2. How Knowledge of a Singular escapes another Angel

26. From this the second point is clear [n.18], namely how the intellection by this angel about a singular can escape another angel:

For - according to this position - by the same old apprehension, by which he was previously apprehending a quiddity set before him in his habit absolutely, he will now comprehend it “in whatever way it was (existent or revealed [24]), for it cannot escape him in any respect save only because what was conceived before is conceived by him now under a new respect.” An example: “if there were a single intellect one in number in everyone, then, from whoever’s phantasm a universal were abstracted - after the intellect had once abstracted it, and had understood it in him from whom it abstracted it, then if (while that intellect remains in place) it begins to understand it in someone else, it would not perceive a new universal with a new intellect; rather the old universal (that it had first perceived under the old respect) it would now perceive under a new respect, namely in this phantasm.”

27. So it is with the angelic intellect, because, without making some new thing under the universal concept but by renewing the concept - conceiving the universal many times in diverse particulars - this singular and that singular are conceived. And, because this angel sees a singular (which he did not see before) without any newness of concept, therefore “although another angel sees universal forms in the first angel (which are the ideas for knowing particulars), yet this other angel does not see the particulars that the first angel sees, whether they are existent or revealed;” or at any rate, if the second angel could see existent singulars through his own habit and through the universals that shine within him, yet he cannot see revealed ones. Nor even can he see - as the first angel sees - those singulars, because the first angel sees them without any newness of concept.

28. Briefly then, as to this article:

For this reason a singular - understood by one angel - is posited as escaping another angel, that although the intellect of the first angel (and the universal, which is for him the idea of understanding) is plain to him, yet his concept, as it is about the singular, is not plain to the second angel, because the fact that the first angel is using the universal form to conceive the singular produces nothing new in the intellect of the second angel. And if the singular is not existent, the second angel cannot see it - not even the very thing known - through his own habit or the first angel’s habit; but if it is existent and he can see it through his own habit, yet the singular, known or unknown, does not enable him to see the intellectual acts of the first angel. And so there is need of speaking [sc. by the first angel to the second] either because of the singular the first angel knows that escapes the second angel (as when the singular is a non-existing revealed singular) - or because of the first angel’s very act of knowing which escapes the second angel, and this whether the act of knowing is about a revealed singular or a naturally known one.