truth these lightnings instead of descending upon the head of the unbeliever serve only to illuminate the poverty of the arguments upon which apologetics rest, even with a man like Vico; and, objectively considered, the division introduced by religious scruple between sacred and profane history, and the consequent dogmatic treatment of the one, with its strange hypotheses and defences, and critical treatment of the other, produced and still produces an irresistible impression that the seclusion of sacred history from human science is due to the impotence not of the human science but of the sacred history; its impotence, that is, to preserve itself intact within the limits of science. Seldom has a religious scruple so endangered the cause of religion. But Vico had far too genuine and exacting a scientific sense added to his natural antipathies to permit him ever to become a Selden or a Bossuet; and hence this apologetic for and harmonisation of sacred history remains in him a mere episode, which it is possible to ignore. And since on the other hand he was not permitted to treat philosophy and history as entirely profane and to represent the complex movement of history according to the fundamental criterion of progress, his only course was to look at the facts from the point of view which his philosophy left open to him, that of flux and reflux, the eternal process and the eternal phases of the mind. Here lay his strength. Here he could recognise the specific, if not strictly the individual, character of laws, customs, poetry and myth, of whole social and cultural formations which history down to his own time had entirely misunderstood. For this reason, in narrating history he was bound to confine himself to emphasising the common aspects of certain groups of facts belonging to various nations and periods. In the New Science, he says, "the whole history of the laws and deeds of Rome and Greece is set forth, not in its particularity and in time, but following the substantial identity of intention and diversity of the modes of expression." Elsewhere he says, "the facts are adduced after the fashion of examples, because they are understood by means of principles," for "to see the principles confirmed by the innumerable host of their consequences is a thing which must await certain other works of ours, which are either as yet unpublished or now in process of publication." In other words, as we know, this science contains on the one hand a philosophical side, and on the other a descriptive or empirical, exemplified in history, in which the Romans figure not as Romans but in virtue of the common nature which they share with Greeks and possibly with Japanese; the history of Rome under the kings or in the early Republican period demonstrates its affinity with that of the earlier centuries of the Middle Ages; and Homer stands not as Homer but as an example of primitive poetry, and across the centuries finds and greets his brother in Dante.