Man's will is free, weak though it is, to make his passions into virtues; and in his struggle towards virtue he is helped in a natural manner by God through providence. Certainly Vico did not intend to deny the efficacy of direct and personal divine grace as well: but following his usual method he separates the latter from the natural operation of providence, which is the only question of importance for him and the only one he considers. So far as concerns the controversies on grace, he always likes to maintain a middle position between two extremes represented typically, according to him, by Pelagianism and Calvinism: and ever since as a young man he studied the works of Richard, the theologian of the Sorbonne, he had accepted his demonstration of the superiority of the Augustinian doctrine, just because it was intermediate between these extremes. A moderate doctrine of this kind seemed to him, as he says, to provide a suitable foundation for a principle of the natural rights of nations which should explain the origin of Roman and other Gentile law, while at the same time remaining in agreement with the Catholic religion. He was inclined to admit that there was a privileged nation, namely the Jewish; and that in the struggle against the passions the Christian had an advantage over the non-Christian, because in cases where natural grace failed he might be helped by supernatural. But, in a word, miracles are miracles, and the New Science is not a science of the miraculous. That it is not, is proved by Vico's criticism on the third of the "principles" of natural rights, against John Selden, a famous man in his day though forgotten later, and author of _De iure naturali et gentium iuxta disciplinant Hebraeorum_ (1640). Selden disagreed with Grotius, in this as in certain other questions, in not denying, and even in exalting, the value of religion: he conceived moral and civil life impossible for mankind except through revelation. This revelation, made by God to the Jewish people, passed from them according to Selden by several channels to the Gentiles: Pythagoras for instance had learnt from Ezekiel; Aristotle, at the time of the campaigns of Alexander in Asia, formed a friendship with Simon the Just; Numa Pompilius acquired some knowledge of the Bible and the prophets. This was enough to reassure any believer who had been frightened away from the works of the natural-right school by their heterodox tendencies. But Vico will have none of this ultra-religious system. If Grotius ignored providence and Puffendorf denied it, Selden was wrong, said Vico, in supplying it, making it a _deus ex machina,_ without explaining it by the essential character of the human mind. It was a system not only unphilosophical but incompatible with sacred history, which admits to a certain extent even in the case of the Jews a natural, not revealed, law: and it was only because, during the captivity in Egypt, they lost sight of this