Religion, as we have already seen, means for Vico not necessarily revelation, but conception of reality: either that which expresses itself as it does in the period of fully developed mind in the form of intelligible metaphysic, which passes from the thought of God to explain logic by its reasoning and to condescend to purify the human heart by morality: or that which takes concrete shape, as it does in the earliest stage of humanity, in the form of poetical metaphysics. One may easily ignore revealed religion when inquiring into the foundations of morality: but how can one ever ignore this natural religion, identical as it is with knowledge of the truth? Plutarch, discussing the primitive religions of terror, asks the question whether it would not have been better, instead of worshipping the gods in so impious a manner, that there should be no religion at all: but he forgot that from these cruel superstitions brilliant civilisations developed, and no civilisation could ever have grown from atheism. Without a religion, whether gentle or fierce, rational or fantastic, to give the idea, more or less clearly defined, more or less elevated, of something superior to the individual and uniting all individuals, the moral will would have no object for its volition. At this point we see the meaning of what we have described as the second, practical or ethical, signification of the word "religion" in Vico. In this signification, Vico justifies and vindicates the impious saying that "fear creates the gods": he even places the source of religion in the longing for eternal life which man feels when stirred by a universal sense of immortality hidden in the depths of the mind. In this second signification, religion is a practical fact, indeed it is morality itself, as in the first meaning it was truth itself.