E. God is Known through the Species of Creatures

61. Fifth [n.24] I say that the things known about God are known through species of creatures, because either the more and the less universal are known through the same species of the less universal, or each has its own intelligible species proper to it; at any rate, what can impress a species of the less universal on the intellect can also cause in it a species of anything more universal; and thus can creatures, which impress their proper species on the intellect, also impress species of the transcendentals that belong in common to them and to God. And then the intellect can, by its own proper virtue, use many species together to form a joint concept of that of which these are the species, as for example by the species of ‘good’ and the species of ‘supreme’ and the species of ‘act’ to conceive a ‘supreme and most actual good’. This is plain through an argument a minori: for the imaginative power [sc. which is lesser than the intellectual power] can use the species of diverse sensible things to imagine something composed of those diverse things, as is plain when imagining a golden mountain.a

a.a [Interpolated note] I say that our intellect knows God to be a being infinite, supremely good and the like, in this way: For the concept of being is included in the concept of creature; therefore our intellect, in conceiving this being, as white or stone, can, by ascending and abstracting from it, know the conceptual content of being, and stop at it; likewise it can abstract supremeness from this supremeness and that, and can thus know what supreme is, and can conjoin the conceptual content of supremeness with that of being or of good and can thus know supreme being and supreme good, and so on as to infinite being - in the same way does the imaginative power imagine a golden mountain, where only the extreme terms exist in reality and not the conjunction itself of them. In this way, then, by abstracting common conceptual contents from creatures and conjoining them, we can know God in universal terms, and even the concept asserted of God that most belongs to him as he is known by us.

62. From this is evident a refutation of what is said in the preceding opinion [n.21, interpolated text] about [cognitive] ‘digging down’; for never through digging is what is not under the dig found by the dig. But never does there exist under the concept of a creature a concept or species representing something proper to God that is of an altogether different idea from what belongs to a creature - as was proved by the second argument in the second article [n.35]. Therefore, by digging down no such concept is found there. -And as to what is added about a similarity with the estimative power [n.21, interpolated text], I say that it seems one falsehood is being used to confirm another falsehood. For, if a sheep remain in the same nature and with the same natural affection for the lamb and yet it were changed, by a miracle, to be like a wolf in all sensible accidents, as color, shape, and sound and the rest, the lamb would flee a sheep thus altered as it would flee a wolf. And yet in the sheep thus altered there would be no conceptual idea of the harmful but of the agreeable. Therefore, the estimative power of the lamb would not dig down to discover under the sensible species the conceptual content of the agreeable, but would be precisely moved by its sense appetite in the way the sensible accidents would move it. If you say that the conceptual idea in it of the agreeable does not reduplicate itself, because there are no accidents present of the sort to be agreeable to such an idea, and the idea of the agreeable is not reduplicated without agreeable accidents - this is nothing, because if a lamb were to flee a wolf because of the perception of something harmful conceived by its estimative power, and if the perception is not reduplicated along with the sensible accidents (because it is not reduplicated with them in this supposed case), then either there is here a digging down of the lamb to an idea of the harmful that is null [because not reduplicated], or if the lamb does not flee here because of digging down to it, then not in the other case either.