Third Distinction. Third Part. About the Image

Question One Whether in the Intellective Part Properly Taken there is a Memory that has an Intelligible Species Naturally Prior to the Act of Understanding

333. About the third part of this distinction, namely about the image, I ask whether in the intellective part properly taken there is a memory that has an intelligible species naturally prior to the act of understanding.a

a.a [Interpolated text, in place of n.333]. “And now to him etc.” [Lombard, Sent. I ch. 2 n.39]. About the third part of this distinction, where the Master deals with the image, four questions are asked. The first is whether in the intellective part properly taken there is a memory that has an intelligible species naturally prior to the act of understanding. The second is about generated knowledge, what the cause is of generating it or the reason for generating it [n.401], namely whether the intellective part properly taken or some element of it is the total cause that generates actual knowledge, or is the reason for generating it. The third is whether the more principal cause of generated knowledge is the object present in itself or in the species, or a part itself of the intellective soul [n.554]. The fourth is whether in the mind there is an image distinctly of the Trinity [n.569]. About the first.

Argument that there is not:

Because [Henry of Ghent, Quodlibet 5 q.14] every species impressed by the object represents that object under the idea under which the species is impressed by it; and if the species is impressed by something else, it still represents under the same idea under which it would represent if it were impressed by the object, otherwise it would not be a true species of it. But when a species is impressed by an object, it is impressed by the object as the object is a singular, because action belongs to the singular. Therefore, the species, by whatever it is impressed, cannot represent the universal, but only a universal of the sort that is represented to the intellect can do so. Therefore, no impressed species represents the intelligible under the idea of the intelligible.

334. Again [Henry of Ghent, ibid.], the presence of the object is the cause of the presence of the species, and not conversely. For not because the species is in the eye is the white thing therefore present, but conversely. Therefore, the first representation of the object is not through the species. Therefore the species, because of the presence of the object, is posited superfluously.

335. Again [Henry of Ghent, ibid.], any species at all would, if it were in the intellect, be a form naturally acting for intellection; but many species can, if one species be posited, be together in the intellect; therefore all of them would naturally act for the intellections corresponding to them; therefore there would be several intellections in the intellect corresponding to those several species. For if one of them were to act naturally and yet there were no intellection according to it, the consequence would be that there could never be an intellection according to it, because when a cause naturally acting acts according to the ultimate of its power, then, if it cannot have an effect, it will never have it. - And [not by Henry, cf. Scotus, Lectura I d.3 n.251], this plurality too of species, which follows from the hypothesis, is disproved by the argument of Algazel in his Metaphysics [I tr.3 sent.4] that “just as one body cannot be shaped at the same time with many shapes, so does it not seem that the same intellect can be shaped at the same time with diverse objects,” which however would follow if one posits several intelligible species at the same time.

336. Again, fourth [Henry, ibid.], it seems to follow that the intellect will not be acted on by an intelligible insofar as it is intelligible, but it will be acted on by a real passion, by receiving a certain form that is as if the real perfection of it; for it receives the species as a subject receives a real accident, and therefore the intellect is not acted on by the intelligible insofar as it is intelligible. From this, too, it follows that ‘to understand’ will not be a motion of the thing to the soul [Aristotle, Metaphysics 12.7.1072a30, On the Soul 3.4.429a13-15], but rather every intellection will be an absolute action of it, as a form standing in itself not having any term externally.

337. Again [Henry, ibid.], the species could be conserved without an act, and so conversion to a phantasm would not be necessary [n.343, n.554 Scotus’ note].

338. Again, the will has an object present to itself sufficiently so as to be able to act about it, though it receive in itself nothing from the object. Therefore, so can it be in the issue at hand, insofar as the object is the term of the act. There is a confirmation: just as [the object] is present to the will because it is in the intellect, why is this not so about the intellect and phantasm [n.340]?

339. To the opposite:

The intellect, which before was in essential and remote potency to understanding, sometimes is in proximate and accidental potency to it. This is only in the intellect through some change; but not a change of the object, as is plain; therefore of the intellect itself. This change, which takes place toward proximate potency, seems to be toward some form, through which the intelligible object is present to the intellect. And this form is prior to the act of understanding, because the proximate power that someone is capable of understanding by is naturally prior to the act of understanding; the form by which the object is present in this way is called the species; therefore etc.a [Henry of Ghent, Summa a.1 qq.5, 10].

a.a [Interpolated text; Scotus, Rep IA d.3 n.88] The argument [n.339] is deduced in another way as follows: the intellect is disposed in one way when it is in essential potency prior to learning, and disposed in another way when it is in accidental potency prior to understanding; now the object is not disposed in a different way but in the same way; the intellect is disposed in a different way, then, by the fact it has been changed. But every change terminates in some form; therefore, some form precedes the act of intellection, and to that I give no name but species.

I. To the Question

A. The Opinion of Others

340. On this question there are many ways of speaking.

[First opinion] - In one way is every intelligible species denied naturally preceding the act of understanding, because of the reasons set down for the first side of the question [nn.333-338]. The way of setting it down is this: once the impression of the sensible species on the organ of sense, and the whole process as far as the imaginative power, have been achieved, the agent intellect abstracts from the object in a phantasm and moves the possible intellect to a simple apprehension of the essence - but in such a way that neither does the possible intellect receive an impressed species from the phantasm, nor is the object present to the intellect save because it is present in imagination.

341. And this is proved from the following deduction: for the sense receives a species that is other than the act, either because the organ is of the same idea as the medium, or because the species received is a disposition proximate to receiving the action of sensing. Neither of these occurs in the intellect; for the intellect is a non-organic power and is of itself supremely disposed to act of understanding; therefore etc.

342. This is said to be Aristotle’s intention in On the Soul 3.4.429a27-28, where he commends the ancients who say that “the soul is the place of species, not the whole soul but the intellective soul.” Now this distinction does not seem true if one means that the other parts do not have species (for there are species in the sensitive part), but [it is true] because the other parts do not, as they are places, have species but do, as they are subjects, have accidents; and the intellect does, as a place, have them, because it has them as they are an expressed form, not as they are an impressed one.

343. This [n.340] is also taken from On the Soul 3.8.432a8-9, because, according to Aristotle, “we contemplate the ‘what it is’ in phantasms,” and “phantasms are disposed to the intellect as sensibles are to the senses,” and “we understand nothing without phantasms,” and many like things does he say. From these is the conclusion drawn that he does not posit an intelligible species, because if an intelligible species were posited the intellect would not contemplate the ‘what it is’ in phantasms but in the intelligible species. Likewise it would not need to be turned toward phantasms, but the intelligible species would suffice, and in that would it have present to it the object it would be turned toward.

344. If it be argued against this from the Philosopher there [n.343[,“it is necessary that either the things are in the soul or the species of things; the things are not there, so the species are,” he replies [Henry, ibid.] that on the part of the intellect, that is, in the intellect, there is an impressed species (which is the habit or the act), or an expressed species (which is the species in the phantasm), or a quiddity (which quiddity, shining forth [in the phantasm], is the species with respect to the singular - for ‘this stone’ is not in the soul but the quiddity, which is the species with respect to such stone).

345. This is also posited to be the intention of Augustine, who maintains that the word is not generated from the intelligible species but from the habit. For Augustine says, On the Trinity 15.10 n.19, that, “the word is born from the knowledge itself that we hold in memory,” and ibid. ch.11 n.20, “the word is generated from the knowledge that abides in the soul.”

346. [Second opinion]. Another doctor [Godfrey of Fontaines, Quodlibet 9 q.19, also 1.9] posits the same thing, denying an intelligible species; and he deals with the argument about the organ [n.341] that was touched on in the above opinion [n.340].

347. He posits another argument as well, of this sort:a that any power that is in potency to some act is first perfected in such act by the presence of an agent proportioned to it; but the power of apprehension is a power first ordered to this act, namely to apprehension; therefore by an agent first proportioned to it is it perfected in this act, which is the act ‘to apprehend’.b

a.a [Interpolated text; cf. Rep. IA d.3 n.92] what something is in potency to first and per se, that and nothing else does it receive from an object that is proportionable to itself; the cognitive power is in potency per se and first with respect to its own knowledge; therefore, it receives knowledge and not a species from a proportioned object.

b.b [Note by Scotus] The same conclusion as the stated opinion [n.340] is held by Godfrey, Quodlibet 9 q.19, “what something is per se in potency to, has in it per se being and nothing else from a proportional agent; the apprehending power is only per se in potency to knowledge.”
“Augustine On the Trinity 11.2 n.2, ‘the very form that is imposed on sight is called vision’.” “The organ in its changing agrees with the medium.”

B. Scotus’ Response and his own Opinion

348. My argument against this position [n.340]: Whether a singular is understood or not I do not care now [cf. canceled note to n.75]; for it is certain that the universal can be understood by the intellect, and the intellect is posited by philosophers as a power distinct from the sensitive powers because of its understanding of the universal, and because of composition and division [sc. in propositions], and because of syllogizing, rather than because of knowledge of the singular - if it be possible to understand the singular [cf. Henry of Ghent, Summa a40 qq.1, 4]/

349. From this manifest point, then, namely that the intellect can understand the universal, I take this proposition, ‘the intellect can have an object actually universal,a per se present to it in idea of object, naturally prior to its understanding it’. From this follows the proposed conclusion, that in that prior stage the intellect has an object present [to it] in an intelligible species, and so it has an intelligible species prior to act.

a.a [Note by Scotus] ‘universal’: therefore although a species of the nature [of a thing] be posited, ‘because we can understand a nature not present in itself, and different from the species of the universal (because it does not display [the nature] indifferently in this way), and through the action of the agent intellect (because the possible intellect does not make present its own object)’ - yet that is not a premise in this question [n.333] but a conclusion, for from this solution [nn.348-370] the conclusion is: there is an intelligible species for everything understood that is absent; therefore the reasons that are drawn from universality prove the necessity of a species [nn.352, 357, 359, 363-365]; but the arguments from the presence [of the object, nn.336-338] prove the possibility [of a species] from the nobility of the intellect in the genus of created cognitive powers.

350. The assumed premise [n .249, ‘the intellect can understand the universal’] seems manifest enough, because the object is naturally prior to the act; therefore universality, which is the proper condition of an object insofar as it is object, precedes the act of the intellect or of understanding; therefore under that idea too [of universality] must the object be present, because the presence of the object precedes the act.a

a.a [Note by Scotus] Note that an object is understood in a determinate organ, and although what is thus understood not be received in an organ, yet it will be determined to an organ as to that in which the object precisely is as object.

351. I prove the consequence [‘From this follows^’ n.249] first on the part of the universality of the object [nn.352-365], second on the part of presence [of the object, nn.366-369]. On the part of the universality of the object I argue in three ways, one of which is taken from the side of the phantasm representing it, and one from the side of the agent intellect, and one The Vatican Editors note that in place of the (here) italicized three Scotus put ‘six’, and in place of the first italicized one he put ‘first two’, and in place of the second and third italicized one he put ‘two’, in each case. The reason the Vatican Editors give for their correction is that there are in fact only three ways that Scotus gives, but the three ways together have six arguments, two each. Scotus’ numbering seems thus not so much wrong as less perspicuous perhaps than it is on the numbering of the Vatican Editors. ⁴² from the side of the more and less common.

1. Reasons on the Part of the Universality of the Object

352. [Reasons on the part of the representing phantasm] - First I argue as follows: a species has the sort of idea of representing it has from the fact it is the sort of species it is, and that in respect of the object under the sort of idea the object has of being something represented. Therefore, while the same species remains, it does not have two representative ideas, nor is it representative with respect to two ideas in the representable thing. But to understand an object under the idea of universal and singular requires a double representative idea or idea of representing, and in respect of a double idea of what is formally representable. Therefore, while the same thing remains the same, it does not represent in this way and that; therefore the phantasm, which of itself represents the object under the idea of a singular, cannot represent it under the idea of a universal.a

a.a [Interpolated text, cf. Rep. IA d.3 n.97] Or the argument can be formed in this way: a species the same and of the same idea is not per se representative of an object under opposite ideas of representable thing. The idea of singular and the idea of universal are opposite ideas in a knowable and representable thing. Therefore, no species the same and of one idea can be representative of an object under the idea of universal and of singular. A species in a phantasm represents a singular object under the idea of singular. Therefore, it cannot represent that object under the idea of a universal. - Proof of the major [the first proposition in this interpolation] is that a species under the idea by which it represents the object is measured by the object. But the same thing cannot be measured by two opposite measures, or conversely; for then the same thing would be said twice, according to the Philosopher, Metaphysics 5.15.1021a31-b3. Therefore the same species cannot represent two opposite objects, or the same object under opposite objective ideas.

353. Response [Henry of Ghent, Summa a58 a.2 ad 3]: the same representative in different lights represents an object under different ideas, just as phosphorescent things represent themselves in daylight under the idea of things colored, in light at night under the idea of things luminous.

354. To the contrary: This representative thing is naturally something in itself first before it represents [anything] in this or that sort of light; for because it is the sort of species it is, therefore does a light agree with it in which it may represent one thing and not another. Otherwise, one would posit, or could posit, that the same species would represent color and sound (though the species as it is in vibrating air represents sound, and as it is in illumed air it represents color), and thus no distinction between the representative things could be shown. Therefore, in the prior stage one must understand a unity of the species in itself before a unity of the representation (and of the object represented) follows on insofar as it is represented in it or through it. And so something that is the same in that prior stage cannot have a diverse idea of representing, nor can it represent the object under different ideas of the object’s being representable. There is a confirmation, that light does not represent formally, nor is it the formal idea of what is representative, but is only that in which something is represented. Also it seems that the more perfect the light, the more precisely and distinctly does that shine forth in it which the representative thing represents.a

a.a [Interpolated text; in place of ‘There is a confirmation.. .representative thing represents’. Cf. Scotus, Rep. IA d.3 nn.99-101]. Or form the argument like this:
     Light does not represent but is that in which the representative represents, because the light in the medium is of the same idea whether I see white or black; for light does not distinguish representative essentially from representative. However, there is a different species and representative of white and black, and consequently the distinction of light does not cause a distinct idea of representing or of representative, but, while the same nature of the representative remains, it always represents the same representable and a representable of the same idea; therefore, not under diverse ideas.
The argument is confirmed, because a representative in more perfect light does not represent a different thing, but represents the same thing more clearly than in more imperfect light; the fact is plain about the species of white and black in sunlight and moonlight. Therefore, although the species in the organ of imagination may, in the light of the agent intellect, represent the singular more clearly (so that the intellect can understand it better than in [the species’] proper light, namely the light of imagination), yet it never represents, in any light whatever, the universal object under a universal idea.
     Their example about phosphorescent things [nn.353, 355] is not valid, for I ask whether they represent with the same representative differently by day and by night, or with different representatives. Not with the same, because then they would represent by day as they do by night, because the representative is something in itself before it represents in such or such light. If it represents in different representatives diverse elements in phosphorescent things, the conclusion is gained, whether the light is the same or diverse.

355. Nor is the example [n.353, of phosphorescent things] of any worth for the issue at hand. Rather it is to the opposite, because either two qualities are in such a body, as light and color, one of which reduplicates itself in a greater present light, the other in a lesser one, when no other thing moves [the senses] more efficaciously; or each at the same time reduplicates itself in a greater light, but what moves more efficaciously is perceived and what moves less efficaciously is not perceived (just as the stars reduplicate their rays by day and yet are not seen, because something else brighter moves sight more efficaciously); or if there is a single sensible quality in such a body, it causes diverse representatives in different light, namely one in greater light, another in a lesser light. And so it is always the case that there is not the same representative of the object under diverse idea of being representable, however much one and another light come together.

356. If you reply [Henry of Ghent, Summa a.34 q.5] that the same thing according to the same quality can be similar to diverse things, as one white thing according to the same whiteness is similar to diverse white things - this is nothing to the purpose, because in relations of an essential order there cannot be different things in something that are dependent on two things in the same order; as, for example, of the same measured thing on two measures in the same order, or of the same participating thing on two participated things in the same order, or of the same effect on two total causes in the same order (as was proved in the question about the unity of God previously [Ord. I d.2 n.73]). Therefore, in this relation, where there is not only likeness but imitation and passive exemplification, it is impossible for the same absolute to be referred to diverse things, and thus there cannot be the same species in idea of representing for diverse things under the idea of diverse things.

357. Second as to the first way Instead of ‘first way’, Scotus wrote ‘first member’; see footnote to n.351. ⁴³ I argue as follows, that something representative that represents, according to its whole power, something under one idea cannot at the same time represent the same thing or another thing under another idea of object. But the phantasm, in which the universal is understood [cf. n.349], represents, according to its whole power, the object as a singular to the imaginative power, because then there is actual imagination of the object in the singular. And it is plain that this is according to the whole power of the phantasm, because otherwise the imaginative power could not, through the phantasm, have as perfect an act about the object as the object has a nature for being represented by the phantasm; therefore, the phantasm cannot then represent the object under another idea of the representable.

358. Again, why cannot there be in the imaginative power an act in respect of an object universal in act if there can be a species there in respect of such an object, since the act is a certain species?

359. [Reasons on the part of the agent intellect]. In the second way Instead of ‘second way’, Scotus wrote ‘second member’; see footnote to n.351. ⁴⁴ I argue as follows: the agent intellect is a purely active power, according to the Philosopher On the Soul [3.5.430a11-15], both because it is “by what making all things is” and because it is compared to the possible intellect also “as art is to matter;” therefore it can have a real action. Every real action has some real term. That real term is not received in a phantasm, because the thing received would be extended, and so the agent intellect would not transfer it from order to order, and [the thing received] would not be more proportioned to the possible intellect than the phantasm is.a Nor either does the agent intellect cause anything in phantasms, because [a phantasm] is not its passive object, according to the aforesaid authorities [the Philosopher, ibid.]; therefore it [the agent intellect’s real term] is only received in the possible intellect, for the agent intellect is receptive of nothing. That first caused thing cannot be posited to be an act of understanding, because the first term of the action of the agent intellect is the universal in act, because it transfers from order to order; but the universal in act precedes the act of understanding (as was assumed already in the antecedent [n.349]), because an object under the idea of object precedes the act [n.350].b The argument here is not that the phantasm together with the agent intellect cannot cause an intellection, but that it cannot cause an intellection of a universal unless it first causes a species - because the universal too in act precedes by nature the intellection of itself, and the universal is the first term of intellection.

a.a [Text canceled by Scotus; replaced by ‘the thing received would be extended.. .phantasm is’] whatever is there is extended, and not able to be in proportion to moving the possible intellect.

b.b [Interpolated text; cf. Rep. IA d.3 nn.104-105] It will be said [Henry of Ghent, Summa a.58 q.2, supra n.340] that the term of the action of the agent intellect is the universal object, under the idea of a universal, shining forth in the phantasm.
     On the contrary: the universal object, under the idea of a universal, only has diminished being as known being (just as Hercules in a statue has only diminished being, because he has, in the image, represented being). But if it does have some real being, this is insofar as it exists in something as what represents it under this idea, namely such that the agent intellect (as was said) makes something that represents a universal out of what was representing a singular. Therefore, since the term of real action is not an object having diminished being, as known being or represented being, but something real, it follows that such action of the agent intellect terminates at a real form in existence, by which a universal is formally represented as a universal, and which real form is accompanied by an intentional term, as by a universal object, according to the representative being it has in the species.

360. And there is a confirmation of the reason, because it is [universally] posited that the agent intellect makes a universal from a non-universal, or makes understanding in act from understanding in potency, as is said by the authorities of the Philosopher [On the Soul 3.5.430a14-17] and of the Commentator [Averroes, On the Soul III com.18]. Since the universal as universal is not anything in existence, but is only in something as representing it under such an idea, these words [‘makes a universal from a non-universal etc.’] will only have meaning because the agent intellect makes something to be representative of the universal out of that which was representative of the singular, however much the ‘out of’ be materially or virtually understood. Real action is only terminated at something that represents the object under the idea of the universal; therefore the real action of the agent intellect is terminated at some real form in existence that formally represents the universal as universal, because otherwise its action could not be terminated at the universal under the idea of the universal.

361. Here, about the action of the agent intellect, Godfrey of Fontaines [Quodlibet 5 q.10] removes what gets in the way of it by separating the quiddity from singularity, not in its being but in its acting on [the agent intellect]. And it does not act on the phantasm, nor on the possible intellect, but touches virtually on the phantasm. This is explained as follows: in the phantasm there is a ‘what’ [sc. its quiddity] and a ‘this’ [sc. its singularity]; in the light, co-created with the possible intellect, the ‘what’ is the mover of the power so moved, the ‘this’ is not. An example: if white and sweet are together, the white moves the illumined medium, the sweet does not; therefore, the light abstracts the color from the sweet and separates it as far as moving [the sense] is concerned, and moves aside what gets in the way [sc. the sweet] into something that does not move [the sense].

362. On the contrary. Either the ‘what’ as it is in the phantasm has sufficient active power to move the possible intellect to an intellection of the universal, and the result is that the universal is not the term of action of the agent intellect. Or it does not [have sufficient power], and another agent is required properly acting in that way, the way that properly active power is lacking to the ‘what’.

