Vico's thought was limited by the idea of transcendence, which prevented him from attaining not only the unity of reality, but also a truly complete knowledge of that world of man which he had so powerfully explained by means of the opposite principle. We now see why Vico, though he did not deny the fact of progress, could have no real conception of it. It has been observed that the conception of progress is foreign to Catholicism and dates from the Protestant Reformation, and that therefore the Catholic Vico was bound to deny himself the use of it. But the conception of an immanent providence is no less irreconcilable with Catholicism, and yet Vico is saturated with this idea. This means that he did not lack the impulse: rather he was unable to pass a certain point beyond which his faith would have been too obviously defeated. Progress, deduced from the immanent providence and introduced into the New Science, would have accentuated the difference within the uniformity, the origin at every moment of something new, the perpetual enrichment of the flux at every reflux: it would have changed history from an orderly traversing and retraversing of the line drawn by God under the eye of God to a drama whose _ratio essendi_ is contained within itself: it would have enmeshed and drawn with it the whole universe and realised the thought of infinite worlds. In face of this vision Vico paused in apprehension and stubbornly refused to proceed: the philosopher in him had yielded to the Catholic. CHAPTER XIII TRANSITION TO HISTORY: GENERAL CHARACTER OF VICO'S TREATMENT OF HISTORY It is clear from the facts above discussed that the historical portion of the New Science could not take the shape of a history of the human race in which peoples and individuals were recognised as playing each its own unique part in the whole course of events. To enable it to fulfil such a function Vico would have had to close up his system of thought, which was still at one point incomplete and not impervious to the religious idea, and to elevate his provident deity into a progressive deity, determining flux and reflux as the eternal rhythm of the process. Or on the other hand in order to attain the vision of individuality, in the diametrically opposite sense, in history, he would have had to abandon his rudimentary idealistic philosophy, break down the distinction between ordinary and extraordinary providence, and trace the history of man on the plan which God had revealed or permitted him to discover. Vico's orthodoxy rebelled against the former alternative, while his philosophy kept him from the second: and the result of his dilemma was that the history he reconstructed was not and could not be a universal history.