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forming these principles is in the soul initially,(Footnote: 12:
Ibid., p. 247. the actual apprehension of them presupposes the
“intervention of the sensible.”(Footnote: 13: Idem. Thus the
knowledge of being, unity, etc., is built upon and derived from
sense objects: “principium nostrae cognitionis est a sensu [our
knowledge of principles is from sense].”(Footnote: 14: Idem.
(2) The Intelligible Species
When once the first principles have been thus abstracted,
they serve as tools for the abstracting of the whole range of
universals in terms of which knowledge becomes actual: “We
abstract universal forms from their particular conditions; which
is to make them actually intelligible.”(Footnote: 15: Aquinas,
op. cit., p. 752; Summa, I, qu. 79, art. 4. Knowledge is, in fact,
an apprehension of particulars through their universal forms,
and of universals by abstraction from their concrete particular
instances.
B. The Resultant Knowledge of God
Knowledge of God through His effects.---Since all knowledge,
on the natural level, is derived from sense experience,
knowledge of God is no exception: “The only road which can
lead us to a knowledge of the Creator must be cut through the
things of sense. The immediate access to the Cause being
barred to us, it remains for us to divine it with the help of its effects.”(Footnote:
16: Gilson, op. cit., p. 64.
The knowledge of God’s existence is therefore neither selfevident
to us nor innate in our intellect: it is rather achieved
through an analysis of the objects of sense in accordance with
the process of knowledge already described in the preceding
section.(Footnote: 17: Aquinas, op. cit., Summa, I, qu. 2, art. 1f.
The demonstration of God’s existence, according to Thomas, is
fivefold and rests on analysis successively of motion, efficient
causation, necessity and contingency, the gradations of the