Origin of Thought

Appendix 9. (554)

If anyone denied that the name cognition could be applied to the single, innate idea which our spirit intuits directly without any judgment, I would not dispute the matter. This seems to have been Aquinas' view, and I hope to be able to throw some light upon it.

St. Thomas teaches that our mind understands and knows only through phantasms. Now it is very important to grasp what he means by this. He observes that it is proper to the human mind to know things themselves (quidditas rei est objectum intellectus). But the mind knows things through their idea or species. The intellect, therefore, knows real things, but through ideas which are the means of knowledge (non quod cognoscit, sed quo cognoscit). He can say, therefore, ad cognitionem duo concurrere oportet, scilicet apprehensionem (the idea), et judicium [two things are required for knowledge, namely apprehension and judgment], which brings the mind to the real thing (the mental word). In this case, our simple apprehension, that is, the pure idea without any real, felt thing, would not be something we understood, but only themeans of understanding. This is precisely the state of the mind which possesses only the idea of being without having received any phantasm through sense. It cannot be said to know anything because as yet it understands nothing; it has only a potency for knowing and understanding. As St. Thomas says: ''As a potency, it cannot know anything except relative to its object, just as vision is meaningless without colour. Phantasms, therefore, are related to the possible intellect as feelable things are related to sense. The intellect, although it may have some intelligible species, does not actually consider anything according to that species except in the presence of phantasms. Hence our intellect, in its present state, needs phantasms to really think' (De Verit. q. 10, art. 2, ad 7). St. Thomas admits that the intellect can have some idea or intellectual species antecedent to phantasms which, however, it needs in order to know in the restricted sense of the word.