabilitation of classical practical philosophy as the basis of
emerging humanistic disciplines.'6 But Vico does not identify critica exclusively
with natural-scientific approaches, nor advocate topica as an approach for mo-
dern human science. His conception of the civil order here, far from favoring a
return to the Aristotelian distinction between theoretical and practical cognition,
seeks precisely to orient practice flexibly to universal rational ideas, to the true,
to justice in the moderate modern form of civil equity.17 It is not the prudentia
of the classical republic that Vico claims as a model for modern civil life, but the
jurisprudentia of the popular monarchy of later Rome, an orientation that places
Vico in the line of political thinkers that leads from Hobbes to Montesquieu
and Hume.18
What is most important for the present question is that Vico believes that
early encouragement of imagination would further, not hinder, the predominant
cultural pursuit of rational truth. Just as "the goal which today is most particu-

'6See, e.g., Hans-Georg Gadamer, Wahrheit und Methode (Tubingen: Mohr, 1960; 4th ed. 1975),
pp. 16-21; Karl-Otto Apel, Die Idee der Sprache in der Tradition des Humanismus von Dante bis
Vico (Bonn: Bouvier, 1963), pp. 103, 327-329, 336-344; and Jurgen Habermas, Theorie und Praxis
(Neuwied: Luchterhand, 1963), pp. 16-18, 42n., 45-46, 50. All three see Vico as renewing the
Aristotelian conception of phronesis (prudentia) in its opposition to sophia (scientia) as a means of
opposing Bacon and/or Hobbes. See also Ferdinand Fellmann, Das Vico-Axiom: Der Mensch macht
die Geschichte (Freiburg: Alber, 1976), pp. 17, 34-35, 55, 167, rev. by J. Bamouw in The
Eighteenth Century: A Current Bibliography, 1978, N.S. 4.
'7See Jeffrey Barnouw, "The Relation between the Certain and the True in Vico's Pragmatist
Construction of Human History," Comparative Literature Studies, 1978, 15:242-264. Vico draws on
Nichomachean Ethics 1137b for his conception of equity, but he elaborates it in a framework that
reverses Aristotle's separation of practical knowledge and science by correlating equity with a
procedure characteristic of modem empirical science. In De nostri temporis studiorum ratione, (Ch. 7,
he transforms the opposition between science and prudence by introducing sapientia as the most
adequate approach in the practical sphere. It is the second of Vico's four practical types, the astute
but unread man, who in effect relies on prudence, while the fourth type, the man of sapientia, orients
himself to general truth (of which prudence is incapable), but approaches it indirectly and flexibly.
In the German translation by Walter F. Otto, Vom Wesen und Weg der geistigen Bildung (Godesberg,
1947), p. 61, the distinction between prudentia and sapientia is obliterated when both are rendered as
Klugheit (prudence), a mistake that has misled those who see Vico as working for a rehabilitation of
classical practical philosophy, e.g., Habermas, Theorie, p. 17.
'8See Jeffrey Barnouw, "The Critique of Classical Republicanism and the Understanding of
Modern Forms of Polity in Vico's New Science," Clio, 1980, 9(3), in press.

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 VICO AND THE CONTINUITYOF SCIENCE 615

larly pursued, i.e. ideal or universal truth, is exceedingly beneficial to poetry,"

so conversely cultivation of imagination provides a basis for the critical or
rational capacity. It was for this reason, he says, that the Greeks trained youths
in logic by means of geometry, "which cannot be grasped without a vivid
capacity to form images."'9
This conviction leads Vico to oppose the analytic geometry of Descartes, as
had both Hobbes and Newton's teacher Isaac Barrow, because it isolates mathe-
matics from the concrete sphere of sensuous imagination, of evidence.20 Vico
objects to Cartesian analysis because its abstract quality hampers not only
education but science. He denies that the new form given to geometry by Des-
cartes played a role in the scientific and technological breakthroughs of the
seventeenth century. He claims in fact that analysis leads to failure in practical
application, a Baconian criterion already turned against Descartes by Leibniz.
Vico's disparagement of Descartes is thus perfectly consistent with his enthusi-
asm for the role of geometry and geometric method in leading to new inventions
and to advances in mechanics. It is patently wrong, though still common in Vico
studies, to identify critica with Cartesian tendencies exclusively and geometrical
method with analysis. Vico opposes Descartes because he sees that founding
science in the cogito in effect undermines its basis-not only its progressivity and
practical applicability, but its very rationality.
Central to Vico's understanding of science is his Baconian emphasis on the
interdependence of the empirical and the rational, his Hobbesian conception
that the operational and constructive aspects of science are integrated:

