If the formula of the conversion of the true with the created is not found in Thomism, it may perhaps be found, at least in its original, sceptical or mystical, intention, in other tendencies of scholasticism or mediaeval philosophy generally. With Thomism Vico seems to have had neither acquaintance nor sympathy: but from his autobiography it is plain that he studied nominalism and the summaries of Petrus Hispanus and Paulus Venetus, though with little profit,[16] and later also, much more profitably, the Scotist philosophy; which he considered the most Platonic of the Scholastic systems.[17] Traces of this appear in several views expressed in the _De antiquissima,_ especially in those dealing with universals and ideas. In this direction, the direction that is to say of the Scotist system and the closely allied system of Occamism, I have attempted various researches, without attaining any remarkable results: further, I have applied for assistance to various specialists in Scholasticism, but in vain; they would do nothing but express their own superficial impressions or lose themselves in idle disputation. In general it seems possible to say that Duns Scotus's theory of knowledge presents points of affinity to that of Vico: for example, in the polemic against the Thomistic doctrine of the _adaequatio intellectus et rei,_ which he refutes by applying it to the divine knowledge, since God knows objects as willed by Him, and they exist because He wills their existence without His being necessitated by them.[18] For Occam again the thought of objects has no reality and objectivity (or subjectivity according to the usage of Scholastic terminology, which is the reverse of modern) in God, and is nothing else than the objects themselves, known by God according to the possibility of creating them, in virtue of which they are thinkable to the divine mind.[19] But the question for Vico is not merely the priority of creation to knowledge or knowledge to creation, but the convertibility or identity of knowledge and creation.