De Anima (On the Soul)
33. De Anima III.3: Grasping and Judging, Sensing vs. Reason, and the Prevalence of Error
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[0:03] Now, starting in chapter three here, we'll look at the first part today. Actually, in Thomas, it occupies what four lectios, right? And the first lectio goes down to 304, where the second lectio begins, number five, and then 318, the sixth lectio begins. Now, chapter three is the chapter now, which is going to make the transition from

[0:38] the sense world or the senses, and even the inward senses, to what reason, right? And to see in a preliminary way that reason is something different from the senses, even these inward senses. And then in chapter four, he's going to begin to talk about that next part about the reason of the understanding. Starting in chapter four, there, Okay. Three twenty two there, page 36. So chapter three is is a chapter you might say of of going from the study of the senses, which in a way he's concluded here in the chapter two, right?

[1:24] It's like he's giving an epilogue there, right? The last sentence we just looked at before the break here, concerning the principle, therefore, by which we say an animal is sensitive, let it be termed in this way.

[1:39] Now, what he's going to do here in chapter three is to distinguish the senses from reason, and then starting in next time we'll be starting 304 next time, he's going to be talking about the difference between image and opinion, right? Or between imagining and thinking, right? Okay. But he's going to bring out there later on what imagining is, right? What the image is. Okay. So he's going to, in a sense, although he's in a way concluded the consideration of the what senses, he's going to nevertheless illuminate something more about the senses.

[2:30] Now, he begins here chapter three by recalling something which we didn't see very much, but in book one, right? In book one, after the proemium which we looked at, Aristotle goes through the opinions of his predecessors, and they seem to investigate life from two things.

[2:56] They start off with the idea that life involves something like self-motion, right? Okay. And without distinguishing between sensing and understanding, they saw the living things as having some kind of what knowing, right? Okay. They didn't clearly distinguish between sensing and, let's say, understanding.

[3:23] And so Aristotle will go through the opinions about the soul, but those opinions were a result of looking for the cause of sensing or knowing in general, right? And moving oneself from one way to another, right? So they were looking for life, really,

[3:49] in the middle there. And we're looking at plant life in particular, were they? And they weren't looking at, or not yet anyway, distinguish the higher life that man has through reason and understanding, because they had not yet seen that as something higher than the senses, huh? Okay. But

[4:14] this, in a way, is reflected as you mentioned before in the Latin word for soul, anima, whence we get the word what? Animal. Yeah. Now, why is the animal? Of course, man is an animal. in broad sense, right. Why is it that the animal is named from anima,

[4:39] and the plant is left out in the word here? Now we could in English, and sometimes you see this. We could speak of animate matter. And animate matter means simply what? Living matter, right? Huh? Kind of a synonym, not. Okay. But literally, animate matter means what? Matter that has a soul. Of course, you would speak of the plant as being alive, right? Okay. But Aristotle says in the first book and elsewhere, life in the plants is what?

[5:18] Hidden, right? It's not so clear when a plant is alive or dead, or its life is not that clear. So investigated, huh? The soul more through what the animal does than what the plant does, right? Okay.

[5:48] I often point to something you find very common in Shakespeare and some other poets too. The comparison between sleep and death, huh? Have you seen that comparison? It runs all the way through Shakespeare's countless allusions in that. You know, sleep is called the counterfeit of death, right? Okay. Sleep, the eve of death. Okay. Now,

[6:23] in sleep, the vegetative powers, huh? Like digestion or growing, they can be active, right? Okay. But sleep is an inactivity of what? Mind. Yeah. I don't seem to be sensing my surroundings, right?

[6:45] If I sense into my surroundings, I've woken up, right? Yeah. Okay. So my sensing is no longer there, and when I'm sleeping, I'm no longer what? Moving. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. I can take you, you know, to Homer, but in other poets, but Shakespeare's very clear. He's always making that comparison, right? But in David's speech, he said, right? You know, he's dead. Sleep, right? Use that expression. Okay.

[7:12] You know the famous scene there in Shakespeare's Henry the Fourth, you know, where Henry the Fourth is what? Is on his deathbed, right? Huh. And Prince Hal comes in and he thinks his father has died, right? Huh. And he enters the feathers on the princess, and there the crown is next to him, right? Huh. So now he's what? Succeeds the crown, right? So he takes the crown and walks into the room, you know, meditating upon you know the crown and how it's worn his father down and his responsibility now and taking it over, right?

[7:53] But the father wakes up, right? Where's the crown couldn't wait till he died. Oh. And it's a very, very good father-son scene. There, there are two or three of these ones between the king and Prince Hal. They're really marvelous to understand what you know, father and son, and you know, Hal, excuseing himself, you know, and convincing his father that he wasn't, you know, happy that his father died.

[8:17] Now the crown, you see. Um. But the point is, now his father was asleep, and he took him to be what? Dead. Dead. Yeah. See. See. Because when you're asleep, you're not moving around like the man up, you know. There's no sense of life in that way, and you don't seem to be what? Sensing, right? You see. But you know, most people, you know, I think we're digesting our food when we're asleep, right?

