permit. To say that “God is good” and that “man is good” is to say that God is good in proportion to his received act of to be (which in God is his essence, of which more below) and that man is good with respect to his potential existence. Or to use another example, God knows as deity; man knows as man. The proportion that obtains between being and essence determines the truth of that which is predicated of each thing. We begin to see something here of Aquinas’s so-called scale of being. Everything