MIND AND SOUL ‘Intellectus’ is one of the few technical terms in Aquinas that means roughly the same as its English equivalent, ‘intellect’ The cognate verb ‘intelligere’, however, does not have an equivalent ‘intellege’ and fortunately no medievalist has had the idea of coining such a word to match ‘cognize’ The Latin verb is often translated ‘understand’, but in Aquinas’ use it has a very broad sense, rather like the English ‘think’ We have seen that Aquinas divides the acts of the intellect into two classes: the grasp of non-complexes, on the one hand, and composition and division on the other.10 These correspond to two kinds of thought: thoughts of (such as the thought of a hawk), and thoughts that (such as the thought that a hawk is not a handsaw) It is not quite faithful to Aquinas, however, to equate the intellect with the capacity for thought, because he believed that animals, who not have intellects, could have simple thoughts It is more accurate to identify the intellect with the capacity for the kind of thought that only language-users can have For Aquinas, the intellect thinks in universals, and a grasp of universals is not within the capacity of animals: a universal can neither be sensed nor imagined Nonetheless, Aquinas believed that in human beings the operation of sense and imagination was essential both for the acquisition and for the exercise of universal concepts In the present life, he maintained, the proper object of the human intellect was the essence, or quiddity, of material objects; and this, he said, the intellect understood by abstraction from phantasms (phantasmata) By ‘phantasms’ Aquinas means the deliverances of sense and imagination, and without them Aquinas thinks that intellectual thought is impossible But he does not believe, as empiricist philosophers have believed, that ideas are derived from sense-experience by abstraction from, or selective inattention to, features of that experience If that were so, then animals no less than humans would be able to frame universal concepts, whereas Aquinas believed that such conceptualization demanded a species-speciWc human faculty, the agent intellect On the other hand, Aquinas does not believe, as rationalist philosophers have believed, that there are individual ideas inborn in every human being The human intellect, at birth, is for him a tabula rasa (ST 1a 85) The human intellect, for Aquinas, consists of two powers with a double function Beside the agent intellect, which is the capacity to abstract 10 See Ch above 236