[8:43] And and maybe we're growing in some sense too, and so on. Ah. If you ever read the Tempest, there, huh? Where the brother is tempted there, you know, to kill his. His brother, right, succeeds to his throne, but the brother is what, laying the ground, sleeping, right? And he says, "Well, look at him, you know. I can't remember the exact words of Shakespeare, but I mean, you know, tell him he can be king.

[9:13] He's taught him that to do that, and but he's he'll be like what he looks like already, you know. There are all kinds of illusions in the words of Shakespeare. There's a likeness there between death and what, sleep, right? Now, you know how in Scripture, of course, they use the word sleep, with the tied up with the belief in the what, resurrection, right? Huh? Somebody said to fall asleep when we die, huh?

[9:45] Kind of a metaphor, right? But it's a metaphor that we use more than other people do, right? As Christians, because we believe in the resurrection and that we will rise as easily through the power of God as a man does when we shake him and wake him up, huh? Okay. So I'm a manu ductu here, a paraposita a manu ductu by opposites here, right? Then you see that sleep seems to be like death, right?

[10:16] But sleep is a what, removal, right, of these things that characterize the animal, at least higher animals, sensing and knowing in some way and walking around and moving around from one place to another. Okay. So Aristotle is kind of recalling that thing. Since, however, men mostly define the soul by two differences, huh, by its self-motion, by its moving from one place to another, right, and by knowing, you could say, but he uses more particular words here, right?

[11:00] By understanding and discerning, while understanding and judging seem to be like a certain sensing, huh? For in both of these, the soul discerns and knows being. So the senses, in some way, discriminate, right? The tastes of things, huh? The colors of things, right? The sounds of things, right? And they seem to, in some way, judge that this is different from that, right? So a man who's tasting wine, he's judging the wine, he senses by taste, huh?

[11:31] Okay. But for the ancients, huh? They didn't what, see these as being what, really different, huh? Okay. And you find that same problem in the English empiricists, huh? They don't clearly see the difference between sensing or at least imagining and what, thinking, huh?

[12:05] Now, what's the Greek word there that the the author here translates by judging, huh? Well, it could be, but it's not that particular one. I think it's phronein huh Okay.

[12:28] So he translates it understanding and judging. The Greek words are knowing, is the Greek word that's usually translated by to understand now by intelligere in Latin, right? And phronein, huh, which is the word tied up with to be wise, maybe in a practical sense, right? But Aristotle always ties up the idea of wisdom and what judgment, right? That the wise man is able to what judge, right?

[12:58] Okay. This will come back more clearly at the beginning of the fourth chapter there, right? Okay. If you look just for a second, beginning of page thirty-six, about that part of the soul by which the soul both knows and judges. But Thomas takes knows there in the sense of what grasps, right? Okay. Now,

[13:33] this is kind of a common thing here, the common distinction that Thomas makes in knowing, but it's already in Aristotle. That knowing involves two things: grasping

[13:50] and judging. Okay. Now, perhaps it's easiest to see that distinction there in this way, in regard to reason. When you read an author, right? It's one thing to grasp what he means or what he's saying. It's another thing to judge whether what he says is true or false, right?

[14:30] And sometimes we use the word understanding, right? Like he does here, and we do the same in English. Sometimes we use the word understanding for what grasping, right? You understand what I said? We say, right? Well, he misunderstood what I said, right? Okay. So it's one thing to grasp or understand what I'm saying. It's another thing to what judge it to be true or false, right?

[15:09] Okay. And because the wise man, most of all, is able to judge, huh? Which is a perfection of knowing, grasping or judging? judging? Yeah, yeah. So judging is especially attributed to the wise man. In the Latin text, the chapter that I mentioned, they'll say sapere, right? To savor, right? To judge, we get the word sapientia. And this word uses here, a phronesis is taken for practical wisdom, right?

[15:39] Phronimos huh He's the man of good judgment, right? Okay. My mother used to tell, I guess, my father was a young executive, huh? Oh. The big boss would call my father and the other young executive and ask them their opinion about something, right? Mm-hmm. And what the company should do, and so on. And the other guy would tell him right away what he thought the company should do.

[16:01] My father says, "I'll tell you tomorrow." And he'd always follow my father's advice. But a man of good sense, a man of good what? Judgment, right? Okay. Notice we speak of a man of good judgment, as a man of good sense. You can see all this similarity between the senses and and reason, right? And then that perfect. So if wisdom is the highest perfection of reason, then judging, which is a perfection of knowing, is going to characterize the wise man, huh?

[16:34] So we speak of Solomon and his what? He had a judge, right? Whose baby is it, right? He did it very well, right? You know the story, right? Okay. But you have to grasp or understand before you can what? Judge, okay.

