This is what we are going to prove in the following propositions.
First proposition: If intelligence and will were admitted to be mere perfections in God, the admission would imply a division in God and a breaking up of the Infinite.
Before we proceed to prove this proposition, we premise that in the argument we take intelligence and will in action, and not in potentiality; in other words, we take them as acts, and not as faculties.
The reason is because, as we shall prove, there can be no faculties or potentiality in the Infinite. This premised, we lay down the undoubted ontological truth that between intelligence in act and the conception or interior logos, the result of intelligencing, there is and must be a real distinction. In other words, the intellect in act and the conception of the intellect necessarily imply a duality.
The reason of this is evident. First, because between the intellect in action and conception there is necessarily an opposition. The intellect in act, is such, inasmuch as it is not conception, and vice versa. Now, a real opposition implies, necessarily, a real distinction. Again, the conception or interior logos is to the intellect in action as the effect is to its cause, or, better, as the consequence is to its principle.
If, therefore, there were no real distinction between the intellect and the conception, there would be no real distinction between the effect and its cause, the principle and its consequence. Hence, thinking and thought are necessarily distinct. What is true of the act of thinking and of thought is true of the will and its volition, for the same reason. Hence it is evident that the intellect in action, thought or the conception, the will in action and its volition, are necessarily distinct by their very ontological nature and relation. It follows, then, that if we admit them to be mere perfections of the Infinite, we would imply a real distinction in the essence of the Infinite, in other words, a duality of essence; because a perfection in the Infinite is identical with essence, since we have said that perfections have no real existence in re, and are only partial conceptions of our minds, which cannot take in the Infinite at one intellectual glance.
Intelligence in action and conception, therefore, being considered as perfections, would be identical with the essence; and they requiring, in force of their metaphysical nature, a real distinction, the distinction would fall upon the essence of the Infinite. Any one versed in ontology will perceive this truth at a glance. Hence, Unitarians cannot say that the intelligence and the conception of the intelligence, the will and love in the Infinite, are mere perfections, without admitting a real distinction in the essence of the Infinite, and thus admitting a multiplicity of Infinites, which is absurd.
Second proposition: If Unitarians rank the intellect and thought, the will and its volition, of the infinite among faculties, they then fall into pantheism.
Ontology, as we have said, defines a faculty to be a force of development by union with its object.