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