[16:54] Now you've heard my complaint about the modern philosophers, right? They have a, in many cases, a very obscure way of speaking, right? So you're never quite sure that you grasp what they mean. And I always joke about this one colleague that I had at St. Mary's, where I talked for three years. And I came out there, was trying to find out what Heidegger meant by being. Three years later, when I left, he's still trying to find out.

[17:27] I say it's all wrong there, the proportion, right? Yeah. You see, you should spend most of your time trying to judge whether what somebody says is true or false, rather than what does he mean? Yeah. And if the man speaks so obscurely, right, that you're not quite sure what he means, how can you judge it, right? Now someone comes out like Thales and says, "Water is the beginning of all things."

[17:53] I think I understand what he's saying, and now I can start to discuss, you know, and to try to judge is that true or false, right? Well, if I don't understand what he's saying, I can't judge, right? Ho philos estin allos autos? True or false? See, you don't understand what I'm saying, right? I'll say in English. A friend is another self. Two false. Yeah. See. Okay. Um. So, Thomas so often distinguishes between those two.

[18:35] Judging there means the separating of the true from the false by some beginning in our knowledge. So that's the definition of judging, at least for a reason. It's separating the true from the false by some beginning in our knowledge.

[19:19] So, when Berquist is standing, when Berquist is not standing, they can't both be true. Can they Can they both be false? No. One must be true and the other must be false, right?

[19:39] But seeing the opposition of those two statements and how they're opposed, such that they can't both be true, they can't both be false, you grasp kind of clearly what I'm saying. Berquist is standing, right? Berquist is not standing. But now the next point is, how do you judge that? How do you separate the true from the false? Well, in this case, you go back to your what?

[20:02] Senses. Yeah. Which is the very beginning of our knowledge, right? Okay. But now, say if I'm in geometry, right? I might go back just to what the axioms or the postulates, right? Okay.

[20:23] And I've mentioned that theorem there, number six, right, where it goes back to the whole is more than the part, right? Okay. So you can judge it by that. Okay. An

[20:41] obtuse angle is more than an acute angle. Now, how do you judge that? Because I'm going to say the opposite now, right? An obtuse angle is not greater than an acute angle. How do you judge this now? By going back all the way to the senses, or might you go back to something before, after that, but still beginning. The meaning of the word definition. definition. Well back to not necessarily the word, but the thing, right?

[21:14] Go back to the definition of obtuse angle, right? And acute angle, and the right angle, right? And if you recall, the definition of right angle is not 90 degrees, as most people say. I said, why, why, why divide the circle into 60 parts to find out what a right angle is? Okay. More sense to say that the right angle is a fourth of a circle, right? Okay.

[21:40] But the actual definition of right angle is what? When a straight line meets a straight line and makes what? Equal angles. Those angles are called what? Right angles. That's the definition of right angle. The definition of obtuse angle and acute angle in Book One of Euclid is through the definition of what? Right angle. And obtuse angle is an angle what? Greater than a right angle. And acute angle is an angle what?

[22:11] Less than. So those definitions of right angle and the obtuse angle and acute angle, they are beginnings of geometry, right? The first thing you have in geometry, in fact, is the what? Definitions, right? Okay. So it's by going back to some beginning knowledge. In this case, the definitions of obtuse and acute angle, which I would judge that an obtuse angle is more than the right angle. Right angle, right?

[22:40] Right angle, right? You see that? Now, if someone's asking you, "Are all right angles equal?" See? How do you know that? How do you judge that? By knowing what a right angle is, yeah. Okay. But how do you know if you laid this line upon this line and this point upon that point that the two lines would coincide? Oh. And if they coincide, we obviously they're equal, right?

[23:24] But how do you know that they couldn't, you know, come off like that? If they, if they didn't, the lesser would be equal to the greater would be equal to the greater. The part would be equal to the whole. Yeah, yeah. What you, what you say is to give these some names here. Let's use A, B, C, and then D, right? Okay. So if this is a right angle,

[23:59] A, D, C is going to be equal to what? C, D, B, right? Okay. And since I said the wrong letter, see my twice. Okay. A, E, C has to be equal to C, E, B because they're right angles, right? Okay. But C, E, B is going to be greater than D, E, B because the whole is more than the what? Part. See. And going back to the beginning, which is not a postulate, this is a postulate.

[24:35] Going back to the beginning before that, which is what? The axiom that the whole is more than the part, right? So if AEC is equal to CEB, and CEB is greater than DEB, because the whole is greater than the part, then A, E, C must be greater than D, E, B, right? Right. And then, therefore, A, E, B must be much greater than D, E, B, right?

[25:10] You see what we say, right? Mm-hmm. But it's also equal because this was a right angle too. You can't both be equal and greater than

[25:27] that, and both equal and unequal. That goes back to what axiom? The axiom. The same thing cannot both be and not be at the same time in the same way, right?

