122. General and indeterminate conceptions are the ideas of being and not-being, substance and accidents, simple and composite, cause and effect. All that is real in these conceptions is affirmed of God. 123. Being or that which really exists, is affirmed of God. That which is not has no property. 124. Substance, or being subsistent in itself, is also affirmed of God. I do not enter into the discussion of the question greatly disputed in the schools, whether the ideas of being and substance are applied in the same sense, or, as logicians say, _univoce_, to God and creatures. It is sufficient for my purpose that the idea of being is applied to the infinite being, as opposed to the idea of not-being, and the idea of substance as opposed to accidents, or rather, as implying a thing which contains all that is necessary in order to subsist by itself without inhering in any other. 125. The idea of accident cannot be applied to the infinite being; but this is not to deny it any thing positive, but rather to affirm a perfection; for we say that it has no need of being inherent in another. This is a perfection; it is being: to deny the quality of accident is to remove a negation. To say that a being is a substance is to deny that it is an accident: these two ideas are contradictory and cannot be attributed to the same subject at the same time. 126. Simplicity is affirmed of God. This attribute denies nothing; to be convinced of this we need only recollect what simplicity is. The simple is one; the composite is a union of beings. If the parts are real, as they must be if there is a true composition, the resultant is a collection of beings subordinated to a certain law of unity. When, therefore, we say that God is simple, we say that God is not a collection of beings, but one being. This involves no negation: but on the contrary it is the affirmation of an existence not divided into various beings. 127. The idea of cause, that is, of activity which produces in another the transition from not-being to being, or from one mode of being to another, is also affirmed of God. This involves no negation, but is an affirmation of being; for a cause is not only being, but a being which so abounds in perfection as to communicate it to others. 128. The idea of effect cannot be applied to God; but this is an affirmation, not a negation. Every effect is a thing produced, which has, consequently, passed from not-being to being: to deny the quality of effect is to remove the negation of being, and affirm the fulness of being. 129. What has been said of the ideas of cause and effect, may be extended to the ideas of necessary and contingent. The negative proposition, God is not contingent, is an affirmation; for contingency is the possibility of not-being. To deny this possibility is to affirm the necessity of being, which is the fulness of perfection. CHAPTER XVII. ALL THAT IS NOT CONTRADICTORY IN INTUITIVE IDEAS IS AFFIRMED OF GOD.