Let us leave aside the question whether geometry has undergonegreater develop-
ment by means of "analysis,"and whethermodern mechanicsconstitutessomething
new. What cannot be denied is the fact that leading investigatorshave availableto
them a science enriched by a number of new and extremelyingeniousdiscoveries.
Modern scientists, seeking for guidancein their explorationof the dark pathwaysof
nature, have introducedthe geometricalmethod into physics.Holdingto this method
as to Ariadne's thread, they can reach the end of their appointedjourney. Do not
consider them as gropingpractitionersof physics:they are to be viewed, instead, as
the grand architects of this limitless fabric of the world: able to give a detailed
account of the ensemble of principlesaccordingto which God has built this admir-
able structureof the cosmos.21

The fact that the geometrical method has been introduced into physics is far
more significant for Vico than the epistemological difference between geometry

19I quote De nostri temporis studiorum ratione from the loose translation by Elio Gianturco, On
the Study Methods of Our Time (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1965), p. 14.
20Gianturco, in his notes to Study Methods, p. 27, refers to Carl B. Boyer, History of the Calculus
and its Conceptual Development (New York: Dover, 1959), p. 175, on Hobbes and Barrow as
opponents of the "arithmetization of mathematics." Boyer--recognizes the connection of this ten-
dency in Hobbes with the physical application of the Hobbesian conception of conatus, which
influenced the -subsequent development of the calculus. That Vico shared Hobbes's misgivings is
clear from a passage in his Autobiography (cit. n. 13), p. 125: "So perception is striken by algebra,
for algebra sees only what is right under its eyes; memory is confounded, since when the second sign
is found algebra pays no further attention to the first; imagination goes blind because algebra has no
need of images; understanding is destroyed because algebra professes to divine." In discussing
"blind" or "symbolic" thinking, Leibniz argued on the contrary that it could be advantageous for
thinking to be able to proceed without concern for the meaning or even meaningfulness of the signs
it was using. See Marcelo Dascal, "Quelques fonctions des signes et du langage d'apres Leibniz et
ses contemporains," in Akten des II. Internationalen Leibniz-Kongresses, (Studia leibnitiana, suppl.
15), Vol. IV (Wiesbaden: Steiner, 1975), pp. 239-255, and review by J. Barnouw in Eighteenth-
Century Studies, 1979, 12:433-438.
21ViCo, Study Methods, pp. 9-10.

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616 JEFFREY BARNOUW

and physics. The passage echoes the Baconian contrast of mere empirics, preoc-
cupied with singular empirical causes and immediate effects, to those metaphy-
sicians in a good sense, who are concerned with the formal causes, the structure
and laws, of the universe. This perception is consistent with Vico's recognition
that the truths brought out in physics by the geometrical method are never more than
probable. Hobbes had maintained the same tenet in the last part of De corpore,
while justifying physics as a science. Vico's enthusiasm for science is also consis-
tent with the counsel he derives from the ineradicably conjectural character of
physics, that we should be content to study it "as philosophers, that is, curbing
our presumption," and even-a distinctly Baconian note-"cultivate the study of
physics in order to curb our pride."22
In the course of this argument Vico states what has since been seen as the
nucleus of his epistemological principle: "We demonstrate geometry because we
make it; if we could demonstrate physics, we would make it," that is, make the
natural world. Vico quotes this sentence from himself the following year in De
antiquissima Italorum sapientia, where he elaborates it in a context that seems
predestined to heighten his reputation for obscurity.23 But Vico's ideas are not
obscure once we lay them out.
Vico first distinguishes cogitatio, which is characteristic of human knowledge,
from the intelligentia that we attribute to God. Pursuing his etymological bent,
he emphasizes the root meaning legere, "to read," in construing intelligere as
perfecte legere, and he points to the sign relation that links words to ideas, ideas
to things, which makes reading a way of knowing, when one knows the lan-
guage. Intelligere is the Latin equivalent of Hobbes's "understanding"; it was
used by Leibniz in the same sense, in a context that underlines its link with
operatio.24 By contrast, cogitare suggests for Vico an ongoing process of gather-
ing, andar racogliendo, open-ended and inductive, whereas intelligere (cf. colli-
gere, collect) implies a bringing together of all elements. Man is thus said to
participate in reason, not to possess it completely. It is as if he had to interpret
a text while discovering or learning its language.
The definition of the true as that which one knows by having made it is first
used here to characterize the divine capacity of intuitive understanding or intel-
ligentia. God contains and controls the elements, internal as well as outward, of
all things, whereas the human mind, finite and external to things, can never
comprehend the whole. But this contrast also implies a parallel. God knows
(cognoscit) because he creates and disposes; man knows (novit) because he
makes and composes. The active component of human knowing is the key to
man's participation in the divine form of cognition, intelligere.
Science essentially includes knowledge of how its object is constituted or came
to be, knowledge that God possesses wholly and intimately, man partially and

