I am wondering what it means to say I know, for example, Jim the ferret. If I have never seen a ferret before, and I smell and set eyes on Jim, in this first seeing I know not just “this”, but also “ferret” - though I may not yet have a clear concept of ferret. I smell and see Jim. I know that the smell and the shape belong together. Moreover, I can tell that there are perhaps two smells, and one is Jim, the other not. When I see another ferret, I think “oh look, another one of those things”.
I do not see a lake of various colours, and analyse them into shapes, and then from analyses of many similar shapes identify members of a set I choose to call “ferret”, and by observing the temporal co-incidence of certain shapes and a certain pattern of smell-sensation, conclude that the two go together. And then decide that another pattern of shifting colour is so similar to the first, that I will class it as “ferret” as well.
Since in this philosophy knowledge is caused by the thing known, the action of the object on the knower, and is a union of the known and the knower, the knower in some way becoming the thing known, we can immediately see that the unity of Jim-as-known-by-us must be in Jim. What remains to be explored is how the unity of Jim is found, in a certain sense, in me, although Jim-in-me arrives only by a kind of refraction through the senses.
The proper objects of the senses are a certain class of accident, a kind of being. What makes an accident an accident is that it has its being from another. Where substantial form gives being to that which it informs, whereas accidental receives being from that which it informs. So the being, the esse by which the sensible accidental form exists and informs, actualises the knower, is in fact the esse of the subject.
This actualisation of the knower is physical, sensible, particular. Jim is actually sensed, but not understood; being a material being, he is actually sensible, but only potentially intelligible. Likewise, my particular physical knowledge of Jim is only potentially intellectual knowledge.
We know that we come to intellectual knowledge of natures, to knowledge of universals, through abstraction from the phantasm, which in this case is (I think one can say this, though of course I am now wondering) Jim-in-me, the action of Jim on me (present or recalled). It is not the phantasm itself that we know – the word names an action or result of an action by Jim in me, a presence of Jim in me, and it is Jim I know. Jim is able to inform me, act on me, physically, but his material being cannot of itself have any contact, touch in any way, my intellect.
St Thomas teaches that we have one soul. With different parts and powers, but one. Material beings can inform the lower part of the soul – and the soul itself enables them to form the intellect, lending as it were its immateriality to something that has it only in potentiality. [I think that maybe an interpretation I read in Fr M.A. Krąpiec, OP's Realizm Ludzkiego Poznania – the realism of human knowing, and not my own, but I agree with it, tentatively.] And so through abstraction we arrive at knowledge of universal natures and so on.
However, is there not some intellectual knowledge of the singular? It seems there may be. I do not mean a knowledge independent of the phantasms, but one which while reliant on them is truly a knowledge of the singular. It must be a knowledge of Jim under some immaterial aspect. Jim of himself has no actual intelligibility - it is actualised by the intellect. So I wonder if the universal nature of ferret might be, as it were, lent particularity by the individual soul. Or if the fact that the universal nature is known by an individual soul does not involve or imply some kind of particularity. ST I.89.4 says that in the infused knowledge of species, the separated soul knows the individuals "to which it has some kind of determinate relation", to which it is "determined by former knowledge in this life, or by some affection, or by natural aptitude, or by the disposition of the Divine order", because "everything received is received according to the mode of the receiver".
And that is where the essay will go when it is written, but this post is already so overdue that I will put it up as it stands. Which may suggest that this post is the casual work of a half-hour or so - it's not! I hope that its many gaps and loose phrasing will provide fuel for many comments :-)
