Page:The Conception of God (1897).djvu/266

Rh ently unideal or unintelligible basis of individuation which seems to be implied in this account is not any absolute, but only a humanly distorted truth. One’s first impression of the doctrine is, indeed, that it makes the individual a mere brute fact of sense, and in so far incomprehensible. For the materia signata of the Thomistic account is not mere matter in the strict Aristotelian sense, viz., matter as mere potentia. On the contrary, the materia signata is sensuous matter, the brute fact of the world of perception; and the meaning of the doctrine seems, in so far, to be that corporeal individuals are essentially sensuous and immediate, and not intellectually intelligible beings, just in so far forth as they are corporeal individuals. The intellect knows universals; the senses show us individuals; and, so far, the old Aristotelian difficulty returns, but, on the other hand, this is not the end. The same Thomas who makes the corporeal individual thus wholly indefinable for our intellect, by reason of its sensuous materiality, also asserts that not only God (Q. XIV, Art. II), but also the angels (Q. LVII, Art. II), must know corporeal individuals. But the angels know truth in purely intellectual, not in sensuous forms. “By one intellectual virtue,” declares Thomas, “the angels know both universal and immaterial, singular and corporeal objects.” If this be true, then the material opaqueness, the sensuous and indefinable immediacy, of the corporeal individual, as we view it, must to an angelic intelligence possess the same sort of clearness and of ideal and definable intelligibility that is possessed, for us, by universal principles. Our opaque material individual of the