C. Second Article: about Memory of the Past in the Intellective Part

1. About the Authorities of the Ancients

117. About the second principal article, Aristotle seems to say certain things in the book [On Memory 1.449b18-21] from which it follows that memory is in the intellective part. For he says that we remember certain intelligibilities, as that a triangle has three angles equal to two right angles etc. “because we have learnt and considered them.”

118. A response is given [Henry of Ghent, Quodlibet 6 q.8] according to Aristotle’s own remark, for later in the same place [ibid. 1.449a12-13] he says “memory of intelligibilities is not without a phantasm.”

119. On the contrary: not for this reason must memory be denied to be in the intellect, just as understanding is not denied to be in the intellect and yet, according to his opinion there, we do not understand without a phantasm.

120. Another response [Henry, ibid. q.8] is that we remember intelligibilities per accidens; hence Aristotle says there [On Memory 1.450a12-13], when speaking of intelligibilities, that intellection will be per accidens. And Damascene (as cited before, n.76), “we remember intelligibilities just as we learn them, but we do not have memory of the substance of them.”

121. On the contrary: any power that knows an act as the act is of an object, in some way knows the object; but this object ‘a triangle has three angles equal to two right angles’ as it is a demonstrated and known truth can only be known by the intellect, such that no sense is similarly able to know this act ‘I have considered the fact that a triangle has etc.’

122. Again the Philosopher concedes there [On Memory 1.450a16-18, 2.453a8-10] that recollection is present only in man (and Avicenna maintains this above [nn.8, 10; On the Soul p.4 ch.3;]), because there is a sort of syllogizing in it. From this there is a twofold argument. First, that the knowledge proper to man himself seems to belong to the intellect itself; second, more efficaciously, that knowledge through syllogistic discourse pertains to the intellect alone; of this sort is recollection, for recollection proceeds discursively from certain known things to what has in some way fallen away, which it wants to recover the memory of. And although, because syllogism is always from premises to conclusion, there is no syllogism there (for recollection proceeds from contraries or similars, or from something that has, in its being sensed, an ordering toward what we are looking for), nevertheless neither can such conferring belong to the sense power, as it seems; rather the discursive process and the cognition that terminates it belong to the same power, and recollection terminates this discursive process; therefore etc.

123. An objection against this reasoning [Henry of Ghent, Summa a.4 q.4] is as follows:

The Philosopher [On Memory 1.449b6-8, 450b5-12; Book of Six Principles 4 nn.46-47] says that some are good at recollection and others bad, because of diversity in the organ; therefore he attributes recollection to the sense part.

124. Again [Henry, ibid. a.1 q.10] an argument that recollection is impossible is taken from Themistius [On Posterior Analytics 1 ch.1] about a fugitive slave, whereby it is proved that it is impossible to learn anything, because either it was something already known and so it is not learnt, or it was not and so, if it occurs to the intellect, the intellect does not know it to be what it is looking for.

125. This argument there indeed [n.124] lacks evidence, because whatever is necessarily inferred from necessary premises is known by this very fact; nor is it necessary for me to know [sc. first] what I [sc. later] acquired knowledge of, or not necessary for me to know it save in general, because I sought to know whatever I could infer from things I knew.

126. But in the issue at hand there is a difficulty. For the argument goes as follows: has he [the one recollecting] completely forgotten the thing that a is [sc. the thing he is looking for] or not? If he has then, if he could through recollection get back to the memory of it, he does not know it to be what he sought the memory of, and consequently he does not recollect it; because in recollecting he remembers it anew, as a thing having been remembered before and forgotten in the meantime. If he has not completely forgotten a, then he cannot recollect a.

127. The first member of this argument is confirmed by Avicenna from before [n.122]: the desire to remember in particular belongs to no brute, “for if brutes do not remember, neither do they desire to remember.” Likewise the Philosopher [On Memory 1.450a27-30] seems to posit that memory belongs to the imaginative part, “the habit of which,” he says, “we assert to be memory.”a And Damascene, as above [n.76] says, “Memory is imagination left behind by actualized sense.”

a.a [Interpolation] namely, it is manifest that memory is a part of the soul: when and of what there is imagination, of that there is also memory.

