argument for a
future life from the desire of a happiness more perfect than can be
found here, and to make the pure contemplation, in which consists
highest bliss, a vision of the divine essence face to face, a direct
cognition of Deity far surpassing demonstrative knowledge or mortal
faith--he is more theologian than philosopher, or if a philosopher,
more Platonist than Aristotelian.

The condition of perfect happiness being a theoretic or intellectual
state, the _visio_, and not the _delectatio_, is consistently given as
its central fact; and when he proceeds to consider the other questions
of Ethics, the same superiority is steadily ascribed to the
intellectual function. It is because we _know_ a thing to be good that
we wish it, and knowing it, we cannot help wishing. Conscience, as the
name implies, is allied to knowledge. Reason gives the law to will.

After a long disquisition about the passions and the whole appetitive
side of human nature, over which Reason is called to rule, he is
brought to the subject of virtue. He is Aristotelian enough to describe
virtue as _habitus_--a disposition or quality (like health) whereby a
subject is more or less well disposed with reference to itself or
something else; and he takes account of the acquisition of good moral
habits (_virtutes acquisitae_) by practice. But with this he couples,
or tends to substitute for it, the definition of Augustin that virtue
is a good quality of mind, _quam Deus in nobis sine nobis operatur_, as
a ground for _virtutes infusae_, conferred as gifts upon man, or rather
on certain men, by free grace from on high. He wavers greatly at this
stage, and in this respect his attitude is characteristic for all the
schoolmen.

So again in passing from the general question of Virtue to the virtues,
he puts several of the systems under contribution, as if not prepared
to leave the guidance of Aristotle, but feeling at the same time the
necessity of bridging over the distance between his position and
Christian requirements. Understanding Aristotle to make a co-ordinate
division of virtues into Moral and Intellectual, he gives reasons for
such a step. Though virtue, he says, is not so much the perfecting of
the operation of our faculties, as their employment by the will for
good ends, it may be used in the first sense, and thus the intellectual
virtues will be the habits of intelligence that procure the truest
knowledge. The well-known division of the card