God’s will is more fundamental than the good. God makes the good to be good. Both Thomas and Scotus say that the moral law is the command of God. Thomas conceives it to be God’s command because it is in accord with the good; Scotus, for no other reason than that it is God’s command. The good might be different if God so created it. In opposition to Thomas, Scotus maintained that God does not have to create what He does create, and that this is not the best possible world. God creates what He wills; He can, therefore, grant dispensation, and so can the church. If God’s will were determined by His intellect, He would have no independence, He would not even exist, He would be only nature or one of its causes, there could be no evil nor accident. He can supersede the moral law by a new law, just as He superseded the Mosaic law by the Gospel. Individuality, revelation, salvation, and all objects of faith have their existence only in the groundless and inscrutable will of God. For this reason there can be no rational theology. This founder of the “Franciscan tradition” of practical piety and meritorious action could not have other than the freedom of the will as his central principle. An Augustinian he refused, however, to follow Augustine in centralizing freedom in God. The object of faith is the will of God, the subject of faith is the will of man. Human freedom consists in coöperation with divine grace. Man can help in the work of God. His freedom is partly formal: he can will or not will. It is partly material: he can will A or B. There is no ulterior ground to determine the human will, and this undetermined freedom is the ground for merit, provided the human will coincides with the divine. =The Problem of Individuality.= The problem of individuation was a favorite one with Scotus. While Scotus agrees with Thomas as to the threefold existence of the universal, the individual and not the universal is the ultimate fact. The individual cannot be deduced from the universal, nor can it be constituted by the quantitative determinations of matter. It is already individualized and substantialized. Form, not matter, individualizes. The definite individual form, the “thisness” (_hæcceitas_), is the ultimate fact. The individual can only be verified as actual fact. The individual is irreducible, and no further explanation can be made than to say that it is an individual. Thus the inquiry into the _Principium individuationis_ has no meaning.