[25:46] So when we judge, we separate the true from the false by some beginning or not, right? It might be a definition, it might be an axiom, right? Ultimately, all our judgments go back to our senses, and that's why we express our judgments by using the word "sense." That makes sense. It doesn't make sense.

[26:10] Nonsense. So, okay. So these two things, right, involved in knowing, huh? So now, before arguing against this mistake, he's saying in his first paragraph that the ancients indeed say judging and sensing are the same, right, huh? Using judging there for the name for the act of a reason, huh?

[26:52] And he's quoting, you know, somewhat what briefly there, right? For in men, as Empedocles says, skill is increased with what is present, and elsewhere, whence for them judging always presents something different. In the context, I guess what Empedocles is saying is that when your environment changes, right, your thinking changes. And see, what they don't see is that reason yet is something immaterial, right? Yeah. For the philosophers before, at least Anaxagoras, right, they were materialists, huh?

[27:31] Okay. Um. So that everything that was was a body or something in a body, right? And so they didn't really see the difference between the senses, which are something bodily, and reason, which is not a body, huh? Okay. Okay. And so they thought of reason being acted upon in the same way that the senses acted upon by their environment, huh? And so when the things are different, then they act what differently, huh?

[28:01] Okay. And then he quotes Homer, but as Thomas points out in the commentary and the translating here follows Thomas, he just quotes the beginning of the phrase from Homer because it's a phrase everybody would know among the Greeks, right? But as Thomas mentions, Boethius in his translation gives the whole verse because he would not be familiar with the Latins. For the mind of earthly men is such as the day, the father of men and gods may bring forth the sun itself, would change their thinking, right?

[28:41] And he lay there thinking other thoughts. My brother Mark, you know, was made a joke about this. Brother Mark used to go mountain climbing with this Christian brother there, Brother Edmund, who'd gone to the vault and who I was talking with there. And they were climbing one time, Brother Edmund slipped and he fell and hit himself on the rocks and so on, and was knocked unconscious, huh?

[29:07] And Brother Edmund. Was trying to get down to my brother Mark, and he almost fell too because it was a dangerous thing, right? I guess by the time he got down there, the brother, my brother, had come too, you know, but he's a little broken up. And we always joked afterwards that if he had been alert enough at that moment, he would have pretended his philosophy at all changed and different, right?

[29:28] He didn't teach though what it said here, you know. And you know he laid there thinking other thoughts after getting his head hit, right? And he had a whole series of jokes about this because I mean his his shoulder was dislocated and so on, and they had to bring in a helicopter in to get him off the mountain, right? And then of course the the aftermath of that, of course, is that does the insurance pay for the helicopter?

[29:54] They eventually did, but they they had a fight, you know. But because another joke was, for instance, watch got torn off as he fell, you know. So another joke was that brother didn't even take his watch, you know. Oh. They're real good friends. Funny. But knowing this thing, you know, this scene in Homey, where the guy gets hit there and lands on the ground, thinking other thoughts, right?

[30:17] It as if the thought is something that is what the result of being acted upon in a material way. And so in two ninety five he gives as I was anticipating there, as Thomas points out in the commentary, the reason why they in a sense don't see such a difference as Aristotle would between reason and the senses because they still think of everything as being bodily, right?

[30:45] And so the reason would be just another bodily sense in a way. For all these thinkers assume understanding to be bodily, like sensing, and that like is sensed and judged by like because we determine the first arguments. Now

[31:07] we had that fragment back in our study of Empedocles. If you recall, he says by what Earth we know Earth by water, water by air, air by fire, fire and by love, love and by hate, hate. We know these things because we have them inside of us, right? And as we pointed out at that time when we studied that, there is an element of truth in Empedocles' thinking, huh?

[31:32] And that is that the known must in some way be in the knower before he can what what? And even this word "grasping" implies that, right? Huh? Because I'm grasping the piece of chalk, right? And the piece of chalk is what in my hand now, right? See, I can't grasp the center of this table right now. I'd have to cut out the center in order to grasp it, right?

[32:02] So when you know something, you have it inside you in some way, huh? And sometimes, you know, people say you look into somebody's eye. There, you know, you can see yourself in somebody's eye. So that the thing known is in the knower, right? It's very obvious.

[32:22] But isn't this true? If you remember somebody that you've seen before, don't you have their shape and their color and so on, color, in inside your head in some way? And didn't you get their shape and their color and so on through your your eye? Okay. But in what way exactly is the known inside the knower? Empedocles seems to have understood this in a somewhat material way,

[33:02] and there is obvious difficulties if you stop and think about it, because then this chair would know a solid metal. Metal Is because it has metal in it, and that chair over there. would know what wood is because it has wood in it, huh? And Goliath, you know, when he got that stone, was it in his forehead? He would know better what a stone is, because

[33:26] you have rocks in your head. You know, you know what a rock is, huh? So Aristotle began to see that it's true that the thing known must be in the knower before it's known, but it's not in there in this material way, in some immaterial way. Now, even the senses is a kind of immateriality, as we see in the way they receive. But nevertheless, they receive in a bodily organ.

