This is the least successful, but a profoundly significant part of his work. He was forced to admit, though the admission was opposed by all his discoveries and outraged his whole system of thought, that the Hebrews had enjoyed the privilege of always keeping intact their memories of the beginning of the world, a memory which other nations claimed in vain; and hence sacred history must supply the true origin and succession of universal history. The necessity of connecting his views on primitive civilisation with Biblical chronology, with the date usually assigned to the creation of the world, with the traditions of a universal deluge and of a race of giants--the necessity of finding, as he says, the "continuity of sacred with profane history"--led him to the most extravagant flights of fancy. After the flood, in the year 1656 from the creation, at the separation of the sons of Noah, while the Hebrews began or continued their sacred history with Abraham and the other patriarchs and then with the laws given to Moses by God, all the other descendants of Shem, Ham, and Japhet, the first race more slowly and for a shorter period, the second and third with greater rapidity and for a longer time, lapsed into the state of nature and wandered over the earth as insensible and savage brutes. And while the Hebrews, subjected to their theocratic government, strictly educated and practising ablution, remained of normal stature, the members of the other races, living without either physical or moral discipline, wallowing in dirt and excrement and absorbing nitrogenous salts (just as the earth is enriched and made fertile by excrement), grew to monstrous and gigantic size. The state of nature lasted a hundred years for the Semites and two hundred for the other two races; at the end of which the earth which had long been sodden with the moisture of the universal deluge began to dry up and emit dry exhalations or fiery matter into the air so as to generate lightning. With lightning, as we already know, and with the mythology of the thundering sky, which is Jupiter, arose in these brutes the consciousness of God and of themselves, by which they became human. Thus begins the "age of the gods," which, socially, is that of domestic monarchy where the father is king and priest. In the course of this age the system of greater deities was gradually established, and the giants, by means of their religions of terror and their domestic education taming the flesh and developing the spiritual element in them, and by the practice of washing, shrank by degrees to the normal size of the men whom we find at the beginning of the next or heroic age.