The Divine Lamp

NOTE: The words in regular script are Aristotle’s; those in italics are mine

A1. All men by nature desire to know. An indication of this is the delight we take in our senses; for even apart from their usefulness they are loved for themselves; and above all others the sense of sight. For not only with a view to action, but even when we are not going to do anything, we prefer seeing (one might say) to everything else. The reason is that this, most of all the senses, makes us know and brings to light many differences between things.

In his commentary on the Metaphysics, St Thomas Aquinas gives three reasons why “all men by nature desire to know.” The first is that”each thing naturally desires its own perfection. Hence matter is also said to desire form as any imperfect thing desires its perfection. Therefore, since the intellect, by which man is what he is, considered in itself is all things potentially, and becomes them actually only through knowledge, because the intellect is none of the things that exist before it understands them, as is stated in Book 3 of THE SOUL, so each man naturally desires knowledge just as matter desires form. The second reason is that each thing has a natural inclination to perform its proper operation, as something hot is naturally inclined to heat, and something heavy to be moved downwards. Now the proper operation of man as man is to understand, for by reason of this he differs from all other things. Hence the desire of man is naturally inclined to understand, and therefore to possess scientific knowledge. The third reason is that it is desirable for each thing to be united to its source, since it is in this that the perfection of each thing consists. This is also the reason why circular motion is the most perfect motion, as is proved in Book 8 of THE PHYSICS, because its terminus is united to its starting point. Now it is only by means of his intellect that man is united to the separate substance, which are the source of the human intellect and that to which the human intellect is related as something imperfect to something perfect. It is for this reason, too, that the ultimate happiness of man consists in this union. Therefore man naturally desires to know.”

For Aristotle, man learns through his senses: By what medium is it that the oak tree, situated at a distance of ten yards, say, from my eye, affects my organism?…

Origin of intellectual knowledge: There is a well known adage of scholastic and Thomistic psychology, which states that we derive the content of our abstract ideas from the content of our sensations, and, by means of these, ultimately from the material universe. Nihil est in intellectu quod prius non fuerit sensu. “There is nothing in the mind that is not first in the senses.” Our ideas of life, strength, greatness, motion, action exercised or received, double, half, left, right, ect.,- all these and a thousand others equally abstract in nature- are derived from the sense perceptions which surround us. We have proper and direct knowledge of the material world only. Our mind is closely united to our body, and it is in and through the corporeal bodies that we obtain our intellectual knowledge. It follows from this that even moral ideas (justice, right, ect.,) and our knowledge of spiritual beings (the mind, spirits, God) is derived from, and must be expressed in terms of the material, by means of comparison, analogy, negation, and transcendence. We have only an improper and indirect idea of what is spiritual. Although we can prove that there is such a thing as a spiritual being, we do not know in what it consists properly, and our feeble minds have to conceive it by applying to it the notions of being, reality, causality, etc., which have come to us through the channel of our senses. (SOURCE)

Aristotle thinks-and most people would agree-that in light of how our knowledge begins, sight is the most important and valued of the senses, for it is the most useful.

By nature animals are born with the faculty of sensation, and from sensation memory is produced in some of them, though not in others. And therefore the former are more intelligent and apt at learning than those which cannot remember; those which are incapable of hearing sounds are intelligent though they cannot be taught, e.g., the bee, and any other race of animals that may be like it; and those which besides memory have this sense of hearing can be taught.

All animals have sentient souls. All (apparently) have the sense of touch, which for some may be the only sense they possess. Animals with more sense powers are higher (more perfect) than those with less (the highest being man). Further, other factors contribute to this gradation of being: e.g., though all animals have sensation, not all are by nature able to develop memory, which is derived from sensation.

The animals other than man live by appearances and memories, and have but little of connected experience; but the human race lives also by art and reasonings. Now from memory experience is produced in men; for the several memories of the same thing produce finally the capacity of a single experience. And experience seems pretty much like science and art, but really science and art come to men through experience; for ‘experience made art’, as Polus says (in Plato’s Gorgias), ‘but inexperience lucj’. Now art arises when from many notions gained by experience one universal judgment about a class of objects is produced. For to have a judgment that when Callais was ill of this disease this liquid did him good, and similarly in the case of Socrates and in many individual cases, is a matter of experience; but to judge that it has done good to all persons of a certain constitution, marked of in one class, when they were ill of this disease, e.g., to phlegmatic or bilious people when burning with fever,-this is a matter of art

As the opening chapter of the Metaphysics proceeds, Aristotle notes that memory is the cause of experience in men, and that from many such remembered experiences of a particular action producing like results all or most of the time, art develops. Notice also that the way in which art develops from experience is similar to the way in which experience develops from memory. “(T)he way in which art rises from experience is the same as the way spoken of above in which experience arises from memory. For just as one experiential cognition comes from many memories of a thing, so does one universal judgment about all similar things come from the apprehension of many experiences. Hence art has this [unified view] more than experience because experience is concerned only with singulars, whereas art has to do with universals.” (AQUINAS)