The second mental state is imaginative knowledge, "poetical wisdom"; to this corresponds the higher barbarism of the heroic age.

Finally, comes conceptual knowledge, and with it the age of civilisation.

These are the three stages through which every society passes, and each of these types determines law, institutions, language, literature, and the characters of men.
Vico's strenuous researches in the study of Homer and early Roman history were undertaken in order to get at the point of view of the heroic age.

He insisted that it could not be understood unless we transcended our own abstract ways of thinking and looked at the world with primitive eyes, by a forced effort of imagination.

He was convinced that history had been vitiated by the habit of ignoring psychological differences, by the failure to recapture the ancient point of view.