2. On Intuitive Knowledge

111. But to speak of the other sort of knowledge, namely intuitive knowledge, which is about natures or singulars as regards actual existence, I say that this knowledge is either perfect (which is the kind that is about an object as it is now present and existent), or imperfect (which is the kind that opinion about the future is, or memory about the past).

112. In the first way Christ’s soul does not know everything in its proper genus in the Word, even by habit, because an object taken in this way is only knowable as it is actually present in itself, or in something in which it possesses being more perfectly than in itself; but a thing known in this way is not in its proper genus; so ‘Peter’s sitting down’ would not then be of a nature to be known unless Peter’s sitting down were in itself now present. Thus, since many objects neither were nor could have been present, as to their actual existence, to Christ’s intellect, it will not be able to have intuitive knowledge of them.

113. And if it be said that it could have had knowledge of all existing things for any period of time through infused species [Aquinas], this is false: first because infused species represent an object as it is abstracted from actual existence (for they represent the object regardless of whether it is existing or not, and so they are not principles for knowing the existent as existent); second because truths that are knowable by intuitive knowledge of existents as they are existent, namely contingent truths, cannot be known by any sort of innate species at all; for from knowledge of the terms of contingent things the truth of contingent propositions about those terms cannot be known (because the truth of those propositions is not included in the terms the way the necessary truth of scientific propositions is included in the intelligible species and in their terms). So, because of truths knowable by intuitive knowledge (which are contingent truths about existents as they are existent), and because of actually knowing these existents as they are in themselves, one has to have the objects present in themselves so that they may be intuitively known and seen in themselves; and this is only possible about things in their proper genus if the very things are in themselves present in their proper existence.

114. And this intuitive knowledge of things in their proper genus, actual or habitual, could be given to Christ’s soul about everything. And to this extent one must say that it advanced as do other souls, and that it comes in some way to know other objects.

115. But as to imperfect intuitive knowledge, of which sort is opinion about the future and memory of the past [n.111], which is what remains from perfect intuitive knowledge - I say that because many experiences and memories of many such things, since these things were perfectly intuitively known, remain in the intellect, and by them the objects can (as regard the conditions of their existence) be known as they are present and not as they are past - and I say this because Christ’s soul knows them in their proper genus in this way as well.

116. And if the objection be made that what is left from a present thing is only the intelligible species impressed on the intellect and the imaginative species impressed on the sensitive faculty (as it is imaginable virtually) - I say that this is false, because what is left from a present thing is not only the intelligible species in the intellect (whereby the thing is known without any reference to time), but also another species in the power of memory. And these powers know the object in different ways: one knows the object as it exists in its presence, the other knows it as apprehended in the past, such that the apprehension of the past is the immediate object of memory, and the immediate object of that past apprehension is the mediate object of recollection.

117. Thus also, when some sensible thing is present to the senses, a double knowledge can, by virtue of it, be caused in the intellect: one knowledge is abstractive, whereby the agent intellect abstracts the species of the quiddity, as it is a quiddity, from the species in imagination, and this species of the quiddity represents the object absolutely (and not as it exists at this time or that); the other knowledge can be intuitive knowledge in the intellect whereby the object as existing cooperates with the intellect, and from this knowledge there is left a habitual intuitive knowledge imported into intellective memory; and this knowledge is not of the quiddity absolutely (as the first abstractive knowledge was) but of the known thing as existent, namely in the way it was apprehended in the past.

118. In this way Christ is said to have learnt many things by experience, that is by instances of intuitive knowledge (intuitive knowledge of things known as to their existence) and by the memories left over from them.