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Show ii Conversations Our Club j i By Orestes JL Brownson, j In chapter XI of Conversations the members of Our Club take up another subject. Education and the best ways of imparting it, discussed pro and con i in their applications to Catholic needs, ' at its finish naturally gravitates into : a discussion of theocracy, which comprehends com-prehends the government of.a state by the immediate direction of God. such as the Israelites furnished :.-or the state ' thus governed. Another definition i would be an intimate union of the soul ! with God in contemplation, i Diefenbach stated the proposition I thus: "There. are not, and cannot be. 1 two original and eternal principles of ' things, one good and one evil. There j is. and can he. no positive principle of evil.- Evtry principle must be real: if real, being: if being, good, and good cannot be the principle of evil. If the principle be not bring, it is merely an abstraction, and abstraction's are nullities.' null-ities.' God being supreme and perfect being, .being in its- plentitude. is necessarily neces-sarily the supremo and perfect good, the good itself, and in itself. Only being can create, for what is' not can not act." CONVERSATION XI. (Continued.) "The transcendentalists. even the Hegelians, He-gelians, who assert the' identity of being be-ing and not-being das Sein and das Xiehtstin will hardly concede that," interrupted O'Connor, "for they tell us that being is in doing, and that by doing we may enlarge and fill up our being. On this assumption is founded found-ed the modern doctrine of progress, which, teaches that man may attain to the. infinite, realize infinite possibilities, possibili-ties, and make himself God." "Speculations . of that sort." said Winslow. "were not uncommon a few years since in -France. Germany and the. United States, the three leading speculative nations of the modern world, but they are out of fashion now. and seldom gain admittance into good society. What is not, cannot act. and nothing cannot make itself something. We act. because through the creative j act of God, we partake of 'being, and j the limit of our participation in be- j ing is the limit, of our activity. Only! I infinite being can have infinite activity, or create from nothing. The Creator, then, is and cannot but be good." "If being and good are identical, and there is no original principle of evil," asked De Bonneville.- "how car. we assert as-sert that the distinction between good and evil, right and wrong, justice and injustice, virtue ' and vice, is eternal, and founded in the very nature of things?"' "Evil, wrong, injustice, vice," answered an-swered Winslow, "are not things. They have no physical existence, and therefore there-fore require no 6riginal or eternal principle. They are predicable only of creatures, and the distinction between them and good is not a distinction between be-tween two principles, but a distinction between being and no-being, between principle and its denial, between the presence of principle and its absence. It is called eternal, because the being or principle they deny, or of which they are the absence or privation, is eternal."- I "There is and can be," added Diefenbach. Die-fenbach. "no positive evil. Evil has and: can have no physical existence. If, we suppose it to exist physically, we must suppose that it exists either as I created existence or as uncreated being, j We can suppose neither. If uncreated being it is real, necessary, self-existing being, therefore not-evil but good. If, created .then being must have created it; but all being is good, and good can not create evil. The only possible evil is moral evil, and that is not a positive posi-tive existence, . but simply a. misuse or abuse of his faculties by a created moral acent."- "We are led into'difficultles on this subject," said Father John, "by our want of a philosophy that accords with our fheology or the truth of things. The popular philosophy- is a miserable sen-sism, sen-sism, which either . denies the intelligible, intelli-gible, or confounds it with the sensible, I and identifies good with sensible pleas-I pleas-I une and evil with sensible pain. Whether the pleasure be or be not the effect of good.' whether the pain be or be not the effect of evfl, it is certain, the pleasure is not. the good and the - pain is' not the evil, itself. The only possible evil is sin,' and sin is not a creature, but simply a deliberate transgression trans-gression of the law of God, or deviation from the line of rectitude by a free moral agent." "To ask if God be. goqd," said Die-fenback, Die-fenback, . "after having conceded that he exists, is absurd, not only because no distinction between good and being is possible, . but also because we have no criterion, standard, or measure of good except God himself. To ask if God be good is simply to ask if God be God, or if he is what he is. When we say of any particular thing, it is good, we pronounce a judgment, and every judgment is by virtue of some rule or standard of judgment." "That rule or standard." replied De Bonneville, "is -our intelligence, or our reason." "Yet reason," rejoined Diefenbach, "must have some principle or moral judgment, or no moral judgment is possible'.' pos-sible'.' "That .principle," interposed 0"Cun-nor. 0"Cun-nor. "is.-the-idea of good, of the good itself, a constituent element of reason, and one of dMr. absolute and necessary ideas. What conforms to that idea we judge to be good, and what repugns it, we judge to be evil, bad, or not good." "But that idea of good, or of the good itself, what is that?" said Diefenbach. "The questions seems to me quite unnecessary," un-necessary," -answered " De Bonneville. "We cannot go back of our ideas; and "all we can do is to show that they are inherent , in reason as its constituent j elements. We all know that we have the idea of good, and what conforms to it we judge, to be good and what conforms not to it we Judge to be evil."