SECTION IV.--_Of the Object of Perfect Happiness_.


1. As happiness is an act of the speculative intellect contemplating
(s. ii., n. 6, p. 9), so the thing thus contemplated is the _object of
happiness_. As happiness is the _subjective last end_, so will this
object, inasmuch as the contemplation of it yields perfect happiness,
be the _objective last end_ of man. (s. i., nn. 3, 4, p. 4.) As
perfect happiness is possible, and intended by nature, so is this
objective last end attainable, and should be attained. But attained by
man? Aye, there's the rub. It cannot be attained in this life, and
after death man is no more: a soul out of the body is not man. About
the resurrection of the body philosophy knows nothing. Nature can make
out no title to resurrection. That is a gratuitous gift of God in
Christ. When it takes effect, _stupebit natura_. Philosophy deals only
with the natural order, with man as man, leaving the supernatural
order, or the privileges and _status_ of man as a child of God, to the
higher science of Scholastic Theology. Had God so willed it, there
might have been no supernatural at all. Philosophy shows the world as
it would have been on that hypothesis. In that case, then, man would
have been, as Aristotle represents him, a being incapable of perfect
happiness; but _he who is man_ could have become perfectly happy in a
state other than human, that is, as a disembodied spirit. Peter is
man: the soul of Peter, after separation, is man no longer; but Peter
is not one person, and Peter's soul out of the body another person;
there is but one person there, with one personal history and
liabilities. The soul of Peter is Peter still: therefore the person
Peter, or he _who is Peter_, attains to happiness, but not the man
Peter, as man, apart from the supernatural privilege of the