[33:58] And until the great Anaxagoras comes along, the Greeks didn't really see that there was anything other than material things or bodies. And one of the most fundamental places where I like to point out that common opinion is in Book Four of Natural Hearing, Book Four of the so-called Physics, where Aristotle is taking up place, and he says that it's a common opinion that whatever is must be somewhere in some place, right?

[34:33] If it isn't somewhere, it doesn't exist. If you go out and talk to the man in the street, I bet you'd find that same opinion today. Whatever it is must be somewhere. If it isn't somewhere, it doesn't exist. But to be in some place is really a property of bodies, huh? Okay. So even in elementary CCD, people are like, "Well, where is God, right? " And the sisters would never know exactly how to answer the question, right?

[35:04] But you know, God or the angels are not in place, huh? Not contained by some place because they're not bodies, right? So the man who says whatever is must be somewhere contained in some place, and if it isn't contained in some place, it doesn't exist. They're identifying what is with what What is it? body, right? Okay. And that's important later on, you know, when you get to to to wisdom, and you find out that wisdom is about what is.

[35:35] And sometimes Thomas Aquinas following Avicenna says that being or what is is what our mind first understands, but as he explains in some other texts,

[35:49] what's first understood by our mind is being as it's considered in sensible or material things. And going back to what we learned the other time, there, Aristotle is giving the reason why we have many senses. He's giving a reason in the sense of an end or purpose, an inner purpose purpose in regard to the good of the mind, to the reason. The reason has a difficulty separating things that never separated in our experience.

[36:25] So the same way here, if in our experience what is, there's always a body, right? We have a hard time separating what is from what body, right? We tend to identify the two. Cajetan has the phrase of that first being we understand as in Latin.

[36:50] He says it's ens which is Latin word for being, right? Ens concretum ens concretely, right? in quiditate sensibili, it's being, right, concretely, and what it is is something sensible. Okay. Thomas says it's being considered in material things, right? So you can see that in the common opinion whatever is must be somewhere."And so they identify, you know, substance with body, and those are the only substances that are manifest to us in the beginning.

[37:45] What is that the definition of? the being Well, this is the being that our mind first understands, right? Okay. It's not this being that is the subject of wisdom, right? Yeah. It's not until you realize that there are some immaterial things, like the unmoved mover, right? And the unmoved mover is not a body, like we reason at the end of the eight books of Natural Hearing, or as we're going to reason here, that the reason is not material.

[38:14] Not until you know that there is something immaterial that you would have any reason to separate being from body. So this is. What is in bodies? This is the object of grasping.

[38:29] Well, we'll see more clearly when we get into the consideration of reason. But what you're going to find out is that the the proper or private object of reason, right? Okay. Of our reason is the what it is of something you can sense or imagine. Okay.

[38:50] And therefore, we don't really know the what it is. Something you can't sense or imagine. Yeah. Although we can know some things about it, right? Yeah. By negation and by analogy and eminence of these things, right? Yeah. Um.

[39:08] Yeah. Of course, you know that's why even when we talk about God, as Thomas points out, we have these concrete and abstract words. See, so we can say God is good. We can say God is goodness itself. But why do we have those two words? See,

[39:33] that's because our mind is naturally adapted to knowing that what it is is something that can be sensed or imagined, and those things are composed of matter and form.

[39:46] So when you speak of the form by itself, it doesn't seem to be what is, but that by which something is something. Therefore, our way of speaking breaks down when we talk about God, right? Because if we said that God is good, we might seem to be saying God has goodness, and implying some distinction between the have and the had, is if God was not his goodness, as if God was not as goodness, as if God was not altogether simple.

[40:17] But if we said that God is goodness itself, which we do say, right? Then you might seem to be saying, right, that He's that by which something is good, but He's not good Himself. See, notice notice with the word healthy and health, right?

[40:38] Is my body health? No, no. You could say my body maybe has health, right? But my body is not health, is it? So when you say my body, when you say my body is healthy, you're saying that there's some distinction between my body and health, right? My body has health, right? Okay. Now, is health itself healthy?

[41:08] No. Health is that by which something is healthy. So this way of speaking reflects the fact that what it is as something sensible or imaginable is the proper object of our mind, and and those things, the form and what has the form are not the same.

[41:30] So therefore, our very way of speaking, which affects our way of understanding, is not adequate to expressing God, because God is good, but there's no composition between God and His goodness. He is his goodness. And so we have to say both of God, realizing how both ways of speaking fall short. He really is good. You know, when our Lord speaking one of the Gospels, there, we know which one it is now, where you know they're praising him for what?

[42:05] Blessed is you. Yeah, blessed the womb that bore you and so and and speaking of these things as good, and he says, right, call me good, right? God alone is good, right? Okay, so it's a very strong way of speaking, right? God alone is good. So good can very much be said of God, right? But it's the way of signifying good signifies not goodness, but but has goodness, and therefore the way of speaking there seems to indicate some distinction between the have and the had.

