Note 80 — Chapter XIX · FREETHOUGHT IN THE REMAINING EUROPEAN STATES

2. First came the great work of Vico, the Principles of a New Science (1725), whereof the originality and the depth—qualities in which, despite its incoherences, it on the whole excels Montesquieu’s Spirit of Laws—place him among the great freethinkers in philosophy. It was significant of much that Vico’s book, while constantly using the vocabulary of faith, grappled with the science of human development in an essentially secular and scientific spirit. This is the note of the whole eighteenth century in Italy.80 Vico posits Deity and Providence, but proceeds nevertheless to study the laws of civilization inductively from its phenomena. He permanently obscured his case, indeed, by insisting on putting it theologically, and condemning Grotius and others for separating the idea of law from that of religion. Only in a pantheistic sense has Vico’s formula any validity; and he never avows a pantheistic view, refusing even to go with Grotius in allowing that Hebrew law was akin to that of other nations. But a rationalistic view, had he put it, would have been barred. The wonder is, in the circumstances, not that he makes so much parade of religion, but that he could venture to undermine so vitally its pretensions, especially after he had found it prudent to renounce the project of annotating the great work of Grotius, De Jure Belli et Pacis, on the score that (as he puts it in his Autobiography) a good Catholic must not endorse a heretic.