22lbid., p. 23.
23Translations of De antiqluissimaItalormmsapientia are soon to be published in German (Munich:
Fink) and English (Ithaca: Cornell University Press), but I have coped with the Latin text (Giam-
battista Vico, Opere filosofiche, ed. Paolo Cristofolini, Florence: Sansoni, 1971), aided by Cristo-
folini's Italian translation and Jules Michelet's French version (De l'antique sagesse de l'ltalie, in
Oeuvres choisies de Vico, Paris: Flammarion, 1894, pp. 211-280).
24In an early text, Definitio justitiae universalis, Leibniz defined pernoscere (which he equated with
intelligere): "Pernoscere est nosse, quid res agere aut pati possit. Scilicet tum per se, tum cum aliis
combinata. Haec vera notitia practica est. Theorema enim est propter problema. Scientia propter
operationem." Adolf Trendelenburg, who first published this text (which Vico could not have
known), remarked that its source was Hobbes, De corpore, Ch. 1 [?6]. See Vittorio Mathieu,
"Wissenschaft und Wirksamkeit bei Leibniz," in Akten des II. Leibniz-Kongresses (cit. n. 20),
pp. 147-155. This conception of understanding as based in operation is historically linked to an idea
of understanding takes on a hermeneutic cast, as I hope to show in a later essay.

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 VICOANDTHECONTINUITY
OFSCIENCE 617

by way of externals. Human truth is not a paradox but simply a limited reality,
the assurance of which depends on an awareness and observance of its limits. Or
even on turning those limitations to advantage, which man does when he creates
for himself two fictions: the dimensionless point, which can nonetheless be
represented, and the unit which can be multiplied. On the basis of these two
artificial terms man has founded a world of forms and numbers which he is able
to comprehend in its entirety.
Like Hobbes, Vico insists on the actively constructive aspect of the foundation
of this "world" of geometry and arithmetic: not only its problems, but its very
theorems present a task involving operatio, where people commonly but mis-
takenly think it a matter of contemplatio. In effect, man cast himself in the
image of God the creator by turning what had been tokens of the deficiency of
his knowledge into a strength or virtue.
Vico's summation of this development is revealing: since man is not capable
of grasping the natural elements from which things derive their reality, he
creates for himself the elements of words, from which ideas are called forth
without controversy.25 The influence of Hobbes, perhaps mediated or reinforced
by Leibniz, is evident here too, as it is where Vico says that science does not
divide men in the way that opinion gives rise to sects.26 He relates this freedom
from controversy to what he says was customary Roman usage, equating ques-
tions of name and of definition. To seek the definition was to determine what
the word called forth "in the common mind of men."
The implicit linguistic character of this verum factum-truth through making-
model of knowing now reveals an Ockhamist-conceptualist aspect. The capacity
for fictions and artificial signs, a mark of inadequacy when measured against the
intimacy and immediacy of divine knowledge, provides the key to a conception
of distinctly human scientific knowledge. Reference to a divine model of intelli-
gentia no longer sets a standard or limit for man's science, beyond the bare idea
of knowing the truth which one has oneself produced.
It is this affirmative, even celebratory, conception of modern science that Vico
undertakes to defend against the attacks of skeptics and dogmatists. Here is the
context of his critique of Cartesian epistemology. Descartes is for him repre-
sentative, not of a revolutionary yet overweening natural-scientific consciousness,
but rather of a dogmatist position intimately linked with skepticism and itself a
danger to the informing attitude of modern science. In this sense he opposes his
verum factum principle to the "clear and distinct ideas in the mind" which
Descartes had claimed to be the criterion of scientific knowledge. The "clear
and distinct idea" fails not only as a criterion of the true, Vico argues, but as a
criterion of rational self-consciousness, since the mind, in knowing itself, does
not make itself and cannot know how it is itself constituted. He expands this
point into a critique of the metaphysics based on Descartes's cogito ergo sum.
The cogito as self-awareness is not scientia but merely conscientia, knowledge by
acquaintance or mere certitude (certum), and it cannot provide the grounds for
any demonstrative truth, about the thinking self or the world.27
The skeptic agrees in this critique of dogmatism, of the pretended first truth
of immediate self-awareness in the cogito, and therefore the only way to over-
come the skeptic is to locate the criterion of the true in having made it oneself.
The certainty of consciousness itself (conscientia) must be secured in and through
objective knowledge, that is, knowledge which is objective for being part of, not