Again, the ‘this’ conjoined to the ‘what’ is not an obstacle - just as it is neither an obstacle to the being of the ‘what’, so is it neither an obstacle to [the ‘what’] being a mover of the intellect.

Again, what removes an obstacle has an action prior to the action of the thing from which the obstacle is removed; grant that [prior] action here, and on what [does it act]? And toward what term? - But this argument is solved by the ‘This is explained as follows’ [n.361], because the argument [here n.362] is against what properly removes [an obstacle], not against what disposes a passive subject for receiving.

363. Again second, according to this way [the second way, n.351], because the agent intellect in idea of active element does not exceed the possible intellect in idea of passive element; therefore, whatever is caused by the agent intellect is received in the possible intellect. Therefore, the first term of action of the agent intellect is received in the possible intellect, and so since the first action of the agent intellect is to the universal in act, this universal, or that by which it has such being, is received in the possible intellect.

364. [Reasons on the part of the more and less common] - According to the third way [n.351] I argue as follows: a less universal habit and a more universal habit are distinct proper habits, otherwise metaphysics as metaphysics would not be a habit of the intellect because it would be about the most universal object for all the other objects. But it is possible to use a more universal habit without using any less universal habit, just as it is possible to have an act of understanding about what is more universal (in the way it is considered by the habit) without having an act about what is less universal. But an act about what is more universal is not had unless it is present to the intellect under that sort of idea. Therefore, what is more universal can be present to the intellect through something other than that through which there is in the intellect the presence of something less universal. But if an object were precisely understood in the phantasm, the more universal would never be present save in the less universal, because never present save in some imaginable singular. Therefore etc.

365. Again lastly according to this way [n.351]: the more universal, when it is apprehended in its inferior,a is never apprehended according to its total indifference. For the total indifference of the more universal accords with the fact that, as conceived, it is the same as each one of its inferiors; and never is the more common as conceived in some inferior the same as each inferior but precisely the same as the inferior in which it is conceived. Therefore, any universal conceived in a singular, or anything more common conceived in something less common, is not conceived according to its total indifference; but the intellect can conceive it according to its total indifference; therefore, the more common is not precisely conceived in the less common, or the universal in the singular, and so not the universal precisely in the phantasm. For a phantasm is only properly of the singular, and this insofar as it is a singular of the most specific species - and this if the phantasm is impressed by something duly close to it [cf. n.73].

a.a [Interpolated text; cf. Rep. IA d.3 n.106] The more universal cannot, according to its total indifference, be understood or represented in what represents the less universal; but the imaginable species per se and first represents an individual as it is a ‘this’; therefore, in it the universal cannot be represented according to the total indifference that it has relative to all its individuals.
The proof of the major is that never is the more universal known according to its total indifference save when it is known as one knowable the same as all its inferiors; but, as it has being and is known in one singular, it is impossible for it to be the same as all other singulars, but [it is] precisely the same as the singular in which it is. Therefore, it is not known, in the representative of one singular, according to its total indifference; so there would not be any universal categories, nor definitions, nor species, nor genera, nor anything of the sort, precisely. Therefore, the universal is not known in the phantasm; for the phantasm is only properly of the singular.

2. Reasons on the Part of the Presence of the Object

366. From the second membera [n.351], namely from the presence of the object, is proof given for the first consequence [n.349]. First as follows: Either the intellect can have an object present to it in idea of intelligible object without the fact it is to any inferior power, or it cannot. If it cannot, then, it cannot have any operation without the inferior powers (because it cannot have an object present without them), and if it cannot have an operation without them, then it cannot be without them, according to the Philosopher in his preface to On the Soul [1.1.403a3-10]. But if it can have an object present without the object’s presence to an inferior power, then it has [sc. an operation without the inferior powers]. The proof of the consequence is that the agents of such presence of the object, namely the phantasm and the agent intellect, are close enough to the possible intellect, and they act by way of nature and so they necessarily cause in it that of which it is itself receptive.b

a.a [Note by Scotus] The second way [n.349], three reasons against Henry; note the first with the third.

b.b [Interpolated text; cf. Rep. IA d.3 n.107] Now the intellect, as it is distinguished from the sensitive part, can have an object present in its proper presentiality or it cannot. If it can, the intended conclusion is gained, that the object is not present in abstractive cognition before an elicited act is save through some representative that I call a species. If it cannot, then it cannot have any operation proper to itself without the sensitive part, and consequently neither can it be without it, according to the argument of the Philosopher On the Soul 1 [n.366], “if the intellect cannot have an operation proper to itself, it cannot be separated;” and so it could not have an operation proper to itself in which it would not depend on the sensitive part.

367. Second as follows: the other cognitive powers have an object present to them, not merely secondarily (namely because these objects are present to other inferior powers), but in its proper presentiality, just as the common sense has color present to it, not only insofar as color is present to sight, but because it has the species of color present in the organ of the common sense. Therefore, since this is a mark of perfection in the cognitive power (to have an object present to it under the idea in which it is an object of this sort of power), it follows that not only can this power have an object present to it because it is present to the imaginative power, but can have it in its proper presentiality, insofar, of course, as it shines forth for the intellect through something that is in the intellect.

368. Again third; if a power, which is not able to have an act save about an object present to it, cannot have that object present save through another power with which it is contingently conjoined, it depends in its operation on such power as is contingently conjoined with it, and so it is imperfect. But the intellect cannot have an act save about an object present to it and, for you, it cannot have an object present save in the virtue of imagination [n.340]. But the virtue of imagination is contingently conjoined to the intellect insofar as it is a power; therefore, the intellect in its operation depends on another power that is contingently conjoined with it, and so this puts an imperfection of cognitive power in it [cf. Henry of Ghent, Quodlibet 4 q.7]; but no imperfection is to be posited in any nature unless a necessity appear in such nature; therefore such imperfection is not to be posited in the intellect.

369. If you object that plurality is only to be posited where there is necessity, here there is no necessity, therefore etc. - I reply: there is necessity when the perfection of nature requires it. Now although the supposit that a man is can have, because he is a man, an object present to him in the phantasm, yet the intellectual nature of man, as it is intellectual, does not have an object sufficiently present to it if it has it only in a presence begged from the imaginative power. This therefore much cheapens intellective nature as it is intellective, because that is removed from it which is a mark of perfection in a cognitive power, and which is found in the sensitive power, as in the imaginative power. Therefore, plurality is being posited here on account of necessity, because on account of saving the perfection of a more perfect nature, a perfection which is greater than that of a more imperfect nature, or at least equal to it.

3. Scotus’ Concluding Opinion

370. To the question therefore [n.333], I say that it is necessary to posit in the intellect, as the intellect has the idea of memory, an intelligible species,a which species represents the universal as universal, prior naturally to the act of understanding - for the reasons already set down on the part of the object: insofar as the object is universal and insofar as it is present to the intellect [nn.352-369], which two conditions, namely universality and presence, naturally precede intellection.

a.a [Note by Scotus] There is a proper species of anything that is per se and primarily understood -Parisian Collations 4. [“The quiddity of an accident more truly has being in the intellect through a species than the quiddity of a substance has, because perhaps the substance is not understood through its proper species, by the fact it does not act on the intellect, as neither on the senses, through its proper species. Similarly, the quiddity of a material substance more truly has being in the intelligible species than the quiddity of an immaterial substance has, which immaterial substance does not have a proper phantasm, not even the phantasm of an accident.”]

4. To the Reasons from the Authorities

371. This also which I have proved above [nn.352-370] seems to be the express intention of Aristotle in On the Soul [3.8.431b21-23] where, maintaining that the soul is “in some way everything,” he expounds himself by as it were proving that the soul is “sensible things through the senses and knowable things through science.”

372. Others expound this statement of the Philosopher by saying that Aristotle is not speaking uniformly in this case and that, because about the senses he means it as to impressed species and about the intellect as to the habit of science.

373. This exposition [n.372] does not seem to be to the intention of the Philosopher because, just as the ancients posited the soul to be everything really in order that it might know everything, so does the Philosopher posit that it is everything not really, but by a certain likeness [n.121]. Now if it were sensibles through the senses because of the impressed [sensible] species or likenesses, and were intelligibles through the intellect, then either this would be because of the science that is in the intellect, and in this way the soul would not be knowables by a likeness, for science in itself (setting aside the species representing the object) is not a likeness of the intelligible; or it would be because of something else representing the intelligible object, and then the intellect would not be intelligibles by the intelligible species but the soul would be through phantasms; for nothing would be there representing the intelligible save the phantasm alone, according to this sort of position.

374. Again Aristotle in Physics [8.4.255a33-5b5], and in com.30 according to the Commentator, posits that by acquired science the intellect is reduced from essential potency to accidental potency. I ask what does he understand by ‘science’? Not a habit following the act, because when the intellect performed the act it was not in essential potency. Therefore, a form following the act; therefore, an intelligible species. Proof: both because a phantasm does not reduce the intellect to accidental potency, and because then all science that is said to be a habit of the quiddity of the first object [Henry of Ghent, Quodlibet 9 q.4; Scotus, Ord. Prol. n.145] would be in a phantasm; therefore every habit about the same thing would be there, because according to the Philosopher [Posterior Analytics, 2.3.90b20-21] intellect and science are the same habit.

375. More expressly to this effect is the intention of Augustine. I prove this as follows: for nothing has a nature sufficient to generate actual knowledge unless it have an object naturally prior to the act, an object that is present to it in itself or in something that represents it. But, if one denies intelligible species, the whole intellective part does not have an object present to it before the act of understanding; and so nothing in the intellective part will be sufficiently a memory with respect to such intellection. Augustine denies this in On the Trinity 12.4 n.4 and 15.10 n.17

376. If you reply that the memory is in the intellective part properly taken, by the fact the intellect has come to be in first act of understanding, and thus is it active with respect to second act of understanding, such that, possessing a confused first knowledge. it is active in respect of a second distinct knowledge - this is against him [Henry of Ghent, Summa a.58 q.2, a.59 q.2; also Scotus, Ord. I d.2 nn.273-280] who thinks this opinion and against Augustine. Against him who thinks this because he posits [Henry, Quodlibet 5 q.25; cf. infra n.450] that the universal as it is in the phantasm is there as if in the memory; but as moving to an act of understanding it is present there as if in the intelligence. Therefore, by that opinion, to be sure, no act of understanding is an act of memory but of the intelligence [cf. Scotus, Ord. I d.2 nn.290-291]. This appears from Augustine On the Trinity 15 ch.21 n.40, “those who attribute to intelligence everything that is thought etc.”

377. This point is likewise proved by reason, because then: Either the act by which the memory is in first act will be the same as the act of intelligence, and then the same thing will be the idea of generating itself. Or it will be different from it, and then it will either be simultaneous with the act of intelligence (and then two acts are simultaneous), or it will not be simultaneous, and then memory will formally generate when it will not exist. For memory formally exists by that which, for you [n.376; cf. Scotus, Ord. I d.2 n.299], does not exist when the second act is generated.

378. If you also say [Henry, Quodlibet 5 q.25] that memory exists through the habit of science, this does not stand along with the opinion, because it says that by the habit the object is only present in a phantasm, and so someone who has the habit must have recourse to a phantasm in order actually to understand. Therefore, the object is not present precisely through a habit but through a phantasm, which is not in the intellective part. And this will be plainer in the response to the authorities of Augustine [nn.345, 393397], where he posits science to be in the memory and not a species impressed on the intellect, as is argued [by Henry, n.345] from his words.a

a.a [Several interpolated texts] But note first that he (Scotus) speaks differently in the Parisian Reportationes [Rep. IA d.3 nn.108-114] in the body of the question. For he speaks as follows:
     To the question then I say that it is necessary to posit in the intellect, as it has the idea of memory, an intelligible species representing the universal prior to an act of understanding naturally. And the necessity for this is double: one from the condition per se of the object, which is ‘universality’, and which, as the per se idea of the object, always precedes the act, which act would not be unless a species were impressed on the intellect; the other is the condition and dignity of the superior power, so that it not be cheapened [cf. n.370] (but how it would be cheapened is stated in the present question; cf. supra nn.368-369).
     As to evidence, then, for the question, one needs to know that memory, or the intellect under the idea of memory, can be taken in three ways. In one way as it is preservative of past species as they are past [supra n.331], and in this way does the Philosopher speak in On Memory [1.449b24-25, 451a14-17]. In another way as it is preservative of species representing objects in themselves, whether really or not; and in this way are we speaking here [cf. Rep. IA d.3 n.84: ‘whether memory has distinct intelligible species’; cf. supra n.333;] and I say that it does [sc. have distinct intelligible species], both because of universality and because of the dignity of the power. In a third way as memory has a principle of eliciting some actual knowledge (which however does not remain without a second act, in the way Avicenna [On the Soul p.3 ch.6; cf. supra n.331] posited a species in our intellect; and this will be spoken of in the next question [Rep. IA d.3 n.126; cf. infra n.401]). The things I proved above [Rep. IA d.3 nn.95-107; supra nn.352-369] seem to be the Philosopher’s intention in On the Soul 3, where he says that the soul is in some way all intelligibles through the intellect, as it is all sensibles through the senses [cf. supra n.371] - which cannot be meant ‘through a habit’, for a habit is not a likeness representative of an object, because a habit follows an act.
     And there is a confirmation of this, because the habit of science - through which the intellect is reduced from essential potency to accidental potency in respect of the acts of which the Philosopher speaks in On the Soul 2 and Physics 8 [cf. infra n.396] - necessarily precedes the act of understanding. Now the science that is a habit follows an act, because it is generated from acts; hence this science, which reduces the intellect from essential potency to accidental potency, is a species that is truly a habit, because it is of a nature to be rooted and fixed in the intellect. But yet not every habit is a species, because a habit actually rooted and fixed is not the species that precedes an act and that is of a nature to be rooted and fixed, because this is fixed afterwards by an act [cf. supra n.374, infra. n.396].
     Again, according to them [Henry of Ghent], it does not seem that any habit is to be posited in our intellect but only in the imaginative power [supra n.378], because with whatever mode of being the object in a power accords, with that same mode of being does everything virtually contained in the object accord. Therefore, if a universal object is, through its representative, not in the intellect but in the imaginative power, everything that must and can be explained about that power will be in the same imaginative power. And so there will only be an imaginative power (especially if phantasms combine in ordered fashion), which explains all the truths knowable about the object. And every science will be in imagination and will be a perfection of it, and will not be a perfection of the intellect (against the Philosopher). And so, since the species in imagination virtually contains the act of the intellect, therefore will the act be in imagination [cf. infra n.397].
     Again, Augustine in On the Trinity 12 and 15 [supra n.375] is investigating the Trinity, where he says that it is impossible to take from our soul or in our mind an image of the Trinity save by the fact that something is in the memory which something else is expressed from. I then argue as follows: if in the mind there is something that is parent of a word, it is necessary that this be through something intrinsic to or existing in memory. But there is no parent of a word save the memory possessing within itself an object present to the mind; otherwise it will not be a parent. Therefore, since the object is not quidditatively or really in memory, and since it is not a phantasm, the memory will necessarily through the intelligible species be a parent.

II. To the Initial Arguments

379. To the first argument for the opposite side [n.333]. First it is apparent that the argument is not cogent, because if it were valid it would, against every opinion, prove that a universal can in no way be understood [n.348]. For whatever that be by which the universal is represented, it will represent in a way similar to the way it would if it had been impressed by an object; but if it were impressed by an object, it would be impressed by a singular, because an act is of a singular, as argued [n.333].

380. Therefore I reply that there can be an idea of the acting and an idea of the agent. Singularity is the condition of an agent, not the idea of acting; but the idea of acting is the form itself in the singular, according to which the singular acts. When, therefore, the proposition is taken that ‘any species that is generated by something represents that something according to the idea according to which it is generated by it’, if this is understood about the idea of the what generates [sc. the agent] it is false, if about the idea of generating [sc. the act] it can be conceded; and then it does not follow that it represents it under the idea of a singular, but under the idea of nature, because the idea of nature is the idea of generating.

381. But this response is not sufficient, because thus does it seem that the species in the senses would represent the universal, not the singular, because the idea of generating species in the senses is not singularity but the idea of nature [n.90]. Therefore, I respond generally that when a species is generated by something as by a total cause, it represents it under the idea under which it is generated when speaking of the idea of generating; and it also concomitantly represents it under the idea of what generates. Therefore, the species in the senses does not represent the object under the idea of the universal (which is a condition opposite to the idea of a singular that generates). But the object is not the total generating cause with respect to the intelligible species, because the intellect acts along with it as the other partial cause; and therefore the thing generated by these two can represent the object under the opposite idea of singularity, which is the idea of [the agent] that generates.

382. To the second [n.334], about presence,a I reply that the object has, with respect to the power, first a real presence, namely a closeness of the sort that could generate such a species in the intellect (which species is the formal idea of intellection); second, through the species generated, which is the image of what generates, the object is present under the idea of the knowable or of the represented. The first presence naturally precedes the second, because it precedes the impression of the species through which the second presence formally is. When, therefore, the proposition is taken that ‘the species in the intellect is not the cause of the presence of the object’, I say that it is false of presence under the idea of the knowable, at least in abstractive intellection which we are now speaking about. And when it is proved that ‘the object is present first before the species’, that is true of the real presence by which the agent is present to the thing acted on. And I understand this as follows, that in the first moment of nature the object is in itself, or in a phantasm, present to the agent intellect; in the second moment, in which these [sc. object and agent intellect] are present to the possible intellect as agents to what they act on, a species is generated in the possible intellect; and then, through the species, the object is present under the idea of the knowable.

a.a [Interpolated text; cf. Rep. IA d.3 n.118] I say that there is equivocation over ‘presentiality’. For one kind is the real presentiality of the object and of the power, or the active element, to the passive element; and another kind is the presentiality of the knowable object of the power, and it does not require the real presentiality of the object in itself but it requires something in which the object shines forth. I say, therefore, that the real presence of the object is the real cause of the species, and in it is the object present. From there the object in its first presence is the efficient cause, but in its second presence it is the formal presence of the species; for the species is of this sort of nature because in it the knowable object is present, not effectively or really, but by way of what shines forth.

383. As to the third [n.335], Augustine On the Trinity 14.6 n.8 “Just like someone skilled in many disciplines, the things he knows are contained in his memory, and there is not anything from it in the grasp or his mind save what he is thinking from it; the others are hidden in a certain secret knowledge which is called memory. Therefore, the trinity we were thus commending, as that from which is formed the gaze of the thinker, we would locate in the memory.” ⁴⁵ posits that memory is habitually of many known things together, as is plain there about someone skilled in many disciplines or sciences etc.; therefore it is necessary, according to every opinion, to posit many known things habitually in the memory; and these things, as they are there, are in a way the cause with respect to generated knowledge, according to Augustine - and a natural cause only, as far as they precede act of the will. Therefore, if the argument were valid it would, according to every opinion, prove actual knowledge of many things at once.

384. Therefore I respond the way it was said about the first thing known in the second question of this third distinction [n.73] that whatever species a singular of moves the senses more strongly first, its phantasm is impressed more efficaciously and moves the intellect first. And as to that first act, what we understand is not in our power (for according to Augustine On Free Choice 3.25 n.74, it is not in our power what things, when seen, we are touched by); but once the act is in place, actual knowledge of whatever is habitually known is in our power (this will be spoken about in Ord. I d.6 nn.6-7). When, therefore, it is said that this species can either move to intellection or cannot, I say that it can; but if another species moves more strongly, this one is impeded so that it does not now move. Afterwards, however, the species of whatever is habitually known can, by command of the commanding will, move to knowledge.

385. To Algazel [n.335] I say that the likeness is not valid, because taken away here is the reason for incompossibility there. This is proved by Aristotle Metaphysics 7.7.1032a32-b3, and by the Commentator Metaphysics 7 com.23, where they maintain that the ideas of opposites are not opposites in the intellect.

386. To the fourth [n.336] I say that the intellect is not only acted on really by the real object that imprints a real such species, but also acted on by the object by way of intentionality as it shines forth in the species. And this second being acted on is reception of intellection, which is from the intelligible insofar as it is intelligible, shining forth in the intelligible species; and that ‘to be acted on’ is ‘to understand’, as will be plain in the next question [nn.401, 537].

387. When you deduce further that intellection is not a motion of the thing to the soul, this does not follow, because the impression of the species is a certain motion of the thing toward the soul insofar as the thing has being in that species. The intellection too that follows the impressed species is a motion of the thing toward the soul, insofar as the object, through the intellection, has actually known being in the soul, when before it had only being in it habitually.

III. To the Arguments for the Opinion of Others

388. [To the arguments for the first opinion, that of Henry of Ghent] When it is argued [n.341] in the first opinion that to receive a species belongs to sense precisely because sense is an organic power, I say this is false because that is not the precise cause. But the precise cause of any power that has a species representing its object, as it is its object, is the following: that it is a cognitive power, and nature has given it the ability to have an object naturally present to it first before it knows. But what nature has given to an organic power is that an object be present to it, not in the power itself, but in an organ, that is, in the part of the body that the organic power perfects. And this presence suffices, because the organ is the whole made up of the appropriately mixed46 part of the body and the power. To this whole is the object sufficiently present when the species is in that part of the body. Since therefore nothing of perfection is taken away from the intellect, insofar as it is a cognitive power, by the fact it is not organic, indeed by this fact is perfection rather added to it, the result is that an object can be present to it before an act, just as in the case of the other cognitive powers. But the presence will not be through something impressed on the organ, for it does not have an organ. Therefore, it will be through something impressed on the power itself. Such an impressed representing thing, when it precedes the act of understanding in the intellective power, I call an intelligible species.

