This axiom establishes the fact that divine providence initiated the process by which the fierce and violent were brought from their outlaw state to humanity and entered upon national life. It did so by awaking in them a confused idea of divinity, which they in their ignorance attributed to that to which it did not belong. Thus through the terror of this imagined divinity, they began to put themselves in some order. When men are ignorant of the natural causes producing things, and cannot even explain them by analogy with similar things, they attribute their own nature to them. The physics of the ignorant is a vulgar metaphysics by which they refer the causes of the things they do not know to the will of God without considering the means by which the divine will operates.
Imagination is more robust in proportion as reasoning power is weak.
This philologico-philosophical axiom proves to us that in the world s childhood men were by nature sublime poets. Providence generates this terror by awakening an idea of the sacred that is first attributed to the new post-diluvian phenomena of thunder and lightning. Vico is the first thinker to articulate this duality. It is providence that supplies the paradoxical link between the transcendental concept of divinity and the worldly object of the gentiles fear. This intervention of providence is not a mere sop to the Inquisition .