is necessary to distinguish, and identify created truth with what is made, and uncreated truth with what is begotten, _genito_. Thus the Sacred Scriptures, with an elegance truly divine, give the name of _the Word_ to the wisdom of God, which contains in itself the ideas of all things and the elements of these ideas. In the Word, truth is the comprehension of all the elements of this universe, and it might produce infinite worlds. From these elements, known and contained in the divine omnipotence, is formed the Word real and absolute, known by the Father from all eternity and begotten by him also from all eternity."[26] [26] _Ancient Wisdom of Italy_, L. 1, C. 1. 295. From these principles Vico deduces some very transcendental consequences, among others, the explanation of the reason why our sciences are divided into many branches, and that of the different grades of certainty by which they are distinguished. Mathematics is the most certain, because a kind of creation of the intellect, which, starting with the unity of a point, constructs a world of forms and numbers by prolonging lines, and multiplying unity even to infinity. Thus it knows what it produces itself, and hence it is that the theorems commonly held to be objects of pure contemplation depend upon action just as the problems do. Mechanics is a less certain science than either geometry or arithemetic, because it considers motions as realized by machines; and physics is even less certain yet, because it does not, like mechanics, consider the external motion of circumferences, but the internal motion of their centres. There is still less certainty in sciences of the moral order, because these do not consider the motions of bodies arising from one certain and common origin, which is nature, but the motions of the soul, often most profound, often also capricious. "Human science," he says, "owes its origin to a defect of the human mind; it is beyond all things in its extreme limitation, contains nothing of what it seeks to know, and is consequently unable to make the truth to which it aspires. The most perfect sciences are those which have expiated the vice of their origin, and are assimilated, as a creation, to divine science, that is, those in which the truth and the fact are mutually convertible. "From what proceeds, we may infer that the criterion of truth, and the rule to recognize it, is _to have made it_: consequently, the clear and distinct idea of our mind which we have, is not a criterion of the truth, nor is it even a criterion of our mind; because the soul does not, by knowing itself, make itself; and not making itself, it knows not in what way it knows itself. Since human science takes abstraction for its basis, sciences are so much the more uncertain, as they more nearly approach corporal matter....