In its philosophical aspect, the New Science might, owing to this prominence given to the study of the individualising forms, above all the imagination (since the doctrine that primitive man is a poet and thinks in poetic images is in Vico's words the "master key" of the work) be called, without undue paradox, a philosophy of Mind with special attention to the Philosophy of Imagination or Aesthetic.
Aesthetic may in fact be considered as a discovery of Vico's, though with the reservations to which the determination of discoveries and discoverers is always subject; and although he did not deal with it in a separate treatise or give it the happy title with which Baumgarten christened it ten years or so later. It is interesting however to notice that the terminology of the New Science lights upon a name similar to one of the equivalents for Aesthetic which Baumgarten passes in review; namely that of "the Logic of Poetry." But ultimately the name matters little: what does matter is the fact: and the fact is that Vico adopted a theory of poetry which was then and was still for a time to be a bold and revolutionary innovation. At that time, as is well known, the old practical or didactic theory held the field: the theory which, starting late in the history of the ancient world, persisting through the Middle Ages, and transplanted into the Renaissance, regarded poetry as an ingenious disguise for the popularising of lofty philosophical and theological ideas. Beside this theory, though inferior in authority, stood another, which considered poetry as the product of or means to diversion and pleasure. These views had come to alter the original meaning of the Aristotelian treatise on poetry, so as to be at last introduced into it and discovered there as if Aristotle himself had held and written them. Nor was this mistake corrected by Cartesianism, which, as we should expect from its general direction, rather tended to enfeeble and annul the very object of these definitions, as a thing of no value, or practically none. At a time when philosophers were trying to reduce metaphysics and ethics to a mathematical form, and despised concrete intuition: when men were devising a literature and a poetry suited to disseminate science among the common people or the world of fashion: when experiments were being made in the construction of artificial, logical languages, superior to those of past or present usage: when, finally, it was thought possible to lay down rules for composing musical airs without being a musician, and poems without being a poet: in this atmosphere of detachment, coolness, hostility and mockery, only a miracle could arouse a different and indeed opposite feeling--a warm and vivid consciousness of the real nature of poetry in its original function: and this miracle was worked by the keen, restless and stormy mind of Giambattista Vico.