Page:The World and the Individual, First Series (1899).djvu/251

232 St. Thomas’s way of escaping this consequence involves a theory of Possible Being, as it is in God, in advance of creation. The theory is to preserve the unity of the divine essence, is to explain the variety of finite beings, and is to show the relation of the created beings to God, in such wise as to avoid the apparent eternity and relative independence of the essences of finite beings.

In advance of creation, any possible being is known to God, — but how? God primarily and perfectly knows himself, and so knows his own absolute fulness of being. But this nature of God is One and Simple. In knowing this his own nature, even in its unity, God however views this nature, by virtue of its very fulness of Being, as Imitable now in this, now in that aspect, — as imitable in countless fashions and degrees, and thereby as imitable by various orders of possible beings that God could create. The divine knowledge of these finite beings not yet created primarily has, then, God’s own nature as its immediate object. God first knows just himself. But, secondarily, indeed, this nature can be viewed, not only as one, and as immediately present to God’s insight, but also, so to speak, as rendering valid countless true possible assertions about possible imperfect imitations of the Divine nature. The validity of these countless views of the one divine nature is implied, just as a type of genuine possibility, in the divine perfection, and is accordingly said to be, as it were, known to the divine insight in one act with the simple self-knowledge of God. And in this sense are the created beings viewed as possible in advance of creation. God knows not these beings as mere data of his knowledge, but as truths valid only