Appendix 23.

(685) [St. Thomas and Locke on reflection]

St. Thomas, who is unjustly confused with modern sensists, carefully distinguished the faculty of reflection from the faculty of feeling. He stripped feeling of all reflection upon itself; reflection appertained to intellect. This distinction was sufficient to divide the two faculties and prevent any intermingling. 'No feeling knows itself or its action,' he writes. 'Sight does not in any way see itself, nor see its seeing; this is proper to a superior power. - The intellect knows itself and knows its knowing. Intellect and feeling are not therefore the same thing' (C. Gentes, II, 66). This teaching, founded on Aristotle's (De Anima, bk. 3), confirms my interpretation of that judgment which Aristotle incorrectly attributes to feeling (cf. vol. 1, App., no. 16 ). If feeling cannot return upon itself, much less can it, properly speaking, judge what it feels.

Locke, however, did distinguish reflection in some way, although he was incoherent in denying the idea of substance on the one hand, while sometimes feeling obliged to grant a vague notion of it on the other. After him, his successors confused everything by making reflection coalesce with sensation. In Italy, Gallini, professor of physiology at Padua University, seems to acknowledge only one difference between direct and reflective ideas: there is a lesser degree of intension in the attention we give to the impressions made on our sensories. This difference alone explains greater or lesser clarity in our ideas. Unfortunately he did not see that the act of reflection is another act, inconfusable with the act of direct attention, just as direct attention of the intellect is something essentially different from instinctive or sensitive tension (cf. Dr. Stefano Gallini's article, Considerazioni filosofiche sul senso del Bello, etc., in Esercitazioni dell'Ateneo di Venezia, vol. 1).