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V. To the Arguments for the Second Opinion
408. To the arguments for the second opinion [nn.364-365].
The answer to Dionysius [n.364] is plain from a different translation that is adduced (‘total’ etc 
.) - look at Lincoln [Grosseteste, translation and commentary on Celestial Hierarchy ch.12]; for, as Lincoln himself expounds, by ‘universality of species’ is understood ‘totality of species’. But this totality is totality of perfection (as of clearness or intensity), and not that a single reason is for something a reason of knowing more things than it is for another, because equal for every finite intellect is that all of them require, as regard knowing several things, proper reasons.
409. When, second, the argument is made that ‘the first are nearer the first’ [n.364], I concede the fact; but they do not have to be nearer in this sense, that they know through fewer principles, but because they can know more clearly; for the per se nearness of perfection lies in the latter and not, were it possible, in the former. For that intellect is simply more perfect which knows more clearly; but nothing is lost to it if it knows through different principles, provided however it knows more clearly; for if it were to know through one and the same principle and were not to know more clearly, it would not know more perfectly - which is false [sc. for, ex hypothesi, it does know more perfectly]. For per se nearness exists in this clearness, and not in the fewness of reasons for knowing, because - absolutely - it is not in the nature of any created reason that it be one for several.
410. And hereby is plain the answer to the argument that is made about the cleverer intellect, that it knows through fewer things etc. [n.364]; the argument is false, but the cleverer intellect has as many species of knowables as the slower intellect has; yet it thereby knows objects more clearly and uses them more quickly, combining this object with that and running discursively from one known thing to another. But from its greater clearness and speed one cannot deduce that it understands through fewer reasons; so it is in the issue at hand.a
a.a [Interpolation] As to what was said there [interpolation to n.353], about the authority of the author of On Causes, there is no need to worry about it; hence one should say that the authority has to be understood about a cause simply first, not about any intermediate cause, because although a first cause can do more than a second cause (because it includes it), yet because it does not include it eminently in its whole entity (because only God includes everything in this way), so neither does it include it in its whole active virtue, because it does not include it in the representative power by which it can represent the intelligible object that a body cannot represent.
411. To the final argument for this opinion [n.365] I say that there is not a single species in sense, imagination, and intellect, but different ones; nor does a species represent more universally merely on the ground that it is in a more immaterial subject, because if - per impossibile - the species that is in the sense were in the imagination (or if the one that is in the imagination were in the intellect), it would not represent more perfectly (neither as to quiddity nor as to intensity) because, namely, it was the proper reason for more things. So from the sole immateriality or greater actuality of the receiver cannot be deduced a greater actuality in representing of the species received, but this will be only from the nature of the species in itself.
412. However these conditions of received species are proportionate to the receptive things (according to the saying of Boethius [Consolation of Philosophy 5 prose 5] that ‘the received is in the receiver in the mode of the receiver etc.’) - but absolutely, just as no receiving essence is universal with respect to all essences (nor even does it perfectly contain every essence other than itself), so neither can anything received in it be the universal reason for perfectly representing everything else; but such universal representation can precisely belong (infinitely and eminently) to the divine essence, and to no other.76