A Guide for the Religious Instruction of Jewish Youth | Page 4

God, man finds in himself when his intellectual faculties have attained a certain degree of culture and maturity. He then knows himself to be a moral being; that is to say, a being who, placed between good and evil, can, of his own free will, adhere to the former and reject the latter, if he follows the dictates of his reason. Then the moral sense awakens in his mind the idea of a supreme blessing, of a progressive and infallible moral perfection, of a future final accord between virtue and felicity, and their necessary co-existence. Now, he cannot expect this supreme blessing from anything that surrounds him in nature, because he does not find in the latter the desired union of happiness with virtue, enjoyment with merit. He must, therefore, seek it in a Supreme Cause existing out of nature--in a Cause which should contain in itself the type of the moral law, embrace the whole extent of that law with infinite intelligence, and act up to its dictates with a powerful will. This Supreme Cause is God.
CHAPTER II.
VIII. MAN has many advantages and privileges over all other creatures. Not only can he, like other animals, perceive through his senses all the surrounding objects, but he can compare with one another the perceptions received, associate them together, separate them, and form new ideas. He can know for what purposes things exist, investigate their causes and effects, discern between good and evil, between just and unjust; he alone can communicate his thoughts to others; he alone can speak.
IX. Everything produced by an intelligent Author must be intended for some purpose--must have a destination. Man, the noblest creature on earth, must also have a destination. We shall arrive at a clear knowledge of that destination, when we shall have considered the powers and capabilities possessed by him; for the means with which nature has endowed him, for the development of his activity, evidently point out the goal which that activity is designed to attain.
X. Now, the capabilities that we discover in man are the following:--Besides a body constructed with wonderful skill, but weak, corruptible, mortal, man has within himself a vivifying principle, which substantiates in him the knowledge of things with the aid of the senses, renews in him perceptions once received, unites them, separates them, and forms out of them new ideas. This thinking principle is certainly different from the body, of which no part is apt to think, and is what we call the soul; the act itself of thinking proceeds from a faculty of the soul which we call intellect.
XI. But the soul can also judge, conclude from causes to effects, distinguish between good and evil, between just and unjust, conceive an idea of things never perceived through the senses; it can recognise the supreme Author of the universe, it can adore God. This faculty of the soul is called reason; intellect and reason are the principal or superior faculties of the human soul.
XII. Reason points out good as a thing desirable, and evil as a thing to be avoided; yet man feels within himself a desire or impulse towards all that is pleasurable to the senses, although reason may represent it to him as an evil. And, on the other hand, he is conscious of his perfect freedom of choosing good, however disagreeable to the senses, and of abhorring evil, however tempting it may appear; he has, then, the faculty of directing his action to one or other of these two courses; his soul is endowed with free-will.
XIII. A being endowed with intellect, reason, and free-will cannot be composed of parts, because the operations proceeding from such faculties presuppose a comparison of various relations with each other, and a deduction of consequences from their principles; and these operations require such a unity and simplicity in their subject as are absolutely incompatible with the nature of matter, composed, as it is, of parts. The human soul is therefore a simple being, a spirit, and, as such, indestructible, immortal.
XIV. Man, then, unites in himself two natures, belongs to two classes of beings very different from one another, is a citizen of two worlds. In his body he is linked to the material world, undergoes all the vicissitudes of matter, is subject to the incentives of the senses, and is impelled to gratify the wants and cravings of physical enjoyment. As regards his soul, he enters into the sphere of intelligences, he feels himself attracted by the ideas of the beautiful, of the true, of the just; he participates in the condition of the spiritual beings, aspires to the immense, to the infinite; and is susceptible of an ever-increasing perfectibility, finding within himself the power of abhorring moral evil, viz., vice, and of cleaving to moral good, viz., virtue.
XV. Man has,