389. Briefly, then: the sense has an organ present in the part of the body that is called the organ of that sense. But the intellect has both that prior presence actually and the act itself, by reason of being the same recipient [for them].

390. And so it is false to take it that such a species only exists precisely because of the organ. For nature causes such part, thus mixed,47 of such body to be perfectible by such power of the soul and to be in agreement with the operation of it, because “matter is for the sake of form” and conversely, Averroes Physics 2 com.26, and in On the Soul 1 com.53, “for the bodily members of a lion only differ from those of a deer because soul differs from soul.” Form then is not for the sake of matter but conversely. And therefore is such part made receptive of such species, so that through such species the object may be present to such composite, which is the whole organ. Hence the first cause of the presence of the object in the species is not such disposition of the body, but there is a prior cause, so that the apprehensive power may have an object actually knowable present to it, whether in itself or in something that is part of the organ in such operation.

391. As to the next argument [n.342] from the Philosopher, that the intellect is the place of species, the exposition can be that the intellect is called the place of species because it is the preserver of them (the way it is said that it belongs to a place to preserve the thing placed in it), and other powers are not ‘places’ because they do not thus preserve them. The intelligible species, to be sure, does not seem to be destroyed as the sensible species is, because a sensible species is thus in an organ that is corrupted formally by a contrary, or by a disposition in the organ that does not fit such form - as is plain according to the Philosopher in On Memory 2.433a23-24, 453b4-7, that old men and young men and children are bad at reminiscence because of a too great abundance of humors, and even because of damage or indisposition in the organ. The intelligible species is not in the intellect in either of these ways so as to be per se destroyed by anything contrary to it, or by indisposition in what is susceptive of it. Many other areas of agreement could be assigned as regard this word ‘place’, which it is not necessary now to delay over.

392. As to what is added from the Philosopher [n.343], that “we contemplate the ‘what it is’ in phantasms etc.,” I say on behalf of all these sort of authorities that such is how, for this present state, the connection is between these powers of imagination and intellect, for we understand nothing in a universal save what we have a phantasm of a singular of. Nor is the turn toward phantasms other than that he who understands a universal is imagining a singular instance of it. Nor does the intellect see the ‘what it is’ in phantasms as if in idea of ‘seeing’ it; rather, he who understands the ‘what it is’ shining forth in the intelligible species, as it shines forth in the intelligible species, sees it in its own singular instance seen, through the imaginative power, in the phantasm.

393. As to what is adduced from Augustine [n.345], ‘who does not posit in the memory a sensible species but knowledge’, I reply: when he posits knowledge he at once posits something that includes an intelligible species, though he does not use this word. For since in On the Trinity 15.10 n.19 he had premised that “from the knowledge itself that we hold in the memory a word is born,” he adds that “the cognition formed by the thing that we know is a word.” And since, ibid. 11 n.20, he had premised, “the seeing of thinking is very like the seeing of knowledge,” he adds, “when a thing that is in knowledge is this thing in a word, then is it a true word.” And ibid. 12 n.22, “a word is most like the thing known from which it is generated; and from the seeing of science the seeing of thinking arises,” he adds, “Nor does it matter when he who speaks what he knows learnt what he knows.” Likewise ibid. 22 n.42, “When I turn the eye of my thinking to my memory, it is as if I am saying to myself that I know etc.” Again, On the Trinity 15.27 n.50, when he is speaking of the light in which truths are seen, “It itself,” he says, “shows you that a true word is in you when it is born from your knowledge, that is, when we say what we know.” So his words.

394. From all these is it plain that what Augustine has attributed to memory, as to the idea of knowledge as to the generator of it, explains itself always of the object present in memory. And it is not the case that the object is present in memory, as memory is intellective, through knowledge as knowledge is a habit distinct from the species. Therefore, it must be that he understands this presence to be through the intelligible species, and under the idea under which it is also distinguished from the habit of knowledge properly taken.

395. And in this way [n.394] too must be taken the word of the Philosopher On the Soul 3.8.431b21-23, who, since he had premised that the soul is “in some way everything,” adds that “through the senses it is sensibles, through knowledge it is knowables” [n.371]. Knowledge, of course, is taken, both in Aristotle and in Augustine in the aforesaid places [nn.371, 345, 393], for the very habitual presence of the object in intellective memory, which habitual presence is knowledge about such object virtually, because in the object thus present is contained virtually all knowledge about such object.

396. This species [n.393] is the knowledge that reduces the intellect from essential potency to accidental potency [n.374] (according to Aristotle Physics 8.4.255a32-5b5 and On the Soul 2.5.417a21-b2), but not that which is properly called knowledge [n.394], which of course is the facility left over from acts because, before that facility, it is requisite that, for the first act of considering, the intellect have been reduced already from essential potency to accidental potency, otherwise it would not be operating. Nor is the species in which the quiddity shines forth unfittingly called knowledge [n.392]; not only virtually, because it contains the whole [nn.392, 395], but formally can it be called the cognitive habit, because the quality that remains in the intellect is dispositive of it as concerns act [cf. Scotus, Ord. Prol. n.145].

397. And from this, namely from the first condition [sc. virtually containing knowledge] is argument obtained for an intelligible species, because it does not appear how any total science could be said, by reason of its first object, to be one science save insofar as the knowledge is contained virtually in the first intelligible object. For a total science is not called one by an object insofar as the object containing that science shines forth in a phantasm, because that would not be the oneness of an intellectual habit but of an imagination.

398. [To the arguments for the other opinion, that of Godfrey of Fontaines]. As for what is argued after for the second opinion, that ‘a potency that is for some act is first made actual in accord with that act’ [n.347], I say that any apprehensive power at all, as it is apprehensive, is in potency to apprehending first with firstness of perfection, though not with firstness in the way of generation [nn.69, 71, 95]. And sometimes it is first with the firstness of generation, namely when the object in itself is present to such potency as actually knowable by it. For then there is no need, before the act, for anything else to come to be in it in which it may be present; but the first thing that comes to be from it is the act. But when the object is not of a nature to be in itself present under the idea of what is actually knowable by such potency, then any apprehensive potency is in potency toward apprehension and toward that in which the knowable will be present, and it is in potency first to having the presence, in order of origin, than to having the act. So is it in the issue at hand. Sensibles are not of a nature to be present in themselves to the intellect under the idea of being actual intelligibles, but they can only be thus present in the intelligible species - and this as to abstractive understanding, which the discussion in the issue at hand is about. And therefore is the apprehensive power with respect to such things in potency to a double act, and the prior act will it receive from the agent close to it first, in the order of origin, before the later one.

399. And yet I do not mean these acts to be so ordered that the prior is the receptive idea with respect to the posterior, in the way, namely, that a surface is the idea of receiving whiteness. For then the intellect could, with respect to no intelligible, receive the second act (which is the act of understanding), unless it had the first act (as the species of the same object) before; but I mean that the intellect of itself is the immediate reason for receiving both acts. However these acts have an order between them when the object is not of a nature to be present in itself, because then the act in which the object is present as intelligible must come naturally first before the act which is elicited about the intelligible object as it is present,a - and this is only preserved in the intelligible species.

a.a [Text canceled by Scotus] If it be objected against this solution [n.397] that a plurality is never to be posited save because of necessity (Physics 1.4.188a17-18), and here there does not seem to be necessity, because the object seems to be present sufficiently in the phantasm, therefore etc. - I reply: there is always a necessity to dignify a noble nature when there does not appear to be anything that is manifestly repugnant. But it seems a considerable cheapening of the intellective power, as it is intellective, that it cannot have an object present to it in itself without a presence begged from inferior powers (with which it is contingently joined in idea of power), and yet that the other inferior powers can have an object thus present in itself. Although the intellect could have an object present to it in an inferior power, yet not in the highest presentiality able to precede the act of understanding. But just as for the other cognitive powers, so much more for this power must it be conceded that the object is supremely present, to the extent it can be present, and this before an act of knowing [nn.368-369].

400. Also the highest perfection possible of the cognitive power is not posited if is not posited that it can preserve the intelligible species beyond the act, and thus that it can have its object, preserved without an act, present to it, for this is allowed to the sensitive power [sc. in imagination or sense memory]. And perfection in the intellective cognitive power is that it not depend on something else in its cognition, but that it can have an object present to it without dependence on another power.

Question Two. Whether the Intellective Part Properly Taken or Something of it is the Total Cause Generating Actual Knowledge, or the Idea of Generating it

401. Second about generated knowledge I ask what its generating cause is, or the reason for generating it. And I ask whether the intellective part properly taken, or something of it, is the total cause generating actual knowledge, or the reason for generating it.

Argument that it is not:

Because in On the Soul 2.5.416b33-35, 417a6-9 the Philosopher proves that sense is passive, not active, by the fact that, if it were active, it would always be acting, just as if the combustible were combustive the combustible would always be burning. So do I argue in the issue at hand: if the intellective part were active with respect to intellection, it would always be understanding, even without an object - which is false.

402. There is confirmation because, from On the Soul [3.2.425b25-28], “sensible and sense are the same act,” for example, sounding and hearing are the same act. Therefore, by similarity, the active motion of the object and the passive motion of the intellect (which is intellection) are the same act; therefore, intellection is from the object.

403. Again, On the Soul 3.5.430a14-15, the possible intellect is “that by which there is a becoming everything” just as the agent intellect is “that by which there is a making everything.” Therefore, the possible intellect at least will not be the active cause with respect to cognition, just as also the agent intellect is not passively disposed with respect to act.

404. Again, third: actions are distinguished through distinction of active principles [cf. On the Soul 2.4.415a17-20]. If therefore the intellect, which is without distinction, is the active principle of all intellection, then all intellections would be of the same species; and if all intellections then also all the subsequent habits, and so all the sciences.

405. To the opposite is Avicenna Metaphysics 9.4: immateriality is the idea of being intellective just as it is of being intelligible; therefore the intellect or the intellective part is, of its immateriality, by itself alone active with respect to intellection, just as it is receptive.

406. Again, if the object, or something of it, were the formal idea of acting, then the intellections of objects diverse in species would be diverse in species, which is false. The proof of the consequence is that effects which are from causes diverse in species are different in species. The proof of the falsity of the consequent is that then there would be a proper science of every most specific species, and so there could not be one science of several most specific species. This is also proved, namely the falsity of the consequent, from the Philosopher Ethics 1.7.1098a3-4, where he maintains that ‘to understand’ is the proper operation of man according as he is man; but of one species there is one operation according to species.

I. Six Opinions of Others are Expounded and Rejected

A. About the First Opinion

1. Exposition of the Opinion

407. In this question there is an opinion [Peter Olivi, Sent. II q.58] which attributes to the soul all activity in respect of intellection, and it is imputed to Augustine, who says in Literal Commentary On Genesis 12.16 n.32-33, “Because the image of the body is in the spirit, which is more outstanding than the body, therefore is the image of the body more outstanding in the spirit than the body itself is in its own substance;” and there follows [ch.29], “Nor should one think that the body does something in the spirit, as if the spirit be subject, like matter, to the action of the body. For the thing that acts is in every way more outstanding than the thing about which it acts, and in no way is the body more outstanding than the spirit; rather the spirit is more outstanding than the body. So although the image begins to be in the spirit, yet it is not the body that makes that same image in the spirit, but the spirit makes it in itself with marvelous quickness;” and there follows, “for the image, as soon as it is seen by the eyes, is formed in the spirit of the seer without alteration.”

408. Again, On the Trinity 10.5 n.7, “The soul turns over and seizes images of bodies made in itself and by itself; for it gives them, in forming them, something of its own substance; and it keeps in itself something free, whereby it may judge of such species; and this is the mind, that is, rational intelligence, which is preserved so that it may judge; for the parts of the soul that are informed with likenesses of the body we feel we have in common even with the beasts.” Therefore, the soul itself forms in itself images of things known, as this cited authority says even more expressly.

409. Argument on behalf of this opinion is made with reasons as follows: An effect does not exceed its cause in perfection; “every living thing is better than a nonliving thing,” according to Augustine City of God [9.6, 11.16, 7.3 n.1]; therefore a living operation can only come from a living or live principle of action. These operations of thinking are living operations; therefore, they are from the soul itself as from the reason for acting.

410. Again the more perfect a form is the more actual and consequently the more active it is, because to be active belongs to something insofar as it is in act; but the intellective soul is, among all forms, the most actual; therefore it is most active; therefore it has the power by itself alone for its own operation, since more imperfect forms have power for this, as is plain of the forms of the elements and of certain mixed bodies.48

411. Again, third, the Philosopher in Ethics 1 [1.1.1094a3-6] and Metaphysics 9[9.8.1050a21-b1] and Physics 3 [3.3.202a22-24], distinguishes between acting and making, and he maintains that action properly speaking abides in the agent, as he illustrates about speculation there [Metaphysics 9]. Intellection, therefore, is properly an operation that abides in the agent; but it abides in the intellective part, therefore it will come from that part as from its agent.

412. Fourth, and it is the same, because action properly speaking, and as it is distinguished from making, denominates the agent; but ‘to understand’ denominates man as to his intellective part, therefore etc. [sc. therefore man’s intellective part or intellect is the agent of the action of understanding].

2. Rejection of the Opinion

413. Against this opinion:

That it is not the opinion of Augustine appears from the last chapter of On the Trinity 9.12 n.18 (or chapter 30 of the smaller version): “It must be clearly held that everything we know co-generates in us knowledge of itself; for knowledge is born of both, namely of the knower and the known etc.”a

Again, ibid. 11.2 n.3, “Vision is generated from the seeable and the seer etc.”

Again, ibid. 15.10 n.9 (as was said before [n.393]), “The knowledge formed by the thing that we know is a word.” Therefore, he intends to attribute some causality to the object.

a.a [Interpolated text]. [Augustine cont.] “Therefore, when the mind knows itself it is the sole parent of its own knowledge, for it is both known and knower. And it was knowable to itself even before it knew itself, but knowledge of itself was not in it when it did not know itself.”

414. There is an argument by reason in favor of this, becausea when two causes prior to the thing itself, namely the efficient cause and the matter, are perfect in themselves and proximate and not impeded, the effect follows or can follow. Therefore if the soul is the active total cause of generated knowledge, and if it is the disposed matter, or receptive subject, with respect to the same knowledge, and if it is always actually present to itself, then, since it is a natural cause, there will always be in it every actual intellection of which it is itself the cause - of which, moreover, it is by itself the cause; or at least there will be an intellection that it most strongly has the power for.b

a.a [Text canceled by Scotus] there are only four kinds of per se causes, as appears in Physics 2.3.194b23-5a3 and Metaphysics 5.2 1013a24-b4. So, when they exist perfect in themselves and are not impeded and are sufficiently close by, the effect comes from them if they are natural causes, or it will be possible for it to come from them if any of the causes is a freely acting cause. And because a form in some way has being through being produced, and the end follows the production in being of the thing (or if it precedes, this is insofar as it moves the efficient cause to act), therefore the major follows [sc. about the soul as active total cause, n.414].

b.b [Text canceled by Scotus] For the imperfection of a second cause in itself cannot be posited if the hypothesis is retained [sc. that the soul is active total cause], nor can non-proximity be posited, nor can impediment, because nothing would seem to be an impediment. And to take flight to a cause ‘sine qua non’ and to say that it is required for this, that knowledge be generated, this is to say that all per se causes are not sufficient causes, but that something else is required on which the thing to be caused essentially depends. So there will not only be four kinds of causes but more, or something will essentially depend on something that is not the cause of it. [Text interpolated in this canceled text] Again, all causes besides the said four are accidental to the thing; therefore, the thing does not simply depend on them, either in being or in becoming. The antecedent is expressly stated by the Commentator Physics 2 com.30-31; again, he proves that of anything whatever there are only four causes, or some of the four, in Physics 2 com. 67-70 through a sufficiency of demonstration.

415. By this are disproved the diverse ways that those, who posit this opinion [n.407], have of maintaining it. For if there be posited an object necessary in idea of sine qua non cause, or in idea of term or of stimulant [e.g. Olivi, ibid. q.58, 72] - if there not be given it some per se causality (since the soul is always perfect in itself and proximate to what it acts on) and if any new impediment not be removed - how will be preserved the fact that it [the object] is necessarily required save by positing five kinds of causes?

416. Specifically, too, the point about ‘stimulating’ does not seem valid. For I ask what it is ‘to stimulate’? If it is to cause something in the intellective power, then the object causes something before the intellective power of itself acts. Therefore, the intellective power is not the total active first cause in respect of anything caused in it, but the object is as well. If ‘to stimulate’ not be to cause something in the intellective power, then the intellective power is not differently disposed in itself after the stimulation than it was before, and so it is not more stimulated now than it was before.

417. This argument [n.414] would, however, work in like manner, as it seems, against action of the will. Hence response can be given that when forms have an essential order as they are received, either in the same nature or in the same power (and this whether by the same agent or by another), and given also that neither be the reason for receiving the other - never can the second be induced by the agent in the receptive subject of it unless the first has been induced already. An example about volition and delight: when positing that these are diverse really, never is the second received unless the first is received already; since however the second has a natural active cause [sc. the object] present to it before there is volition, in these sorts of ordered things is the major premise [n.414 init.] denied. The like holds of the intelligible species in relation to intellection, when positing the intelligible species not to be cause or receptive subject of intellection; the like holds of light in the medium [nn.471-473], if it does not act on or receive the species of color.

418. Note: it is said in another way [Olivi, ibid. qq.72, 58, 57, 23] that whenever the receiving of some form in its potential subject pre-requires of necessity the receiving of another form in its receptive subject, the major,a that ‘a perfect agent proximate to its passive subject and not impeded is able to act’ [n.414], is false, understanding this of proximate power - and this whether the recipient of the prior form is the same power as the recipient of the later form (example: volition and delight in the will), or is the same nature (example: intellection and volition in the soul, when positing the will to be totally active with respect to willing), or both forms are received in the same supposit, not in a single nature or power (example: about phantasm and intellection, if an intelligible species be denied and the total action be given to the intellect), or the prior and later form are received in different supposits (example: light from the sun in air and in water).

a.a Above the word ‘major’ the sign a was placed by Scotus. See n.421.

419. There is not here preserved the proposition [n.418] that the prior form is active with respect to the later one, or is the reason for receiving it, as with light in the medium in respect of the species of color. For if this [example of light] be instanced in such cases [sc. the four listed in n.418], the instance is of no value, because the proximate active or passive principle would in such cases be lacking. In the four instances already set down [n.418] neither condition [sc. lack of active and of passive principle] is met, for neither is volition the active cause of delight but the object is, nor is it the receptive subject, but the will is. So in the other instances [n.418], The Vatican Editors helpfully explain the same point about the remaining three cases in n.418 as follows: “Intellection is not the active cause of volition but the will is, nor is it the receptive subject but the soul is. The phantasm is not the active cause of intellection but the intellect is, nor is it the receptive subject but the supposit is. Light in the air is not the active cause of light in water but the sun is, nor is it the receptive subject but water is.” Hence, to complete the criticism, the claim in n.418, that the major ‘a perfect agent proximate to its passive subject and not impeded is able to act’ is sometimes false, is itself false. And the four examples given to illustrate it fail, because they are misdescribed; when they are correctly described the relevant major is seen to remain true. ⁴⁶ according to those opinions.

420. Nor should it be said that the major [n.418] is true unless two effects are necessarily producible in an ordered way by the same agent; because this is also not true if there is necessarily an order between forms that can be introduced by different agents, as is plain in the instances set down [n.418].

421. Universally, then, any form that, in order to be received in its passive subject, requires another form to be first received in any subject and by any agent, never is the active principle of the second form in accidental potency for acting on the receptive subject of the second form, unless the prior form has already been induced. Therefore the later [second] form depends, as to its coming to be, essentially on something different from the per se causes of it in its own coming to be, which per se causes are agent and matter.a This conclusion [sc. the previous sentence] can be conceded, because ‘first essentially’ does not belong only to the cause (the fact is plain in the treatise [by Scotus himself], On the First Principle ch. 1 nn.2-4), yet itb is not with probability denied unless the priority of the other form be shown - either as it is active with respect to the second form, or as it is the reason for the receiving, or as it is the effect of a cause nearer to a common cause, or to a cause that necessarily causes first.

a.a [Note by Scotus] It can be said that the later form does not, in the instant in which it is causable, depend on others. It is not causable save naturally after the other cause that is pre-required for it.

b.b Above ‘it’ the sign a was put by Scotus. See n.418.

B. About the Second Opinion

1. Exposition of the opinion

422. There is another opinion that is to the opposite extreme entirely. As is gathered from diverse places in him who thinks this way [Godfrey of Fontaines, Quodlibet 8 q.2, 1 q.7, 14 q.5, 6 q.7], it says that the intellective soul, as it is intellective, has nothing of activity in respect of intellection.

