WHAT IS MEANT by calling man fallible? Essentially this: that the
possibility of moral evil is inherent in man's constitution. This reply
calls for two kinds of clarifications. It may be asked, indeed, in what
features of this primordial constitution the possibility of failing re-
sides more particularly. On the other hand, one may ask about the
nature of this possibility itself. Let us consider these two aspects of
the problem in succession.

A long philosophic tradition, which attained its most perfect ex-
pression in Leibniz, would maintain that the limitation proper to
creatures is the occasion of moral evil. Considered as the occasion
of moral evil, this limitation would even merit the name of meta-
physical evil. Our whole preceding analysis tends to rectify this
ancient proposition in a precise way: the idea of limitation as such
cannot bring us to the threshold of moral evil. Not just any limitation
constitutes the possibility of failing, but that specific limitation which
consists, for human reality, in not coinciding with itself. Nor would
it be of any use to define limitation as a participation in nothingness
or not-being: we remember that Descartes, before elucidating the
relation of the will to the understanding, elaborated a brief ontology
of human reality that consisted in combining the idea of being or
perfection with "a certain negative idea of nothingness, i.e., of what
is infinitely far removed from every kind of perfection." Thus he
could say "I am a something intermediate between God and nothing-
ness." But any combination of being and nothingness does not con-
stitute the occasion of failing, for every reality that is not being as
such is, in a quite general sense, "intermediate between God and
nothingness." We can understand how Descartes could be satisfied

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