summa-contra-gentiles

CHAPTER LXXVII 213
remains itself in potentiality to the determinate likenesses
of things that can be known by us, and these are the natures
of sensible things. It is the phantasms that oflfer us these
determinate natures of sensible things
: which phantasms,
however, have not yet acquired intelligible being,
— since
they are images of sensible things even as to material
— conditions, which are the individual properties, and
moreover are in material organs. Wherefore they are not
actually intelligible. And yet, since in the individual man
whose image the phantasms reflect it is possible to conceive
the universal nature apart from all the individualizing
conditions, they are intelligible potentially. Accordingly
they have intelligibility potentially, though they are actually
determinate as images of :
things whereas it was the other
about in the intellective soul. Consequently there is
way
in the intellective soul an active power in respect of the
phantasms, rendering them actually intelligible, and this
power of the soul is called the active intellect. There is
also in the soul a power that is in potentiality to the determinate
images of sensible things and this is the power of
;
the possible intellect.
Nevertheless that which is found in the soul differs from
what is found in natural agents. Because in the latter one
thing is in potentiality to something according to the same
mode as it is actually found in another : for the matter of
the air is in potentiality to the form of water in the same
way as it is in water. Hence natural bodies which have a
common matter are mutually active and passive in the same
order. Whereas the intellective soul is not in potentiality
to the likenesses of things which are in the phantasms,
according to the mode in which they are there, but according
as these images are raised to something higher, by
being abstracted from the individualizing conditions of
matter, so that they become actually intelligible. Consequently
the action of the active intellect on the phantasm
precedes the reception by the possible intellect. Wherefore
the pre-eminence of the action is ascribed, not to the phantasms
but tQ the active intellect. For this reason Aristotle