Aquinas Summa I q.86 a.3–4: Matter, Form and Necessity in Contingent Things; Knowing the Future: Eternity, Causes, Dreams and Animals

Orientation #

He opens “back to begin the paragraph”, i.e. the body of a. 3 already begun (prev. lecture), and refers back to what “we said above / saw the other day” on the mind knowing singulars by coming back on itself. He closes announcing next time: “at least two articles, maybe more” of the next question, how the soul knows itself. The previous class treated a. 2 (infinity) and opened a. 3; the next treats q. 87 a. 1.

The class, in order #

1. Contingency from matter, necessity from form (“each thing is contingent because of matter”) #

The point: a. 3 rests on a distinction between what in a thing is contingent (from matter) and what is necessary (from form).

1. A contingent is what is able to be and not be; that ability belongs to matter, “that’s in a sense what matter is.”
2. Necessity follows on the definition of form: what follows on form is in a thing of necessity.
3. Matter is the principle of individuation; the universal notion is taken by abstraction of form from particular matter.
4. Hence (as in the De Anima) the proper object of our understanding is the “what it is” of something sensed or imagined, and the what-it-is is universal: what a triangle, a circle, a dog, a chair is.

• Plato’s discovery: in material and even in imaginable (geometrical) things, the individual and its what-it-is are not identical.
• Boethius on Porphyry, quoted as often: the thing is singular when sensed, universal when understood. This chair felt is individual; “What is this? A chair” is universal, separated from the individuating conditions of matter, “part outside of part”. This is possible because the mind is immaterial.

2. Digression: parts of a definition do not meet, thoughts are not continuous (“the parts of a what definition don’t meet”) #

The point: the parts of what we understand behave like number, not like the continuous.

• Two definitions of the continuous: (a) divisible forever; (b) a quantity whose parts meet at a common boundary (two parts of a line at a point, two sides of a square at a line, two parts of the chalk at a surface).
• Boundary case: “equilateral, right-angled quadrilateral” — do equilateral and right-angled meet at a point, line or surface? No. The parts of the individual square meet at a line; the parts of its definition do not meet.
• Thoughts are not divisible forever either: given “every mother is a woman” and “no man is a woman”, only one thought comes next (“no man is a mother”). Likewise from quadrilateral, adding right-angled and equilateral, you are at square with no stopping points in between. In the continuous there is no “next” longer line or next bigger circle; yet Aristotle constantly says “next”.
• Train from Worcester to Boston stopping at Framingham: if you had to stop at every intermediate place you would never arrive; so if thought were a continuous “line of thought”, a lecturer could never complete any line of thought, and every step would be a jump leaving out the things in between. “How many points did you have to make in order to make any point?”
• Conclusion: “thoughts are like numbers, and not like the continuous.”
• Aside: in a good lecture you can almost anticipate the next thought; when the lecturer “jumps”, you cannot.

3. The conclusion of a. 3 and the replies (“all sciences are about necessary things”) #

The point: contingent things as contingent are known directly by sense and only indirectly by understanding; their universal necessary reasons are known by understanding.

• Understanding is per se and directly of universals, sense of singulars; the understanding knows singulars indirectly, by reflex, “coming back”.
• Therefore: looking to the universal definitions of the knowable, all sciences are about necessary things; looking to the things themselves, some sciences are about necessary things and some about contingent. “From this is clear the reply to the objections” — he does not go through the replies separately.
• Aside on English: “understand” comes from “stand”; how understand what does not stand still? Answer by the same distinction: time is not universal, yet time always has a before and after, so there is something necessary there.
• The Heracliteans: everything flows, so you cannot finish a sentence about anything. But “what changes is other now than it was before” never changes; defining change as becoming other (in quality, place, etc.) gives unchanging knowledge about change. Descending to the concrete, a fluid situation cannot be characterized before it alters.
• Break before the next article.

4. Article 4, the objections: does our understanding know future things? (“It seems that our understanding does know future things”) #

The point: three objections that the mind knows the future, and the sed contra.

1. We know through understandable forms abstracting from here and now, indifferent to all time (what a dog is is neither past, present nor future); the mind knows present things, therefore future ones too.
2. A man alienated from his senses (sleeping, phrenetic) can know some future things; when alienated his understanding is more vigorous (“that’s maybe a question”); so the understanding, quantum est de se, can know the future. He recalls Aristotle’s books on dreams and on prophesying by dreams, and St Joseph told in a dream to go down to Egypt and come back.
3. Man’s understanding is more efficacious than any brute’s; yet some animals (the crow, cornicula) know the future — signify coming rain. Therefore much more the human intellect. Are we not superior in knowledge to them?

