Why did Giambattista Vico think only God could fully know the natural world?

Giambattista Vico argued that human knowledge is fundamentally linked to the act of creation, a principle he summarized with the idea that one can only truly know what one has made.12

Because Vico believed that the natural world was created by God, he concluded that only God possesses the capacity to fully understand and know it. In contrast, Vico maintained that humans can achieve a superior level of knowledge regarding the "world of nations"—the realm of human history, institutions, and social actions—precisely because these are the creations of humanity itself. By establishing this distinction, Vico sought to differentiate historical inquiry from the natural sciences, emphasizing that while the physical world remains the domain of divine knowledge, the human world is something that people can hope to understand through the study of their own history and collective achievements.12