into a lower.  It is as when men copy after beasts.  For the four-footed horse walks beautifully, but if a man on all fours should imitate him, who would think him worthy even of chaff for food?  Rightly therefore we generally disapprove of one who imitates, while we approve of him whom he imitates.  But we disapprove not because he has not succeeded, but for wishing to succeed at all.  For in the horse we approve of that to which by as much as we prefer man, by so much are we offended that he copies after inferior creatures.  So among men, however well the crier may do in sending forth his voice, would not the senator be insane, if he should do it even more clearly and better than the crier?  Take an illustration from the heavenly bodies:  The moon when shining is praised, and by its course and its changes is quite pleasing to those that pay attention to such things.  But if the sun should wish to imitate it (for we may feign that it has desires of this sort215), who would not be greatly and rightly displeased.  From which illustrations I wish it to be understood, that even if there are souls (which meanwhile is left an open question216) devoted to bodily offices not by sin but by nature, and even if they are related to us, however inferior they may be, by some inner affinity, they should not be esteemed evil simply because we are evil ourselves in following them and in loving corporeal things.  For we sin by loving corporeal things, because by justice we are required and by nature we are able to love spiritual things, and when we do this we are, in our kind, the best and the happiest. 217 21.  Wherefore what proof does deliberation, violently urged in both directions, now prone to sin, now borne on toward right conduct, furnish, that we are compelled to accept two kinds of souls, the nature of one of which is from God, of the other not; when we are free to conjecture so many other causes of alternating states of mind?  But that these things are obscure and are to no purpose pried into by blear-eyed minds, whoever is a good judge of things sees.  Wherefore those things rather which have been said regarding the will and sin, those things, I say, that supreme justice permits no man using his reason to be ignorant of, those things which if they were taken from us, there is nothing whence the discipline of virtue may begin, nothing whence it may rise from the death of vices, those things I say considered again and again with sufficient clearness and lucidity convince us that the heresy of the Manichæans is false. 215 Augustin’s carefulness to explain that he is only indulging in personification is doubtless due to the fact that with the Manichæans the sun and the moon were objects of worship.—A.H.N. 216 In his Retractations, Augustin explains that he did not really regard this as an open question, but speaks of it as such only so far as this particular discussion is concerned.  He simply declines to enter upon a consider- ation of it in this connection.—A.H.N. 217 Here also the use of the word "nature" gave Augustin trouble in his later years.  He claims in the Retracta- tions that he uses the word in the sense of "nature that has been healed" and that "cannot be vitiated," and seeks to show that he did not mean to exclude divine grace.—A.H.N. 183 From Deliberation on the Evil and on the Good Part It Results that Two Classes…