[Footnote 177: Cf. Arist. _Magna Moral._ i. 1: "It would be absurd if a man, wishing to prove that the angles of a triangle were equal to two right angles, assumed as his principle that the soul is immortal."--WITTE.] Therefore I say that Judgment is between Apprehension and Appetite. First, a man apprehends a thing; then he judges it to be good or bad; then he pursues or avoids it accordingly. If therefore the Judgment guides the Appetite wholly, and in no way is forestalled by the Appetite, then is the Judgment free. But if the Appetite in any way at all forestalls the Judgment and guides it, then the Judgment cannot be free: it is not its own: it is captive to another power. Therefore the brute beasts cannot have freedom of Judgment; for in them the Appetite always forestalls the Judgment. Therefore, too, it is that intellectual beings whose wills are unchangeable, and souls which are separate from the body, which have gone hence in peace, do not lose the freedom of their wills, because their wishes cannot change; nay, it is in full strength and completeness that their wills are free.[178] [Footnote 178: Cf. _Purgatorio_, xviii. 22.--WITTE.] It is therefore again manifest that this liberty, or this principle of all our liberty, is the greatest gift bestowed by God on mankind: by it alone we gain happiness[179] as men: by it alone we gain happiness elsewhere as gods.[180] But if this is so, who will say that human kind is not in its best state, when it can most use this principle? But he who lives under a Monarchy is most free. Therefore let it be understood that he is free who exists not for another's sake but for his own, as the Philosopher, in his Treatise of simple Being, thought.[181] For everything which exists for the sake of some other thing, is necessitated by that other thing, as a road has to run to its ordained end. Men exist for themselves, and not at the pleasure of others, only if a Monarch rules; for then only are the perverted forms of government set right, while democracies, oligarchies, and tyrannies, drive mankind into slavery, as is obvious to any who goes about among them all; and public power[182] is in the hands of kings and aristocracies, which they call the rule of the best, and champions of popular liberty. And because the Monarch loves his subjects much, as we have seen, he wishes all men to be good, which cannot be the case in perverted forms of government:[183] therefore the Philosopher says, in his _Politics_:[184] "In the bad state the good man is a bad citizen, but in a good state the two coincide." Good states in this way aim at liberty, that in them men may live for themselves. The citizens exist not for the good of consuls, nor the nation for the good of its king; but the consuls for the good of the citizens, and the king for the good of his nation. For as the laws are made to suit the state, and not the state to suit the laws, so those who live under