God forbade...must reading!

Intellect








   Thomas Aquinas thought a special faculty called the active intellect must be postulated to account for the minds possession of ideas or concepts whereby it actually understands what it cannot perceive or imagine.



   Angels are intellectual beings and men are rational, says Aquinas. Recourse to reasoning for man betrays the feebleness of their intellectual light. For if they had the intellectual fullness light, like angels, would grasp first principles they’d, at once, comprehend all they implied, by perceiving, at once, whatever could be reasoned out of them.



    Can certain things be known by insight or instinct, by induction or intuition, rather than by reasoning? Are there truths that can be known not by reasoning, at all, but only by some other form of thought. These questions, in turn, raise the problem of the priority or superiority of such modes of thought don’t consist in reasoning. The theory that induction is, prior to reasoning, because intuitive generalization, from experience, must provide the starting points for demonstration- indicate one solution to the problem.