I ought to restore my friend's jewel, is a simple necessary truth, or idea; therefore, that I ought to restore it, is God! The obligation to restore it is not an obligation imposed upon me by God as my sovereign, but is identically God himself! It is clear, then, that by morally good, the author understands simply good, which, in the absolute sense or the good in itself, is undoubtedly God, the source and measure of every particular or participated good. The author, it seems to us, confounds moral obligation with the good in itself, which, we hardly need say, is to confound it with the end we are obliged to seek; a mistake of the same nature with that of confounding the effect with the cause,the error of pantheism.

The author, no doubt, aims to prove that moral good and moral evil, virtue and vice, are not mere arbitrary distinctions, dependent on any will whatever, but are founded in the intrinsic nature of things. But between this and the assertion that moral obligation is God, or that "moral obligation by no means need imply the existence of any other person (is moral obligation a person?) who imposes it," there is, to our understanding, some difference. Ethics is a mixed science. It has an ideal, necessary, apodictic element, which is God, necessary, immutable, eternal as the Divine Essence itself; but it has also a contingent element, connected with the ideal only by the creative act, and as contingent, related to the nature and acts of the creature. Things are, no doubt, intrinsically good or evil, and that is a reason why they should be commanded or prohibited; but it is not the reason why they are or are not obligatory on my will. The author seems to hold, and it appears to us the great point with him, that the simple intellectual apprehension or intuition of the intrinsic good itself imposes the moral obligation, or rather is itself that moral obligation. This we cannot accept; for it would imply not that our reason or intellectual faculty perceives or takes cognizance of the law, or is the medium of its promulgation, but is itself the law imposing the obligation, which is not true, and which, if we understand him, is precisely what Suarez opposes in the doctrine, as he represents it, of Vasquez. In the first place, intellectual apprehension is not and cannot be law. I may and must intellectually apprehend the law, but my apprehension of it is not the law, for, as Suarez says, even as cited by the author, "there can be no law properly so called without

the will of some one giving command." Lex enim propria et præceptiva non est, sine voluntate alicujus præcipientis. Besides, a law imposed and promulgated by our intellect, would be only a human law, and no divine law at all, and would imply that the legislator, the law, and the subject on which it is to operate, are all identically one and the same. In this case the moral maxim would be that of the Transcendentalists, "obey thy self," which is only another way of saying, "thou art free from all law, therefore live as thou listest." Where there is no law, there is no obligation. It is the law that binds, and a law that does not bind is simply no law at all. To say a thing is obligatory is only saying, in other words, "it is the law," or "the law enjoins it." The law imposes the obligation. But if there can be no law without a law-giver, without some will, or as Suarez maintains, the will of some one commanding, how can the author assert that "moral obligation by no means need imply the existence of any other person (law-giver?) who imposes it?" There can be no obligation without law, and no law without a will, and we will add, without the will of the superior commanding.

The author's theory of morals, therefore, strikes us as unsound. It is founded on two assumptions, which we regard as unwarranted; the first, that the simple intellectual apprehension of good and evil is the apprehension of the morally good and the morally evil; and the second, that this apprehension imposes the obligation to do the one and to avoid the other. The first assumption identifies moral obligation with God, which is objective pantheism; the second, identifies it with our own intellect, which is subjective pantheism, or Fichteanism. That there is an intrinsic difference between good and evil, we, of course, concede; and that in this difference is founded, not the law, but the reason of the law or the moral obligation, we maintain as earnestly as any one can do. This intrinsic nature of things not Omnipotence itself can alter. It is not the law, indeed, but the measure of the Divine action as well as of the human. But what is meant by this intrinsic and immutable nature of things? Is this intrinsic nature of things, which not even Omnipotence can alter, and in which is to be sought the reason of the Divine commands and prohibitions, a mere abstraction, therefore nothing; or is it a reality-that is to say, being, since all reality is in

* De Leg. Lib. II. Cap. 6 No. 1.

being? If being, is it created or uncreated? That it is created, or creature, is not admissible. If it is uncreated being, then it is identically the Supreme Being we own and worship as God, or there are two self-existent, eternal, and independent beings. This last, of course, cannot be said. What, then, is this intrinsic nature of things?

We answer this question as we have answered it in these pages more than once: that it is the essence or intrinsic nature of God himself, and is immutable and eternal, because he himself, in his very nature, is immutable and eternal. He cannot alter it, because he cannot alter himself, or make himself other than he is. He cannot contradict or annihilate himself, but is obliged by the perfection or plenitude of his being to act always consistently with himself, or with his own intrinsic nature. The intrinsic goodness of the acts of creatures is in their conformity, their intrinsic evil is in their non-conformity to his intrinsic being. All that is necessary, all that is necessity is in him, is his being, as is asserted in the assertion that he is necessary being. In some sense he is himself necessitated. He is necessarily what he is. He is free in his creation and providence, but in case he creates and governs, he must create and govern according to his own essence or eternal and immutable ideas. He cannot make what is intrinsically good evil, nor what is intrinsically evil good; command his creatures to do evil, or forbid them to do good, for that would be to contradict himself, to change or annihilate his own necessary, eternal, and immutable being. When, then, we speak of the intrinsic nature of things, we mean, if we understand ourselves, the intrinsic nature of God, that is, God himself.

