Ockham and Scotus and Natural Theology

Throughout his criticism of Scotus' doctrine of the existence and oneness of God, Ockham remains faithful to his basic philosophical notions, which are radically different from those of the Subtle Doctor. The two theologians do not differ in what they believe about the Christian God, but they diverge on what human reason left to its own resources can prove about him. Ockham finds only "adequate reasons" for affirming his existence - reasons that fall short of strict demonstration. Philosophy assures us of an ultimate ground of the universe: a primary conserving cause or causes, but these might be the heavenly bodies whose causality we experience in our world. Scotus can go further in his rational pursuit of the Christian God because he makes use of a different philosophy, according to which there is real community among beings along with individuality. Ockham fragments the universe into myriad individuals, from which all real community has been eliminated. This leads him to an empirical notion of causality, according to which a cause shares nothing with its effect (except perhaps some of its matter), their bond being simply the recognized presence of effect to cause. As Léon Baudry perceptively remarks, Scotism and Ockhamism are not just two doctrines but two different styles of thinking.

- Maurer, The Philosophy of William of Ockham in the Light of its Principles, 182-183.

I still plan on posting some longer excerpts, but I've been busy over the Christmas season with travels and getting ready for the new semester.

Reflecting on Essence and Existence

I wanted to address some of what commenter "AT" says in this thread, not because I have a burning urge to refute him, but because this is a topic I'm none too sure of myself and I'd like to reflect on it. So I hope our commenter will forgive my using his remarks as a springboard. He writes:

To say something that doesn't exist has a potency to exist doesn't seem to make sense. If true this would mean the things created by God had a potency to be created. Where would this potency come from? Not from God because in God there is no potency. Also, creation was a free act of God and didn't depend on anything else.

I think that many theologians would admit that "the things created by God had a potency to be created". This potency doesn't come from anywhere except the intrinsic properties of the essences themselves. Now, the commenter makes two claims, each of which is true in one sense and - according to some theories at least - false in another respect.

1) The potency to be created cannot come from God because there is no potency in God.

I think we need to distinguish, as Faber does, between active and passive potency. God can't have passive potency whereby something other that himself can cause anything about or in him. But God can and does have an active potency to cause things other than himself.

I think that we would want to say that the "creatibility" of essences before creation comes from God, not insofar as he has the ability to create them, but insofar as he understands them. That is, the active potency of God to create (in the example) a rose, comes from, and is logically posterior to, his understanding of the essence of a rose, whether or not he decides ever to create any. "AT" says in another comment, "I think you will agree that God knows things which have never existed, don't now exist, and will never exist. In what sense could they be said to have a potency to exist?" To which I reply, that have a potency to exist insofar as they can exist but do not. It can't be the case the essence of a rose in itself is posterior to its existence, since it had to be an "existible" object, intelligible to the mind of God and willable by his will, in order for it to be created. This is because a rose has an intrinsic intelligible structure, a nature, a quod quid erat esse, which can be grasped and expressed whether there is an actually existing rose. This essence exists in the mind of God as an exemplar, a divine idea, and the existent rose is conforms to it, in a way analogous to the way the concept of the rose in our minds conforms to the essence as existing in the real rose.

To show that the essence pre-exists in the mind of God, before God decides to create it, we can advert to the (presumed) fact that there are other possible kinds of flowers which God also knows about, but has never created and will never create. The essences of these flowers remain externally non-existent, in the sense that there are no such flowers, but there still are such essences, in the sense that they are possible and God knows them to be such.

2) Creation is a free act of God and doesn't depend on anything else.

From the foregoing we can infer that creation, while indeed a free act, does depend on something else, namely the prior understanding of what is to be created, not as a cause of the act of creation per se, but as a sine qua non. For if the essence to be created was not an intelligible structure and if it were not already understood in the mind of God, God could never will to create it. This is no way compromises the freedom of divine action, since the act of understanding something as creatible in no way determines that it should be created, but it is a necessary condition (as Faber said a little while back, it's an essentially ordered co-cause).

The difficulty of the "real distinction" is that it treats essences as though they are the matter of existence. Just as matter, according to St Thomas, does not exist until actualized by some form, so form does not exist until actualized by existence. Can an essence, like the nature of a rose, be thought of in this respect?

But if we don't want to think of the form or essence as a potential principle, then we have to grapple with this separability criterion - which amounts to the claim that the essence can "exist" in the mind of man or of God, but without "existing" in its own right. Since the essences of elanor and simbelmyne "are", in the sense that I can tell you what sort of flowers they are and what their natural habitats are and what are the differences between them, and yet since they do not exist, since the flowers are fictional and there aren't any, it seems that it isn't true that if there is an essence then a thing of which it is the essence exists.

There's lots more to think about here, and perhaps I'll come back to it soon.

Contradiction in the Trinity?

Dr Vallicella has another post about the Trinity, here:

I don't assert, but I suspect that it's directed at least partially at me. He writes:

5. Is the doctrine thinkable (conceivable) without contradiction? . . . It is difficult to get some people to appreciate the force and importance of (5) because they are dogmatists who accept the Trinity doctrine as true simply because they were brought up to believe it, or because it is something their church teaches. Since they accept it as true, no question of its logical coherence arises for them. And so they think that anyone who questions the doctrine must not understand it. To 'set the objector straight' they then repeat the very verbal formulas the logical coherence of which is in question. "What's the problem? There is one God in three divine Persons!" They think that if they only repeat the formulas often enough, then the objector will 'get it.' But it is they who do not get it, since they do not understand the logical problems to which the doctrinal formulations give rise.

