Page:Essays on Catholicism, Liberalism, and Socialism.djvu/217

spicuous by which he reconciles what would seem to be irreconcilable, and by means of which all contradictions and incompatibilities are combined in one magnificent synthesis.

With regard to sin, the entire question lies in this difficult problem: How can we be sinners when we do not sing? How can we as infants sin?

In order to explain this, we must consider that our first parent represented both an individual and a species, a man and the human species, diversity and unity joined into one. And as it is a fundamental and primitive law that diversity proceeds from the unity wherein it exists in order to form a separate existence, but returns in its ultimate evolution to the unity from which it originates, as a consequence of this law the species which Adam represented proceeded from Adam, through generation, so as to constitute for itself a separate existence. but as Adam was at the same time species and individual, it necessarily results from this, that Adam was in the species as he was in the individual. When the individual and the species were one and the same, Adam united these things in himself; when the individual and the species were separated in order to constitute unity and diversity, Adam was these two things separated, in the same way that he had previously been these two things united. There then existed an Adam as an individual, and another Adam as a species; and as sin existed before the separation, and as Adam sinned both with his individual nature and with his collective nature, it results from this, that both the one and the other Adam were sinners. The individual Adam died, but the collective Adam did not die, and with his life preserves his