299. If the intellect be condemned to know nothing not made by itself, it is difficult to conceive how the act of understanding can commence. If we place ourselves in the initial moment, we shall not know how to explain the development of this activity; for, if it can only know what it has made, what is it to understand in the first moment before it has made any thing? In the system before us, the intellect has no object but what it has itself produced; but to understand, without an object understood, is a contradiction, so that not having in its initial moment yet produced any thing, there can be nothing understood; and, consequently, intelligence is inexplicable. We cannot suppose its activity to be blindly exercised: nothing is done blindly when there is question of representation, and the productive activity essentially relates to things represented as represented. So far as the problem of intelligence is concerned, it makes no difference that these are produced externally, with an existence distinct from the intellectual representation. As Vico himself explains, human reason knows what it constructs in a purely ideal world; and God knows the Word which he begets, although the Word is not without the divine essence, but is identified with it. 300. The Neapolitan philosopher, not satisfied with applying his system to human reason, makes it applicable to all intelligences, not excepting the divine; although with a praiseworthy regard for religion, he endeavors to reconcile his ideological doctrine with the dogmas of Christianity. Truly, the problems of intelligence cannot be completely solved without greatly cumulating them. To trace the footsteps of human reason does not suffice to make us know the human understanding; we must, moreover, propose the general problem of intelligence itself, now limited, like our own, to faint glimmerings, now dilating itself in a sea of light over the regions of infinity. The sublime words, with which St. John commences his Gospel, besides the august truth taught by divine inspiration, involve transcendental doctrines of an importance higher than can be found in the words of any man, even if considered under a merely philosophical point of view.