, we have to look into ourselves, and there we shall find that two facts of vital intelligence may be conceived; the first, a necessary and eternal outgoing of intelligence (
) from being
, with the will as an accompaniment, but not from it as a cause, — in order, though not necessarily in time, precedent. This is true filiation. The second is an act of the will and the reason, in their purity strict identities, and therefore not begotten or filiated, but proceeding from intelligent essence and essential intelligence combining in the act, necessarily and coeternally.
For the coexistence of absolute spontaneity with absolute necessity is involved in the very idea of God, one of whose intellectual definitions is, the
synthesis, generative ad extra, et annihilative, etsi inclusive, quoad se,
of all conceivable
antitheses;
even as the best moral definition — (and, O! how much more godlike to us in this state of antithetic intellect is the moral beyond the intellectual!) — is, God is love. This is to us the high prerogative of the moral, that all its dictates immediately reveal the truths of intelligence, whereas the strictly intellectual only by more distant and cold deductions carries us towards the moral. For what is love? Union with the desire of union. God therefore is the cohesion and the oneness of all things; and dark and dim is that system of ethics, which does not take oneness as the root of all virtue. Being, Mind, Love in action, are ideas distinguishable though not divisible; but Will is incapable of distinction or division: it is equally implied in vital action, in essential intelligence, and in effluent love or holy action.