Page:The World and the Individual, First Series (1899).djvu/250

fect; and when we assert a mere plurality of attributes in God, the variety of these attributes is, as variety, due to the point of view, and to our imperfect comprehension of the divine unity. One very remarkable apparent plurality, however, which our understanding finds in God, is brought to light by the theory of the Divine Knowledge, when viewed in relation to the Creative Will of God. God as Knower, not only knows all truth, but he somehow knew in advance of creation, both all things to be created, and all the possible beings that he has left or will leave uncreated. This knowledge of many facts, viewed as a plurality, constitutes for St. Thomas the realm of the divine Ideas. As the divine ideas, in the created world, receive discrete and individual embodiments, it seems at first natural to say that God, by various acts of knowledge, comprehends, and, by various acts of will, realizes, or leaves unrealized, the beings whom his wisdom, in advance of creation, conceives. But this way of stating the case not only would endanger the absolute unity of the divine essence, but also would seem to give the various ideas of the possible created beings a certain independence of one another, and of the divine essence itself; so that it would seem as if God were, so to speak, forced to know the essences or natures of the finite facts, and as if these finite entities, even in advance of creation, had their own stubborn ideal independence over against God’s unity. Hence arose the scholastic problem whether the essences of created things, in advance of creation, constituted a true term, or, as it were, an eternal limitation of the divine knowledge.