But if we can and must deny all value to Vico's cosmology, if the contradictions and obscurities in which he involves himself are manifest, and were observed by critics of his own time, still we cannot deny its dynamic nature as opposed to the mechanicism of contemporary philosophy. The theory of metaphysical points, in which God appears as the great geometrician who creates by knowing and knows by creating the realities of the universe, is as it were a symbol of the necessity of interpreting nature in idealistic language. We find here and there a theologian Vico, an agnostic Vico, or even a fanciful Vico composing cosmological and physical romances: but look where we will among his works, we shall never find a materialistic Vico. Even this by no means overbold metaphysic aroused suspicions of pantheism, though the author insisted upon the theological doctrine that God's activity is convertible _ab intra_ with the thing created and _ab extra_ with the fact, and that therefore the world was created in time; that the human soul, which as a mirror of the divine thinks infinity and eternity, is not bounded by the body and therefore not by time, and is therefore immortal; and that man, even if God were to reveal it to him, cannot understand how the infinite enters into finite objects. However, he thought it necessary to conclude his replies to his critics by collecting statements demonstrating his orthodoxy, and clinching the matter with the remark that "since God is in one sense substance and in another His creatures, and since the _ratio essendi_ or essence is proper to substance, the created substances even as regards their essence are diverse and distinct from the substance of God."