25Vico, De sapientia, Ch. 1, Sects. 1 and 2 (Opere filosofiche, pp. 63, 67, 69).
26Vico, De sapientia, Ch. 4, Sect. 2 (Opere filosofiche, p. 93).
27Vico, De sapientia, Ch. 1, Sect. 3 and 4 (Opere filosofiche, pp. 73, 75).

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618 JEFFREY BARNOUW

apart from, our effectual practical involvement with the world. The constitutive
reliance on operatio marks the difference between a Hobbesian conception of
understanding (intellectio) and the self-evidence claimed for ideas in the dis-
engaged Cartesian cogito.
Vico repeats from his 1709 work the critique of Cartesian analysis, that,
unlike geometry, it is uncertain in its practical application. He follows Bacon in
seeing a model for science in those arts which aim at an end which they them-
selves have proposed, because they start from principles contained in the mind
that show how something is made or done, whereas rhetoric, politics, and
medicine remain "conjectural arts." Furthermore, those arts and sciences that
are not rooted in forms contained in men's minds tend, as Bacon also suggested,
toward self-inflation and uselessness. For the same reason Vico rejects Aris-
totelian physics as abstract and universal, while he praises the operationally
constituted physics of the moderns for being guided by the experimental pro-
duction of effects that correspond to the particular workings of nature. He then
compares, strikingly, the methodological orientation of empirical natural science
to that of the jurist who is able to discern the special circumstances of fact that
determine when an exception must be made for the sake of equity, and, further,
to that of the historian who, untempted by either a compendium of facts or
sweeping general causes, pursues the facts to their last consequences and par-
ticular causes.28
Vico extends his verum factum principle to physics not only because physics is
integrated with mathematical reasoning, but also because experimentation con-
nects physics with the technical and creative arts. In the third chapter, "On
Causes," Vico says, "If the true is the made, then to prove or try [probare] by
causes is to make or bring about [efficere] and thus cause and activity [negocium]
are the same thing, namely, operation, and the made and the true are the same
thing, namely, the effect." The continuity here with Bacon and Hobbes is un-
mistakable.
Vico goes so far as to offer an adaptation of the conception of the subjectivity
of sensation, variously elaborated by Galileo, Descartes, and Hobbes, according
to which we create the objects of sense in sensing.29 This notion extends into the
creativity of imagination: because it produces the images of things, phantasia is
extravagantly claimed to be a "most certain faculty." The intellect itself, finally,
is seen as "the faculty by which in understanding [intelligere] something we make
it true." This ability is exemplified primarily by arithmetic and geometry, but
Vico also generalizes: "Man, directing [intendendo] his mind to things, engen-
ders their modes and images and human truth."

28ViCo, De sapientia, Ch. 2 (Opere filosofiche, pp. 77, 79).

