 The challenge, however, is to develop this science in such a way as to understand the facts of the human world without either reducing them to mere contingency or explaining their order by way of speculative principles of the sort generated by traditional metaphysics. They must be rendered intelligible, that is, without reducing them, as did the Cartesians, to the status of ephemera. Vico satisfies this demand by distinguishing at the outset of The New Science between il vero and il certo, “the true” and “the certain.” The former is the object of knowledge (scienza) since it is universal and eternal, whereas the latter, related as it is to human consciousness (coscienza), is particular and individuated. This produces two pairs of terms-il vero/scienza and il certo/coscienza-which constitute, in turn, the explananda of philosophy and philology (“history” broadly conceived), respectively. As Vico says, “philosophy contemplates reason, whence comes knowledge of the true; philology observes that of which human choice is author, whence comes consciousness of the certain” (Element X, §138, p.63). These two disciplines combine in a method or “new critical art” (nuova’arte critica) where philosophy aims at articulating the universal forms of intelligibility common to all experience, while philology adumbrates the empirical phenomena of the world which arise from human choice: the languages, customs, and actions of people which make up civil society. Understood as mutually exclusive disciplines-a tendency evident, according to Vico, in the history of philosophy up to his time-philosophy and philology appear as empty and abstract (as in the rational certainty of Cartesian metaphysics) and merely empirical and contingent, respectively. Once combined, however, they form a doctrine which yields a full knowledge of facts where “knowledge” in the Vichean sense means to have grasped both the necessity of human affairs (manifest in the causal connections between otherwise random events) and the contingency of the events which form the content of the causal chains. Philosophy yields the universally true and philology the individually certain.