Now Vico could not advance even to this position without relaxing to some extent part of his humility, and taking over something of Descartes's confidence: without introducing into his Catholic turn of mind some trace of the leaven of that Protestantism he thought so dangerous, and venturing to conceive a philosophy rather less worthy of man's weakness and correspondingly more worthy of man, a creature at once strong and weak, at once man and God. This advance is to be seen in the next phase of his thought. [Footnote 1: In the appendix to his _Opera Medica_ (Tolosae Tectosagum, 1636, p. 110). Windelband draws attention to this thought, _Gesch. der neueren Philosophie,_ 3rd ed. i. p. 23.] CHAPTER II VICO'S THEORY OF KNOWLEDGE: SECOND PHASE The will to believe, which in Vico's case was very strong, and the complete sway which the Catholicism of his country and age held over his mind, bound him firmly down to the Christian Platonic metaphysic and theory of knowledge; a theory whose inherent contradictions were prevented by the above psychological facts from coming explicitly before his mind. The idea of God at once dominated and supported him; he neither had the audacity nor realised the necessity to probe to the bottom such problems as the validity of revelation, the conceivability of a God apart from the world, or the possibility of affirming the existence of God without in some sense demonstrating and therefore creating him. For Vico to open up and partially traverse a new path, which should lead the human mind to transcend that of the Christian Platonists, providence--to use for the moment an idea of his own which we shall explain later on--had perforce to deceive him; to lead him by a long and circuitous way to the commencement of the new path without letting him suspect where it would end.