- "Nevertheless."- insisted Winslow, "the validity of the judgment depends on the validity, of the idea. If the idea-be invalid,-the judgment is .worthless. .worth-less. We must, then, determine, the validity of the idea, the soundness of the principle of our moral judgments, or we have no- scientific basis either for our morals or our politics. We must understand by idea of good, the good itself, an objective representative of good to the mind, distinguishable from good as the representative from the represented: or, in fine, the simple mental perception or subjective judgment, judg-ment, itself. If we say the last, we? take ourselves as the standard, and good and evil will be simply what each one judges them to be. If we. take the second sense, and understand by idea, j with the peripatetics, not the objective reality itself, but a certain intelligible species or immaterial copy, image, or representation of it. Ave must .determine .deter-mine whether the idea really. represents anything existing a parte rei. and .if! it does, whether it represents it truly afid adequately, two things, which the interminable disputes of philosophers on the point prove to be forever beyond be-yond the power of reason. Nothing remains re-mains for. us but to understand by the idea of good, the good itself as intui- , tively present by its own affirmation i of itself in reason, as the very principle ; of our moral life. That is, we must un- ! derstand that the ideal is the real, as! Plato long ago taught." j "M. Cousin, whose view Mr. O'Con- I nor seems to favor," said Diefenbach, j "makes our absolute and necessary ' ideas the idea of the true, the idea of 1 the good, and the idea of the fair-inherent fair-inherent in what he calls the impersonal imper-sonal reason.: or reason operating inde- ' pendently of our personality or will; : : i ! but unhappily, on the one hand, he , makes this same impersonal reason i substantially our faculty of intelli-i intelli-i gence which has a pantheistic tendency I and on the other distinguishes it from God or real and necessary being, which tends to nihilism. He is very obscure on this impersonal reason, and I am not able to determine always his pre- i cise meaning. Reason operating spon- 1 taneousiy he calls divine; operating re- llectively, he calls it human. Yet whether operating spontaneously or I reflectively, it is one and the same rea- j son. Is it the reason of God or the j leas t p. i f man? Is the mason of both j one and the same being? The latter j 'would seem, to be his doctrine. He as- j sell, and 'it is a great point, reason) as objective, but he distinguishes fcve;i this objective reason from the divine j being, and makes it representative of . reality, rather than the reality itse'f. He calls reason operating spontaneous.- iv divine, the word of God, and yet shrinks from calling it God. as does j Rosmini from so calling the idea of be- j ing into which he resolves all our ntc-l ntc-l essary and absolute ideas. But abso-i abso-i lute and necessary ideas, if not God. if j J not real and necessary being, are mere I abstractions, and therefore nothing; for ! j the necessary is not and cannot be j I creature, since creature is always con- j : tingenl. If .real and necessary, they' : must be being, and therefore God him- j ! self, the only being. The Word. Ver- ' bum Dei. is A distinction in God. not from God, for the Word is God. Rea- i i son then .when distinguished from our j faculty of intelligence, which depends 1 j on it, is not something between neces- I ! sary being and contingent, existence, j I but is real and necessary being, or God j himself, as Fenelon maintains, and-j and-j therefore the idea must be the good it- , i self." 1 "The ideal," interposed Father John, "is the intelligible, and the intelligible , I is God himself affirming himself, and ; i I in the act of aflirming hims;elf creating i and illumining our intelligence: and be ' 1 is at once the Creator, the immediate I object and the light of our reason. The J ! idea of good, whic h is the principle of j our moral judgments, is God affirm- ; I ing himself to us as the good itself, i j "too, men, is nimseit tne principle, uie i rule, standard, or measure of our j moral judgment. When we judge this ' or that particular thing' is or is not' j good, he is the term of comparison. We ', may properly judge whether this or ', that conception of God be true or false , in the same way, but to ask whether j God himself be good or not is absurd; for we can, in order to answer the question, ques-tion, compare him only with himself." j "We have not," added Diefenbach, "two distinct ideas, one of God and an- j other of good, between which we can. institute a compariron, or which we can judge the one by tjte other. The two f ideas in the real order are one and the same. God as being is identically I God as good, for in God there is no distinction between essence and being, and none between being and attribute, or between one attribute and another." "Therefore," said Winslow, "nothing is gained by the attempt to found the sovereignty of God on his intrinsic justice, jus-tice, goodness, love, distinguished from ; his omnipotence, or creative power, j Goodness, justice, love, so distinguished ' give the law according to which the j sovereign power must be exercised, if you will, but they do not give dominion ; itself. If, per impossibile, some other power had created us. we might still love and revere God. for what he is in ; and of himself, but he would have no right to command us as a sovereign, for in that case we should not be his creatures, but another's." "If. then, the devil had created us, we should have been bound to obey the devil," concluded De Bonneville. |