The author cites and approves our doctrine, as set forth in the "Conversations of Our Club," January, 1859, that good and God are identical, and therefore that to ask, if God be good, is absurd; but objects that it is not absurd to ask, if our Creator be good or benevolent, for it is imaginable, he says, that an evil and malignant being has created us. Perhaps so, perhaps not so, as we shall soon proceed to inquire. Suffice it now to say, that he concedes that good and God are identical. Then the good in itself, and being in itself are the same. Yet we fear he is not quite prepared to admit this conclusion. He does not seem to us to have any very lively sense of the unity and simplicity of God, or that God is as the schoolmen say, Ens simpli

2

cissimum, most simple being, and therefore that his attributes are not distinguishable in ce from his essence, or even from one another. The schoolmen all tell us that the distinction between the divine essentia and the divine esse, or between the divine being and the divine attributes, and between one attribute and another, is simply a distinctio rationis ratiocinnata-a distinction which exists not in God himself, but simply in our manner of conceiving him, or which we are forced to make in consequence of the feebleness and inadequateness of our faculties, which are incapable of apprehending his being at one view, in its simplicity and infinite fulness, and therefore compelling us to consider it under distinct and successive aspects. The distinction, owing to our limited powers, is valid quoad nos, but not quoad Deum, for essentia, esse and attributum, are one and the same in the simplicity of his being. The Divine Bonum and the Divine Ens must, then, be the same. If the summum Bonum be not identically summum Ens, it must be some quality added to it, and substantially or entitatively distinguishable from it, which would not only deny the Divine simplicity, but imply a summum Ens, distinguishable from the Divine Being, by participation of which God is good; which is absurd, since God is necessary being, and therefore is necessarily what and all he is.

We do not say that the Divine Being necessarily includes every perfection, and since good is a perfection, therefore must include good; because the term perfection is not strictly applicable to God himself, or to the intuition of God, and is applicable only to our conception of God, which is always inadequate and in need of completion by other conceptions. Perfection is a making perfect, a completing or finishing, and is inapplicable to God, who is necessarily being in its plenitude, to which nothing can be added, in which there is no imperfection, no want, no void, and therefore nothing to be perfected, completed, or filled up, finished. Also, we refuse to say it, because the intu-" ition of God is logically prior to the notion of perfection or imperfection; and it is only by reference to him as measure or standard that we can say of any particular thing it is perfect or imperfect, complete or incomplete. The intuition of the Divine Being is the intuition of the Divine Pleroma or Fulness, and without that intuition all our conception of particular existences, substances, or qualities, would be meaningless, or simply impossible. We do not,

therefore, agree with those who suppose our notion of God is made up of particular notions, or notions of distinct excellencies discoverable in creatures, carried up to infinity, and added together as a sum total. God is not composed or made up of separate or distinct excellencies or perfeetions, but is originally, in the very unity and simplicity of being, infinite fulness, and it is only in the intuition of his being as infinitely full, and of creatures related to him and distinguishable from him, that the notion of imperfection, want, or incompleteness is possible. St. Anselm, indeed, attempts, in his Monologium, to rise by induction from the several finite excellencies discoverable in creatures to the conception of God or most perfect Being. Most philosophers, not of the first class, attempt to do the same; but in this way, we attain only to abstract being, and the God we assert is only an abstraction, a generalization, a creature of our own minds. St. Anselm himself appears to have been dissatisfied with his Monologium, in which he followed the ordinary method of the schools in his time, as well as ours, for he afterward wrote his Proslogium, in which he adopts quite another method, and proceeds in his demonstration of the existence and attributes of God ontologically, from the intuition, or, as he says, idea of the most perfect being, which he finds already in his mind, and without which we should and could have no mental standard, measure, or criterion of perfection or imperfection, of good or evil.

No doubt our conception of God includes eminently all our conceptions of particular or finite perfections, but we do not say God includes all perfections, that summum ens is necessarily summum perfectum, and therefore, as good is a perfection, God is good; we say, he is good because he is being, necessarily good because he is necessary being. Good and being are ontologically identical, and no distinction between them is possible or conceivable. All being is good, and all good is being; all creatures are good, participate of good in precisely the respect in which they participate of being. Good and being are identical in re, and are distinguishable only in relation to our faculties. Being, considered in relation to the intellect, is called the True, Verum; in relation to the will or the appetitive faculty, is called the Good, Bonum; in relation to the imagination, is called the Fair, Pulchrum: hence God is the True, the Good, and the Fair. But Truth, Goodness, Beauty, or