Page:Illustrations of the history of medieval thought and learning.djvu/73

Rh from the ideal to the actual, from the world of thought to the world of matter.

John's skill in fitting this theory within the framework of accepted doctrine cannot disguise its essential contrariety. He supplants the dark dogma of the natural corruption of man, his original destiny to perdition, by the conception of the negative character of evil. It is he would say with Plato, as little natural as the diseases of the body: it is the inevitable result of the union of flesh and spirit. But the primal dignity of man's nature must in the end reassert its sway. The soul may forget her natural goods, may fail in her striving towards the goal of the inborn virtues of her nature; the natural powers may move, by fault of judgement, towards something which is not their end: but not for ever. For the universal tendency of things is upward; ''and thus from evil is wont to turn good, but in nowise from good evil. . . . The first evil could not be perpetual, but by the necessity of things must reach a certain bound and one day vanish. For if the divine goodness which ever worketh not only in the good but also in the wicked, is eternal and infinite, it follows that its contrary will not be eternal and infinite. . . . Evil therefore will have its consummation and remain not in any nature, since in all the divine nature will work and be manifest. Our nature then is not fixed in evil;. . . it is ever moving, and seeks nought else but the highest good, from tvhich as from a beginning its motion takes its source, and to which it is hastened as to an end.'' As all things proceed from God, so in God they find their final completion. He is the end of things, the last of the four forms of nature which make the foundation of the Scot s system.

This fourfold division is absolutely John s own property and discoverable elsewhere only in the Indian doctrine of the Sankhya: 'in the simplicity of his general plan,' it has been truly said, 'he surpasses all the philosophers of the middle ages.' The scheme breaks into two by the distinction of creator and created. The first and fourth forms are the two aspects of the uncreated