that the direct intervention of God with the laws given to Moses took place. Nor did the theory agree, as to the alleged dissemination of Jewish knowledge and laws among the Gentiles, with the words of the Jew Josephus and of Lactantius; and in general, it was unsupported by even the smallest documentary evidence. Vico's conclusion therefore remains unaltered. The Jews enjoyed in addition the extraordinary aid of the true God: but the other nations attained civilisation solely through the ordinary light of providence. Whether or no Vico quoted and interpreted Grotius and Puffendorf accurately is for us a question of small importance. His exposition and estimate of other philosophers matter less than his own doctrines, whatever their historical relations, which, to tell the truth, are many in number. Nevertheless it will be as well to indicate briefly, as regards the difficulties which may arise upon this point, the answer which we think plausible. Any one who after reading Vico's censures opened the _De iure belli et pacis_ and found that Grotius explicitly includes among his three fundamental principles, with reason and the social nature, the divine will, and that this ignoring of God amounts to little more than a mere phrase laying emphasis on the power of the social nature and reason, which would take effect "even if we were to grant that God does not exist" (_etiamsi dar emus non esse Deum_) or that he does not care for human affairs, "which cannot be granted without the grossest impiety" (_quod sine summo scelere dari nequit_): any one who opened Puffendorf and read a most solemn denunciation of the Grotian hypothesis as impious and absurd, and a declaration that natural laws would remain hanging in the air devoid of force apart from the will of God as legislator; any one who read these words might be led to accuse Vico of negligence or even of insincerity in his criticisms of his predecessors. But in truth Vico did not know what to make of a God set side by side with other sources of morality, or set above them as a superfluous source for the sources: he, searching for God as he did in the heart of man, saw and felt the gulf fixed between him and those who no longer had him in their hearts and barely kept him on their lips through habit or prudence. A more subtle question would be to ask why,--if Vico agreed with the natural-right school in ignoring revelation, and if he instead of rejecting it deepened their superficial immanental doctrine,--why he put himself forward as their implacable enemy and persisted in boasting loudly before prelates and pontiffs of having formulated a system of natural rights different from that of the three Protestant authors and adapted to the Roman church. The supposition that he acted thus through politic caution might be advanced if instead of Vico we were dealing with, for instance, a passionate and powerful but deceitful friar like Tommaso Campanella: