Mozley: A Treatise on the Augustinian Doctrine of

ix. of Necessity. 253
different argument from the former, and is perhaps the
nearest approach we can make to an account of the exist
ence of moral evil in the world. But it is in truth no
explanation
; for is this will of the creature to which evil
is referred an original cause or only a secondary one? If
the former, this argument only explains one difficulty by
another as great, the existence of evil by the existence of
an original cause in nature besides God. If the latter,
the existence of moral evil falls back, as before, upon the
First Cause ; the human will in that case being no such
barrier intervening between moral evil and God, as is
wanted for the present purpose.
But the principal explanation which was given of this
difficulty, and that in which Aquinas appears finally to
repose, was borrowed from his master. Every reader of S.
is Augustine familiar with a certain view of the nature of
evil, to which he constantly recurs, and which he seems to
cherish in his mind as a great moral discovery, a funda
mental set-off and answer to the great difficulty of the
existence of evil, and the true and perfect mode of extri
cating the Divine attribute of Power from the responsibility
of permitting it, the position, viz. that evil is nothing
nifiil. God was the source ; and as being the source of,
included and comprised, all existence. Evil was a depar
ture from God. Evil, therefore, was a departure from
existence. External to God, it was outside of all being
and substance ; i.e. was no-being or nothing.
Aquinas adopts this position, and improves upon it in
his usual way. Evil was nothing in another sense besides
that of pure negation, which is the common meaning of
nothing, viz., that of privation. Every nature aimed at
good as its perfection or true existence ; evil was a depri
vation of this good or true existence. In the case of evil,
then, there was something in our idea antecedent to it, of
which it was a loss or absence. That which every nature
truly and properly was, was in scholastic language its form,
whence the formal cause of a thing is that which makes a
thing to be what it is. Evil was a privation of form.
There was an end, and there was an action proper to every