LECTIO THIRTEEN

             § 787. After treating of its powers of sense and intellect the Philosopher goes on now to draw conclusions about the nature of the soul: showing first that the early philosophers were partly right and partly wrong about the soul; and then explaining how the intellect depends on the senses. As to the former point, he first explains how the soul, as the early philosophers said, is in a way all things; and then how it is not all things in the way they supposed. He says then, recapitulating, that one can admit that the soul is in a way all things; for everything is either sensible or intelligible, and sense and intellect (or science) are in the soul, sense being somehow the sensible, and intellect, or science, the intelligible or the scientifically knowable.

             § 788. But we must ask how this is so. For sense and intellectual knowledge are divided 'into realities', that is, their division into act and potency corresponds to a like division in reality; but in such a way that while potential intellectual or sensuous knowledge answers to things potentially understood or sensed, and actual intellectual or sensuous knowledge answers to things actually understood or sensed, there is a difference between the two relationships. For the sense in act and the intellect in act are the objects they actually sense or understand; but neither the sensitive nor the intellectual potency is actually its object; it is only so potentially. And that is how the soul is 'somehow' everything.

             § 789. Next, at 'Now they must be', he shows how the ancients misapplied this formula. He says that if the soul is indeed all things, it must be either simply identical with all things or a formal likeness of all things. The former view was that of Empedocles who made out that we, being earth, know earth, and being water we know water, and so on. But obviously the soul is not simply identical with the things it knows; for not stone itself, but its formal likeness exists in the soul. And this enables us to see how intellect in act is what it understands; the form of the object is the form of the mind in act.

             § 790. Thus the soul resembles the hand. The hand is the most perfect of organs, for it takes the place in man of all the organs given to other animals for purposes of defence or attack or covering. Man can provide all these needs for himself with his hands. And in the same way the soul in man takes the place of all the forms of being, so that through his soul a man is, in a way, all being or everything; his soul being able to assimilate all the forms of being--the intellect intelligible forms and the senses sensible forms.

             § 791. Next, at 'But since there are': the doctrine just stated, namely that intellect is, in a way, the intelligible object as sense is the sensible object, might lead one to suppose that the intellect did not depend on the senses; as would be the case indeed if the intelligible objects attained by our mind had their existence apart from sensible things, as the Platonists thought. So he now shows the intellect's dependence on the senses; and then goes on (at 'Imagination is other') to show that it differs, none the less, from imagination which also depends on the senses. First, then, he observes that, since all the objects of our understanding are included within the range of sensible things existing in space, that is to say, that none seems to have that sort of distinct existence apart from things of sense which particular things of sense have apart from one another, it follows that all these intelligible objects have their beings in the objects of sense; this being true not only of the objects studied by natural science, the properties and modifications of things of sense, but even of mathematical abstractions. It follows then that without some use of the senses we can neither learn anything new, as it were for the first time; nor bring before our understanding any intellectual knowledge already possessed. Whenever the intellect actually regards anything there must at the same time be formed in us a phantasm, that is, a likeness of something sensible.

             § 792. Phantasms, however, differ from things of sense by their immateriality. For as we have shown, the senses receive the forms of things immaterially; and phantasms are nothing but movements started by actual sensation.

             It will be clear now that Avicenna erred in saying that once the mind had acquired knowledge it no longer needed the senses. For we know by experience that in order to reflect on knowledge already gained we have to make use of phantasms; and that any injury to the physical apparatus underlying these will tend to prevent our using the knowledge we already have.

             § 793. Then at 'Imagination is other' he distinguishes between intellect and imagination. (1) With respect to the normal activity of the intellect, which is by composing and dividing, he says that imagining is neither intellectual affirmation nor intellectual denial; for these immediately involve truth and falsehood; which is not the case with imagining. Only the intellect knows truth and falsehood.

             § 794. (2) He asks (at 'What difference etc.') how the primary intellectual notions, the understanding of indivisible objects, differ from phantasms; and he replies that while these are always attended by phantasms, they differ from phantasms by their universality: they are abstracted from individuating conditions, whereas phantasms are always of particulars. Phantasms in fact are not actually, but only potentially, indivisible.

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