In this way Vico escaped the prejudice which was beginning to prevail in his time--we may recall Van Dale's history of ancient oracles, popularised by Fontenelle, and Banier's book already mentioned--and was to be so powerful for a century, of considering religions as "some one else's imposture": whereas, he says, they were really due to "one's own credulity." The man who refused to admit the artificial origin of myth could not admit it of religion. But just as he denied no less the supernatural or revealed origin of myth, so at the same time he proclaimed neither more nor less than the natural, even the human, origin of religions; and--a fact especially worthy of notice--placed this origin in an inadequate form of the mind, namely the semi-imaginative form identical with mythology. Nor need we attach weight to certain brief and incidental remarks which seem to contradict this theory, as when he says that religion precedes not only philosophy but language itself, which presupposes the consciousness of some community between man and man: such equivocations are due to the invariable confusedness of his method and his habitual lack of clearness. The identification of religion with myth, and its human origin, are ideas not only emphatically expressed, but essential to Vico's whole system. It is a human origin which in his own words does not exclude a different concept of religion, namely as revealed and hence of supernatural origin. In fact he always separates poetic theology, which is mythology, and natural theology, which is metaphysics or philosophy, from revealed theology. But this last concept is admitted by him not because it is connected with the others and derived from a principle common to them, but simply because Vico asserted its existence no less than theirs. The human origin, poetic theology, followed by metaphysical theology, is the form valid for the Gentile portion of mankind, that is the whole human race except the Hebrew people with its privilege of revelation. The motives that led Vico to maintain this dualism and the annoying inconsistencies in which it compelled him to rest will be seen later on in their own place. But precisely because Vico left this dualism without mediation, we must in expounding his thought hold fast both terms of the dualism: and for the time being we will confine ourselves to the merely human origin--religion as a product of the theoretical needs of man in a condition of comparative moral poverty. This conception has only an indirect connexion with Bruno's view of religion as a thing necessary to the ignorant and undeveloped mob, and with Campanula's theory of natural or permanent religion, an eternal rational philosophy coinciding with a Christianity freed from its abuses. Its parallels in contemporary authors are few and distant: even when they mention it in passing, they grasp it only in a superficial way and propound it without connecting it at all with their other ideas: they attack