deed, alone could justify the appraisal of Hazard. Only the problems
which the actual course of the development of European thought has
engendered can make it meaningful to suggest that Vico's specula-
tions bore the seeds of a genuine alternative. Hazard's sentiment
is, consequently, so far as it can be justified and in its profounder
meaning, an attribution of just such contemporary significance to
Vico.

The point of contact between Vico and contemporary thought is
the problem of man. The key to the modern problem of man, the
problem of man at the mid-point of the twentieth century, lies in the
naturalism of contemporary speculation; modern man has consented
to think of himself as continuous with and as immanent to the pro-
cess of nature. This would not seem, at first glance, peculiar to
modern man. Classical man, too, viewed himself in this same context
and manner. The difference lies in the conception of nature of itself.
The concept of nature upon which the classical notion of man was
predicated possessed one characteristic which sets it off sharply from
the concept of nature in modern thought. The nature of classical
thought was able to sustain, within certain limits, the notions of spirit
and of subjectivity. It did not demand of man, consequently, a total
alienation from himself as the price of his continuity with nature. On
the contrary, it envisaged man as the immanent logos or rationality
of nature and as the proximate end, or telos, of its processes and thus
sustained and vindicated his intimate intuitions of his spirituality and
subjectivity. The modern concept of nature, by contrast, demands of
man precisely the surrender of these insights. This transformation in
the concept of nature itself has been effected by the course of the
development of the sciences of nature in modern times. This develop-
ment seems at first glance to suggest and to demand a trenchant
assertion of these qualities or attributes in man; this was the intended
force of the Kantian critique. In fact, however, this intention was
frustrated because it moved against the profounder implications of
modern science. It was presently made clear that the innermost
speculative demands of the modern natural sciences involved the
elimination of all subjectivity from the structure of nature. Trans-
cendent subjectivity is eliminated by the very openness of the uni-
verse of modern science; the subjectivity of man is logically cancelled
by the inclusion of the processes of human consciousness in the sub-
jectless process of nature and matter. The universe, the nature, which
modern science envisages is essentially independent of the presence
of any subject; the 'anonymous subject' of which some philosophers

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