It is, therefore, evident that what Vico intuitively, perhaps, unconsciously, is striving to assert is the eternity of religion, historically proved apart from any revelation. Thus in his search for the ground of morality he can abstract from positive religion, but how could he abstract from the knowledge of truth, or more than knowledge, the consciousness of truth? Plutarch, after describing the primitive religions and their horrors, wonders if it would not have been better not to have had any religion than to worship the gods in such impious ways. And Vico, after quoting him, observes that surely when he wrote this he must have lost sight of the fact that from such atrocious superstitions luminous civilisation developed in due time, whereas nothing ever grew on atheism. There is no such thing as historical or social life without a religion, full either of tenderness or ferocity, rational or fantastic, but in any case providing man with the idea, more or less clear, more or less noble, that there is something which transcends the individual, in which all individuals weld into one, and which provides man’s morality with the object of his moral will, and thereby means Law. In his understanding of the period in which man had been a brute, Vico was much nearer to the Bible than the Protestants had been. He accepted as a matter of fact the distinction between the Gentiles and the Jews, as implying the radical privation of any supernatural help bestowed on the former, and he thought of them as being in a pre-moral state, a state that was indeed devoid of morality, but full of moral tendencies, and from which mankind emerged through the realisation of those tendencies. Such realisation is not on the other hand the effect of a Divine grace, it is NATURAL, due merely to the development of the natural light granted to every man that comes to life. Man’s free will is weak and between passions and virtue might succumb if he was not upheld in his efforts by Providence. For Vico makes an absolute distinction between the grace of God and Providence. The grace of God, in which he firmly believed, is an extraordinary help granted to some men and particularly to the Chosen People; Providence is the ordinary help of God granted to all men as their birthright so to speak, as inherent in their nature as men.