For it does not have the possible intellect’s sort of acting (whether informed with an intelligible species, which they deny [nn.346-347], or bare), because, according to them, the same thing cannot act on itself. They prove this because, since the agent in act is of the sort the patient is in potency (from Physics 3.2.202a8-12, On Generation 1.5.321b35-2a8), it then follows that the same thing would be in potency and act, which seems, first, to be opposite to the first principle of metaphysics known through the idea of act and potency; then also the same thing would be efficient cause and matter, which seems against the Philosopher (Physics 2.7.198a22-27), that matter and efficient cause do not coincide; then again the same thing would be referred to itself by a real relation, which seems impossible (Metaphysics 5.15.1021a26-b3), because of the opposition of such relations; then, finally, anything at all would be posited as acting on itself and moving itself (as that the air would illuminate itself in the presence of the sun and not the sun, and that wood would heat itself in the presence of fire and not the fire). For there would be no source whence anything might be proved that would be thus causative of anything new at all existing in it, notwithstanding the fact that nothing would be naturally causative of anything new in existence.

From these proofs they say that agent and patient are distinct in subject. And there is added, for confirmation, that whatever difficulties may arise in any matter, not on their account must these metaphysical principles be denied, for then all investigation of truth through such principles would be taken away. For a reason for denying them in one matter is a reason for denying them in another.

423. On the same ground they say that the agent intellect cannot effectively cause anything in the possible intellect, because it is not distinguished in subject from it but, by as it were perfecting it formally with its own light, it causes this sort of illumining - just as [Godfrey, ibid. 6 q.15] “when some luminous body is produced (in which are these two perfections, namely transparency and light itself), it is said that this sort of light makes a transparent body luminous, not by changing it from a potency preceding the act toward such act, but the whole together is, according to idea of efficient cause, made by an extrinsic agent” producing such body in such existence. But for this reason is light said to make the body luminous, that it is formally a perfecter of that body. So is it in the issue at hand. The agent intellect, in idea of efficient cause, does nothing to the possible intellect, but “he who created the soul by way of efficient cause, has himself caused this illumination in it, creating or producing these powers at the same time in the same substance.”

424. Similarly they posit that the agent intellect has no operation with respect to intellection save insofar as it has action about the intelligible object, namely insofar as it acts for this, so that it possess the idea of mover and of object in the act. Therefore, as to intellection, the agent intellect will, for these two reasons, have no activity immediately.

425. What then will effectively cause intellection?

They reply that the same real object effects intellection and volition, and this insofar as it shines forth in the phantasm - the agent intellect having been illumined, not effectively but by concurring formally, as it were, in regard to the intelligible.

426. And as to how it may be possible for a phantasm to move the possible intellect, although however the imaginative power and the possible intellect are in the same substance of the soul (and the phantasm is not distinguished in subject from the possible intellect) - they say [Godfrey of Fontaines, Quodlibet 6 q.7] that the soul can be considered in two ways, either in essence or in powers. In the first way, it is whole in each part and is not a principle of any second operation. In the second way, some power determines for itself some part of the body, as an organic power, some power does not, as the intellective power, because “it under the idea of such a power” is not “in this part of the body nor in that, for it is in no part,” because it is “per se neither in the whole nor in any part, just as neither are the operations that are exercised through it. Just as, therefore, a power that would be in a different part of the body than is the phantasm could be changed by what is in imagination, so a power that is determinate to a part in which there is a phantasm but that is outside it (in this way, that it is no more there than in a foot) will be able to be changed by what is in imagination. So is it in the issue at hand [n.425], because the powers [of intellect and will] are not tied to and immersed in matter as the other powers are.”

2. Rejection of the Opinion

427. Against this opinion.

According to it, the agent intellect causes nothing that may be formally in a phantasm, but all that happens is that, through some spiritual contact of this sort of light with the phantasm, there is removal of an obstacle, and when this removal has been carried out by virtue of the agent intellect, the informing of the possible intellect takes place [cf. supra n.361, Godfrey, ibid. 5 q.10].

428. From this it follows that nothing in the intellective part (and this as the intellective part embraces the agent and possible intellects) will have in any way the idea of something active, whether as agent or as idea of acting, with respect to any intellection at all or with respect to the object of intellection, and thus only a phantasm is disposed to intellection as effective of it. Or if there is another effectivity there, by which an irradiating or illumining of phantasms may take place, that effectivity will be precisely form God himself, who has created such light in the possible intellect. Other than God, therefore, nothing is actively disposed in regard to any intellection at all save only a phantasm.

429. This seems unacceptable, because it very much cheapens the nature of the soul. For a phantasm does not seem able to cause any perfection in the intellect that surpasses the nobility of a phantasm, because an effect does not exceed its cause but falls short of it, especially an equivocal effect. Therefore, as this opinion’s position goes, nothing is caused in the intellect precisely by a phantasm, for every intellection is either more perfect than a phantasm or in man there will be no intellection.a

a.a [Text canceled by Scotus; replaced by the passage from n.428, last sentence, to the end of n.429. See also the canceled text to n.443, which is effectively the same as n.429 here] Either then God will operate immediately for any intellection, or only the phantasm will be the cause of all actions of the intellective part, both intellections and volitions.

430. Again, second, from this position it follows that an angel (in whom such distinction in subject cannot be posited), could have no new intellection, however much an angel have many objects habitually present to him. Indeed, an angel can have no intellection effectively save from God, because if the opposite is posited the intellect will be moved by itself, or agent and patient will not be distinct in subject.b

b.b [Note by Scotus] Along with the second argument against Godfrey [n.430], it seems to be against him how an animal has a phantasm without exterior sensation. For what moves the organ there to act? Nothing seems distinct there in subject, unless he posit a sense memory in an organ different from a phantasma or imagination, and that it moves imagination to imagining.

431. He seems himself to concede this, because he posits that the claim ‘an angel can have a new intellection’ is merely a matter of belief.

432. But this is not a way out. For no matter of belief is repugnant to a conclusion following from true principles. And from this principle, ‘agent and patient are necessarily distinct in subject’, it necessarily follows that an angel cannot have, from himself, any intellection actively. Therefore, if the opposite of this conclusion is a matter of belief, the principle from which the conclusion follows will be false. This is plainer about ‘willing’, for it is clear that an angel did not have his first ‘willing of bad’ from God; so the agent there was not distinct in subject from the thing acted on.

433. Third, it follows that one should not posit any habit in the intellect because, according to this opinion, it is required, and suffices, for ordered understanding that phantasms occur in an ordered way and that, as occurring, they move the intellect in an ordered way. But that they occur in an ordered way cannot come about through a habit in the intellect, because nothing in the thing acted on gives ordered moving to the mover. Or at any rate they can occur in an ordered way through a habit in imagination without any habit in the intellect; therefore etc.

434. There is a confirmation, because, according to them, for this reason is a habit in the will denied, because the will moves easily in conformity with the intellect. Therefore by similarity, since the intellect is moved, according to them, by phantasms in the way the phantasms occur, a habit in imagination will suffice for them to move in an ordered way. These three [nn.428-433] I consider [to be objections against these thinkers].

435. But other arguments are also made against them. First as follows:a if a phantasm causes every intellection effectively, and if a natural cause does nothing save according to the nature by which it is in act, a phantasm will never cause any action in the intellect save one that is conform to the phantasm; and so it will never cause a false composition repugnant to the ideas of the extreme terms which the phantasms are of in the imaginative power. Or if in some way it is possible, as they reply [Godfrey, Quodlibet 10 q.12, 5 q.12], that through one known opposite can its opposite be known, this is only because through one true composition can the intellect know that the opposite is false. But will the phantasm never cause as true a false intellection, or conversely? And if you say it is because a phantasm represents objects falsely that it causes a false intellection in the intellect - the follows that the same phantasm can never cause an opposite assent, and so the intellect will not be able to apprehend the same complex as now true, now false.

a.a [Text canceled by Scotus; replaced by the passage from n.432, opening sentence, to “First as follows” here in n.435]. This response does not seem to be that of a Christian but of a purely pagan philosopher, since an angel knows many new things and is blessed in this operation of his. Thirds

436. Again, second, intellection according to the Philosopher is an immanent act [Metaphysics 9.8.1050a14-b1].

437. They reply [Godfrey, Quodlibet 9 q.19] that ‘to understand’, in the grammatical way of signifying, signifies action, and ‘to be understood’ signifies passion; yet in reality ‘to understand’ is a passion and ‘what is understood’ is the agent. But what may ‘to understand’ have of the idea of action? They say [ibid.] that ‘to understand’ does not signify anything as it has being, in itself and absolutely, in the subject, but as it tends to something else as to an object, or as to a term; “and because it is a mark of action to proceed from the agent and to tend to the thing acted on, therefore such perfections” -which are in reality passions, that is, passions abiding by way of action in that which is denominated from them - “are said to be immanent actions.”

438. To the contrary. The philosopher, when distinguishing action from making, Ethics 1.1.1094a3-6, 6.4.1140a1-6, Metaphysics 9.8.1050a21-b1, assigns diverse principles and properties to action and making, which would not be necessary if his meaning were that what he assigns to be an action were a passion; for then it would not be necessary to assign it its own active principle. For it would not be necessary for prudence to be active, in the way art is a habit of making, if action were nothing but a certain form received in something else (as in that which is called an agent).

439. Again, third, a habit is not posited precisely for undergoing something, and above all in the case of a passive thing that is supremely disposed to form. For what is in itself supremely disposed to receive has no need to be rendered prompt to receive. But the intellect is supremely disposed for any intellection whatever, because it has nothing contrary. Therefore, it would not be necessary to posit any habit in the intellect if it were precisely passive with respect to intellection. Proof of the first proposition [sc. supra n.439, “a habit is not posited precisely for undergoing something”], because a habit is ‘what we use when we want’, and a habit “perfects the haver and renders his work good etc.,” Ethics 2.4.1105b25-26, 1106a15-17.

440. Again, fourth, how would the intellect engage in discursive reasoning, by syllogizing and arguing, if a phantasm cause every intellection? For it does not seem intelligible how phantasms are, by their occurrence, cause of all discourse.

441. Again, fifth, how will logical intentions, or relations of reason, be caused? For, if a phantasm causes every intellection, any intention caused by it will be real, because that is called a real intention which is immediately caused by the thing, or by a species representing the thing in itself. Therefore, no intellection will cause logical intentions or relations of reason, because the intellect will be able, by no act of itself, to compare one object with another, which comparing is what causes a relation of reason, or a second intention, in an object.

442. There is a confirmation, because when the intellect compares a to b according to the sort of relation that there is, from the nature of the thing, between them, it does not cause a relation of reason, as it does for example when it compares them as different or as contrary, or as whole and part, or the like. Therefore, by the comparing alone is a relation of reason caused, which, neither in its being nor in its being known, is consequent to the extremes from the nature of the extremes. Therefore, the extremes are not the cause of the act of comparing.

443. Again, sixth, how does the intellect reflect on its own act,a and how will this be in the capacity of the reflecting power? For if the phantasm causing some intellection naturally has to cause a reflection on that intellection, for the same reason it naturally has to cause a reflection on the reflection, and so on ad infinitum, as Augustine says On the Trinity 15.12 n.21 [cf. n.227]. But if it does not have to cause a reflection but only an absolute act, and if afterwards another phantasm occurs, no reason seems capable of being assigned as to how there could be any reflection on any act.b

a.a [Note added by Scotus] The act is the object of a second act, so it moves the intellect toward it and it is in it, therefore etc. #8 [the argument in n.443 was the eighth in the primitive text].

b.b [Text canceled by Scotus] Again, how does it not cheapen the soul, because every natural action (which is a natural perfection of so perfect a being) is thus effectively caused by a phantasm? For a phantasm seems able to cause no perfection in the intellect that exceeds the nobility of the intellect, because an equivocal effect cannot exceed an equivocal cause but falls short of it. Therefore, nothing precisely caused by a phantasm, as by a total active cause (as that position about intellection posits), can be more perfect than a phantasm, but is more imperfect than it; and so no perfection will be a greater perfection in man than the very phantasm, which is absurd. [This text seems canceled here only because it has been transposed, more or less, to n.429].

444. Of these last six reasons, the first [n.435] is not compelling against them [Godfrey et al.], because it asks about a difficulty common to every opinion. For whether a phantasm is posited to be an active cause of intellection or the intelligible is species or the intellect, one can always ask of them equally (since each of them is a principle of acting naturally, not freely) how opposites in the intellect can be caused, as for example now a true opinion or knowledge about something, and now a false opinion or error about the same.

445. The second reason [nn.436, 438] is not compelling, for prudence is posited to be an active principle because of another act, which is ‘action’, to which its own act is extended as rule is to thing ruled - just as the proper act of an art is extended to a different act, which is ‘making’, although however neither of the habits is a properly active principle in respect of its act.

446. Hereby [n.445] to the third reason [n.439], that a habit inclines the subject acted on the way a prior form inclines to a fitting posterior one, as is said elsewhere about habit [Scotus, Ord. I d.17 p.1 qq.1-3]. For although a passive subject, through removal of the opposite, is of itself supremely disposed, yet not by addition of something fitting. The remark from Ethics 2 [n.439], that [a habit] renders the work good etc., must be understood to mean that it does so not by effecting but by inclining [Scotus, ibid.].

447. The fourth [n.440] coincides with the one considered third [nn.433-434], namely how a habit disposes for phantasms to occur in discursive reasoning in an ordered way, unless the habit is placed in the imaginative power, not in the intellect - which perhaps he would concede.

448. The sixth [n.443] only asks how it is in our power which intellection we have through another, and what the act is known by on which we reflect. The first, to be sure, is because of the will, and the second indeed through the footprint left behind from the act; or otherwise it is through a phantasm, which first displays the object but which, second, is caused by the object. Yet it is not necessary that it in act cause intellection of intellection, except when the will gives command. So it is possible, after the footprint has been left, for a reflex act to be had by being elicited through it, with the will commanding [this intellection]; and it is possible for it not to be had, with the will commanding another intellection.

449. The fifth [nn.441-442] seems it needs pondering if ‘no comparison is a relation of reason that the extremes are of a nature to cause in the intellect’. For if this proposition is true, then although intellections of the simple things that are compared may be caused by the extremes, yet not the comparison that is in the comparing act by which a relation of reason is caused in the extreme term. It could be said that some relation follows the extremes in the thing, and that, when the extremes are known, it follows in knowledge - as in the case of contrariety and the like. And this relation is real. The other relation does not follow the extremes in the thing, and not necessarily in the intellect either. Yet the extremes themselves can cause the act of comparison by eliciting it, when the will gives command. And when the act of comparing has been caused according to the sort of respect that does not follow the extremes in the thing, a relation of reason is caused.

C. About the Third and Fourth Opinion

1. Exposition of the Opinions

450. [Third opinion] The third opinion [Henry of Ghent, Quodlibet 5.25] posits that the intelligible [object], as present simply to the intellect (not through an intelligible species [n.340], but through a phantasm as it is illumined by the agent intellect), is thus simply present to the possible intellect as in memory. And, as it moves to an act of understanding, it is there as in the intelligence, whose knowledge has its term in the object itself. And as concerns these two the intellect is passive, namely both as it is memory having an object simply present to it, and as it is intelligence moved by the object thus present to the first act of understanding. But the intellect, when brought to be in first act, can by natural insight dig down and run through any ‘what it is’, by conjoining and dividing the appropriate differences with the thing divided, and by thus investigating, as regard simple understanding, the ‘what it is’ and, as regard complex understanding, the ‘because of what’ as regard a knowable conclusion. And in this discursive reasoning the intellect, insofar as it thus reasons, is active; insofar, however, as it conceives, it is passive.

451. [Fourth opinion] This same doctor as to this position (about passiveness with respect to the first simple and confused knowledge, and about activity with respect to investigated distinct knowledge) seems to retract it and to correct it in another place where, asking about the active principle of vital actions (namely actions of sensation and intellection), posits that that principle is something in the animate thing itself and not an object outside it. And in the way he posits in the senses that the species impressed on the organ inclines only, and, by inclining, excites the power and, as it were, calls it forth to its operation, so does [he posit that] the phantasm in the imaginative power inclines the intellect so that the inclined intellect is in ultimate disposition to elicit intellection as its own proper operation - And on behalf of this position he there introduces a reason for these actions, that they are to be vital actions and that no action transcends the perfection of the agent. And he introduces another reason about the action that remains in the agent, and these are actions proper and denominate the agent properly, the way ‘to shine’, but not ‘to illumine’, is related to the ‘shining’ thing. With this agrees the reason of Augustine [On Music 6.5 n.9], that the soul forms in itself images of things known.

These three reasons were introduced before, for the first opinion [nn.409, 412, 408].

2. Rejection of the Opinions

452. Neither of these opinions, neither the one retracted nor the one retracting it, seems to be true. Not the retracted one [n.450], because the intellect, when brought to be in act according to the first confused knowledge, is active with respect to second intellection either by virtue of itself, or by virtue of the first confused knowledge itself. If by virtue of itself, it does not seem reasonable that some cause could be active with respect to a more perfect cause in some species and could in no way be active with respect to a more imperfect cause of the same idea; now the confused and distinct intellection of white seem to be intellections of the same idea, because intellections of the same object; therefore it seems unacceptable that the intellect could of itself be causative with respect to the second intellection, which is the more perfect, and not with respect to the first. And if you say that in respect of the second act it is active by virtue of the first act, on the contrary: an imperfect act cannot be the formal idea of causing a more perfect act, because then, if an effect could surpass in perfection its total cause, there would be no way in which it could be proved that God is the most perfect being; but distinct knowledge is nobler than confused knowledge; therefore the confused knowledge is not the formal reason for eliciting or causing the distinct knowledge.

453. The retracting opinion too [n.451] does not seem to be true, because I ask what is understood by ‘inclination’? Either that there is some form in the intellect by which it is inclined, or that nothing is in the intellect. If nothing, the intellect is not more inclined now than it was before. If some form, either an act of understanding - and then the opposite of their opinion, because the object will cause the act - or something prior to the act of understanding, as a species, which they deny [n.340].

454. Response: it is not a habit nor an act nor a species but some fourth thing. -On the contrary. Although this would seem at once to be unacceptable, yet it is argued as follows: Let that fourth thing be a; either without it there is in the intellect the total active virtue with respect to intellection, or there is not. If there is, then without it the intellect is capable of this intellection, and so of any required determination (because a ‘this’ as ‘this’ is most determinate), and so it will be necessary because of nothing. If there is not, then a gives active virtue, whether total or partial, to the intellect itself, and so such action will not be from the intellect, or from within, as from a total active principle.

455. Again, in ordered causes an inferior does not include a superior but conversely;a and with respect to intellection the intellective part is a cause superior to the species of any object, as will be plain in the following question [nn.559-562]; therefore the object does not incline the intellect.

a.a [Note added by Scotus] But this is false; rather each inclines each. An example: a habit inclines a power [cf. n.446].

D. About the Fifth and Sixth Opinion

1. Exposition of the Opinions

456. [Fifth opinion] The fifth opinion [Giles of Rome, Quodlibet 1 q.3, 3 qq.13-14, 5 q.9; On Angelic Knowledge qq.1, 4-5; Thomas of Sutton, Quaestiones Ordinariae qq.2-3] posits that the species of the object in the intellect, or the object itself present in itself, is what generates, or is the formal idea of generating, actual knowledge in the intellect, and the intellect itself is only disposed as material there, informed by the species or possessing the object that supplies the place of the species.

457. The argument for this is as follows: Averroes On the Soul 3 com.5, the intellect is disposed to universal forms as first matter is to individual forms; and elsewhere [in com.5] the soul is lowest in the genus of intelligibles, as matter is in the genus of beings; and On the Soul 2.5.417a2-28, and Physics 8.4.255a30-255b31, the intellect before habit is in essential potency as matter is before form; and On the Soul 3.4.429a24, the soul is nothing of the things that are before understanding. From all these it is concluded that the power of the intellect with respect to the intelligible is purely potential; but what is purely potential cannot be the active principle of any act unless informed by some form; and then the form will be the formal principle.

458. Argument is also made that the very form that is the principle of acting is the likeness, because just as making is formally through the form by which the maker is assimilated to the thing made, so action seems to be through the form by which the agent is assimilated to the object - so similitude will be the formal reason for acting.

459. For this is also added that an indeterminate agent cannot perform a determinate action, or an action about a determinate object, unless it be determined; the intellect of itself is indeterminate as to every intelligible and every intellection; therefore, in order for it to understand, some determination is required; that determination is only through some species; therefore the intelligible species is the determinative principle.

460. [Sixth opinion] The sixth opinion, which returns to the same as to the conclusion of this question, is that actual knowledge itself, generated whether in the senses or in the intellect, is the species; and then, just as the formal idea of generating an actual species that is called actual knowledge is the idea of the object or the species of the object in memory, so it follows, as concerns the issue at hand, that the formal idea of generating actual knowledge is the object itself or some species in virtue of the object; and this such that when the object is in itself present, a species is generated from it, which is intellection; but when it is not present in itself but through a species in memory, then by this species or by virtue of this species another species is generated, which will be intellection.

