One of the most important points in the philosophy of Aristotle and Thomas
Aquinas is that reality is made to be known, and the human mind is made to know reality.
Things are made to be known because they have forms or essences, and their forms or essences
are what we know when we know things, and the mind is capable of knowing them because
we experience things for what they are and receive their forms through experience and
become those very forms in thought.
This may sound like a mysterious thing, but if you have ever been absorbed
in reading a novel, you know how the reader becomes the book.
"So too," as Aristotle says, "the mind in a way becomes all things."
How does that work?
All human beings as such have an experience of the world around them, and all our knowledge
of the world begins from experience.
Every human being has an original contact with things through sensation, and sensations
become memories, and memories become a collected experience of reality, and the collected experience
of reality is potentially intelligible.
Experience is like a treasure chest of meaning and truth.
The human mind is able to reach into that treasure chest and bring to light the intelligibility
and truth of our experience, and the mind does so through three acts.
The first act of the mind is called apprehension, and this is simply the act of getting what
something is.
For example, what is a dog?
What is a cat?
What is gold or what is silver?
Our apprehension is not yet a judgment about things, but a simple reception of their forms,
and the mind becomes those forms in thought.
Through this reception and being of the forms of things, we more or less get what they are.
When we ask another person, do you get what I mean?
We're asking whether they apprehend something.
A second act of the mind consists of making a judgment, whether something is
or is not so.
In the act of judgment, we affirm or deny things like human beings are animals, or gold
is a metal, or water is not a metal.
We gradually acquire a variety of judgments, and this leads to a third act of the mind
by which we reason from a set of judgments to a conclusion.
For example, all human beings are mortal.
Socrates is man. Therefore Socrates is mortal.
All three of these acts of the mind are involved in the process of dialectic, and by passing
through the dialectical process, we grow in understanding of things, and this understanding
is the perfection of apprehension.
So what does it mean to say that the reader becomes the book?
How does that happen?
We start with our experience of the world, which is like a treasure chest of meaning
and truth. The forms of all things are contained in that experience.
The mind brings those forms to light from out of our experience.
When we receive those forms, we enter into the meaning and the truth of reality itself.
When we become deeply engrossed in the meaning and truth of reality, we're like the reader
who becomes the book.
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