• Sed contra, Ecclesiastes: much is the affliction of man, who is ignorant of past things and in no way able to know future things.

5. The body: future things in themselves and in their causes (“future things are able to be known in two ways”) #

The point: the same distinction as for contingents; only God knows the future in itself, we know it in its causes.

• Future things as falling under time are singulars, which the human understanding knows only by coming back on itself (as said above); but the reasons of future things can be universal and there can be sciences of them — one predicts an eclipse.
• Two ways of knowing the future: (a) in themselves — only God, whose knowledge is not in time but in eternity, to which future things are present because his eternal insight is at once over the whole course of time; (b) in their causes.
• Comparison: moments of time are like points on a circle, one before another; the eternal now is outside time, like the centre, directly opposite each point, so past, present and future are all present to God. “We have to wait till we study God” (Thomas: study the body to study the soul, the soul for the angels, the angels for God).
• Boethius, Consolation book 5, where that account of eternity is developed: a dialogue in the Platonic manner, but with Lady Wisdom (sapientia is feminine) instead of Socrates; in book 5 she introduces Aristotle as her true follower, against Plato, on the central question — does truth require that the way we know be the way things are? Aristotle: no; Plato seems to say yes. This is needed before God’s knowledge: God knows time eternally, but does not know time to be eternal; the eternity is on the side of his knowing.
• Our own case: we think about last week’s class now, but do not attribute the “now” of our knowing to the past; we talk about this evening now without thinking the future is now.
• Aristotle’s more common point: the order of our knowing is even contrary to the order of things — we know the effect before the cause. “I know you before your parents”; falsity would come only if I concluded that you are therefore in reality before your parents. Distinguish the order in our knowing from the order in things.

6. Necessary causes and causes for the most part (“as the astronomer foreknows the future eclipse”) #

The point: knowledge of the future in its causes is certain or conjectural according to the cause.

• Causes from which something follows by necessity: known with the certitude of science, mainly astronomy (the eclipse).
• Causes from which something comes to be for the most part: known by conjectura, a guess, more or less certain as the causes are more or less inclined to their effects — “all the way down to the weatherman”. There are arts of guessing: economists and weathermen have reasons for their guess, but it remains a guess (“barring unforeseen circumstances, the economy will pick up”).
• Not even the angels know the future in itself; it can be revealed to the prophets by special illumination (raised by a student during the break).

7. Reply to the first objection: knowing in some way and simply (“you don’t know your mother as the person knocking”) #

The point: the first objection holds only of knowledge through universal reasons of causes, from which the future is known in the order of effect to cause.

• Secundum quid we know every man that will be born; secundum quid we know no man. A girl in class says she does not know his brother Mark; but she knows what a man is, so in some way she knows every man, every brother in the world.
• A knock at the door: you say you do not know who is knocking; it is your mother; “therefore you don’t know your mother” — what is wrong? Two senses of “know”: you know your mother, but not as the person knocking; in some way she is unknown to you, but that is no reason to say simply you do not know her.
• President Bush at the soldiers’ Thanksgiving dinner: they did not know who would come out, recognised him at once; they knew the president but not as the man about to come out. If Bush knocked now, I would not know who was knocking though I know him.
• Aside: a student’s remark about Bush making a retreat; Bing Crosby’s wife and a Cistercian monastery [unclear in recording].

8. Reply to the second objection: sleepers, ecstasy and superior causes (“The soul has a certain power of what divination”) #

The point: foreknowledge in sleep is not from the soul’s own nature but from superior causes acting on it.

• Augustine (he says “twelfth book of the Confessions” [ed.: (inferred) Thomas cites De Genesi ad litteram XII]): the soul has a divining power and knows the future when withdrawn from the senses and returned to itself.
• This is reasonable if the soul knows by partaking of the forms, as the Platonists held: it would know from its own nature the universal causes of all effects and be impeded by the body. But that way of knowing is not connatural to us; we get knowledge from the senses. So such knowledge comes rather from being acted on by superior causes, bodily or spiritual.
• Bodily: ancients and moderns agree the moon influences the tides; not absurd that sun, moon and other bodies act down here, and since they cause things below, they give some knowledge of the future in its causes.
• Spiritual (immaterial): by divine power and the ministry of angels the understanding is illuminated and the images ordered to future things — St Paul carried to the third heaven, alienated from his senses; Pharaoh’s dream, where the dreamer sometimes lacks the illumination to interpret and must go to Joseph or Daniel. Or by demons stirring the imagination to signal future things they know, since they know more of the causes than we do.
• The soul receives these impressions more readily when alienated from the senses: nearer the spiritual substances and freer from exterior disquiet. Also from the upper bodies: the higher bodies act on the lower; the sensitive powers are acts of bodily organs; so celestial bodies change the imagination and, being causes of many future things, leave signs of them — more perceived at night by sleepers than by day by the waking. A dreamer feels pressure in the chest and wakes to find the blankets bunched: small motions are sensed more in sleep.
• Aristotle’s On Sleep and Waking as quoted by Thomas: what was carried by day is dissolved, the night air is undisturbed and silent, and even little motions inside are more sensed by sleepers, making images from which future things are foreseen. “A very obscure thing.”
• Asides: cats taken hundreds of miles finding their way home; birds as navigators. Thomas does not deny such foreknowledge in dreams, whether from bodily causes or divine illumination; the saints in ecstasy are unaware of their senses and drawn to a higher knowledge.

