Language, necessarily anthropomorphic, mythopeic,
engenders thought. "Poetic wisdom, which was the primitive wisdom of
paganism," says Vico in his _Scienza Nuova_, "must have begun with a
metaphysic, not reasoned and abstract, like that of modern educated men,
but felt and imagined, such as must have been that of primitive men.
This was their own poetry, which with them was inborn, an innate
faculty, for nature had furnished them with such feelings and such
imaginations, a faculty born of the ignorance of causes, and therefore
begetting a universal sense of wonder, for knowing nothing they
marvelled greatly at everything. This poetry had a divine origin, for,
while they invented the causes of things out of their own imagination,
at the same time they regarded these causes with feelings of wonder as
gods. In this way the first men of the pagan peoples, as children of the
growing human race, fashioned things out of their ideas.... This nature
of human things has bequeathed that eternal property which Tacitus
elucidated with a fine phrase when he said, not without reason, that men
in their terror _fingunt simul creduntque_."
And then, passing from the age of imagination, Vico proceeds to show us
the age of reason, this age of ours in which the mind, even the popular
mind, is too remote from the senses, "with so many abstractions of which
all languages are full," an age in which "the ability to conceive an
immense image of such a personage as we call sympathetic Nature is
denied to us, for though the phrase 'Dame Nature' may be on our lips,
there is nothing in our minds that corresponds with it, our minds being
occupied with the false, the non-existent.
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