have gone on to consider what might be done in this way, and thus I should have reasoned with myself:  If yonder sun, conspicuous by its brightness and sufficing for day by its light, should little by little decline in our sight into the likeness of the moon, would we perceive anything else with our eyes than light however refulgent, yet seeking light by reason of not seeing what had been, and using it for seeing what was present?  Therefore we should not see the decline, but the light that should survive the decline.  But since we should not see, we should not perceive; for whatever we perceive by sight must necessarily be seen; wherefore if that decline were perceived neither by sight nor by any other sense, it cannot be reckoned among objects of sense.  For nothing is an object of sense that cannot be perceived by sense.  Let us apply now the consideration to virtue, by whose intellectual light we most fittingly say the mind shines.  Again, a certain decline from this light of virtue, not destroying the soul, but obscuring it, is called vice.  Therefore also vice can by no means be reckoned among objects of intellectual perception, as that decline of light is rightly excluded from the number of objects of sense perception.  Yet what remains of soul, that is that which lives and is soul is just as much an object of intellectual perception as that is an object of sense perception which should shine in this visible luminary after any imaginable degree of decline.  And so the soul, in so far as it is soul and partakes of life, without which it can in no way be soul, is most correctly to be preferred to all objects of sense perception.  Wherefore it is most erro- neous to say that any soul is not from God, from whom you boast that the sun and moon have their existence. 99 7.  But if now it should be thought fit to designate as objects of sense perception not only all those things that we perceive by the senses, but also all those things that though not perceiving by the senses we judge of by means of the body, as of darkness through the eyes, of silence through the ears,—for not by seeing darkness and not by hearing silence do we know of their existence,—and again, in the case of objects of intellectual perception, not those things only which we see illuminated by the mind, as is wisdom itself, but also those things which by the illumination itself we avoid, such as foolishness, which I might fittingly designate mental darkness; I should have made no controversy about a word, but should have dissolved the whole question by an easy division, and straightway I should have proved to those giving good attention, that by the divine law of truth intelligible subsistences are to be preferred to sensible subsistences, not the decline of these subsistences, even though we should choose to call these intelligible, those sensible.  Wherefore, that those who ac- knowledge that these visible luminaries and those intelligible souls are subsistences, are in every way compelled to grant and to attribute the sublimer part to souls; but that defects of either kind cannot be preferred the one to the other, for they are only privative and indicate nonexistence, and therefore have precisely the same force as negations themselves.  For when we say, It is not gold, and, It is not virtue, although there is the greatest possible differ- ence between gold and virtue, yet there is no difference between the negations that we adjoin 167 Whether Even Vices Themselves as Objects of Intellectual Apprehension are…