Though living in a part of Italy rich not only in documents but in survivals of the Middle Age, Vico confesses that this second period of barbarism is much more obscure to him than the first, and that it is only the first that has enabled him to throw light upon the second. This he expressed by the mere fact that he named the period "the second barbarism," or the "return" or "reflux" of barbarism, and thus considered it as an instance of his ideal law of reflux. The Middle Ages seemed to him both a representation of the primitive conditions of life, and in consequence a reproduction of the social process developing out of them. It was a view as original as it was rich in truth: and it is no objection to it to say that Vico reveals the generic characters rather than the particular traits of the Middle Ages, because we know that the problem he set before himself was precisely the investigation of generic characters or uniformities, and that he avoided history properly so called in order to escape a dilemma between science and faith, between the purely immanental conception of history, excluding revelation and miracle, and the purely transcendent conception, miraculous and therefore difficult to treat in a scientific manner. Even in our own times, it is a fact worth noticing that we have seen a recrudescence of this attempt to harmonise religion and history by abstracting from the individual aspect of events and reducing history to a history of institutions and uniformities.[1] In this position assumed by the problem in Vico's mind we may see the reason for the fact, which some have thought very strange in a Catholic, that he lays no stress on Christianity, and when he encounters it at the outset of the Middle Ages dismisses it in a few words; saying that God, having by superhuman ways shown clearly the truth of the Christian religion, when he opposed the virtue of the martyrs to the power of Rome, and the doctrine of the Fathers, together with the miracles, to the empty wisdom of Greece, and knowing that armed nations must arise on every hand ready to fight for the divinity of that religion's author, permitted the birth of a new order of civilisation among the nations, in order that the true religion might be established according to the natural course of human affairs. We must be content then with the resemblances observed by Vico between mediaeval society and that of the early centuries of Greece and Rome, and not take offence if his exemplifications and proofs very often seem fallacious and fanciful. His main historical thought as we know already is robust enough to pass over the errors or to live in the midst of them unimpaired.