Such are the chief points in Vico's quaint reconstruction of the earliest history of man upon the earth, harmonised with the account in sacred history. We shall be less inclined to amusement or ridicule if we reflect upon the tragedy underlying the comedy: the tormented conscience of the believer which in its struggle with the philosopher seeks refuge in these extravagant ideas. At any rate, they gave Vico a series of insecure stepping-stones--the flood, the giants, the dry exhalations--which enabled him to cross the torrent of religious tradition and reach the dry land of critical history, where he found the primary starting-point of his philosophy of mind, the state of nature. It may further be suggested that the contact with Hebrew history--the only one which presented itself to him as a history in the strict sense, a _unicum,_ something absolutely individualised even if in a miraculous manner--suggested to him the few attempts met with in his works to assign to various peoples a special function or mission; thus it sometimes appeared to him that the Hebrews represented _mens,_ the Chaldeans _ratio,_ and the Japhetic races _phantasia._ Parallel to this imaginary history of the origin of the human race on the earth is Vico's attempt at Biblical apologetics. He lost no opportunity of adducing proofs from profane sources to confirm the statements of sacred history. For instance, a confirmation of the flood and the giants is supplied by the similar traditions of Greek and other nations. The theocratic government, which is not definitely mentioned by any profane history but merely alluded to obscurely by poets in their tales, is met with in the government of the Hebrews before and after the flood. The Hebrews again knew nothing of divination because they lived in direct contact with the true God, while the Chaldees had a system of magic or divination according to the movements of the stars, and the European peoples a system of augury. One certainly feels in all this something of an effort, a will to see or not to see: a kind of self-interruption and stimulation to belief. It is not infrequent among cultured and scientifically educated believers. Again, in his exposition of the historical genesis of grammatical forms, where he says that verbs began with the imperative, the monosyllabic command given by the father to wife, child or slave (_es, sta, i, da, fac,_ etc.), Vico draws from this an indirect demonstration of the truth of Christianity, because the roots of Hebrew verbs are always found in the third person singular of the past tense; a clear proof that the patriarchs must have given their commands to their families in the name of a single God (_Deus dixit_). This, in Vico's opinion, is "a lightning to confound all those writers who have believed the Hebrews to be a colony proceeding from Egypt; since from the beginning of its foundation the Hebrew tongue had its origin in a single God." But in