9. Reply to the third objection: brutes, lunatics and the empty-minded (“the most imprudent people are most foreseeing”) #

The point: animals foresee more because nothing above imagination orders their images.

• Brutes have nothing above imagination, as men have reason; so their imagination follows the celestial influence wholly (totaliter). We are always imagining at the command of reason (as in geometry), which “messes up” the images; animal images are free and more open to the heavenly bodies. Hence future things such as rain are better known from the motions of animals than from those of men, moved too much by the counsel of reason.
• Perhaps this is why the phrenetic know the future more; origin of “lunatic”, more influenced by Luna. Students: more murders under the full moon, more suicides in spring, worse times in institutions. The Indians respected the man out of his mind as having superior knowledge.
• Aristotle (On Sleep and Waking): some most imprudent people are most foreseeing, their understanding unaffected by cares, “like a desert and empty”, moved as the mover leads. He notes words missing at the end of the text (“mota”). Not the most intelligent but the brutes and the empty-minded have this foreknowledge.
• Next time: the first article of the next question, how the soul knows itself.

His words #

• contingent: what is able to be and not be; the ability pertains to matter.
• “the what it is”: the proper object of our understanding, always universal [ed.: quiddity].
• singular when sensed, universal when understood: Boethius on Porphyry.
• continuous: (a) divisible forever; (b) quantity whose parts meet at a common boundary.
• “coming back upon itself” / by reflex: how the understanding knows singulars indirectly [ed.: reflexio].
• “the what it is … reasons of future things”: the universal reasons [ed.: rationes].
• eternal now: God’s knowledge outside time; centre of the circle against the points.
• conjectura: a guess, more or less certain.
• quantum est de se: “as regards itself”.
• secundum quid: knowing “in some way” vs. simply.
• phrenetic: the mentally disturbed of the second objection.
• alienated from his senses: sleepers, phrenetics, St Paul, saints in ecstasy.
• brutus / the brutes: the beastly animals.
• totaliter: wholly (of the brute imagination following celestial influence).
• lunatic: “more influenced by Luna, the moon”.

Texts #

Read in class

• Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae I, q. 86, a. 3, end of the body (verified source).
• Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae I, q. 86, a. 4, objections, sed contra, body and three replies.
• Aristotle, On Sleep and Waking, as quoted within Thomas’s replies 2 and 3.

Mentioned

• Aristotle, De Anima (on the proper object of understanding).
• Boethius, commentary on Porphyry (“singular when sensed, universal when understood”).
• Boethius, Consolation of Philosophy, book 5 (eternity; Lady Wisdom follows Aristotle).
• Plato (discovery that individual and what-it-is differ; Platonists on partaking of forms).
• Aristotle, book on dreams and book on prophesying by dreams.
• Augustine, “twelfth book of the Confessions” as he says it.
• Ecclesiastes (sed contra); Scripture: St Joseph’s dreams, St Paul’s third heaven, Pharaoh’s dream, Joseph and Daniel.
• Thomas’s treatment of the science of God (“as has been said above”).

His questions #

• Do equilateral, right-angled and quadrilateral meet at a point, a line, a surface? No; the parts of a definition do not meet, unlike the parts of the individual square.
• Is there a next longer line? No; the continuous has no next, but thoughts do.
• How can you understand something that doesn’t stand still? By what stands still in it: the universal reason, e.g. time always has before and after.
• Does a thing ever change without becoming other than it was? No; so “change is becoming other” is unchanging knowledge about change.
• When you understand what a dog is, is that past, present or future? It abstracts from all of them.
• Is it a contradiction to think about the past now? No; the now is in the knowing, not attributed to the past.
• Am I false in knowing you before your parents? No; falsity would be concluding that the order of knowing is the order of things.
• What’s wrong with “you don’t know who’s knocking, it’s your mother, therefore you don’t know your mother”? Two senses of “know”: she is unknown as the knocker, not simply.
• Why should the brute animals have some knowledge we don’t have? Their imagination, with nothing above it, follows celestial influence wholly.