The New Science

known to them—by their own, he raised the barbaric and crude origins of Gentile humanity (4) to the perfect state of his own highest divine, reserved cognitions: whereas, on the contrary, he should have descended and plunged from his ideas to those others: and so, with a learned dazzlement, in which he has been followed up to this very day, he wishes to prove to us that the First Authors of Gentile humanity were most wise in Reserved Wisdom: who, as they were of races of impious men without civilization—such as those of Ham and Japheth must once have been—could only have been great beasts, all astonishment and ferocity. Following this erudite error, instead of meditating on the Eternal Republic (5) and the laws of an Eternal Just, with which Providence ordered the World of Nations and governs it with these common needs of the Human Race; he meditated on an Ideal Republic and a pure Ideal Just, from which Nations not only are not governed and led according to the common sense of all the Human Generation, but to which they should much rather be twisted and estranged; as for example that justice which he commands in his Republic, that women should be common.