[42:42] And so, in order to avoid misunderstanding, we go on to show, as Thomas does, he looks at the Summa Contra Gentiles or the Theology, that not only is God good, but is goodness itself. There is no distinction between no real distinction in God between God and His goodness. It's not just that by which something is good. See, goodness seems to signify that by which the good are good, like health is that by which the healthy are healthy.

[43:16] Color is that which the color is colored, but color is not color. In the case of God, we have to say both, right? But realizing that both ways of speaking fall short of this, we're getting a little bit ahead of ourselves, right? See, but it's interesting. huh, that Thomas going all the way back to the third book on the soul and understanding that the private object of our reason is that what it is is something sensed or imagined, where form and what has the form are always in some way distinct, right?

[43:55] Its way of speaking reflects that way of what understanding, and therefore that way of understanding that way of speaking is not adequate to understanding speaking about God, right? And therefore, we, as he says, I think he's quoting Dionysius there, that we can affirm and deny, right? These words of God, right? See, so we can say that God is good because He really is good. He alone is good in the way as our Lord teaches us there in the Gospel, right?

[44:27] But we can deny that God is good as far as the way the word signifies, right? Because it signifies what has goodness, right? And that implies some distinction between the have and the had, and there is no distinction in God at all between Him and His goodness. He's altogether simple. There is no composition at all in God, like Saint Teresa of Avila says, God is altogether simple.

[44:54] And the closer you get to God, she says, the simpler you become. Beautifully said, right? But Thomas, that's the first thing he shows about God after His existence, right? You know, question two of the prima pars is about the existence of God. Question three is the simplicity of God. Altogether simple, huh? Aristotle in the fifth book of wisdom talks about the simplicity, right? The first cause, all together simple, no composition there.

[45:26] But then, if we want to talk about the truth there, that there's no distinction in God between God and His goodness, then we say God is what? Ipsa bonitas, huh? He's goodness itself, right? Okay. And there we affirm bonitas, or goodness of God. God is goodness, huh? But then, someone might say, "Yeah, but goodness signifies is that by which something is good. But is God just that by which things are good?

[45:56] Isn't He good Himself? " Well, we negate then the imperfection of that way of speaking. But we we can affirm that God is good as Himself because of His simplicity, right? So I mean, most people who don't know this, they can't understand even the way we are forced to use words in theology and the the the truth and the limitation of those words, huh? Thomas understands it very clearly because he was taught by Aristotle, you know.

[46:27] I told you that the famous dinner there; they had the famous dinner room in honor of De Koninck and Monléon, and these two guys, taught at Laval, right? And Monléon used to teach a semester at Laval, and the other semester he'd teach at the Institute of Catholic, huh? And

[46:48] I guess his grandfather was Monléon's grandfather was a philosopher, and I guess he had met Nietzsche, you know. Oh. Nietzsche come down that area. Kind of mild man and guy Nietzsche, you know, but kind of crazy. But anyway, so they were honoring them, and so after you know all these a laudatory speeches and so on, you know, they had a reply they could do at these things, and so Monléon got to speak first, and he says, "Now, thank them, you know, for all their kind words and so on, but he said you shouldn't have been praising me, though you should have been praising Thomas Aquinas.

[47:21] See? Then it's finally De Koninck's time to get up, you know, to top him. He says, "Well, it's not very good what he said, you know, but he should have been praising Thomas. He should have been praising Aristotle. "

[47:43] So, but Thomas, understanding then, what Aristotle would teach you later on, to get into the reason, could then see how we can, as as Dionysius says, affirm and deny these words of Christ, or I mean, of God rather, because of the way they what?

[48:05] Signify, right? Okay. But another way we can affirm them of God, right? Okay. Of course, the modern thinkers are like the ancient, aren't they? Because they generally think of the brain as being a what organ of thought, right? So for them, the mind or reason seems to be a what body, right? Okay. Okay, and I remember one time I was teaching the De Anima, and I had a student who was firmly convinced, you know, that the brain is organ of thought.

[48:49] So I gave a couple arguments confirming his opinion, you know, and then I go on to show the defect in the argument. I explained to you about that before, right?

[49:07] A blow on the brain interferes with thinking, right? Just as a blow on the eye interferes with seeing. Well, I say just therefore, as the eye must be the organ of sight, right? Because interfering with that interferes with seeing. So likewise, the brain must be organ of thought. If a blow on the brain interferes with what thinking, right? Or alcohol going to the brain interferes with thinking, right?

[49:30] Okay. And so, yeah, I was kind of, you know, stating his arguments better than he could maybe state them, right? But simply and say, yeah, yeah, yeah, that's that's confirming his position, right? That the brain must be the organ of thought. And then I said, now suppose you and I were in a what? A room with no windows, huh? And the only source of light was a light bulb in the center of the room that was on, so we could see each other, right?

