The universal principle of etymology in all languages: words are carried over from bodies and from the properties of bodies to express the things of the mind and spirit. The order of ideas must follow the order of things.
Giambattista VicoThe nature of peoples is first crude, then severe, then benign, then delicate, finally dissolute.
Giambattista VicoPolitical Science carries inseparably with it the study of piety, and that he who is not pious cannot be truly wise.
Giambattista VicoBut the nature of our civilized minds is so detached from the senses, even in the vulgar, by abstractions corresponding to all theabstract terms our languages abound in, and so refined by the art of writing, and as it were spiritualized by the use of numbers, because even the vulgar know how to count and reckon, that it is naturally beyond our power to form the vast image of this mistress called "Sympathetic Nature.
Giambattista Vico