29Vico, De sapientia, Ch. 7, Sect. 1 (Opere filosofiche, p. 113). In Letter 26 of On the Aesthetic
Education of Man, trans. R. Snell (New York: Ungar, 1965), p. 125, Friedrich Schiller wrote, "The
reality of things is the work [Werk, creation] of things, the appearance of things is the work of
Man." He was extending a Kantian motif and turning it against Kant, who rather emphasized the
passivity of sense and the active constructive aspect of the understanding. In Section 7 of his
Anthropology Kant writes that "we understand [verstehen] (according to its form) strictly only what
we can make, given the necessary matter, and thus the understanding is a faculty of spontaneity in
our cognition . . . because it submits representation to certain a priori rules and even makes
experience possible." See Jeffrey Barnouw, "The Morality of the Sublime: Kant and Schiller,"
Studies in Romanticism, 1980, 19, in press, where it is argued that Schiller sets transcendental
idealism "back on its feet" by grounding it in empirical psychology. When Friedrich H. Jacobi first
linked Vico with Kant in 1811-quoting De sapientia: "we demonstrate geometry because we make
it; if we could demonstrate physics, we would make it"-he was mainly interested in the phenomen-
alism he thought he saw there and its implication for fideism. Vico, on the contrary, like Hobbes
(and Schiller) brings out the subject's active involvement in sense or appearance in order to secure
the continuity from "phenomena" to reality. See Jeffrey Barnouw, "Hobbes's Causal Account of
Sensation," Journal of the History of Philosophy, 1980, 18:1-17.

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 VICO AND THE CONTINUITYOF SCIENCE 619

The subjective idealism suggested by these last claims may seem to sort ill
with the operationalist anchoring of knowledge that Vico turned against Des-
cartes. In The New Science Vico carries over the idea that sensation creates its
own objects, together with the telling etymology of the "ol-factory" sense, when
he characterizes the vividness of sensing in the heroic age. The idea is thus part
of the developmental approach epitomized by the aphorism homo non intelli-
gendo fit omnia, an imaginative so-called metaphysics in which early man "made
of himself an entire world" by lack of understanding, by anthropomorphic
reduction and projection.30 In The New Science, then, the element of subjective
idealism is linked strictly with conscientia and "the certain," as opposed to (but
also preparing the way for) a grasp of things according to "the true." The denial
of divine intelligentia to "natural" man and the (now gradual) reversal of this
deficiency into an efficacy have taken on a new disposition and meaning: they
are now the terms by which humanity produces itself through its civil history.
Vico anticipates The New Science in De antiquissima Italorum sapientia, and he
suggests that the heroic non intellegendo may lead to knowledge secured through
operation, when he defines ingenium, the proper faculty of knowing (sciendi), as
the capacity of contemplating an object and then making an object like it
(faciendi similia). Beyond connecting ingenium as "wit" with a capacity for
bringing together disparate things, as in simile and metaphor, Vico understands
this capacity as social mimesis, the inborn tendency to imitate, which is a source
of sociability. "Thus the similitude of customs gives rise to common sense in the
nations," that is, common sense is originally contained in the community of
customs, brought forth and carried forward by human activity, but not by
conscious intention. This idea leads into the heart of Vico's new science.
In the conclusion Vico says that he has presented a metaphysics which sup-
ports experimental physics by teaching us to see as true in nature whatever we
can imitate by experiment (simile . faciamus).31 His astute appreciation of
natural science and his sense of solidarity with it in his own new science have largely
been obscured, however, by exaggerated attention to such rhetorical passages in
The New Science as the following:

But in the night of thick darknessenvelopingthe earliest antiquity,so remote from

ourselves, there shines the eternal and never failing light of a truth beyond all
question: that the world of civil society has certainlybeen made by men, and that its
principles are therefore to be found within the modificationsof our own human
mind. Whoever reflects on this cannot but marvelthat the philosophersshould have
bent all their energies to the study of the worldof nature,which, since God made it,
He alone knows; and that they should have neglected the study of the world of
nations, or civil world, which, since men had made it, men could come to know.32

Here the making was not deliberate, the principles not conscious ones, and the
men who made the civil world to begin with are not the same as those who are
to gain knowledge (scienza) of it. The verum factum principle has been extended
metaphorically, and it would require a separate essay to inquire into the trans-
formation and into the meaning and validity of the principle in its new form.
Vico nevertheless saw a continuity from his earlier writing. In The New
Science he elaborates on the verum factum principle and its corollary, that
"history cannot be made more certain than when he who creates the things also

30Giambattista Vico, The New Science of Giambattista Vico, trans. Thomas G. Bergin and Max H.
Fisch (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1968), ?405, p. 130; ?706, pp. 266-267; cf. Vico, De
sapientia, Ch. 7, Sect. 1 (Opere filosofiche, p. 113).
3'Vico, De sapientia, Ch. 7, Sect. 5, Conclusion (Opere filosofiche, pp. 123, 131).
32Vico, New Science, ?331, p. 96.

