They affirm that subsistence or suppositality gives the last complement to the nature, as it terminates it and makes it subsistent. Hence subsistence, as they infer, must add something positive to the nature; which it cannot do unless it be a positive reality. We deny the assumption altogether. Subsistence, in fact, gives no complement whatever to the nature, but, on the contrary, presupposes the complete nature, which, when simply left to itself, cannot but be subsistent by itself, and therefore is said to have its own subsistence. It is not subsistence that causes the thing to subsist; it is the thing which abides by itself that, in consequence of this same abiding by itself, has subsistence, and is called subsistent; just in the same manner as it is not _rest_ that causes the body to be at rest, but _the concrete resting_; as rest is evidently the consequence of the resting. Hence this second objection, too, is based on a false assumption. Another of their reasons is the following: In God, personality is a positive reality, therefore in creatures also; for the created person is a participation of divine person, which is a positive reality. We do not see how this assertion can be true. In God there are three Persons, but neither of them is participated or communicated to creatures. Indeed, creatures bear in themselves a faint imitation of the three divine Persons, inasmuch as they involve three intrinsic principles in their constitution, as we have explained in the preceding article; but these three principles are not three persons. Yet, if divine personality were in any way communicable to creatures, creatures would subsist in three persons; for how could the personality of the Father be communicated in any degree without the personality of the Son and of the Holy Ghost being communicated in the same degree? Personality in God is a relative entity, and cannot be conceived without its correlative; and consequently, if the human personality were a participation of divine personality, it would be impossible for man to be a single person; whence it appears that human personality is not a communication of divine personality, and is not even analogous to it. What we call a human person is nothing but a human individual nature which is _sui juris_—that is, not possessed by a superior being, but left to itself and free to dispose of its acts. It therefore imitates, not the divine Persons, but the divine absolute Being, inasmuch as it is independent in disposing of everything according to his will. Now, independence, even in God, implies the negation or absence of any necessary connection or conjunction with anything distinct from the divine nature. It is but reasonable, then, to hold that the human nature also exists free and independent by the very absence or negation of personal union with a higher being. We remark, however, that such a negation in God is a negation of imperfection, while in creatures an