461. In favor of this opinion, insofar as it says that the intelligible species is actual knowledge, is adduced Augustine On the Trinity 11.2 n.3, where he maintains that “the informing which is called vision is generated by the body alone that sees;” but what is generated by the body alone is the species; therefore, the species is vision, according to Augustine.

462. This is proved, second, through the Philosopher On the Soul 3.2.425b25-28, who maintains that sounding and hearing are the same, because the act of the active and the passive thing is the same, Physics 3.3.202a13-21; but sounding in act causes a species of sound in the ear; therefore this caused species is the same as hearing, and so the sensible species and the sounding are the same.

2. Rejection of the Opinions

463. The conclusion of these last two opinions is disproved by certain arguments made against the second opinion [nn.422, 427-443]. For an equivocal effect cannot exceed an equivocal cause in perfection, but necessarily falls short of it; intellection would be an equivocal effect of the intelligible species if it were caused by it alone; and so it would be simply more imperfect than the intelligible species, which is not true [n.429].

464. This reason [n.463], which was the first against the second opinion [n.429], is less evident against these opinions [the fifth and sixth], because the intelligible species is nobler than the phantasm. The second and third reason against the second opinion [nn.430-434] are not against these opinions [the fifth and sixth]. Six other reasons, which I did not consider against the second opinion [nn.435-443], can be made here. For first,a a habit does not seem necessary, as was argued there [n.439]. Likewise, second, how would discursive reasoning happen [n.440]? Third, how reflection [n.443]? Fourth, how would relations of reason or logical intentions be caused [nn.441-442]? Fifth, how would a false proposition arise that would be assented to as true if the intelligible species alone, generated by the phantasm, were the formal reason for all intellection [n.435]? Sixth, how will an action be immanent [nn.436, 438]?

a.a [Text canceled by Scotus, in place of “This reason.. .For first”] Likewise ..

465. Three middle terms against these opinions [fifth and sixth] are added, which are also not much to be considered. The first is this:a the species would then be rather the intellective potency than the intellect, and so it would, when separated, have the same act, just as heat, when separated, would make things hot.

a.a [Text canceled by Scotus, in place of “Sixth [n.464].is this”] Likewise.

466. Likewise then, ‘to understand’ does not seem to be the proper perfection of the intellect, because nothing seems to be essentially ordered to that operation to which, or to the principle of which, it is disposed in a potentiality for contradiction, as to an accident per accidens - just as ‘to heat something’ does not seem the proper perfection of wood from the fact that wood is disposed to heat something as to an accident per accidens [sc. when it happens to be on fire]. But the intellect would, according to the opinion [sc. the fifth and sixth], be so disposed to the intelligible species that would be the principle of intellection; therefore etc.

467. Likewise, third: both in the senses and in the intellect (positing the same thing doing the representing), greater attention makes for a more perfect act. For the same thing with the same intelligible species or phantasm understands more perfectly that to the understanding of which it gives more effort, and understands it less perfectly when giving less effort. So too in the case of the senses, when the same object is present and in the same light, a thing is more perfectly seen because of greater attention in the seeing. This is plain too from the fact that sometimes sight is, because of greater attention, the more damaged; indeed, ceteris paribus, a more concentrated eye could be greatly affected by the seeing of something which another eye would be less affected by, as is plain from experience. It is plain also from Augustine On the Trinity 11.2 n.4, that in someone attentive the species long after the seeing remain which do not remain in the eye of someone not attentive in that sense.

468. It can be said [to the argument, n.465] that the intellective power is that by which we understand, and we understand by it insofar as it has intellection formally. The species is not of a nature to have it, nor is it the reason for having it. As to what is added, that ‘[the species] would, when separated, have the same act’ [n.465], if the ‘have’ is understood as to the subject, it is plain the argument is not valid; if it is understood as to the effect, my reply is that [the species] does not have the passive object on which to act, especially if it is not of a nature to be the principle of acting on something else, because not the principle of making, but only of an action immanent in the same subject as itself.

469. To the second [n.466] it can be said that the major ‘nothing seems to be essentially ordered etc.’ is false in the case of things that cannot attain, of themselves, the end to which they are ordered, but only by the action of something extrinsic, which gives some accident to them by which they may act and attain their end - and so it is of the intellect.

470. To the third [n.467]: that attention belongs the will by which, through vehement application of oneself to some object, a lower cognitive power is affected by the object more vehemently; and therefore it knows more perfectly, though it does not act for that act.

3. Rejection of the Sixth Opinion Specifically

471. But against the second of these opinions [n.460] (which is sixth overall The six are at nn. 407, 422, 450, 451, 456, 460. ⁴⁷) there is argument specifically that it is false, both in the case of the senses and in that of the intellect. In the case of the senses because, if the species which is vison is a species of the same idea as the one in the medium, then the one in the medium will formally be vision; therefore the medium, in possessing it formally, will be seeing formally. But if, besides the species in sight that is posited to be vision, there is a species of a different idea from it and another species of the same idea as the species in vision, the conclusion is gained. For although that which is vision is called a species, yet there is something else prior to it in the eye, and of a different idea; and it is the species, as it is commonly called, and so the species properly speaking will differ from vision.

472. If you say [Giles of Rome, On the Knowledge of Angels q.1] that the species in the medium differs from the species in the eye because of diversity of receivers - this is nothing because, just as whiteness is of the same idea in a horse and in a stone (and therefore each is white according to the same idea of whiteness), so if that which is called the species is of the same idea in the eye and in the medium, then if it of itself is vision formally, vision formally will be in each; and whatever vision formally is in, that is formally seeing.

473. The principal thing proposed [sc. n.471, that the sixth opinion, that species and vision are the same, is false] is also plain, because in a blind eye that yet remains as physically constituted See footnote to n.122 above. ⁴⁸ as it was before a species is caused; likewise in the eye of someone sleeping, otherwise he would not be woken up by the presence of some surpassing visible thing (nor otherwise too would he be woken up by a surpassing sound if it were not first present in the ear), yet in these cases there is no vision. So too in a well-disposed eye there is received some species of the same idea as that which is in the medium, from the fact that the organ itself is of a similar disposition as the medium, on account of the transparency of each (from On the Soul 2.6.418b26-419a1); and it will not be vision formallya but prior to vision.

a.a [Text canceled by Scotus] because if in any way it is, it will be different.

474. And that this is false in the case of the intellect [sc. as it has just been shown to be false in the case of the senses, n.473] is plain by putting together some of the things said by those who think thus. For they posit that there is no species different from the divine essence in blessed vision, and that beatitude consists essentially in the vision alone; add this statement, that vision is the species formally, and it follows that our beatitude will be the divine essence formally.b Therefore if this conclusion is unacceptable, let them either deny the premise that vision is the species, or posit that the divine essence has a species other than itself or that beatitude is essentially in something other than in the act of vision.

b.b [Interpolated text] Proof: beatitude formally is vision according to them, and vision formally is the species according to them; therefore, the species is the divine essence formally.

475. A response [sc. on the part of those who hold the sixth opinion]: where there is an intelligible species different from the object, it is intellection; but where there is not a species different from the object, there intellection is not the object; in beatitude, therefore, they would deny that the species is different from the object and the act, but that it is different from the object [sc. by itself, without the act] is not denied

476. On the contrary: no object’s intelligible species is different from it save only intellection, according to them [n.460]; therefore, any object whose intellection is different from it has an intelligible species; therefore a species in the vision of God must be admitted, as in the intellection of any other object.

477. A note about the relation of a science to an object.

Note that insofar as the object moves the intellect, or more properly insofar as it is causative of intellection, there is a relation of intellection to it pertaining to the second mode of relatives [cf. nn.287-288], as of son to father or generated heat to generating heat; the relation too of the intellect as movable to the object as mover pertains to the second mode, as does the relation of the heatable to what is heater of it.

478. But besides these relations of the second mode, there is another relation of intellection to the object, as the relation of that which is termed to that which terms it. For intellection is not only from the object as from efficient cause, total or partial, but it is to it as to what terms it, or as that which it is about.

479. The difference between these relations is plain [nn.477-478], because each is without the other. The first is without the second in the case of generated heat; the second without the first in the intellection of a stone, if it came to be in me immediately from God. The first is not an identical relation, because the same absolute could come to be from a different cause; the second seems to be an identical relation, because no act that is of a nature to arise about an object could be the same and not have its term in the same object. The second is not related to a cause as cause because, when all causes have been posited, there is required in such an act something besides this as the term of it. The fact is plain also by way of division: the term is not a form nor an efficient cause, as is plain; it is not an end, because the object, as it is what first the act is about, is not the loved thing for which the act is elicited; nor is it matter, for it is ‘about’ the object without being ‘in’ and ‘from’ it [cf. Scotus, Ord. Prol. n.188]. The second relation can be posited to be of the third mode of relatives [n.296], not because it is the relation of the thing measured, but because it is like it, for it is not mutual. For universally an act requires that which it is about, not conversely; nor does only the relation of a thing measured belong to the third mode, but every similar relation, namely one that is not mutual; of this sort is the relation of the thing termed (in the way said) to the term of it. However, there also comes in here, between the same absolutes, the relation of measured to measurer; but it can be posited as different from this relation of thing termed.

480. Against the third [“the second is not related to a cause as cause...”] and fourth points [“an act requires that which it is about, not conversely.”]: how is a relation that is not relative to a cause identical with anything unless it depend essentially on a noncause, and so the four causes would not suffice for the being of a thing? Again, it [the object an act is about] is able not to be when the act exists; how then is the relation an identical one?

481. These two questions [n.480] seem to prove that the intellect is an absolute form like whiteness. For it is plain that intellection is causable immediately by God; therefore, it does not depend essentially on it [the object] alone. Also when an object causes, it does not depend by way of identity, because the same intellection could be caused from elsewhere (frequently too it is from a non-being).

482. And if you say it is a being in a species [sc. and not an absolute thing], the argument will be about the species, that is an absolute form (or there is a regress to infinity), and it is not the object that is the term, but that is of which it is the species. How then is the Philosopher to be understood in Physics 8.6.246a28-b27, and how the other things said about habits [sc. that they are not absolutes but relations, Categories 7.6a36-b6, 7b.23-33]? How then is the relation an identical one, since it is able not to be when the act exists, or how is it real, since there is no term [cf. Ord. I d.17 n.7]?

483. Again the difference between these relations is posited [nn.477-479] to be that the intellect is, when understanding, sometimes termed to something by which it is not moved, as the divine intellect in relation to a creature or to intrinsic relations or to attributesa, since however only the essence moves to intellection, otherwise what would be the first object of it [the divine intellect]?

a.a [Note added by Scotus] false, save [when terminating] secondarily.

484. On the contrary: then the intellection of God would have a real relation to a creature or to another object; again, second, why is ‘one’ mover rather than ‘one’ term required for unity of act?

485. To the first of these two [n.484]: why cannot a relation of the third mode be only one of reason, just as is also that of the second, by which the divine essence is said to move the understanding of it, and conversely - and thus there would be no difference in Aristotle’s modes [of relations] as regard real being and being of reason, but as regard mutual and non-mutual? And if mutual, as regard quantity and quality, the substantial or accidental, in first act or second, such that any mode could be sometimes real, sometimes of reason? No reply seems to be given to the second question in n.484. ⁴⁹

II. Scotus’ own Opinion

486. To the question [n.401] I reply that actual intellection is something in us not perpetual but possessing being after non-being, as we experience. For this it is necessary to posit some active cause, and a cause somehow in us, otherwise it would not be in our power to understand when we want, which is against the Philosopher, On the Soul 2.5.417b24.

487. And it appears here that the soul and an object present must come together, and that in an intelligible species, as was said in the preceding question [n.370], because it is in another way not present as actually intelligible, speaking of the sensible and material object.

488. I say then that the object of this intellection is not the total active cause, either in itself or in its species, as appears from the first reason against the second opiniona[n.429], and also because then the image in the mind as it is the mind could not be preserved, because nothing of the mind itself would have the idea of parent.

a.a [Text canceled by Scotus] Here first reason has replaced an original reasons; and second opinion has replaced fifth and sixth opinion. The fifth and sixth opinions have the same conclusion as the second [n.460].

489. Nor is the total cause of intellection the intellective soul, or anything of it formally - on account of the reason given about the four causesa against the first opinion [n.414], which reason explains the reason of the Philosopher in On the Soul [n.486], that was touched on when arguing for the main point in the first partb [n.401].

For this are added other probabilities as well.

a.a [Text canceled by Scotus] Here reason given about the four causes replaces an original reasons given.

b.b [Noted added by Scotus] Response: the senses are first, not presupposing anything prior to their being perfected [n.401].

490. First,a because then the act would not be a likeness of the object; second, because then the act would not be distinguished essentially on account of the distinction of the object, because an essential distinction does not come from what is not a cause.

a.a Text canceled by Scotus: Here First replaces an original and also.

491. Third, because neither would the intellection of a more perfect intelligible be simply more perfect (on the supposition of equal effort on the part of the intellect on this side and that), which is not true; because when a total cause operating more efficaciously is posited, a more perfect action follows; and also, if the soul were total cause, whenever it were to act on its own part more perfectly and with greater effort, it would produce a more perfect intellection, and so an intellection of God would not be more perfect than an intellection of a fly, which is against the Philosopher in Ethics 10.8.1178b7-32, who locates happiness in contemplation of the most perfect object.

492. It seems also, fourth, that then there would be an infinite activity in the intellect, insofar as the intellect is active with respect to all intellections. Because for one intellection is required some perfection in the cause of the intellection, and for another intellection of another idea is required as much perfection, or greater, because containing virtually two perfections of its proper causes, in this case and that. Therefore, what has this and that intellection will be more perfect than what has that one alone, and so what as total cause [of all intellections] has infinite such intellections is infinite in perfection.a

a.a [Note added by Scotus] The like can be argued about partial causality with respect to infinites; look in the Parisian Collations [collation 2].

493. Likewise, fifth, it would not be apparent how any total science might be contained virtually in the object if the intellective soul alone would have causality with respect to the act and the habit.a Of these five probabilities [nn.490-493], the third and fourth [nn.491-492] can be considered.

a.a [Note added by Scotus] For the activity of the intellect, at least its partial activity, note the first three arguments. Otherwise, how an image is in the mind [n.488]; the intellect is cheaper than the other cause [n.488, 429]; attention would not help [nn.467, 470]; how there is reflection, how relations of reason, how discursive reasoning [n.464]. That [the intellect] is not the total active cause [of intellection]; the argument from On the Soul 2 [nn.489, 401], and also there the remark of On the Soul 2 [n.402], ‘sounding and hearing are the same act’; the more perfect belongs to the more perfect [n.491]; infinity [n.492].
     Among these six: three of them prove that not the object only is cause [nn.486, 488], another three prove that not the soul alone is cause [nn.489, 491-492]. Two are considered especially: namely for the first part, that an equivocal cause is nobler than the effect; for the other side, about the four causes. Put on the scales, the first seems weaker than the second; also the two that are collateral to the first, which are taken from Augustine about the image and about attention (which attention he speaks about On the Trinity 11 ch.2 n.5, and elsewhere he joins the parent with the offspring), these collaterals, I say, seem weaker than those collateral to the second, namely about the difference of perfection of acts [ n.491], and about the infinity of activity in the intellective power [n.492]; therefore the second is a more certain conclusion.

494. From these points [nn.486-493] the question is solved as follows: so if neither the soul by itself nor the object by itself is the total cause of actual intellection (and they alone seem required for intellection), it follows that these two are one integral cause with respect to generated knowledge. And this is the opinion of Augustine, On the Trinity, 9.12 n.18, as cited when arguing against the first opinion, “It must be clearly held” [n.413].

495. But as to how this is to be understood, I draw a distinction about when several causes come together for the same effect.

496. For some causes come together on an equality, as when two people are pulling one and the same body. Some are not on an equality but possess an essential order, and this in two ways. Either thus, that a superior move an inferior such that the inferior does not act save because moved by the superior, and sometimes such inferior cause has from the superior the virtue or form by which it moves, sometimes it does not but has the form from something else, and from the superior cause only actual motion to produce the effect. On the other hand, sometimes the superior does not move the inferior, nor give it the power by which it moves, but the superior has of itself a more perfect power of acting and the inferior a more imperfect power of acting.

An example of the first member of this division: from the motive power that is in the hand and in a stick and a ball. An example of the second: if the mother is posited to have active virtue in the generation of offspring, she and the active power of the father come together as two partial causes, ordered causes indeed, because one is more perfect than the other; but the inferior does not receive its causality from the more perfect cause, nor is the total causality eminently in the more perfect cause, but the more imperfect cause adds something insofar as the effect can be more perfect from a more perfect and more imperfect cause than from a more perfect cause alone.

497. To the point at issue. An intelligible object (present in itself or in an intelligible species) and the intellective part do not come together for intellection as causes on an equality, for then one would have an imperfect sort of causality and the other would be the supplement for it. And if one were perfect, it could have in itself singly the total causality of both, just as, if the motive power of one were perfect, it would supply the virtue of the other; and then the species would be as it were a certain degree of intellective-ness, supplying the degree of intellective-ness lacking to the intellect; and then, if the intellect were to become to such a degree more perfect, it could have an act of understanding without a species and without an object, which is false.

498. Therefore, these two come together as having an essential order. Not however in the first way [n.496], because neither does the intellect give to the object or the species the idea of their own causality (for the object is not of a nature, in itself or in its species, to cause intellection through something that it receives from the intellect but from its own nature), nor does the intellect receive its causality from the object or from the species of the object, as was proved in the first argument against the seconda opinion [nn.429, 488]. They are, therefore, causes essentially ordered, and in the last way [n.496], namely because one is simply more perfect than the other, such that each is perfect in its own causality not depending on the other.

a.a ‘against the fifth and sixth opinion’ in the original text before the later revision [nn.463-467].

499. If argument is made against this [n.498], that in such essentially ordered causes neither of them is the perfection of the other, therefore the intelligible species will not be the form of the intellect itself.

Similarly, to the same point, if the species is the perfection of the intellect and the whole is the reason for acting, then a single operation (namely intellection) will not have a single formal idea of acting; and, likewise, from a being per accidens (of which sort is this whole of intellect possessing a species) there will be one per se operation, which is unacceptable, for what is not a being per se one is not the formal idea of acting.

Response:

500. To the first [of these, n.499]: it is accidental to a species (insofar as it is a partial cause with respect to the act of understanding concurring with the intellect as the other partial cause) that it perfect the intellect; because although it does perfect it, yet it does not give it any activity pertaining to the causality of the intellect.

An example: the motive power in the hand can use a knife, insofar as the knife is sharp, for dividing up some body. If this sharpness were in the hand as in a subject, the hand could use it for the same operation and yet it would be an accident in the hand (insofar as there is motive power in the hand) that there was sharpness in it, and conversely, because sharpness would give no perfection to the hand pertaining to the hand’s motive power. The point is plain, because the [hand’s] motive power is equally perfect without such sharpness and, when the sharpness is in something else joined to the hand (as a knife), the hand uses the sharpness in the same way as it would if it were in the hand.

So is it in the matter at issue. If the species could exist within the intellect without inhering in it after the manner of a form - if it existed within it in that way or could be sufficiently conjoined with the intellect - these two partial causes, intellect and species, conjoined with each other, would be capable of the same operation that they are now capable of when the species informs the intellect. This is also apparent when positinga some intelligible object without a species. For the object is a partial cause and does not inform the intellect, which is the other partial cause; but these two causes, when proximate to each other without the informing of one by the other, cause, by their proximity alone, one common effect.

a.a [Note added by Scotus] ‘positing’; note that it is not necessary that the object, or what supplies the place of the object, will necessarily be a principle of action immanent in that in which the object, or what supplies it, is present.

501. If this second case is posited, not without cause is it perhaps impossible for an accidenta that is the principle of something immanent and not transitive to be sufficiently joined to a passive subject, unless it be in it subjectively - which is why it is called an accident.b Surely the divine essence in the intellect of the blessed is a principle of intuition, which is not immanent in the essence, nor in anything of which it is a form? Likewise, charity in the fatherland is a principle of its own intuition, and yet it is not in the intellect intuiting it. Therefore is intellection an immanent action, taking ‘action’ for ‘operation’.

a.a Above ‘accident’ Scotus placed the symbol a

b.b Above ‘accident’ Scotus placed the symbol a

502. On the contrary: there is not thus one action immanent and another transient. I reply, then, and say that there is a division of the term into the things signified. In one way is act in the genus of action immanent in the other cause, namely in the intellect, and with respect to it is it immanent, but not so with respect to the one that is left, namely the object.

503. From the same argument [n.500] is plain the answer to the second objection [n.499], that in any single order of cause it is necessary to posit one per se cause with respect to one effect, and one idea of per se causing (thus the intellect in its order of causality is one, and has one formal idea of causing; and the species or object in its order of causing is one special cause, and has one idea of causing). But it is not necessary that a total cause, as it embraces all the partial causes, have one idea of causing save in unity of order. Because if with a unity of order there come together a unity per accidens, this is accidental; but a unity of order is per se. An example: the sun in its order of causing has one idea of causing with respect to offspring, and a father in his order of causing is one cause of one idea; but the total cause that embraces sun and father does not have any single formal idea of causing (just as it is not one cause) save by unity of order. And if it happen that causes thus ordered have, besides unity of order, a unity per accidens (insofar namely as one is accident to the other), this does not belong to them per se insofar as they are ordered causes.

