PROPOSITION XXV.

Being, as such, has certain Attributes which are really and truly predicated of it.

The truth of this Proposition is established by the testimony of common sense alike and of individual experience. For it is indisputable that the One, the True, the Good, are universally predicated of beings; and it is equally sure that by such predication some reality is expressed and meant to be expressed, and not a mere figment of the mind. Thus, for instance, when people speak of true gold, while on the one hand no one supposes that they mean to express any real addition to the nature or essence of gold; all, on the other hand, would agree that some real perfection is attributed to the gold when it is called true, and would never allow that the epithet is a mere logical designation. So again, when the soul of a man is said to be one, that unity forms no real addition to its nature; but, for all that, it is no mere phantom of a conceptual caprice. In like manner, air may be called good; nor would any one dream that its goodness was a real addition made to the nature of the air. Nevertheless, we are all conscious that, in conceiving the air as good, there is something more in the thought than when it is simply conceived as air; and that the something more, in the former concept, is expressive of a reality which, somehow or other, the air exhibits.

The quotations, made from the Angelic Doctor in the previous Proposition, are equally confirmatory of the position here maintained. For, when he declares that 'it is not nugatory to speak of true Being,' and when he distinctly states that the referribility of a final cause is that which Good adds to Being; he evidently considers these Attributes to be more than logical figments. Further statements of his doctrine, which will appear in the succeeding Propositions, will put the question beyond all doubt.

Notwithstanding, it will not be amiss, for the sake of obviating difficulties which might otherwise arise, to subjoin that, speaking loosely, these Attributes may be called in a way logical entities forasmuch as they do not connote any positive and really intrinsic entity in their Subject, and the distinction between them and Being is not real, but a distinction of reason founded in reality.