[49:58] Now a blow on that light bulb would what? Interfere with you seeing me. Therefore, the light bulb must be the organ of sight, right?

[50:12] Obviously, it isn't, huh? And even more simply, if you leave the room, that's going to interfere with my seeing you, right? Therefore, you must be the organ of my sight, right? If we blow you up, you know, or the terrorist blows you up, right? It's going to interfere with my seeing you, right? So you must have been the organ of my sight, right? So there's obviously something insufficient about that, right?

[50:38] The fact that a blow on the brain interferes with thinking, the fact that alcohol going to the brain interferes with thinking, right? That sleep interferes with thinking, and so on. Um, this shows a connection between the two, right? Between the brain and thought. But as these other examples I gave you show, huh? There's two connections that something can have with knowing, right? When a blow on the eye interferes with what?

[51:12] Sight. It's, I think, because you interfere with the organ of sight. When a blow on the light bulb interferes with seeing, you're interfering not with the organ now, but with the what? Object. Object, right? Okay. So what the thinker should have done was to say, um, if a blow on the brain interferes with thinking, and there's some truth to that I certainly think so, right? Then the brain must be either the organ of thought or pertain to the object of thought in some way.

[51:49] But the fact that a blow on the brain interferes with thinking doesn't, by itself, tell you which is which of those two possible connections it is.

[52:01] See? And Aristotle, what we show later on here, is that the images which are maybe in the brain, right? They are to thought on the side of its what object, right? But you can't know which it is. You can't separate the true from the false there until you have a reason, you know,

[52:25] to think that reason is immaterial, right? And there's all kinds of reasons to think that reason is immaterial. And once you realize that, then you realize well, then the organ, the brain, cannot be the organ of thought. Therefore, it must be related to thinking on the side of the object. And that comes out very clearly when Aristotle brings out what the object is. That's the what it is is something sensed or imagined.

[52:51] And so you don't think about the what it is as something sensed or imagined without sensing or imagining. Yeah. See? And Aristotle will have a beautiful comparison. Just like I don't see the color of you without you. See? And so if we take away you, I can't see the color of you. But you're still not not the organ of my sight, are you? See? And so as exterior object in a way is the senses, right?

[53:21] So the images are to the what? To the reason, huh? And so we don't think without an image, huh? And that's the reason why people tend to think that everything that is is a body. That everything that is is something what continuous or tied up with the continuous because the images are continuous and in time.

[53:45] Okay. We're getting a little bit ahead of ourselves here, though. This is, but it's very easy for people to get into the, you know, the natural might say in the beginning will think that whatever is must be somewhere, right? And even Catholics who might have some belief, you know, there are angels and so on. They can't really understand this very much, huh? And they tend to fall back upon this way of thinking.

[54:20] And partly because they thought that, as he says in two ninety five, that like is sensed and judged by like, huh? And so if we know these material things, right, as our reason does know material things, it must have these material things in it, right? And therefore it must be material, right? Okay. Now, Aristotle gives some very interesting critique of this,

[54:48] and he first of all criticizes them for trying to explain the cause of of knowing, which is likeness, and they didn't explain the cause of what deception.

[55:05] Now, in this place, and especially Thomas in his commentary when he comments on it, it's one of the most strongest places that I know of in in Aristotle and Thomas, where they speak of the what prevalence of mistake or error in man. huh? Okay. Now, If you want to talk about what takes place in man and other animals, he says you shouldn't talk about just about knowing, but also about what

[55:38] deception, error, or mistake, right? And yet it was necessary for them to speak also at the same time of urine, for this is more proper than animals, he says, and the soul remains in this for a longer time. Okay, just to give you Thomas's expansion on that in the commentary today. I'm not

[56:35] Okay. He says, therefore, first that the philosophers, assigning the cause of knowledge to be likeness of the knower to the known, they ought to also have assigned some cause also of deception, right? Because deception seems to be more proper to animals than knowledge, according to the condition of their nature, as if animals, including man, are more apt to be deceived than to be true, right? Of course, and Thomas goes on.

[57:16] videmus, We see that men, from themselves, are able to be deceived and to err, right? Now, I have to know a little bit about the history of human thought to see how men disagree, right? And you remember how back in natural philosophy, there, when Aristotle gives a kind of logical division of the thinking of his predecessors, everybody's got a different opinion, and no two people have the same opinion.

[57:49] So one man says that the beginning of all things is one. Others say the beginning of all things is many, right? And those who say they're one can't agree. Some say it's water. Some say it's air. Some say it's fire, and so on. Well, at best, one of these men could be correct, right? But most men, at least if not all, are mistaken, right? So you can say, to be mistaken seems to be the usual what condition of man, huh?

[58:23] Okay. And it seems to be an infinity of mistakes that can be made. So, De Koninck used to say, "You know, it's kind of an infinite distance to the truth from, in the sense that there's an infinity of, you know, errors along the way that they can fall into." So, he says that men, from themselves, able to be deceived into error. That's interesting. Ex ipsis huh? You need a teacher, right, to avoid some of these errors, huh?