III. To the Arguments for the Opinions

A. To the Arguments for the First Opinion

504. To the arguments for the opinions, in order.

First to the authorities of Augustine [nn.407-408] I say that the image which is posited by him to exist in the spirit needs to be understood to exist in the soul or in something of the soul as in a subject, and not precisely in a body physically thus mixed See fn. to n.120. ⁵⁰ - otherwise the conclusion would not follow that the image is nobler than every body, which however he himself says in Literal Commentary on Genesis 12.16 nn.32-33. Now what is in the soul or in something of the soul as in a subject is not the species which is commonly called ‘species’; that, rather, is received in an organ’s part [sc. the receptive part of the bodily senses] that is a body physically thus mixed [n.471]. See fn. to n.120. ⁵¹ But what is received in the soul or a power of the soul is the act of knowing; therefore by image Augustine himself means such sort of act.

505. This gloss [n.504] is proved from his remark On the Trinity 11.2 n.3, where he maintains that the informing of the sense, which is done by the body alone, is called vision. And the informing is the species proper which is received in a part of the organ, namely in such physically mixed body; this is plain from what he says [ibid.] that “it is generated by the body alone that is seen” [n.461]. Just as therefore what is properly an image is called vision, so conversely can vision be called an image, and much more truly, for vision, in truth, is a certain quality, and the sort of quality that is a certain likeness of the object, and is perhaps more perfect than the preceding likeness which is usually called a species.

506. On this understanding, the response to his authority [nn.407-408] is easily made clear. For I concede that the body does not, as total cause, cause in the spirit the image that a sensation is, but the soul causes it in itself with marvelous speed - not however as total cause, but it together with the object. Hence he says there that “as soon as it is seen etc.”, indicating that the presence of the object in idea of being visible is required for the soul to cause vision in itself; and it is required only as in some way partial cause, as he himself expresses it in On the Trinity 11 ch.2 n.3 [n.413] that “vision is generated by the seer and the visible.”

507. This conclusion [n.506], thus understood, is proved by his first cited reason [n.407], because this conclusion, that “the agent is more outstanding than the effect,” is not an immediate one but depends on these three statements, ‘the agent is more outstanding than the effect’ and ‘the effect of the agent is the form and act of what undergoes it’ and ‘act is nobler than potency’. Where these propositions are true, there the proposition that Augustine takes is true [n.407]; but that the agent is more outstanding than the effect is only true of an equivocal and total cause. And some cause can be partially an agent for a more noble effect than itself, as an element in virtue of the heavenly bodies can act for the generation of a mixed body, which is nobler than the element acting as partial cause [cf. Scotus, Ord. I d.2 nn.333, 331].

508. From this [n.506] is clear the response to the second authority of Augustine On the Trinity 10.5 [n.408]. For the soul forms an image in itself, that is, sensation; and forms it from itself, that is, it itself is in natural potency to sensation and not in neutral potency, as a surface is in neutral and not natural potency to whiteness; and he points to this naturality, because he says ‘from itself’. And he is speaking there only of sensations, as is apparent, because he says there that “the parts of the soul that are informed by likenesses of bodies we have in common with the beasts.” This is true of those parts that are informed by images, that is, sensations, extending the name ‘image’ to sensation.

509. As to the first argument for the [first] opinion [n.409]: it concludes for me, because thinking, since it is a living operation, does not come from a non-living thing as from a total cause; but a non-living thing can be a partial cause of something living or of a living effect, just as the non-living sun is a partial cause, along with the father, for generating a living son; and much more is this possible in the issue at hand, because here the more principal cause is life, as will be clear in the following question [nn.559-562].

510. When argument is made next about perfect form [n.410], this argument concludes that it [the soul] has some activity with respect to its proper operation. But as to its seeming to prove total causality in it [the soul] with respect to its own operation - I reply that that form, by its own perfection, is ordered to having an operation about the whole of being, as is said in the third question of this distinction [nn.185-187]. But since it is not simply perfect, because it is not infinite, therefore does it not have the whole of being in itself. From its perfection, therefore, along with its imperfection, is concluded that it does have some activity, and yet not a sufficient activity, for it could not have total causality with respect to the whole of being unless it had the whole of being in itself. And therefore I say that more imperfect forms can well be total causes with respect to their own operations, because their operations are limited as to certain things, and having total activity with respect to these things does not prove any active perfection save a limited one. But in that perfect form, which is ordered to the whole of being, there cannot be posited such a causality with respect to knowledge of the whole of being (for then an unlimited active virtue would be posited in it). But a partial causality can be posited in it, and a partial causality in the object, so that it itself could thus cooperate with its own perfection about any object whatever, and also any object whatever could cooperate with it - a great object for a great perfection of it, and a little object for a little perfection of it.

511. The other two arguments, namely about action as distinguished from making, and that action denominates the agent [nn.411-412], I concede. For I posit that the act of understanding truly remains in the agent which is its partial cause - not just that it remains in the agent supposit (such that it not go outside the supposit), but that it does not go outside the intellective part into the sensitive part, nor outside the intellective part into the appetitive part, nor outside its active principle into another power, but that it remains in the intellective part, which is its partial cause. And it is not necessary that action properly speaking remain in its total cause, but it is enough that it remain in its own partial cause.

B. To the Arguments for the Second Opinion

512. To the arguments for the second opinion [n.422].

Although there it could be touched on whether the causality that is attributed to the intellective part belongs properly to the agent intellect or the possible intellect, yet I dismiss the difficulty to another place [Scotus, Quodlibet 15 nn.13-20, 24; cf. n.554 infra.].

513. When it is argued [n.422] that the possible [intellect] cannot have any causality, because nothing the same acts on itself, I reply that that proposition is only true of a univocal agent, and that the proof of it, that then the same thing would be in act and potency, only concludes when the agent is acting univocally, that is, when it is inducing in the passive subject a form of the same idea as that by which it acts. For if it were thus to act on itself, then it would at the same time have a form of the same idea as that to which it is being moved, and while it is being moved to it, it would lack it; so it would have it and not have it at the same time - at least this follows about two forms of the same species or about the same form. But in equivocal agents, that is, in those agents that do not act through forms of the same idea as that toward which they act, the proposition that nothing moves itself does not have necessity. Nor does the proof of it, that something would be in potency and act with respect to the same thing, conclude anything, for there the agent is not formally in act of the sort that the passive subject is formally in potency [cf. n.422]; but that the agent is virtually such in act and formally such in potency is not a contradiction.

514. This gloss [n.513] about univocal and equivocal agents is necessary because the Philosopher posited that what is moved is not only in the genus of quality but of quantity and ‘where’. And in quantity and ‘where’ no agent is univocal, because in the genus of quantity and ‘where’ there is no form that is the principle of inducing a similar form. Indeed, to speak generally, any motion that is not to an active form is not from a univocal agent, because, from the fact that a terminating form is not active, no form of the same idea is the principle of acting. There are with the Philosopher, therefore, many motions from an agent not univocal but equivocal; and there an agent is virtually such in act as the patient is formally in potency.

515. If you argue that therefore in all cases the same thing could be in virtual act and in potency to a formal act, and so anything can move itself [n.513] - I reply that in this inference a non-cause is put for the cause, for from the general idea of virtual act and of potency for formal act no repugnancy arises, because if there were a repugnancy from this idea, there would be a repugnancy in everything. Yet in something with virtual act there concurs something else on account of which it is sometimes repugnant for it to be virtually in potency or formally such in act. An example: being hot virtually in act and in potency formally do not of themselves include contradiction or repugnancy, and therefore in no subject do they include a repugnance that, because of this, they could not be together, or that one could not be there because the other is. However, the sun, which is hot virtually, cannot be hot formally, but this is not because of a primary repugnance between these things. For Saturn is cold virtually and yet cannot be hot formally, so the virtual act was not the reason in it for the repugnance, but something else was that is common to the sun and Saturn, namely that these are incorruptible bodies and heat is a corruptible quality. In medieval and ancient physics of the Aristotelian and some other traditions, the heavenly bodies are incorruptible and impassible because not made of contraries (hot/cold, wet/dry) or their mixtures (fire, water etc.). They suffer no change save change in place. They do, however, have effects in the sublunary world, as that the sun warms the earth because, although not actually hot, it is virtually hot, or has the power to heat other things. ⁵²

516. But if you object that such metaphysical principles [‘nothing acts on itself’, nn.422, 513] should not, because of the fact they are general, be denied on account of some special difficulties, I reply: no principles that have many false instances are metaphysical principles. But if one has the understanding that nothing is in virtual act and in potency to a formal act, and that this repugnance is taken from the idea of act and potency, there are many instances that are sufficiently plainly false, and from this it sufficiently follows that this is not a metaphysical principle. But that nothing is in formal act and in potency in respect of the same formal act is true, namely that nothing is thus in act and in potency at the same time.

517. And if you altogether contend that, even when speaking of virtual act and potency to formal act, it is a metaphysical principle - how were others so blind, and he [sc. Godfrey of Fontaines, n.422] alone seeing, that they could not conceive the idea of the common metaphysical terms and from them apprehend the truth of such a proposition as he posits to be a metaphysical principle, which is not only not posited by others to be a principle, but is in many cases false, and never necessary by reason of the terms?

518. When, second, it is argued [n.422] about material and efficient cause that they do not coincide - this is true of matter that is in pure potency but not of matter in a certain respect, of which sort is a subject in respect of an accident. For it is necessary that something that is the same is sometimes matter and efficient cause with respect to the same thing - which is apparent because otherwise a property would not be predicated of a subject per se in the second mode. Proof: because if it [a property] is predicated of it [a subject] per se in the second mode, it [the subject] is the material cause of that [the property] as matter is in the case of accidents, because it [the subject] is put in the definition of it [a property] as an addition. If too the predication is per se, then it is also necessary; but what is only a material cause with respect to something does not have necessity with respect to it; therefore, to save necessity, one must posit in the subject, besides a causality of matter, a causality of efficiency.

519. As to what is argued afterwards about opposite real relations [n.422], I say that some real opposites are incompossible in the same nature, some incompossible not in the same nature but in the same supposit, some neither in the same nature nor in the same supposit. Hence a repugnance of them in the same thing cannot be proved by reason of real relations generally. Examples of the aforesaid: cause and caused in the same nature or in the same supposit are repugnant because, if not, then the same thing would depend on itself. Producer and produced are not repugnant in the same nature if the nature can be communicated without division, of which sort is the divine nature; yet they are repugnant in the same supposit. Mover and moved are repugnant neither in the same nature nor in the same supposit, because there is not posited here an essential dependence of the sort they posit relations to be of cause and caused; nor is it posited there that the same thing exists before it exists, which the idea of producer and produced seems to posit; but there is only posited here that the same thing depends on itself as far as concerns an accidental act, as the moved depends on the mover as to the accidental act that it receives from it. The incompossibility, therefore, of some real relations must be reduced to some prior incompossibility, and where that prior incompossibility is not found, there the incompossibility of opposite real relations will not be proved.

520. This is also made clear further, because just as these relations of producer and product, which are repugnant in the same supposit, can be founded on the same unlimited nature, as in the divine essence, so these relations of mover and moved, which have a much lesser repugnance, can be founded on the same somehow unlimited nature. And whatever is in potency to some act formally, and yet along with this has the same actuality virtually (as when the same thing moves itself), it is in some way unlimited; for it is posited to be not only capable of that perfection but as causing it. So there those opposite relations are, because of some sort of unlimitedness, very well compatible.

521. To their ‘Achilles’ [their key argument, n.422], that ‘anything would move itself’, I say, as was argued against the first opinion when excluding a cause ‘sine qua non’ [n.415], that nothing is a total and perfect and natural effective cause of anything without causing it when it is proximate to the whole receptive subject and not impeded. Now wood is always proximate to itself, and sufficiently so, and a persistent impediment cannot be posited when fire is not present; because, if this impediment be posited, let it be removed and it will not exist, if that impediment be posited, let it be removed; and so, by running through them one by one, one will get to wood that is present to itself and in no way impeded. Therefore, if it were the total active cause with respect to heat, and it is itself the total receptive cause, then it would always be hot, as a brute is always able to sense. Therefore, since an absence of total causality cannot be posited because of an impediment, nor because of non-proximity, nor because of receptive subject, the conclusion will be that there is not a total active causality in the wood, which is the point intended. So, therefore, not everything will move itself as total cause, because no cause, which does not always have its act, is a total natural cause of the act.

522. If you say, ‘at least I will say the wood is a partial cause, so that, when fire is present, it acts along with it for the heating of itself in idea of partial effective and active cause’ - this cavil is not of any value either, because two partial causes are not posited with respect to the same effect when one of them precisely has the total effect, univocally or equivocally, in its own power. Proof: for if one of them has the whole effect in its own power, it can produce the whole of it, or the same thing would be produced twice; but fire, which from the preceding argument [n.521] was proved to have activity with respect to heat in the wood, has in itself virtually the whole heat of the wood; therefore the wood here has no partial causality.

523. To the issue at hand then: because the soul is not always in act with respect to any intellection (although, however, it is receptive of any intellection whatever, and is itself proximate to itself and not always impeded), the conclusion is that it is not the total active cause but something else is; that something else is proved to be the object, because when it is present the effect follows, when it is not present the effect cannot be had. Some sort of primary causality then is proved to be in the object; and not total causality, because the object (on account of its imperfection) cannot have intellection (on account of its perfection) totally in its power, and so it is proved that, along with the object, is required some other partial active cause - and not any cause other than the intellective power because, when it concurs with the object, there is intellection. So therefore is it here proved that there are two partial active causes, and in many other cases that nothing the same moves itself, either totally or partially.

This argument too, which is held up as the Achilles [n.522], does not seem capable of effecting much; for this seems to be a certain defensive move, by diverting [attention] from the side of the opponent to the side of the respondent; for, because of their lack of arguments, they take on the sort of form that respondents take one, so that the [other] respondents may make an argument to prove something necessary, namely that wood does not heat itself.

524. An objection to the response [n.521] to the Achilles is that wood will not heat itself unless the other ‘sine quo non’ thing [sc. fire] is present, just as the will, for you [Scotus], does not make itself to will save when an object through cognition is present. Also, if you argue that one of the two [sc. wood and fire] will always heat something else, because it has the power of heating, the response is that it will heat itself before something else, and do this first only when the sine qua non cause is present. Or perhaps it will never heat something else, just as neither does the will make another will to will. Indeed, having conceded that some action of the genus of action is immanent, will it be said, or why will it not be said, that any is?

525. The Achilles is removed in another way: when diverse pieces of wood, similarly disposed, are present to fire, they are all made hot; when the same object is present to diverse wills, they do not all similarly make themselves to will (City of God 12.6); therefore the fire acts here, and not there the object, because then [the object] would act equally on every will.

526. An objection against this [n.525] is that if wills are not similarly affected when a sine qua non cause is present, this is because, for you [Scotus], they act freely. Pieces of wood when a sine qua non cause is present act naturally; therefore, prove that fire here is a cause other than a sine qua non cause. But [in reply], all that is said is that wood is a natural [cause], the will is not.

527. Argument in a third way [nn.521, 525] against the Achilles [sc. ‘anything would move itself’]. Whatever is acted on, it is acted on by something; when therefore it cannot be acted on by itself, it must be posited that it is acted on by something else. The will cannot be acted on by something else (not speaking about God), both because then volition would not be in its power and because then some other mover, disposed in the same way and with respect to the same passive subject, would have power indifferently for both opposites; for the will can will and not will the same thing presented to it in the same way. Therefore, it is necessary to attribute principally to the will the motion of itself toward [act of] willing, because it alone has the indifference in acting that is proportioned to itself in its idea as passive subject. But wood does not have in acting the indifference that is proportioned to itself in idea of passive subject; for it is receptive of disparate qualities, and also of contraries, one of which, when made intense, corrupts it. And it does not have that many univocal principles (as is plain, because also nothing univocally moves itself), nor does it have a single univocal principle, because how would [a single principle] be unlimited unless one says that anything at all has power for all the qualities it is susceptible of, even those corruptive of it? In the case of the will anything it all that it is capable of is an operation of it and some sort of perfection.

C. To the Things Said in the Third and Fourth Opinion

528. For the third and fourth opinion [nn.450-451] there are no arguments adduced to which it may be necessary to reply. He who wants to believe what is said about the first simple act and about the second of distinct knowing, or the statement of the second opinion [n.451, the second opinion of Henry] that the species ‘inclines’, let him believe it. For him who does not believe it, since it is not an article of faith, let this be shown by the arguments [nn.452-453].

529. However, these two opinions, namely the third and fourth, which seem opposed to each other, are in agreement and in conformity with each other, and that as follows: There is required for acting a formal idea of acting and an idea of an agent. The agent is the supposit, the idea of acting is the form elicitive of action. Therefore, the agent in the first action on the possible intellect is the phantasm, but the ‘what it is’, shining forth in the phantasm, is the idea of acting, and this insofar as the ‘what it is’ stands in the light of the agent intellect and is penetrated by the light and is embraced by the agent. And what is first by this idea of acting impressed on the possible intellect is the beginning of the scientific habit, which beginning is not the intelligible species nor the form that moves to act of understanding, because the object in itself is present insofar it shines forth in the phantasm, for the phantasm is present to the intellect because it is in a place in the body. So some other species is not required whereby the object may be thus present, nor is anything required holding the place of the object or representing it. Yet the first impression has the idea both of the ‘by which’ and the ‘what’ with respect to intellection. The ‘by which’ because by it the intellect is proximate and in accidental potency to an act of understanding, just as a body is by its weight in potency to a ‘where’; and ‘by which’ also in this regard, that it remains in the intellect when the intellect is prevented from actual intellection. The first impression is also the ‘what’ because it comes to it [the intellect] first (just as, according to Avicenna, On the Soul p.2 ch2, the first sensed thing is the species) - not as the terminating object, but as what leads to the object, not through comparison but by continuation. In this way, then, do the first and second opinion [of Henry, nn.450-451] agree as to this, that the first denies the species and the second admits an inclination preceding the act.

530. But as to this point, that the first opinion [n.450] posits the intellect to be passive with respect to the first act and active with respect to the second act, and that the second opinion [n.451] seems to posit that the soul itself elicits the act - these agree in this way that when on the possible intellect such an impression has first been made, the intellect itself meets with the impressed effect, because everything acted on strives, when meeting an agent, to preserve its being. Augustine also maintains this in On Music 6.5 n.11, where he speaks of the numbers that come to us, and of other numbers. These ‘numbers’ are characterized as progressive (pronouncing of words), sounding (sounds), occurring to us (hearing), memorable (memory) and judgeable (judgment of sensing). ⁵³ And, in this meeting, the intellect imbibes the confused intellection and transmits it within into itself and then receives it more intimately from itself than it could receive it from the object. Also, the intellect meets with the impression, thus intimate, a second time, and in that second meeting it immerses itself in it by penetrating it - and in this lies the intellect’s distinct and perfect knowledge.

531. However it may be with these opinions which this middle view strives to expound, there is argument against much of what is here said [nn.529-530].

As to what it first posits, that the ‘what it is’ shining forth in the phantasm is the formal idea of acting for the phantasm [n.529] - on the contrary: how is a thing the idea of acting for something which it is not formally in? Or if the ‘what it is’ is somehow posited to be in the phantasm, then since it is the being of it in a certain respect, for it is the being of what is represented, and is not there according to any being of existence, how will the ‘what it is’ be, according to this being, the formal idea of doing some real action? And thus, since the phantasm, by the fact that this being belongs to it, is not the principal cause of acting according to them [Henry etc., n.529], neither is the ‘what it is’, according as it exists in the phantasm, the principal idea of acting, which is against them.

532. Besides this, I ask what is it to say that the ‘what it is’ stands in the light of the agent intellect [n.529]. If it is nothing other than that the agent intellect is in the soul, and that in the imagination of the same soul there is a phantasm, then as long as the phantasm is in the imaginative power the penetrating and surrounding takes place, and so it will exist in a madman and a sleeper, which he whose opinion is being expounded denies. If it is something other than that the two are together, some new action takes place whose term will not be in the phantasm; therefore, it will be in the possible intellect. Therefore the ‘what it is’ does not act by any penetration (which penetration would precede the action of the ‘what it is’), but it only acts along with the agent intellect by causing some new impression in the agent intellect. This is what that other first opinion says [sc. of Scotus himself, nn.366, 381-382].

533. If you will say that the other opinion posits an impressed intelligible species [nn.339, 349, 370], this one does not but posits the beginning of a scientific habit - on the contrary: this opinion posits that the impression is the principle by which the intellect is in accidental potency [n.529], although however it was in essential potency first. If the intelligible object is, by this impression, not present more than it was before, it is not in accidental potency now more than it was before. If it is present in any way now that it was not present in before, the way it is now present is the intelligible species. This is even more apparent from the fact that [the intellect] is posited to meet with it first as with something displaying the object on account of natural continuation with it [n.529]. This could not be unless the object were to shine forth in it, and so unless it had the idea of a species.

