The Manner or Mode of Man's Understanding

In this life, the human intellect rises from sense-findings to concepts. The human intellect is contrasted in this operation with the angelic intellect which descends from the knowledge ofnonmaterial things to the knowledge of material things.

Man’s intellect, by its concepts, knows reality. The ideas are that by which reality is known; they are not that which is known. For the intellect is not directly aware of its own ideas, but of what the ideas represent. The intellect, however, by reflecting upon itself, can become aware ofits concepts as such, and aware of the way in which these concepts are formed. But by its direct operation the intellect knows things, not its own knowing of things.

Even though intellectual knowledge in man is acquired from individual and material phantasms, it is at first general and indefinite and afterwards more special and distinct. So at first a child might call all men father, but later learn to specify one.

The intellect cannot understand many things at one time except in so far as they are included in one concept orintelligible species. Our knowledge may include many things, but we understand and think of the items of knowledge one at a time. Asthe eye cannot see more than one view at a time, but can behold them any visible things that belong to that view, so the intellectcannot think of more than is contained in the one concept on which its attention is fixed, but it can understand many things that belong to that concept.

Intellect compares ideas, pronouncing upon them by affirming or denying their agreement as subject and predicate. In making an affirmative judgment, such as “A plant is a living body,” the intellect puts together or composes subject-idea and predicate-idea. In making a negative judgment,such as “A plant is not a sentient body,” the intellect divides subject-idea and predicate-idea by its denial. Thus the intellect knows things by composing and dividing. And the intellect proceeds from judgments to further judgments by reasoning or discursive thinking. The elements of intellectual knowledge inman are ideas or concepts which are formed upon sense-findings. The actual items of human intellectual knowledge are judgments, whether these be made directly by composing and dividing, or arrived at by inference from other judgments, that is, by reasoning.

The intellect cannot be false in itself. Error in intellectual knowledge comes from something accidental to the intellect, not from the intellect itself. For example, error may come from careless use of the intellect.

One human intellect cannot understand a thing more than another, but one intellect can understand better than another. Just so, two men, one with cleareyesight and the other with imperfect vision, look upon the same scene; one does not see more actually than the other sees, but one sees better or more clearly than the other.

Confused knowledge regularly precedes distinct knowledge. We know things first in a general way, and later ina more detailed and distinct way. We first know a thing as undivided before we advert to its divisions; we know a whole object before we have knowledge of its various parts and their relation toone another.