144. To know good, is good; to know evil, is also good; to wish good is good; to wish evil is evil; here is a difference between the understanding and the will; the will may be defiled by its object, the understanding never. The moralist considers, examines, and analyzes the greatest iniquities, and studies the details of the most degrading corruption; the politician knows the passions, the miseries, and the crimes of society; the lawyer witnesses injustice under all its aspects; the naturalist and the physician contemplate the most filthy and loathsome objects; and in all this no stain attaches to the intelligence. God himself knows all the evil there is or can be in the physical or in the moral order, and yet his intelligence remains immaculate. 145. Created beings abuse liberty as such; for it is essentially a principle of action, and may be directed to evil; but the intelligence, as regards itself alone, cannot be abused. It is essentially an immanent or intransitive act in which are represented real or possible objects; the abuse does not commence until the free will combines the acts of the intelligence and directs them to a bad action; there is no evil knowledge until the act of the will is introduced into the combinations of the understanding. A collection of stratagems to commit the most horrible crimes, may be the innocent object of intellectual contemplation. 146. A wonderful thing is intelligence. With it there is relation, order, rule, science, art; without intelligence there is nothing. Conceive, if you can, the world without the pre-existence of intelligence; all is chaos; imagine the order which now exists, destroy intelligence, and the universe is a beautiful picture placed before the extinguished sight of a corpse. 147. We conceive beings as more perfect accordingly as they are higher in the order of intelligence. Leaving the sphere of the insensible and entering the order of sensitive representation, a new world commences. The first degree is the animal in which sensations are limited to a small number of objects, and the summit is intelligence. Morality flows from intelligence, or, rather, is one of its laws, it is the prescription of conformity to an infinitely perfect type. Morality is explained with intelligence; without intelligence it is an absurdity. The intelligence has its laws, its duties, but they proceed from itself, as the sun enlightens itself by its own light. Liberty is explained with intelligence; without it, liberty is an absurdity. Without intelligence causality is presented to us as a farce operating without an object or a direction, without a sufficient reason, and is consequently the greatest of absurdities. When some theologians said that the constitutive attribute of the essence of God is intelligence, they expressed an idea which contains a wonderfully profound philosophical meaning.