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620 JEFFREY BARNOUW

narrates them." Here "creation" refers to the constructive activity of the his-
torian, construing the givens according to "an ideal eternal history," as much as
to the original conjectured making of that civil world. The rationality of history,
which derives from the historian's act of construction or interpretation (and is
thus rooted in his awareness and analysis of the modifications of the human
mind), offers a close analogy, then, to the science of physics and its use of
mathematical thinking: "Now, as geometry, when it constructs the world of
quantity out of its elements, or contemplates that world, is creating it for itself,
just so does our Science, but with a reality greater by just so much as the
institutions having to do with human affairs are more real than points, lines,
surfaces, and figures are."33 Geometry should not be compared with the reality
of history, however, but with the ideal history, the pure construction that allows
the historian to construe the real, as the natural science "makes" nature rational.
Much has been done recently, and much more remains to be done, to under-
stand Vico's "new science" as a science. Further study of the emergent human
sciences in general may build on the insights gained from close reading of his
earlier writings, links themselves in the continuity of science.

33Ibid., ?349, pp. 104-105.

THE STUDENTS OF IRA REMSEN AND ROGER ADAMS

By D. S. Tarbell,* Ann T. Tarbell,* and R. M. Joyce**

The flowering of organic chemistry in
the United States was profoundly in-
fluenced by two men and the chemistry
departments they headed. Ira Remsen
organized the department at Johns Hop-
kins from the year that Hopkins opened,
1876, to 1913. Roger Adams came to the
University of Illinois in 1916 and was
head of the chemistry department from
1926 to 1954. Both men created depart-
ments that were the outstanding ones of
their time in the United States. Both
made significant contributions to the
publication of chemical research: Rem-
sen founded and edited the Anmerican
Chentical Journal (1879-1913), and
Adams founded and was the driving
force behind Organic Syntheses and Or-
ganic Reactions. Both men were out-
standing teachers who trained their re-
search students as careful experimen-
talists and had the faculty of inspiring in
them an intense interest in chemistry and
a desire to contribute to the science.
*
Department of Chemistry, Vanderbilt Univer-
sity, Nashville, Tennessee 37215.
**Du Pont Co., now retired; RD 1, Box 86,
Hockessin, Delaware 19707.
Isis, 1980, 71 (No. 259)
Here the similarity between the two
ended. 1
Remsen was an unimaginative admin-
istrator; he lacked the breadth of vision
to advance his department, and his con-
tributions to chemistry were conven-
tional and not very original.2 Of great
' For background on chemistry in the country in
1876, see D. S. Tarbell, "Organic Chemistry: The
Past 100 Years," Chenmicaland Engineering News,
1976, 54(15):110-123; D. S. and A. T. Tarbell,
"Remsen Revisited" (paper delivered at the An-
nual Meeting of the American Chemical Society,
Chicago, September 1975); A. J. Ihde, "European
Tradition in 19th 'Century American Chemistry,"
Journal of ChenmicalEducation, 1976, 53:741-744.
For an account of chemistry professors in England
and Germany, see J. B. Morrell, "The Chemist
Breeders: The Research Schools of Liebig and
Thomas Thomson," Anmbix,1972, 19:1-46.
2For early years of Hopkins and Remsen, see
Hugh Hawkins, Pioneer: A History of the Johns
Hopkins University, 1874-1889 (Ithaca, N.Y.:
Cornell University Press, 1960); Burton J. Hen-
drick, The Training of an Anmerican:The Earlier
Life and Letters of Walter H. Page, 1855-1913
(Boston/New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1928), pp.
68- 90. On Remsen's career, see W. A. Noyes and
J. F. Norris, Biographical Menmoirs,National Acad-
enmyof Sciences, 1932, 14:205; Owen Hannaway,
"The German Model of Chemical Education in
America: Ira Remsen at Johns Hopkins (1876-

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