Even granting that the criterion in question is irreconcilable with Thomism but not with an improved Christian theology, it is certainly irreconcilable with both in the form it adopts in what I have called "Vico's second theory of knowledge," in the _Scienza Nuova,_ which Balmes either did not know or omitted to mention, and is passed over by my critics with a light-heartedness that is not particularly enviable. One of them asserts that "the alleged distinction" (the distinction that is drawn by myself) "between Vico's first and second theories of knowledge does not in point of fact exist, and produces no effects of any kind." What? Has it no effects, when those historical studies and sciences of mind, which in the _De antiquissima_ occupied the lowest position among mere probabilities became in the _Scienza Nuova_ the truest of all--true even in a higher degree than mathematics itself as dealing with the human world which "is man's creation?" when their form is found "in the modifications of the actual human mind itself?" when they have "a reality as much greater, as the reality of the laws of human affairs is greater than that of points, lines, areas and figures?"[12] Is there no distinction, when we pass from the scepticism of the _De antiquissima_ to the rationalism of the statement that these "proofs are of a divine nature," and must produce "a divine pleasure, since in God to know and to create are one and the same"?[13] It is true that upon this point my attention has been recalled to a well-known passage of Galileo (_Dialogo dei massimi sistemi_), an especial favourite of our own Spaventa,[14] where we find the thought that the human intellect differs from the divine _extensivè,_ but not _intensivè,_ and that if the divine intellect knows infinitely more about mathematical propositions because it knows them all, yet "of these few facts known by the human intellect, its knowledge is equal to that of the divine in objective certainty, since it attains comprehension of the necessity than which no greater certainty, it seems, can exist." But in any case Galileo was not a Schoolman, and moreover this pronouncement of his seemed so dangerous to the Christian theory of ideas, that he himself was obliged to alter it by admitting that while "so far as the truth of which mathematical proof gives no knowledge is concerned, this is identical with that which the divine wisdom knows," yet "the manner, in which God knows the infinitely numerous propositions of which we know a few, is immensely superior to our own, which proceeds discursively from one conclusion to another, while His is simple intuition." It is important too not to forget that this very statement figures among the heads of the accusation in Galileo's trial.[15]