philosophy, he exerted all his great talents to make the most precise
distinction from it. Philosophers (he says) have always regarded the world
as an emanation from God. Then all is God. Such is not the way to
reason. There is no emanation, but creation; God created the world and has
remained distinct from it. He lives in it in such a way that we live in
Him; in Him we live and move and have our being; He dwells throughout the
world, but He is not the world; He is everywhere but He is not all. God
created the world. Then, can it be said that before the world was created
God remained doing nothing during an immense space of time? Certainly not,
because time only began at the creation of the world. God is outside
time. The eternal is the absence of time. God, therefore, was not an
instant before He created the world. Or, if it be preferred, there was an
eternity before the birth of the world. But it is the same thing; for
eternity is the non-existence of time.

Some understand God in three Persons as three Gods. This polytheism, this
paganism must be rejected. But how to understand? How? You feel in
yourself several souls? No. And yet there are several faculties of the
soul. The three Persons of God are the three divine faculties. Man has body
and soul. No one ought to have doubts about the soul, for to have doubts
presupposes thought, and to think is to be; above all things we are
thinking beings. But what is the soul? Something immaterial, assuredly,
since it can conceive immaterial things, such as a line, a point, surface,
space. It is as necessary for the soul to be immaterial in order to be able
to grasp the immaterial, as it is necessary for the hand to be material in
order that it can grasp a stone.

Whence comes the soul? From the souls of ancestors by transmission? This is
not probable, for this would be to regard it as material. From God by
emanation? This is inadmissible; it is the same error as believing that the