Ordinatio

Fifth [n.24] I say that these things that are known about God are known through species of creatures, because either the more and the less universal are known through the same species of the less universal, or each has its own intelligible species proper to it; at any rate, what can impress a species of the less universal on the intellect can also cause a species of anything more universal; and thus can creatures, which impress their proper species on the intellect, also impress species of the transcendentals that belong in common to them and to God. And then the intellect can, by its own virtue, use many species together to conceive together those things which these are species of, as for example by the species of ‘good’ and the species of ‘supreme’ and the species of ‘act’ to conceive some ‘supreme and most actual good’. This is plain through an argument a minori: for the imaginative power [sc. which is lesser than the intellectual power] can use the species of diverse sensible things to imagine a composite of those diverse things, as is plain when imagining a golden mountain.¹

From this is evident a refutation of what is said in the preceding opinion [n.21, interpolated text] about the [cognitive] ‘digging down’; for by digging never is what is not under the dig found by the dig. But there does not exist under the concept of a creature any concept or species representing something proper to God that is of an altogether different idea from what belongs to a creature – as was proved by the second argument in the second article [n.35]. Therefore, by digging down is no such concept found. – And as to what is added, the simile, about the estimative power [n.21, interpolated text], I say that it seems a falsehood is being adduced to confirm another falsehood. For, if a sheep remain in the same nature and with the same natural affection for the lamb and yet it were changed, by a miracle, to be like a wolf in all sensible accidents, as color, shape, and sound and the rest of this sort, the lamb would flee the sheep thus altered just as it would flee a wolf. And yet in the sheep thus altered there would be no meaning of the harmful but of the agreeable. Therefore, the estimative power of the lamb would not dig down to discover under the sensible species the intention of the agreeable, but would be precisely as moved in accord with its sense appetite as the sensible accidents would move it. If you say that the intention there of the agreeable does not multiply itself, because such accidents are not agreeable to such intention and the intention of the agreeable is not reduplicated without agreeable accidents – this is nothing, because if a lamb were to flee a wolf on account of the perception of something harmful conceived by its estimative power, and if the perception is not reduplicated along with the sensible accidents (because it is not reduplicated with them in this tendentious case), then either there is here a digging down of the lamb to an intention of the harmful that is null, or if the lamb does not flee here because of digging down to it, then not otherwise either.