128. For the understanding of these authorities [n.127] I say (as was said before [n.94]) that the act of memory has a double object, namely proximate and remote. Now past-ness is sometimes required in each object as it is object, and sometimes in one of them only.

129. Because the senses do not know their object according to any condition save the one they have when they are sensing, according to Metaphysics 7.10.1036a6-7, “when sensible objects are away from the senses, it is not clear whether these objects are or are not,” and so they cannot have memory of their past act as past without also having memory of the sensed object as past, because they have memory of it only in the way it was as sensed when the act of sensing remained.

130. Now the intellect does not require past-ness in each object but only in the proximate one. For because its act can be of something as that something is necessary, as considering ‘a triangle has three angles equal to two right angles’, so its act of remembering this act of considering can have a remote object, not as past, but as always being the same way.

131. As concerns the condition, then, of ‘regarding a past object as past’ [n.88], that is, both remote and proximate object, such that both are known precisely and necessarily as past - memory as concerns this condition belongs necessarily to the sense part and not necessarily to the intellective part, although it could belong to the intellective part, as will immediately be said in the solution [n.136ff.].

132. Another thing [sc. to understand,[n.128] is that memory in the sense part is enough for operation without the intellect, as is plain in brutes; but, conversely, the intellective memory is not enough for operation without the sense memory, just as we cannot understand without a phantasm. And therefore Aristotle [Metaphysics 7.10.1036a6-7] would not say that a man is good or bad at remembering because his intellect is good or bad at conserving the species of something previously understood, but because his sense memory (which goes along also with the intellective memory for intellective remembering) is good or bad at retention. For perhaps any intellective memory always conserves the species, but it has not the power for act because the species has been destroyed from sense memory, without which the intellective memory is not enough for operation.

133. Proof of this:

First because what is received seems to be in the receiver according to the manner of the receiver, and consequently, since the intellect is an immaterial power and not changeable by these bodily undergoings [sc. of the senses], it does not seem that its species remains indelibly. For this reason, therefore, Aristotle [n.129] assigns a falling away of species in the sense memory only, because the sense organ is affected or moved in this way or that.

134. The same is proved secondly because, when someone remembers, he must have something remaining in himself through which he knows that thing to be what he first remembered and later forgot (in the way the argument about the fugitive slave proceeded [n.124]). But this something that remains cannot be placed in the sense part, because it has been destroyed, at least it does not remain perfectly or sufficiently for an act of remembering; therefore it is probable that it is the species remaining perfectly in the intellect. And thus when the species that somehow fell away has been recovered in the sense memory then, by collation of it with the intelligible species that remains, this ‘remembered object’ is known to be that which was known in memory before.

135. So therefore, as concerns primacy or radicality or sufficiency in itself for acting, memory is not in the intellective part but the sense part, even in our case.

2. Scotus’ own Explication

136. I say therefore as to this article [nn.117, 82] that memory and the act of remembering properly speaking are in the intellective part.

137. For given that the intellect not only knows universals (which indeed is true of abstractive intellection, about which the Philosopher is speaking, because this alone is scientific intellection), but also knows intuitively what the senses know (for a more perfect and higher cognitive power in the same thing knows what the lower power knows), and also knows sensations (and both these points are proved by the fact that the intellect knows contingently true propositions, and from them it forms syllogisms; but to form propositions and to syllogize is proper to the intellect; and the truth of these propositions is about objects as intuitively known, namely known under the idea of existence under which they are known by the senses) - given all this, it follows that in the intellect can be found all the conditions previously said to belong to remembering: for it can perceive time and has an act after passage of time, and so of the rest [nn.90-96].