534. Similarly, what is said of ‘precede’, ‘beginning of scientific habit’, is not true, because a habit properly speaking, as the Philosopher says in Ethics 2.1.1103b21-22, is generated by some elicited act; and just as the ultimate degree of a habit is generated from the ultimate act, so is the first degree generated from the first act, so that any degree of a habit is posterior to some act. Therefore, that which is simply first in the possible intellect is not something of the habit itself. This is confirmed by the opinion of the doctor who is being expounded, because he posits the beginning to be the whole essence of the habit.

535. As to what is said further about ‘meeting’ [n.530] - I reply: ‘meeting’ is not well assigned, nor is it to Augustine’s intention. For what is acted on when it ‘meets’ an agent strives to preserve itself and to act against the agent corrupting it; this agent acts for the preservation and perfection of the passive subject, so, for this reason (that it may preserve itself), it does not ‘meet’ it. Nor is that the intention of Augustine; for he maintains that the soul, when meeting an effect made in the air in the ear, more strongly acts on the air, and in this way causes the hearing that the sound alone did not cause. This ‘meeting’ then is a ‘co-acting’.

And then I respond in brief to the arguments of Augustine. When an impression of a sensible species is made on the organ, or of an intelligible species made on the intellect, the soul ‘meets’ with it through such power, that is, so that along with the impressed species it ‘co-act’ for some more perfect act than the species of itself alone could cause.

536. And when it is added further about that double meeting, that it first meets with the effect as touching it, later with the imbibed effect [n.530], I ask what these metaphorical words mean. If they mean that by the second meeting something more perfect is caused than by the first, and that it perfects more intimately (as matter is said to be more intimately perfected by a more perfect form that more actuates it), then in the second meeting the effect is not taken up inwardly more than before; but the soul, coacting with the effect, causes something more perfect, and this is more intimately in the soul than the effect first caused.

D. To the Arguments of the Fifth Opinion

537. To the authority of the Philosopher On the Soul 3 [n.457], that “to understand is to undergo,” which is adduced for the fifth opinion,a I say that the Philosopher spoke about the powers of the soul in common, to the extent they are that by which we are formally in second act, namely about the senses insofar as they are that by which we formally sense and the intellect insofar as it is that by which we formally understand. But we formally understand by the intellect insofar as it receives intellection because, if it cause it actively, yet I am not said to understand by the intellect insofar as it causes but insofar as it has intellection as its form. For to have a quality is to be of that quality, and so the fact the intellect has intellection, or receives it (which is the same thing), is to be oneself understanding. We understand, therefore, by the intellect insofar as it receives intellection; therefore, the Philosopher, speaking thus of the intellect, necessarily had to say it was passive, and that ‘to understand’ is ‘to undergo something’, that is, that intellection, insofar as it is that by which we formally understand, is a certain form received in the intellect. But we do not understand by it insofar as it is something caused by the intellect, if it is caused by it, for if God were to cause it and were to imprint it on our intellect, we would by it no less understand.

a.a [Text canceled by Scotus] but not by determining it

538. Just as I have spoken about intelligence actually [n.537], so do I speak about knowing habitually - that the intellect is that by which we know habitually insofar as it receives a habit, not insofar as it causes it, if it causes it.

539. I say, therefore, that all the authorities [of Aristotle] that read for the passivity of the possible intellect can be expounded about it insofar as by it we know habitually, or insofar as by it we cognize actually, and in this way I concede that it is passive. And if it be active, yet not according to this idea; but it is an accident of it that it is active according to this idea. Now the authorities [n.457] affirm of the intellect what is true - not speaking of the intellect under the idea of something active, but asserting that it has the idea of something receptive, although they do not say that it is not active. Now a place from an authority does not hold in a negative way [sc. it must not be taken as denying what it does not say].

540. And from these points [nn.537-539] is response made to the authority about essential and accidental potency [n.457]. For the intellect is not in essential potency because there is lacking to it some idea of causality insofar as concerns its own part; rather the intellect is in essential potency when there is not present to it another partial cause that needs to be present for the purpose that action follow; and when that partial cause is proximate to it, it is in accidental or proximate potency to acting.

541. But the authority by which it is said that the possible intellect is nothing of the things that are before it understands [n.457] requires a different exposition - which authority, however, others so far treat of as to say that the possible intellect is in pure potency in the genus of intelligibles, as matter is in the genus of beings. This is not the intention of the Philosopher, because a potency for an accident is only ever based on a substance; now an intellection or an intelligible species is not a substantial form but an accident; therefore what is immediately receptive of it is something in substantial act, or at least that is which is mediately receptive of it (and then what immediately receives it will be some accidental act, in the way a surface is related to whiteness). Therefore, the possible intellect, according as it is that in which intelligible form or intellection is received, or is that according to which the species is received in the soul, will not be a pure potential but will be something in first act, although the respect itself of the potency is not anything in act. For when I speak of a potency receptive of whiteness, I am not speaking of a potency that states a respect to whiteness; for that respect is not anything in act, because the whiteness that it is for is not anything in act either, and a respect does not exist without a term. But that in which the power is or is said to be is something in act, as a surface is receptive of whiteness. So it is here. Although in advance of intellection the power, which is a respect to intellection, is not, before act, anything in act, as neither is the intellection to which it is, yet that in which the power is or is said to be, which is what is receptive of intellection, is something in act, and it is the possible intellect.

542. Therefore that the possible intellect is nothing in act is not held by the Philosopher the way they take it [n.541 init.], but one must expound the authority in this way: we naturally understand first the things that first come to us from phantasms, as was said in the second question of this distinction [nn.73, 187]. Nothing, therefore, can we understand in proximate potency before the intellection of something imaginable; therefore we cannot understand the intellect before having an understanding of another intelligible; therefore neither can the intellect be understood by us before having the understanding of another intelligible; therefore the intellect is not intelligible before the intellection of another intelligible. Just as the first antecedent is true [“we naturally understand first.. .from phantasms”], so also is the consequence [sc. the series of consequents up to the final one of “the intellect is not intelligible before.. .of another intelligible”]. For that reason, therefore, the remark ‘it is not anything of the things that are before it understands’ [n.541, 457] namely ‘of the intelligibles’, must be understood not in the sense that before it understand it is nothing in act, but that it is not anything that could be in proximate potency understood by us before having the understanding of another [intelligible], on account of our natural intellection, which begins now from phantasms [n.187].

543. When argument is next made [n.458] about likeness, that it is the reason both for making and for acting, I say that in a maker that makes well the form is the idea of the making, by which the maker assimilates the thing made to itself; but in action nothing is a product save the action itself, for action is the final term and does not have another term. And, therefore, there is no need that in an agent the idea of the acting be in the producer’s being assimilated to some second product, or in the agent’s being assimilated to the object about which it acts, because the agent does not assimilate the object to itself.

544. And if you say that that at least is the idea of acting wherein the agent assimilated the product to itself, namely the action itself - I do indeed admit that the species, which is the likeness of an object and by which the intellect is assimilated to the produced knowledge, is some idea of generating; but it is not the whole idea, nor even the principal idea, as will be clear in the following question [n.562]. But, when two causes come together, in the nearer one a formal likeness suffices and in the remoter one a virtual or equivocal likeness suffices; and thus the intellect, a sort of superior cause, is assimilated virtually to intellection; the species, a sort of nearer cause, is assimilated to it univocally, as it were, and formally.

545. When argument is later made about the indetermination of the intellect to diverse acts and objects [n.459], I reply that some indetermination is material, because of defect of act, and some is indetermination of the agent, because of unlimitedness of active virtue, as the sun is undetermined as to the many things it is generative of. Something indeterminate in the first way does not act unless it be determined by some act, because otherwise it is not in sufficient act but in potency. Something indeterminate in the second way is determined by no form different from itself, but it is determined by itself to producing whatever effect it is of itself indeterminate to, and this when the passive recipient is present - just as the sun, when a passive subject is present to it, generates anything that, from the fact it is of a nature to be generated, is generable. The indetermination of the intellect is not the indetermination of a passive potentiality in its own order of causality, but is the indetermination of an as it were unlimited actuality; and therefore is it not determined by a form that is a determinate idea of acting for it, but only by the presence of the object, about which determinate object intellection is of a nature to be determined. Or it could be said in another way that, just as a superior cause is determined to acting (as the sun to generating a man when a man concurs as agent, and an ox when an ox concurs), but not by some form received in itself, so the intellect, which is a superior and unlimited cause, is determined to this object when a particular determinate cause concurs, as to acting about this object when this species concurs. Now an inferior cause does nota effectively determine a superior indeterminate cause, nor does it do so formally as the idea of acting, but it determines it like this, that is, the indeterminate active superior power produces something determinate when such and such a determinate inferior power concurs.

a.a [Canceled text by Scotus, replaced by ‘Now an inferior cause does not’] For this determining cause [sc. the particular determinate cause just mentioned] does not

546. There is an opinion that the intellect is the principle of intellection as to substance, but that the object is the principle as to modifying or specifying the act. On the contrary: nothing is the principle for nothing; intellection, when modification or specification is bracketed, is nothing; therefore etc. The major is understood of a nothing that includes a contradiction. The proof of the minor is that the intellect is first by nature precisely something possible to be; but an intellection without the fact that it is, in the same now of nature, the intellection of some object, is a contradiction, otherwise intellection would be a purely absolute form. For a reply to the sixth opinion, nn.461-462 (no separate reply is given by Scotus), the Vatican Editors refer to nn.505-506, 535, and the note added to n.493. ⁵⁴

IV. To the Initial Arguments

547. To the main arguments. To the first [n.401] I say that the argument of the Philosopher On the Soul 2 does well prove that the senses are not the total cause with respect to sensation, which I concede. And thus was it argued against the first opinion [n.414], that the soul is not the active total cause for intellection, and this I concede. But it does not prove it without the soul being a partial cause, because it does not follow therefrom that the soul is always in act save when another partial cause goes along with it.

548. As to the second [n.403] (not treating the difficulty whether the activity belongs to the agent intellect or the possible intellect [cf. n.512, and the note added to n.554]), I say that the possible intellect (according to what the Philosopher says about it [n.537]) is that by which we are formally understanding, and in this way is it precisely “that by which there is a becoming everything,” because, as was said before [nn.537-539], we are formally understanding by it insofar as it receives, not insofar as it acts (although it does act, because this happens to it as it is that by which we understand).

549. As to the third [n.404], although the consequence is not necessary, because the sun can be the cause of many differences in species (on account of the distinct powers in it, which are sufficient in idea of effective cause for distinguishing effects), yet the consequence can be conceded for the issue in hand; for it concludes that the soul is not the total cause of all intellections, which has been conceded [n.547].

550. As to the first argument for the opposite [n.405], I concede that the soul, because it is immaterial, is receptive of any intellection (it is also active as to any intellection of an object other than itself as partial cause, and active as to intellection about itself as total cause,a according to Augustine On the Trinity 9.12 n.18 [n.413], but such intellection we do not have for this present state of life) - but from its immateriality does not follow that it is the total cause of any intellection of an object other than itself.

a.a [Text canceled by Scotus] because as generator and as generated

551. As to the second argument [n.406] I concede the conclusion, that cognitions of diverse species, namely those had by the proper virtue of them, are different in species. I prove this because, for individuals of the same species, there is not required a total cause diverse in species (or anything in the total cause diverse in species) from that which in the total cause belongs to another individual. That for individuals of the same species there is not necessarily required a cause of another species the proof is that the form is the principle of acting and is the formal term of action; therefore a perfect form of one idea is a ‘by which’ of the same idea with respect to a formal term of the same idea; therefore with respect to such term there is not required another ‘by which’. But now, for the intellection of white and black, there are required things diverse in species, namely a white thing and a black thing, or things including them. Therefore, these two differ more than individuals of one species; therefore, they differ in species.

552. When you argue further that then all habits of such things would differ in species [n.406], I concede it about habits that are had by the proper virtue of such objects, and this conclusion is proved like the preceding one, through the causes [n.551].

553. And when you say: how then would there be one science about several most specific species [n.406]? I reply that one most specific species can include many other species virtually (either the properties of them, or by way of cause, or according to another essential order), and then the habit that is formally of the first thing that includes the others is virtually of the other objects, though not formally and first. The habit, therefore, is one by unity of first object, virtually containing everything that is contained in that science - but it is not proper to everything contained virtually in that first object, but habits that would be proper to them would be distinct as they are distinct.a

a.a [Note added by Scotus] On this Metaphysics 6.1.1026a18-19, ‘Why there will be three theoretical philosophies: mathematics, physics, theology’, first question [Scotus, Metaphysics 6 q.1 nn.8-12].

Question Three Whether the More Principal Cause of Generated Knowledge is the Object Present in Itself or in the Species, or the Very Intellective Part of the Intellect

554.a I ask about the comparison of these two partial causes which cause generated knowledge, whether the more principal cause of generated knowledge is the object present in itself or in the species, or the intellective part itself of the intellect.

And proof that it is the object:

Because that is the more principal mover that moves unmoved, as appears in all essentially ordered causes; and the object moves unmoved, as is held by the Philosopher, On the Soul 3.10.433b11-12, but the intellect does not move unless moved; therefore etc.

a.a [Note added by Scotus. The Vatican Editors add that it comes between the two questions, and that the ‘difficult question’, deferred from Ord. I d.1 n.232 and cf. supra nn.512, 548 and infra n.

563, is here finally to be asked by Scotus and settled.] Here it can properly be asked whether the agent intellect is a principle with respect to intellection. And, in that case, let there be treatment of how it is disposed toward memory, according to what Augustine says of it [sc. that it is disposed as having the idea of parent, nn.583-587] - as to why it is posited.

There remain, however, two other difficulties, to be spoken of here or elsewhere [sc. in the Ordinatio], namely about the conservation of the species outside the act, against Avicenna [On the Soul p.5 ch.6, Scotus, Rep. IA d.3 nn.129-130], which difficulty can well be touched on in one of the arguments in the preceding question about the species [n.403, 400; Scotus, Lectura I d.3 n.309, “the intellective memory pertains to the possible intellect, because it belongs to it to conserve and retain, and not to the agent intellect”] - and the other difficulty, about memory, properly speaking, of the past; the question can be per se touched on here [nn.383-384, 391], in Ord. 4 etc. [4 d.45 q.3 nn.3-20; 3 d.14 q.3 n.7].

555. Again, an agent assimilates the effect to itself, therefore that is the more principal agent which assimilates more; the act is assimilated more to the object than to the intellect; therefore etc.

556. Again, unity of science is assigned in view of the unity of the object virtually containing it, and such virtual containing with respect to a habit is not attributed to the intellect; ‘to contain virtually’ belongs to the active cause; therefore will the object be a cause of the habit more principal than the intellect, and if cause of the habit then also of the act.

557. To the opposite:

The more actual, formal, and perfect something is, the more active it is; therefore, the soul, which is a form more actual than the many other concurring causes, will be more active, and so, when it concurs with them in acting, it will be the more principal agent.

558. Again, to what is a being in a certain respect there does not belong an act simply; but when an act has this sort of being in a certain respect through something that is a being simply, then it belongs more principally to that being simply, if it is in any way active with respect to the same thing; but the object now naturally understood by us has only being in a certain respect in our intellect, on account of the being simply of that very intellective part, for the object is in it as a known in a knower; therefore, in the case of the action for which these two concur, the object having such being will not be the principal cause, but the intellective part will be, because of which the object has such being.

I. Solution of the Question

559. I respond. It seems that the intellective part has a more principal causality with respect to the intellections that are now naturally fitting for us.

First because when one of two ordered causes is indeterminate to many effects and is quasi unlimited, and the other is, according to the utmost of its power, determined to a certain effect, the one that is more unlimited and more universal seems to be more perfect and more principal - example about the sun and particular generating causes. The intellect also has a quasi unlimited and indeterminate virtue with respect to all intellections, but the objects naturally known by us have a power determinate in respect of the determinate intellections that focus on them, and this according to the utmost of their power, just as does anything relative to the intellection of itself; therefore etc.

560. Second, because the cause by which, when it is acting, another cause acts along with it (and not conversely), is more principal than the other; but when our intellect is acting for an intellection, the object in itself or in the species acts along with it; for it is in our power to understand, because we understand when we will, On the Soul 2.5.417b24. This is not principally because of the species (which is a natural form) but because of the intellect, which we can use when we want,a and the action of the species, which is of a nature to be always uniform on the part of the species, principally follows the action of the intellect.

a.a [Note by Scotus] Whence is it proved that it is more in the power of the will to use the intellect than the intelligible species? Each is of itself a natural agent. And why is not each free by participation? Response: nothing is by participation primarily free save what is in the same essence along with the will. On the contrary: organic powers and organs (and external ones too) are free by participation Similarly, there is not in our power any act of the vegetative soul. This middle term, then, is obscure, because it is doubtful what things in us are subject to the will and what are not.

561. However, some object that much exceeds the faculty of the intellective part, for example the beatific object as clearly seen, could be posited to have total causality with respect to the vision, or a more principal causality than the intellective part, and this on account of the excellence of such object and of the deficiency on the intellective part, but about this in the fourth book [Ord. Supplement d.49 a.2 q.3 n.9].

562. But as to the objects that we now naturally know, the first part of the response seems to be true [nn.559-560]. For it seems that, as to the intelligibles naturally understood by us, the species of them in the intellect is, as it were, the instrument of the intellect - not something moved by the intellect so as to act (as if namely the species receive something from the intellect), but what the intellect uses for its action; as that, when the intellect acts, the species acts as less principal agent along with it for the same thing, as for a joint effect.

II. To the Initial Arguments

563. To the first argument [n.554] I say that there is a double act of the intellect with respect to objects that are not in themselves present, of which sort are those that we now naturally understand. The first act is the species, by which the object is present as an object actually intelligible; the second act is the actual intellection itself. And for both acts the intellect acts not moved by that which is the partial cause concurring along with it for that action, although one act of the intellect is preceded by the motion of it to the other act. Now for the first act the agent intellect acts along with the phantasm, and there the agent intellect is a more principal cause than the phantasm, and both are integrated into one total cause with respect to the intelligible species. For the second act the intellective part acts (whether the agent intellect or the possible intellect I do not care now [cf. nn.512, 548, and added note to n.554]), and the intelligible species acts, as two partial causes. Also does the intellective part act there not moved by the species, but moving first, that is, acting as it were so that the species acts along with it.

564. When you say, therefore, that the object moves not moved [n.554], I say that in both actions the object is a secondary mover, although it is not moved, that is, it receives in itself something from the principal or prior mover. When you say the intellect does not move unless moved [ibid.], I say that it does not move with a second motion unless moved with a prior motion; but this is to compare two motions of the intellect and not to compare two partial causes concurring in a single motion. If you compare the partial causes in both motions, I say that in both cases the intellect moves not moved by the partial cause concurrent in the same motion.

565. To the second [n.555] I say that an effect is more assimilated formally to an inferior proximate cause than to a remote cause and to a more perfect principle, as appears of a son with respect to the father and the sun. Hence this argument is for the opposite, because it proves that the act of intellection is from the object as from the proximate cause, because it is more assimilated to it formally; thus too is the intelligible species more assimilated formally to the phantasm than to the agent intellect, and yet it is less principally from the phantasm than from the agent intellect.

566. On the contrary: since an agent intends to assimilate the patient to itself, how does the principal agent not assimilate it more?

I reply: a more principal agent is commonly an equivocal agent, and it has in itself the perfection of the effect more eminently than a univocal cause does; and therefore it does not assimilate it more to itself formally (because this would be a mark of imperfection in a cause, to be thus assimilated to the effect), but it does assimilate it, that is, it does give to the effect, more than the particular agent gives to it, the form by which the effect is assimilated to it equivocally; and this active assimilation comes from the perfection of the cause, although it is not a greater assimilation formally.

567. Likewise, a more perfect cause assimilates the effect more to what it is assimilable to than an inferior cause does; for it more causes an effect of the sort that is causable. Now the effect is assimilable formally to the proximate cause, so the more remote cause assimilates the effect to the proximate cause effectively more than the proximate cause assimilates it to itself. For the fact that a son is formally similar to the father is more from the remote cause (which assimilates effectively the son to the father) than from the proximate cause, because what more gives the form by which the effect is assimilated gives effectively the assimilation more.

568. To the third [n.556] I say that the unity of a science is assigned in view of the object, because that is what the sciences are distinguished in view of, not in view of the intellect, for the intellect is single with respect of all the sciences. And, by distinguishing the sciences in this way, that is one science which is of one prime subject, insofar as the first object has to contain the science virtually; but this is only as partial cause, for the intellect is, in addition to it, another partial cause containing the science. To reduce a science, therefore, to its first object is nothing else than to reduce it to what, in the other partial cause (which has an essential order in its genus), is first there simply, and to assign from that the unity of the effect insofar as the effect is from it. And it is not necessary there to reduce it, because it is the same in respect of any habit whatever; and consistent with this is that it is much more perfectly contained in the other partial cause.

Question Four. Whether there is Distinctly in the Mind an Image of the Trinity

569. Lastly about this question I ask whether there is distinctly in the mind an image of the Trinity [cf. nn.281-332].

I argue that there is not;

Because an image represents that of which it is the image; therefore, the mind would distinctly represent the Trinity; this is false. Proof: First because then the Trinity could be proved by natural knowledge from the known the mind. Second because no creature exceeds, in representing, the perfection of its own idea; but the idea of the mind does not represent God insofar as he is triune, because the idea is of God insofar as he is cause, and he is cause insofar as he is one.