[58:56] Now, I am a teacher of logic. I've taught logic for years, and I always come into class and I'm going to teach the if then syllogism.

[59:13] I come to class, and this is I used to do for years when I taught logic. But I'd go to the blackboard and I put the four forms of if then speech on the table. If A is so, then B is so. A and B are representing simple statements, right? And then A is so, okay. And then if A is so, then B is so. A is not so.

[59:51] Okay. So the if part they call the antecedent, right, and the then part the consequent. So if you affirm the antecedent, or you deny the antecedent, does something follow or not, right? Okay. And then I get the other two forms here. If A is so, then B is so, and B is so,

[1:00:22] and if A is so, then B is so, and B is not so. So in this case, you're looking at the consequent, which is the then part, and either affirming that B is so or denying that B is so, right? Okay. I put these four on the board. I have them stretched out across the board, and I look down and get four people up at the board, right?

[1:00:48] And I say, now, if something follows necessarily under the line, write what follows necessarily. Okay. If nothing follows necessarily, right? Right under the thing, no conclusion or invalid or something like that. Okay. Now, they never got all four of them right. Never. In all the years I taught logic, you know, years and years, right? And but they would think that something does follow when it doesn't follow, and vice versa.

[1:01:33] Okay, I remember one time getting getting all four wrong. Amazing, right? So, so if you have some experience of that, this is very simple logic, really. But

[1:01:49] if you say if A is so, then B is so, B is so. Most students, you know, who have any logic, they get on the board and they'll say A is so, right? I think that follows necessarily. Okay, and if A is so, then B is so. A is not so. Most students who've never studied logic will say what? B is not so, right? And fellow, they say no.

[1:02:18] You give me that as being necessary, I'll put you all in jail right away. See, if you're the man who robbed the bank today, then you are a man. That's true, isn't it? But you are a man. If you're, the man who robbed. I say, if it's

[1:02:41] that, I could hang it all. And there was a girl there and said, "No, if you are a mother, then you are a woman. " But you're not a mother. Both true, right? Therefore, you're not a woman, right? Okay,

[1:03:07] so I say you'll usually find the students, most of them, so many of them, will think that these what follow, right? And sometimes I'll say out over here, no conclusion, right? But here it follows necessarily. What? That A is not so, right? Occasionally, this one is the most obvious form. They'll say no conclusion, right? Oh my! Once in a while, right? Don't need to get this so much.

[1:03:38] This is the most obvious form, right? Yeah. So you see how easily men are what deceived, right? It's not just in logic, but in other areas. You'll fish that out, and you know they make the most gross errors, right? And it's kind of obvious to the teacher.

[1:03:57] So we're saying men ex ipsis son, from themselves, we see that men, from themselves, are easily they're able to be deceived and to err. And for this, that they know the truth, is necessary that they be taught by what others, right? Okay,

[1:04:21] and again. The soul, for a longer time, is in deception than in the knowledge of what truth, right? Because to a knowledge of the truth, vix pervenitur. Hardly does one arrive, right? Poststudium after the study of a long time, right? After a long time, one hardly arrives at the truth, right?

[1:04:48] That's very strong, you know. Of course, we could say, like we were talking about, even Aristotle himself, they're talking about light, huh? You see, and Aristotle thought, as Thomas did, and many men thought, the illumination is what instantaneous, right? It takes no time, right? See, and it took a long time to see that was a mistake, right? So we've been much longer in error, right, than in the truth, huh? So it's kind of a sad thing.

[1:05:28] Thomas in the Summa Contra Gentiles, when he's reasoning that we don't have you know perfect happiness in this life, right? He says error, mistake, right? Magna pars miseriae it's a great part of misery to be mistaken, right? Especially to be mistaken about these great things. To be mistaken about light is miserable thing to do, right? And

[1:05:59] Men are spend more time, right? And again, we make the mistakes that our predecessors made, right? If reason is something immaterial, as we're going to see reasons for later on,

[1:06:15] almost all men are mistaken about that, right? And it takes a long time for them to get out that mistake. Okay. Yeah. He says either didn't give any explanation of this, or if you take your opinion that likeness is the cause of knowing, then what's the cause of deception? Unlikeness. Yeah, yeah. In other words, go back to the old probable statement that opposites are the causes of opposites, right?

[1:07:00] So, if likeness is the cause of knowledge, then unlikeness or difference would be the cause of what? Mistake or error, right? But Aristotle goes on to say that there seems to be though the same knowledge of what? Opposites, right? And if you're deceived about the sweet, you're going to be deceived about the bitter, right? It's not if you know the sweet, you're going to be deceived about the bitter, because that's contrary to the sweet, right?

[1:07:45] You know. Okay. But it seems that the error and the science of opposites is the same, right?