138. And the intellect can, in brief, remember any object that sense memory can remember, because it can intuitively know the act (which is the proximate object) when it exists, and so can remember it after it has existed. It can also remember many proximate objects that the sense part cannot remember (as every past intellection and volition). For the proof that man remembers such things is that otherwise he could not repent of evil volitions, nor too could he collate a past intellection as past with a future one, nor consequently direct himself, from the fact that he has studied them, to study other things that follow from them; and in brief, if we do not remember past intellections and volitions, they are destroyed.

139. But no sense can remember these things, because they do not fall under the object of any sense; therefore this remembering is proper to the intellect, and this by reason of its proximate object. There is also another remembering proper to the intellect, not by reason only of proximate object but also of remote object, namely the remembering that tends to the necessary as necessary as to its remote object, of which sort is the remembering that has for remote object ‘a triangle has three angles equal to two right angles’; for the proximate object of remembrance, namely the act that tends to such [remote] object, can only be an act of the intellective part.

140. Thus therefore it is plain that some remembering is proper to the intellect by reason of both objects of its act, namely both the proximate and the remote object; also some remembering is, by reason of proximate object, so proper to the intellect that it could not belong to the senses, and some remembering belongs, by reason of proximate object, to the intellect, yet it can belong to the senses (as would be if the intellect has intuitively understood that I am seeing white, and the intellect afterwards understands or remembers that I saw white). Here indeed both the proximate and the remote object could be the object of intellective remembering (for also sometimes there occurs a discursive collating from such remembering to syllogistic conclusion of something else); however, the past sensation in some sense part, namely the supreme part, cannot be the proximate object save only of intellective remembering, as was touched on in the preceding article [n.98].

141. However, no remembering belongs to the intellect insofar as it understands precisely by abstraction; also no remembering requires, from the fact that it belongs to the intellect, a double past, namely a past in both objects; also no remembering belongs to the intellect as primarily and radically sufficient for an act of remembering.

142. And it is on account of these three conditions, or some of them, that all the authorities of Aristotle and others denying that memory is in the intellective part [nn.118, 123-124] must be understood and expounded.

143. When therefore objection is made against the second argument in this article (which proceeds from the act of remembering, [n.122]), by the fact that the Philosopher posits that there are rememberers and non-rememberers because of disposition of organ [n. 123] - the answer is plain from what has been said [nn. 125, 128-131], and especially from the third condition [n.116], and it was sufficiently explained above [nn.139-141].

144. As to the objection about the fugitive slave [n.124], it has been solved if it is true that the intelligible species always remains, and the sense species that has in some way been lost is perfectly recovered through a certain collating or use of other like species; for then the fact that this thing now remembered is that thing before remembered (and afterwards forgotten) is known through the species resting in the intellect. It is just as if some species of Peter as seen is resting in the imaginative power, though I never use it, and afterwards when Peter comes into sight I at once recognize it to be Peter by collation with this knowledge (as Augustine teaches On the Trinity 9.6 n.10, 8.6 n.9). But if nothing were set down as remaining in such forgetting, by collation with which it could be known that this is what through recollecting was being sought after, it does not seem that it could in the end be known that it is this, more than in the case of the unknown fugitive slave.

145. To the next objection that is set down [n.127], a habit of imagination at any rate is only got from it as to sense memory. For the fact that, besides sense memory, there is some firmness of intellect is plain later from On Memory 2.451b2-3, where Aristotle says, “science or sense, the habit of which we say is memory,” ‘science’ stands for the intellect, ‘sense’ for imagination, of which he said before that memory was the habit. However, this authority would require expounding if sense memory were posited to be a power distinct from imagination; but it is not to the purpose to discuss this here.

146. And as to what is adduced from Damascene [n.120] “we do not have memory of the substance of them” - it is true as of past objects, and in this way there is no remembering of them that requires a double pastness.That is, pastness of proximate and remote object. For we have memory of learning them (proximate object), but we have knowledge, not memory, of them (remote object), n.130. ²¹