The transformation, half rhetorical, half mythical, which the heat of the national reawakening effected in poets, philosophers, and almost every character of any importance in Italian history, representing them as patriots, liberals, and in open rebellion or secret revolt against the throne and the altar, tried for a time to touch with its magic wand and to work its will upon Giambattista Vico. It was said, among other things, that Vico, conscious of the severe blow dealt by his thought to the traditional beliefs of religion, and warned by his friends, took pains to plunge the New Science into such obscurity that only the finest intellects could perceive its tendencies. But though this legend, energetically spread as it was by the patriots and republicans of 1799, was believed here and there, it could not long stand out against criticism or even against common sense; and Cataldo Iannelli was right to pass over it with a few words of contemptuous irony.[2] It is certain from an objective point of view that Vico's doctrines implicitly contained a criticism of Christian transcendence and theology as well as of the history of Christianity. From the subjective point of view it may be that Vico during his youth (of which we know very little) was the victim of religious doubts. Such doubts may have been suggested to him not only by his reading, but by the society of young men of his own age, among whom "libertines," or as contemporary literature still called them "epicureans" or "atheists," were not uncommon.[3] In a letter of 1720 to Father Giacchi, he says that at Naples the "weaknesses and errors dating from his early youth" are remembered against him, and that these, fixed in the memory, became as often happens "eternal criteria for the judgment of everything beautiful and complete which he subsequently succeeded in doing."[4] What can these errors and weaknesses have been?