 The text of The New Science then constitutes Vico’s attempt to develop a method which itself comes to be in the course of applying it to human experience, and this takes the form of a history of civil society and its development through the progress of war and peace, law, social order, commerce, and government. “Thus our Science,” Vico says near the beginning of the work, “comes to be at once a history of the ideas, the customs, the deeds of mankind. From these three we shall derive the principles of the history of human nature, which we shall show to be the principles of universal history, which principles it seems hitherto to have lacked” (“Poetic Wisdom,” §368, p.112). Accomplishing this task involves tracing human society back to its origins in order to reveal a common human nature and a genetic, universal pattern through which all nations run. Vico sees this common nature reflected in language, conceived as a store-house of customs, in which the wisdom of successive ages accumulates and is presupposed in the form of a sensus communis or “mental dictionary” by subsequent generations. Vico defines this common sense as “judgment without reflection, shared by an entire class, an entire people, and entire nation, or the entire human race” (Element XII, §145, pp.63–4). It is also available to the philosopher who, by deciphering and thus recovering its content, can discover an “ideal eternal history traversed in time by the histories of all nations” (Proposition XLII, §114, p.57).