CHAPTER VI

INTELLECTUAL OPERATIONS

SIMPLE AND COMPLEX 'INTELLIGIBLES'

             INTELLIGENCE OF WHAT IS NOT COMPLEX IS IN A sphere where there can be no deception. But in matters where there is false or true, there is also some composition of things understood as of many brought to a unity. As Empedocles said, 'The heads of many grew with no neck', [but] concord afterwards brought them to unity; so in the same way these disjunct terms are combined, like 'the diagonal' and 'the incommensurate'. If the composition be of things done, or of future events, time also is taken into the reckoning, as one of the component elements. Falsity is always in a combination, as for instance when one brings together 'white' and a not-white object, or 'not-white' with a white one. All these statements can also be divisions. It is not only, then, false or true that Cleon is white, but that this fact was true or will be true. It is the intellect which imposes a unity in each case.§§ 746-51

             As the indivisible is twofold, the actual and the potential, there is nothing to prevent the intellect from apprehending an indivisible when it apprehends an extended length. For this length is actually undivided, and is [understood] in an undivided space of time: for time is divided or undivided like the length. It is not right to say that [the mind] understands both by halving both; There is no half, save potentially, unless an actual division has been made. However, in apprehending separately each of the halves, it divides the time also, which is then [divided] like the length. But if this is considered as a whole made up of two halves, then there is something corresponding to each in the time also. §§ 752-4

             But whatever is not indivisible quantitatively, but specifically, the mind apprehends both in an instant of time and by a single act of the soul; incidentally, however, [it apprehends division] not in so far as what the mind understands and the time in which it understands are divisible, but as they are indivisible; for there is in these something indivisible, but perhaps not separable, which gives unity to time and extension; and this holds of all that is continuous, whether by time or extension.§§ 755-6

             A point, and anything separated out and thus incapable of further analysis, is shown as a privation. A similar principle holds in other matters, as in the way we know air or blackness. For in some way the knowledge is by contrariety; but the knowing faculty must be in potency, and one [of the contraries] be in it. But if there is some cause that includes no contrary, it is self-knowing, and in act, and separate.§§ 757-9

             Now every utterance, e.g. an affirmation, is of something, about some subject; and is always either true or false. Yet not all understanding is thus; understanding is true about what anything is, in the sense of the quiddity of it; not as to every fact about a subject, but, as sight is always true about its proper object, yet it is not always true about a white thing being a man or not. So it stands with whatever is immaterial.§§ 760-3