570. Again, nothing in the mind represents one [divine] person more than another; therefore, neither does the whole mind represent the whole Trinity. Proof of the antecedent: On the Trinity 15.7 n.12, the Father is memory, intelligence, will etc.; therefore, the Father is as formally intelligence and will as he is memory, and the Son likewise; therefore the memory does not distinctly represent the Father more than the Son.

571. Again, third, in the Trinity two Persons are produced; in the image nothing is produced, as I will prove; therefore, it is not representative of production. Proof of the assumption. In the soul there are only either first acts or second acts. First acts [sc. the powers of intellect and will] are not originated from themselves mutually, because they are co-created with the soul itself. Nor are second acts [sc. the actions of intellect and will] originated. Proof: because there is not an action of an action, either of an action as the subject or of an action as the term, from the Philosopher Physics 5.2.225b15-16, because then there would be a regress to infinity. Therefore, there is no action of these acts as they are terms, because they are actions formally; proof, for they are second acts, not first acts; but if they were not actions, they would be first acts.

572. Again, by them [second acts or actions] a habit is generated; an action by which a form is generated is an action of the genus of action; therefore etc.

573. To the opposite is Augustine On the Trinity 14.8 n.11, “The image must be looked for and must be found where our nature has nothing that is better.”

I. To the Question

A. About the Image of the Trinity in Us

574. Here one needs to understand, first, what is the idea of an image in corporeal things, whence the word has been transferred to the issue at hand; second, with respect to what in the Trinity the image is; third, in what in us the idea of the image consists.

575. [Article 1]. As to the first point I say, as was said in the question about the footprint [nn.289, 293], that an image is representative of a whole, and in this it differs from a footprint, which is representative of a part. For if the whole body were impressed in the dust, the way a foot is impressed, it would be an image of the whole, just as the latter is an image of the part and a footprint of the whole. But the conformity expressive of a whole does not suffice, but imitation is required, because according to Augustine 83 Questions q.74, “however much two eggs are alike, one is not an image of the other,” because it is not of a nature to imitate it; and so it is required that an image be of a nature to imitate that of which it is the image, and to express it.

576. [Article 2]. About the second article,a although in our intellect the concept of one Person is partial with respect to the concept of the whole Trinity, the creature that may lead us to knowledge of the Trinity by way of image will represent the Trinity as to the total concept that our intellect can have of it; therefore it will represent the distinction of three Persons and the unity of the essence and the order of origin, because the real distinction in divine reality is through origin; it will also have an essential imitation relative to the Trinity that it represents.

a.a [Interpolated text] namely with respect to what in divine reality there is an image in the mind, one must understand that the Trinity constitutes in our intellect a certain numerical whole, of which whole the parts are understood to be divine persons. The image, therefore, is not focused on in respect of one Person only, nor in respect of that in which they are one, but in respect of the whole Trinity and of the essence.

577. [Article 3] About the third article [n.574] one must first consider the things that are manifest in being in the mind; second in what things the image does not consist; third in what things it does consist.

578. As to the first, we experience in ourselves that there is an act of intellection and an act of volition, and that these acts are in some way in our power when an object is present; therefore, it is necessary to posit in some way in ourselves principles active for these second acts, so that by them we may have a capacity with respect to those acts. Now the same thing under the same formal idea cannot be the principle of these two second acts, because these second acts require in their principles an opposed idea of being a principle; therefore it is necessary to have some distinction of first acts, and this a distinction corresponding proportionally to the distinction of second acts.a

a.a [Note by Scotus] Objection about the powers of the soul in distinction 13 [Ord. I d.13 q.1 n.12]. Look for this against the final rejected opinion.

579. About the second point in this article [n.577] I say that neither in first acts alone nor second acts alone is there an image. This appears in two ways: first because it is both the case that the latter are two only and that the former are two only, so they would only be an image of a duality, not of a trinity; second, because in the first acts, although there is consubstantiality there, yet there is not a real distinction there between thing and thing, nor an order of origin; in the second acts, although there is a distinction and an origin in some way, yet not consubstantiality.

580. From these points follows, third, that the image consists in first and second acts together - and I understand this as follows:

The soul has in itself some perfection according to which there is a first act with respect to generated knowledge, and it has in itself a perfection according to which it formally receives generated knowledge, and it has in itself some perfection according to which it formally receives volition. These three perfections are memory, intelligence, and will - or the soul insofar as the soul has them. Therefore, the soul, insofar as it has total first act with respect to intellection (namely something of the soul and the object present to it in idea of ‘intelligible’), is called memory, and this perfect memory by its including both intellect and that by which the object is present to it. The same soul insofar as it receives generated knowledge is called intelligence; the will too is called perfect, insofar as it is under the perfect act of willing. Accepting, therefore, these three on the part of the soul as they are under their three acts, I say that in these three terms there is consubstantiality, by reason of these three realities that exist on the part of the soul. But there is distinction and origin by reason of the actualities received in the soul according to these realities in the soul.a

a.a [Interpolated text. Rep. IA d.3 nn.204-209] What then are the three things in which the image consists?
     I reply that, by taking a single first act or two first acts, whereby we are capable of second acts (intellection namely and volition), we have thus within us some principle fertile for operations producible in the mind. There are therefore three things in us, namely a principle fertile with respect to these two acts, along with the two second acts, which are as one, with a certain unity, and I do not find another three in us as perfectly representing a trinity and a unity. But there is not a like unity here and there. Because in us they are one with unity of subject and accident, but in divine reality the three are one with unity of essence, because in divine reality there is not found a unity conformed to unity of subject and accident. We have therefore three things in us that represent the Trinity, namely the fertile principle, and this is perfect memory in us (which includes the essence of the soul and the intelligible species and the will as parent and combiner), and two operations or productions that respond to that fertile principle with a double fertility (namely the principle of intellect and will, or of intellection and volition); and from this we have the order of origin.
     Now to the mind of Augustine On the Trinity 9.5 at the end, where he assigns the image very beautifully when he says “mind, knowledge, love” - From this he says ‘mind’, which does not precisely state a fertile principle or power for generating or spirating but a certain first act having both in itself virtually, and this representing the Father, who has both from himself. And this is the most properly assigned image of the Trinity, in my judgment.
     But elsewhere, On the Trinity 10.10, he assigns these three: memory, intelligence, and will. And these represent a unity more, and more principally, than a trinity, because they are the same thing as the soul. But they are not thus representative as to the productions and as to the Threeness. For memory only states fertility for understanding, and so does not represent the Father as he has both fertilities, the way mind represents both. Likewise, the intelligence does not represent the Son as produced, or under act of knowing, nor does intelligence as it is a power originated from memory; likewise the will as it is taken for a power does not represent the Holy Spirit.
     But Augustine does not take will there for the power but for the act of willing, as is plain in On the Trinity 15.3, where he compares these images and says that the will is born from knowledge by the fact that it only loves what is known, or that no one loves save what he first knows. That therefore Augustine says that the second assigning of the image is more subtle than the first is true as to some condition of it, because it more perfectly represents the unity of the essence, as was said.

B. Two Doubts

581. But here two doubts arise.

First, that then it seems there is a quaternity in the image, for first act with respect to volition does not go with any of the three in the image. For not with the third part, plainly, because the same thing is not principle of itself; nor with the second part, manifestly, because actual knowledge is not the will; nor with the first either, because memory properly states the productive principle of generated knowledge, not of volition. Therefore, will the will be a fourth along with these.

582. Again, a second doubt is that the order of origin, the way it is in divine reality, is not preserved here. For there the first person originates the second, and these two the third; here the first part of the image is cause of the second, but neither the first nor the second are cause of the third; therefore etc.

1. To the First Doubt

583. To the first [n.581] I reply that the image can be assigned in two ways, according to the fact Augustine assigns it in two ways: in one way On the Trinity 9.5-11, as mind, knowledge, and love; in another way according to the fact he assigns it, ibid. 10. 10-12, as memory, intelligence, and will. And about this double assignment of the image Augustine, speaking in ibid. 15.3 n.5, says that what was set down in ibid. 10 is more evident.

584. I say, then, when treating of the first assignment, that by ‘mind’ we can understand first act with respect to both second acts, namely fertility for generating and for spirating. For in this the mind has perfectly the idea of parent, because it perfectly includes both fertilities; and then the two others, namely knowledge and love, are two things produced by the soul in a certain order. And then there will not be a quaternity, because in the parent having the perfect idea of parent the double first act comes together.a And in this way is it in divine reality, because in the Father there is not only fertility for generating but for spirating, and this from himself; because if the Father did not of himself have fertility for spirating, but had it by way of leftover from the production of the Son (as some say [Henry of Ghent, Summa a q.8, a.54 q.6]), this impossible result, it seems, follows, that the Father would never have that fertility. For no reality, whether absolute or relative, does the Father have in any way by production, and therefore whatever reality he does not have in the first moment of origin (insofar, namely, as he is pre-understood in order of origin to the Son) he never has. Therefore, if that double fertility he does not have in himself in the first moment of origin, he will never have it.

a.a [Note by Scotus] We experience two acts, and acts that originate in a certain order, and are in our power (On the Soul 2, n.560). Therefore, the principles of them are, in us, either the same thing or united in the same thing. That thing will be fertile with a double fertility and from itself (a stand here [sc. no reduction further]); and the two products are distinct and in some way the same as the first fertile principle, taking powers precisely under acts. And they show the first supposit to be fertile of itself with both fertilities, and two products to be adequate to that fertile principle, distinct and originated; therefore an image. On the contrary: the second part does not produce the third.
Reply: here the image falls short.

585. But if mind be taken precisely as first act, having only fertility with respect to generated knowledge, the image in this way is imperfectly assigned, because in this way the mind does not have perfectly the idea of parent.

586. So I say, about the other assigning, that if memory be taken precisely for the parent with respect to generated knowledge it is a parent imperfectly; but a parent perfectly has not only that whereby it generates but that whereby it spirates, because it cannot have that from something else; and it must have it totally; and therefore it must be had in a parent of itself. But if memory be taken for the whole soul, as it aptitudinally has in first act that double fertility, then in this way it has perfectly the idea of parent. But although memory be more evidently a parent, as one must concede because of the word of Augustine On the Trinity 15 ch.3 n.5 [n.583] - namely insofar as it expresses more than the mind does the relation of generator to generated - yet the mind seems to import more perfectly the idea of parent if it be taken as it includes both fertilities.

587. Briefly, then, however a trinity is assigned in the image, whether this way or that, there is no quaternity, because a double relationship and fertility come together in a parent, if is perfectly parent.

2. To the Second Doubt

588. To the second [n.582] I say that in us there cannot be the likeness of an image for the prototype. For generated knowledge in the created image is a certain accident, to which is not communicated the fertility for producing love, by which fertility it is formally something productive of love. For such an accident is not of a nature to be formally thinking and willing, and therefore the memory that generates actual knowledge (taking memory as it is a parent perfectly) cannot communicate to the generated knowledge the fertility that it had before, because it does not communicate to it the same nature, but produces it equivocally in another nature. Now when the Father generates the Son he communicates to him the same nature, and the same fertility for spirating love, which fertility in the generation of the Son is not understood to have an adequate term; and therefore the Son can, by the same fecundity, produce as the Father does. The reason, therefore, is plain why that production cannot be preserved in the parts of the image the way it is in the Persons of the Trinity, because there cannot be the same fertility in the two first parts of the image. But it is and can be the same in two Persons with respect to the third.

589. Similarly, if generated knowledge were in any way productive of anything, this would only be by way of nature and not freely. There is here, however, an order between the second part of the image and the third, because the third part presupposes the second naturally, though it not be from it. And this does Augustine express in On the Trinity 15 ch.27 n.50, “the will, third, joining parent and offspring, which will does indeed proceed from knowledge.” And he adds and expounds at once how he understands it: “for no one wants something that he altogether does not know as to what it is or what it is like, etc.” It is plain, therefore, that he posits the order of origin precisely on account of the natural order of volition to intellection, and not because intellection is cause with respect to volition. It is plain, then, according to Augustine’s intention, that he there takes will (according as it is the third part of the image) for the act of willing, as he takes it here and adds, “which will does indeed proceed etc.” [supra n.589], which is not true of the will as it is a power, but if it be true, this is true of the act of willing.

590. Further, in particular: since all the things aforesaid are found in the mind with respect to any object whatever, one must note that the most perfect and ultimate idea of the image is when these things come together in the mind with respect to God as object; for then the soul has not only an expressive likeness as concerns the aforesaid (by reason of the things in it), but also by that reason by which the acts themselves are conformed to the object. For an act is truly a likeness of the object, as was said in the prior question [n.565], and therefore, when these acts are so in the mind that they not only have consubstantiality and likeness and distinctness and origin but have also a further likeness to God by reason of the object about which they are, there is a more perfect likeness; but the likeness is less perfect when the soul has itself for object, because then, although a likeness is not had from God immediately as from proximate object, yet it is had in some way, insofar as in the mind, as in an image, God is known.

591. And this double trinity is assigned by Augustine, namely the one that is in respect of God, On the Trinity 12.4 n.4, when he says, “in it alone which pertains to the contemplation of eternal things is there not only a trinity but an image of God - but in this which is derived in the doing of temporal things, even if a trinity could be found, yet an image cannot be.” This is to be understood of the expressive image, as far as concerns supreme expression or likeness. About the same is also On the Trinity 15.20 n.39,

“Whence can an eternal and immutable nature be recollected, seen, desired,” etc., “an image, to be sure, of the supreme Trinity, to remembering which, seeing and loving which, everything should refer that lives.”

592. About the other image he speaks in On the Trinity 14.8 n.11: “Behold,” he says, “the mind remembers itself, understands itself, loves itself; if this we discern, we discern a trinity, not yet God indeed, but already an image of God.” This second authority seems to contradict the first [n.591] unless it be understood in the aforesaid way [n.591 “This is to be understood of the expressive imae...”].

593. And then is it plain how, in respect of all the objects lower than the mind, Augustine does not posit an image in the mind, because no other object is an image of God, with respect to whom most of all (and with respect to his image secondarily) there is an image in the mind, as far as concerns the likeness which is had from the object.

3. Corollary

594. From these points appears, by way of corollary, why in the sensitive part there is no image. First, because there is not a consubstantiality there of things operating, or of the totality of them taken along with their operations, because the principle of sensing is not only something of the soul but something composed of soul and part of the body (and a part thus physically constituted See fn. to n.122. ⁵⁵), which is the whole organ.a Likewise, the principle of desiring of the sense appetite is not something of the soul alone, but is similarly composite. These two, which the operations are of, are not consubstantial, because although these powers of the soul are in the same essence, and are perhaps the same as the essence of the soul, yet they are not total causes of operation (namely the whole organs themselves), because the parts of the body are not consubstantial, neither among themselves nor with the powers of the soul.

a.a [Note by Scotus] Note, the proximate reason for receiving a sensation is some simple entity, neither namely something of the soul nor even a thus physically constituted body, but the form of the whole organ (which is called form as the quiddity is the form of the supposit, and not as an informing form).

595. Likewise, in the sense part there is not a double mode of originating, because just as the sense senses naturally, so the sense appetite desires naturally; hence according to John Damascene, On the Orthodox Faith 2.27 (seek for it), the brutes in their actions do not ‘act’ but are ‘acted’.

II. To the Initial Arguments

596. As to the first main argument [n.569] I concede that any created essence, insofar as it is this essence produced according to such idea, does not represent God under the idea of three; because it is not caused or ideated by God under the idea of three, but under the idea of one. But yet some created essence, by reason of its essence and the many things that go along with it (as one whole aggregate), can be representative of the Trinity and of the things that are apprehended in the Trinity. Such a thing is the mind, taken in itself and with its operations, because there is unity there and distinction and order of origin; such a thing too, insofar as concerns such coming together, is nothing that is inferior to the mind, as was plain in the case of the sensitive part [nn.594-595].

597. But when you argue [n.569] that if it were an image, the Trinity could be known through knowledge of the mind, I reply that the things that come together in the mind are for someone who believes the Trinity able to persuade him how the Trinity could be, but they do not prove to one who does not believe that it exists; for the total combining of many things in the mind, wherein the image consists, could be and is from one person; and so from it cannot be shown, by a demonstration-why, that it is an image of the Trinity. Of this Augustine speaks in On the Trinity 15.24, “Those who see the mind and that trinity in it and yet do not believe it is an image of God see indeed the mirror but do not see through the mirror, since neither do they know that what they see is a mirror.”

598. But how the deduction may be able, from the idea of intellect and will in divine reality, to display the three Persons was stated in d.2 in the question about the two productions [Ord. I d.2 nn.301-303, 355-356].

599. To the second [n.570] I say that the argument seems efficacious if it be posited that the Father generates insofar as he is intelligence, as one opinion [Henry of Ghent] has posited it (posited above and rejected in d.2 in the aforesaid question [Ord. I d.2 nn.278-279, 291-296]), which posits that the actual knowledge of the Father has, in some way, the idea of what produces in respect of the generation of the Son, and has the idea of formal productive principle [ibid.]. But according to another way, which I held there, that the Father insofar as he has the divine essence present to him under the idea of being intelligible in act (which belongs to the Father insofar as he is memory) - that in this way does the Father generate; but not insofar as he is understanding, as was there made clear [ibid.]. In that case the antecedent [n.570] is false, because my memory represents the Father more than the Son - not in this respect, that memory alone is in the Father and intelligence alone in the Son, but in this, that the Father generates the Son insofar as the Father has the idea of memory, not as he has the idea of intelligence or will.

600. To the third [n.571] I say that second acts are products.

601. When you give proof from the Philosopher Physics 5 [n.571], the argument is on my side. For since an action is not the term of an action, and since these acts [second acts, ibid.] are truly terms of action (as Augustine says On the Trinity 9.12 nn.17-18, that knowledge is truly ‘generated’ and volition ‘proceeds’, as he says ibid. 15.27 n.50), therefore they are not actions of the genus of action but are absolute forms of the genus of quality.

602. When you prove [n.571] that they are actions properly because they are second acts, I say that certain forms have a fixed being, not dependent continuously on their cause (in quasi state of becoming), the way heat is in wood; some have continuous dependence on their cause, as light in the medium depends on the sun. And about this Augustine speaks, Literal Commentary on Genesis 8.12 n.26, saying that “air is not made transparent but is becoming transparent.” First forms, because of their independence in being, do not have the idea of action or motion; second forms, because of their continuous dependence, seem rather to have being in becoming than in having-become. And they thus have [being in becoming] because always they are, while they are, as equally caused as in the first instant when they begin to be; and therefore, when the cause ceases to cause, these forms cease to be. But it does not follow from this that they are actions of the genus of action, but the opposite follows, that they are terms of such actions.a

a.a [Text canceled by Scotus, replaced by “And they thus have.. .such actions”] although, in truth, there is not action and passion in them, because they are whole at once and not part after part; but action properly is only toward a formb of which part is acquired after part.

b.b [Note by Scotus] this is false in all cases of generation and change.

603. Intellection is disposed in this way, because it is in continuous dependence on the presence of its cause; for otherwise it would not have being, as is plain from Augustine On the Trinity 11.3 n.6, “But when the glance of the one thinking has been turned away from ita.nothing of the form that preceded in it will remain;” for the act of the intelligence does not remain without such presence of the cause, namely of a cause inflowing continually. But this alone does not prove it is a second act (for thus light in the medium gets to be posited as second act); and therefore, along with this, there is another further condition, namely that these forms pass, by reason of themselves, into something else as into a term;b whether, moreover, the something else is within or outside the thing operating [or: ‘is operating within or without’], I care not, for it is not intelligible that there be intellection or volition and that it not be of some term. But this belongs to action properly speaking, that it passes into something as into a term. On account of those two conditions coming together in these forms, these forms are said to be second acts, although truly they are abiding forms.

a.a [Interpolated text = continuation of the citation from Augustine] “and that which was seen in memory has stopped being looked on”

b.b [Note by Scotus] About this relation [sc. of a form to something as to a term], in question three, before, under 3 [nn.478-479].

604. To the other proof, when it is said that such act is generative of a habit [n.572], I reply that the argument is to the opposite, because action of the genus of action cannot be of the same idea unless it have the same term, as heating is not of the same idea unless heat is of the same idea. Therefore, if a habit were to be generated by an act that is an action of the genus of action, and terminated at the habit as at a term, the act could not be of the same idea unless it were per se generative of the habit. Indeed, it would seem to be a contradiction that an action would be of the same idea and not be of some term, because there cannot be an action of the genus of action unless it be of some term. But now some act of intellection or volition can be of the same idea though not be of some produced term; therefore, the act is not generative of a habit as being generation, but as being a form by which the habit is formally generated. Then I say briefly that an act is generative of a habit as being a form that is cause or reason for causing another form, as the light of the sun in the medium is the reason for generating heat there. Now such an act is not generative as an action, but by such action are both an act and a habit generated, as the proper term of such action - and to signify this sort of generation, which is action of the genus of action, I say that the power [of understanding] elicits the act of understanding.