but the spotless character of Vico entirely precludes it, and we can only suppose that, lacking as his ideas always were in clarity, on this occasion he indulged his tendency to confusion and nourished his illusions, to the extent of conferring upon himself the flattering style and title of _Defensor Ecclesiae_ at the very moment when he was destroying the religion of the church by means of the religion of humanity. CHAPTER VIII MORALITY AND LAW With the dazzling light of his originality still shining before our eyes, it is impossible to fix our attention upon those doctrines and classifications which Vico drew from the traditional philosophy and placed especially in the first book of the _Diritto universale_: though it is precisely these that have become favourites with many readers, and are now almost common property through the frequent quotation of them. That God is "infinite power knowledge and will" (_posse nosse velle infinitum_) and man "finite power knowledge and will struggling towards the infinite" (_posse nosse velle finitum quod tendit ad infinitum_): that the state is the image of God, and because "it has all things beneath it, nothing above" (_omnia infra se, nil superius habet_), therefore "it renders account to God alone and to no one else" (_uni Deo, praeterea reddat rationem nemini_), and that just as in God freedom is inherent in his eternal reason, so the state freely obeys the laws it has itself established: that justice "directs and equates utilities" (_utilitates dirigit et exaequat_), directing, like an architect, in the building-up of the state, the two particular kinds of justice, commutative and distributive, the two divine artisans that measure utility with the two divine measures, arithmetic and geometry, so that "what is equal when you measure is also just when you choose" (_quod est aequum cum metiris, idem est iustum quum eligis_), these and similar assertions seem not merely lacking in originality but even false or meaningless, adorned though they may be with the name either of Aristotle or of Campanella or of other philosophers of the ancient world or the Renaissance. If, to take one, justice consisted in measuring, a philosophy of justice would be unnecessary, for the science of calculation and measurement would be enough. Vico himself at one point involuntarily and ingenuously discloses the vicious circle of this metaphor substituted for a concept, by saying that men ought "to share utility equally among themselves, only preserving a _just_ difference where it is a question of desert, and that to preserve the equality."