Vico’s is not a speculative hypothesis. Primitive men wandered savage and ferocious, without family ties or matrimonial bonds, were the prey of the wildest passions. Whence could they receive the law that would prevent their mutual destruction? They cannot be saved by the wisdom of men since human wisdom does not exist as yet, neither by God, He has retired among His chosen people and left to its fate the rest of mankind. But He has left them the character of men and their humanity is sufficient to save them. Thunder strikes them with fear, and the consciousness of their impotency, of their own limitation, suggests the confused and obscure notion of that which is not limited. And to appease the Almightiness of this infinite and enjoy its favour they refrain from some things and do others. They refrain from satisfying some of their physical cravings and Mind’s liberty is the result; so that liberty is born with her twin sister, moral law, out of the fear of God, out of the awe-inspiring consciousness of the not-self. The land becomes covered with altars; the caves behold the union of men and women eager to ensure the Divine favour to their nuptials; the soil is broken to receive the body of the dead who return to the gods. Ethics are born with the three fundamental institutions of society, the cult of the Deity, matrimony as the first call of society, the veneration of the dead as the first assertion of immortality. Why has Croce been able to state, after this energetic assertion of Vico on the essentially religious origin of society, that the father of the philosophy of Mind agrees with the school of natural law in their purely immanent notion of ethics? Because like them he constructs his science of society independently of revelation. The natural law of the Gentile nation spontaneously created by men is the matter of his research not the supernatural law that came down on Sinai for the benefit of the Chosen People. It is not on the idea of law and its origin that he criticised Grotius, Pufendorf, and the rest, it is their idea of religion that is distinctly quite alien to his. Religion for Vico can be understood first as a conception of reality as such; and this is the reason why it is in Gentile’s theories one of the essential moments of Mind as recognition of the not-self, or object. Second, it belongs to practical reality as the basis of ethics. In this case religion is the very essence of ethics as it is the very essence of truth.