With these observations Vico justified and at the same time corrected the opinion of Plato in the _Republic,_ denying to Homer wisdom, every kind of wisdom; the legislative of Lycurgus and Solon, the philosophic of Thales, Anacharsis and Pythagoras, the strategic of military commanders.[11] To Homer (he says) belongs wisdom, undoubtedly, but poetic wisdom only: the Homeric images and comparisons derived from wild beasts and the elements of savage nature are incomparable; but "such success does not spring from talent imbued with domesticity and civilized with any philosophy."[12]
When anybody takes to writing poetry in an era of reflexion, it is because he is returning to childhood and "putting his mind in fetters"; no longer reflecting with his intellect, he follows imagination and loses himself in the particular. If a true poet dallies with philosophical ideas, it is not "that he may assimilate them and dismiss imagination," but merely "that he may have them in front of him, to examine as though on a stage or public platform."[13] The New Comedy which made its appearance after Socrates is undeniably impregnated with philosophic ideas, with intellectual universals, with "intelligible kinds of human conduct"; but its authors were poets in so far only as they knew how to transform logic into imagination and their ideas into portraits.[14]
The dividing line between art and science, imagination and intellect, is here very strongly drawn: the two distinct activities are repeatedly contrasted with a sharpness that leaves no room for confusion. The line of demarcation between poetry and history is hardly less firm. While not quoting Aristotle's passage, Vico implicitly shows why poetry seemed to Aristotle more philosophical than history, and at the same time he dispels the erroneous opinion that history concerns the particular and poetry the universal. Poetry joins hands with science not because it consists in the contemplation of concepts but because, like science, it is ideal. The most beautiful poetic story must be "wholly ideal": "by means of idea, the poet breathes reality into things otherwise unreal; masters of poetry claim that their art must be wholly compact of imagination, like a painter of the ideal, not imitative like a portrait-painter: whence, from their likeness to God the Creator, poets and painters alike are called divine."[15] And against those who blame poets for telling stories which, they say, are untrue, Vico protests: "The best stories are those approximating most nearly to ideal truth, the eternal truth of God: it is immeasurably more certain than the truth of historians who often bring into play caprice, necessity or fortune; but such a Captain as, for instance, Tasso's Godfrey is the type of a captain of all times, of all nations, and so are all personages of poetry, whatever difference there may be in sex, age, temperament, custom, nation, republic, grade, condition or fortune; they are nothing save the eternal properties of the human soul, rationally discussed by politicians, economists and moral philosophers, and painted as portraits by the poet."[16] Referring to an observation made by Castelvetro, and approving it in part, to the effect that if poetry is a presentiment of the possible it should be preceded by history, imitation of the real, yet finding himself confronted by the difficulty that, nevertheless, poets invariably precede historians, Vico solves the problem by identifying history with poetry: primitive history was poetry, its plot was narration of fact, and Homer was the first historian; or rather "he was a heroic character amongst Greek men, in so far as they poetically narrated their own history."[17] Poetry and history, therefore, are originally identical; or rather, undifferentiated. "But inasmuch as it is not possible to give false ideas, since falsity arises from an embroiled combination of ideas, so is it impossible to give a tradition, however fabulous, that has not had, at the beginning, a basis of truth."[18] Hence we gain an entirely new insight into mythology: it is no longer an arbitrary calculated invention, but a spontaneous vision of truth as it presented itself to the spirit of primitive man. Poetry gives an imaginative vision; science or philosophy intelligible truth; history the consciousness of certitude.