The order of ideas must follow the order of institutions.

This was the order of human institutions, first the forests, after that the huts,

next the villages, then the cities, and finally the academies.

Men first feel necessity, then look for utility.

Next, attend to comfort, still later amuse themselves with pleasure, thence grow dissolute

in luxury, and finally go mad and waste their substance.

The nature of peoples is first crude, then severe, then benign, then delicate, finally dissolute.

In the human race first appear, the huge and grotesque, like the Cyclops, then the proud and magnanimous like Achilles, then the valorous and just like Scipio Africanus.

Nearer to us imposing figures with great semblances of virtue

accompanied by great vices like Alexander and Caesar,

still later the melancholy and reflective like Tiberius, finally the

dissolute and shameless madmen like Caligula, Nero, and Domitian.

Entitled opinions coming to you from KZSU on the Stanford campus.

A few select quotes from Jean-Battista Vico's new science to start us off.

A few weeks ago, I promised a show on Vico and many of you cheered.

So welcome to our Crystal Ship.

Entitled Opinions is setting off on golden sail under the horizon to the wondrous continent called the Shienza Nwobe.

When Vico died in 1744, his work was known only to a handful of intellectuals in his native city of Naples,

where he had held a poorly paid minor professorship in rhetoric for some 40 years.

I don't know how he did it, but in a small house full of children in a boisterous city, he wrote one of the most original and probing books of his age, the third and definitive edition

of which was published at his own expense with his last pennies the year he died.

Isaiah Berlin puts it well, I quote him.

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