your principles, and—if your principles are sound—it is more admissible than your account of it as utterly deficient. Describing it in this way would ascribe attributes of perfection to it while respecting the principles you believe to be sound. Nor would this entail any objection without its denial entailing an even greater one.

[Twenty-First Argument]

It may be said:

Your statement, “Its substance has no longing for anything, nor any aversion to anything,” means that it neither loves nor hates anything. Why do you say this?

If you say:

“One who loves and hates loves only what it needs from another, and hates only what it needs to ward off from itself.”

You may be asked:

Why do you say this, when, according to you, the celestial sphere loves—indeed, loves passionately? If it loves something, it hates losing it. Yet, according to you, it fears nothing external to itself and has no need to ward off harm from itself. Indeed, it cannot undergo corruption or dissolution. Nevertheless, it loves passionately, seeks and longs. Thus, its longing does not entail that it is subject to something it needs to ward off.

As for the claim that love requires there to be another substance above it from which it draws, this follows only if it is incapable of attaining what it loves.

But if it is supposed that this involves no need for anything of which it is independent, then no objection arises.

[Twenty-Second Argument]

It may be said:

Your statement, “Its substance, then, has no longing for anything, nor any aversion to anything, nor any susceptibility to change or to the arising of