ABSTRACT
For on one hand the conceit of nations, each believing itself to have been the first in the world, leaves us no hope of getting at the principles of our Science from the philologians. And on the other hand the conceit of scholars, who will have it that what they know must have been immanently understood from the beginning of the world, makes us despair of getting them from the philosophers. So, for the purposes of this inquiry, we must reckon as if there were no other books in the world. (Vico, The New Science, 89)
