The second half of Chapter 9 of Man’s Knowledge of Reality discusses the mechanisms of intellectual
knowing and the nature of the intelligible species.
It runs from pages 95-100.
Consider an example of sense knowing: I see a black cat.
This process begins with light bouncing off the cat and entering my retina.
The cat is present to me in three ways: existentially, in its act of existence, formally, as a being
with a feline essence, and materially, as a small object that absorbs & reflects light
in a part of the spectrum my eyes respond to.
At the material level, what happens is the alteration of the sense organ, my retina,
by the cat’s material factors, the light reflected off the cat.
This produces the sensible species in my mind.
This is step one from our discussion of Eleonore Stump’s video.
Our faculty of perception allows us to grasp the cat as a unified whole, not just a set
of cat-shaped sense data.
The end result is the phantasm, the cat consciously available to me in perception.
This is what I called step two in discussing the Stump video.
I think it’s important to recognize that our knowledge moves beyond the merely material
to the formal, even at the very basic level of grasping a sensible object as something
other than a concatenation of sensible qualities.
And we do grasp the cat as something more than just the material accidents of a cat;
that seems undeniable.
The phantasm is key to our next step of knowing, but it is still too bound to the material
qualities of the cat.
Wilhelmsen points out two reasons the phantasm cannot cause intellectual knowledge on its own.
First, because the intellect is immaterial, and can only be acted on by an immaterial principle.
And second, because the phantasm is still attached to the material conditions of the cat.
So there is another causal agent present in the generation of intellectual knowledge.
This extra agent is the active intellect, or agent intellect.
This is the active principle in the human mind that does the work of extracting the
intelligible form from the phantasm, where it is still mixed with material factors.
This is step three, where I grasp the intellectual species of the cat, its cat-ness.
It’s important that we get the intelligible species right.
It is not the object itself, nor is it the knowing activity of our mind.
It is the action of the object, extended into the mind of the knower.
This is part of the relational, nuptial character of the act of knowing, wherein the knower
and the known become one.
We will say more about this later.
One thing is missing from the intelligible species.
Since we have abstracted it from the material factors in the phantasm, it now lacks a connection
to concrete existence.
To complete the knowing process, the mind will have to circle back round to existence.
This is done by the act of judgment, which is the subject of the next chapter.
That’s my quick comment on the last three sections of Chapter 9 of Wilhelmsen’s book.
Thanks for watching today; goodbye.