 … a necessary and essential difference of things, a fitness and unfitness, a proportion and disproportion, a moral beauty and a moral deformity, an immutable right and wrong, necessary independent of the will of every being created or uncreated, explained by the philosopher Plato under the form of everlasting intellectual ideas, or moral entities, coeval with eternity, and residing in the divine mind; from whence, by irradiating rays, like the emitting of the sun-beams, they enlighten the understanding of all those intellectual beings, who, disregarding the objects of sense, give themselves up to the contemplation of the Deity; whilst modern philosophers, in a lower strain of reasoning, assert an abstract fitness of things perceived by the mind of God, and so interwoven in the nature of contemplative objects, as to be traced like other abstract truths, by those faculties of the mind which enable us to compare and perceive the agreement and disagreement of our sensitive and reflex ideas. (Macaulay 1783, 30–2)