Vico stood henceforth as the best antidote to the dangerous side of Anglo-French speculation. The philosophy of Mind had yet to be developed, but it was sufficiently asserted to claim man and all his activities as belonging to spiritual reality, to historical reality. Thus what Vico called Providence provided the ground for a more human, that is to say, more spiritual, idea of liberty, just when the men who were going to popularise Illuminism were preparing for their task. But his was a far more difficult idea, and less palatable as well, for his liberty springing as it does from Religion, hand in hand with morality, is a double-faced divinity. One never can, according to such a conception of life, grasp liberty without law, or enjoy a right without satisfying the corresponding duty. Passing from religion to law, Vico in his objective understanding of history rejects a justice that should consist in measuring everything, for says he, first this would not be the philosophy but the mathematics of law; then it is the duty of men to share the common goods in such a way as to preserve the differences required by the differences of deserts, and thus to maintain that which is the only true equality of men. The natural law, according to him, was born at first under the form of just desires, just violences; then it took the form of moral fables; ultimately it was asserted in all its rationality and generosity. Away goes with this the abstract and anti-historic notion of an eternal and natural law, superior to positive laws. Vico goes on bowing to the _jus naturale philosophorum_ but instead of putting it high above history, he looks for it exclusively where it can be found—that is to say in history, making it thus historical. After accepting Plato’s idea of an eternal Republic, Vico breaks it to pieces to come out with a quite different conception of his own. The only really eternal Republic is the eternal process of history in all the variety and succession of its modes of realisation, from the man-brute down to Plato. Every single truth has its practical manifestation, its practical consequences; to think in this or that way implies living and acting in this or that way. The divorce of theory and practice resulting from the difficulties that arose a century before between scientific men and their churches is here absolutely annulled.