PART II
ON CERTAIN KINDS OF SINS
CHAPTER I
ON SINS OF THOUGHT
I. THERE are as many kinds of bad thoughts as there are different kinds of sin, but for the purpose of this chapter they are commonly reduced by theologians to two kinds: bad desires and morose pleasure in evil imaginations. Desire, therefore, is here understood in a wide sense and comprises a longing, a wish, purpose, or intention of doing something wrong. Morose pleasure is voluntary joy, delight, and satisfaction in an evil imagination, and what is said about it is also applicable to voluntary sadness and sorrow on account of something good, which should cause the opposite sentiments.
Desires are efficacious when there is the intention of taking the necessary means to obtain what is desired; they are inefficacious or conditional when this is not the case.
2. An efficacious desire of doing what is wrong is a sin of the same kind as the external action would be; it contracts the malice of the object and of all the circumstances of the object. The reason is plain. The external action in the concrete with all its circumstances is the object to which the will tends in forming an efficacious desire; and as an act is specified by its object, the evil desire belongs to the same species of sin to which the external act would belong when performed in the circumstances contemplated.
The same must be said of inefficacious or conditional desires, unless the condition takes away all the malice of the act, as it frequently may do. There is no harm, for example, in saying, " I should like to eat meat on a Friday, unless the Church forbade it "; and the same is true generally whenever the condition, "if it were lawful," is annexed to a merely positive prohibition. If this condition is annexed to a- desire against the natural law, as " I should like to steal if it were lawful," or " I should like to commit fornication if it were not forbidden," the condition does not remove all the malice of the vicious will, for the very tendency of the will toward