I suspect that this is directed at me, or at least that he thinks I'm one of these people. In his reply to my first letter to him he wrote As you no doubt will grant, the mere repetition of verbal formulas is not the same as an exposition of those formulas that shows them to be intelligible. After my response to his reply he wrote off the discussion as not worthwhile, then writes the above. I infer that he thinks my response was nothing more than a repetition of verbal formulas and that I don't understand the logical problem involved. Now I think that my response indicated no such thing. What I was attempting to do, at least, was to clarify the true sense that the verbal formulas hold, rather than a false and plainly contradictory sense. Now this is indeed different from directly showing that the doctrine is coherent. But, as I've already said, analyzing the doctrine must only come after getting the doctrine right. Now I suggest that the reformulations of the doctrine by Dr Vallicella and his sources distort it through the lens of a metaphysics not designed to accommodate it, so that the "logical problem" takes on the character of a petitio principii. I believe that the very way that Dr Vallicella presents the problem begs the question.

Now Dr Vallicella writes that "the gist of the Trinity doctrine is as follows:"

1. Monotheism: There is exactly one God.

2. Divinity of Persons: The Father is God; the Son is God; the Holy Ghost is God.

3. Distinctness of Persons: The Father is not the Son; and the Holy Ghost is not the Father or the Son.

And he follows this up with:

The problem is to show how these propositions are logically consistent, that is, how they can all be true, but without falling into heresy. If you cannot see the problem, you are not paying attention, or you lack intelligence, or your thought-processes are being distorted by ideological commitments.

So, presumably, Dr Vallicella thinks that responses such as the one I gave are not worth responding since I fall under one or all three of these deficiencies. Well, I wouldn't presume to make claims about my intelligence, and if my thought-processes were being distorted by ideological commitments I may well fail to observe it, but the problem is certainly not that I am not paying attention, since I have been studying Latin Trinitarian theology for many years now.

Now it's not that I "cannot see the problem," since there is a prima facie difficulty. How is God both one and three? How are the three identical with the one but not with each other? But the logic of the solution is not very difficult, hardly more difficult than the formulation of the problem. The key is to properly define the terms and distinguish the kinds of identity involved. But once this is done there is no logical problem at all, because the doctrine does not affirm and deny the same thing and in the same respect:

2. Divinity of Persons: The Father is God; the Son is God; the Holy Ghost is God.

It is orthodox to reformulate this as:

2a. Divinity of Persons: The Father, Son, and Holy Ghost are identical with respect to the divine essence.

And now:

3. Distinctness of Persons: The Father is not the Son; and the Holy Ghost is not the Father or the Son.

It is orthodox to reformulate this as:

3a. The Father, Son, and Holy Ghost are distinct with respect to their personally constitutive relations of origin.

So: The divine persons are identical in one respect and distinct in another respect. This is very different from saying "3=1" or "~(things which are equal to the same thing are also equal to each other)".

As far as I'm concerned this dispenses with, at least, any obvious contradiction. The only way to make the contradiction reappear is by importing some such question-begging premise as the one I quoted in an earlier comment thread by Cartwright, from an article cited with approval by Dr Vallicella:

The heretical conclusion [tritheism] follows, by the general principle that if every A is a B then there cannot be fewer B's than A's.

Cartwright claims that this principle "is evident to the natural light of reason," but the examples he gives are not analogous to the case of the Trinity: "Thus, if every cat is an animal, there cannot be fewer animals than cats; if every senator from Massachusetts is a Democrat, there cannot be fewer Democrats than senators from Massachusetts. Just so, if every Divine Person is a God, there cannot be fewer Gods than Divine Persons." But these examples all presuppose a paradigm of the relation of essence to supposit which is explicitly denied in the doctrine of the Trinity, for reasons explained in my last post. In a quote from St Bonaventure I have already pointed out the difference between humanity in Peter and Paul, for instance, and divinity in the Father and the Son. In the first case Cartwright's principle is correct: If every apostle is a man, then there cannot be fewer men than apostles. But the multiplication of apostles involves necessarily the multiplication of individual instances of humanity. On the other hand since deity is not a common nature like humanity, the multiplication of divine supposits cannot be presumed to involve the multiplication of individual instances of deity. Furthermore it should be clear that the claim is not that "The Father is a God," and "The Son is a God, for this formulation, again, presupposes that "God" is a universal and "divinity" a common nature, a "multiply instantiable entity," which I have already denied.*

One may decide that the way that Catholic theology explains the relation of the essence to the divine persons, and their distinction from one another solely according to their personally constitutive relations of origin, is incoherent or otherwise unsatisfying. But in order to do so one must engage this problem and locate the contradiction somewhere further back than where Dr Vallicella does so.

As it stands Dr Vallicella's attempts to grapple with the Trinity are not as off the mark as Dawkins' flying spaghetti monsters or his absurd attempts to refute arguments to a First Cause by resorting to a childish infinite regress argument. The difference, however, is one of degree, not of kind. If Dr Vallicella's aim really is, as stated, to discover whether the doctrine is thinkable without contradiction, then he must attempt to think it as it is thought, without importing foreign premises.

*There is so little danger of Catholic doctrine falling into tritheism or affirming any multiplication of the divine essence that I would be more sympathetic to an objection claiming that the three persons could not be really distinct at all than to this one claiming that they are too distinct to preserve divine unity. After all the word person does not signify a substance at all, but a relation! And the divine persons are defined as internal relations in the one God. Just look at Aquinas, Summa I q.29 a.4: "Distinctio autem in divinis non fit nisi per relationes originis, ut dictum est supra. Relatio autem in divinis non est sicut accidens inhaerens subiecto, sed est ipsa divina essentia: unde est subsistens, sicut essentia divina subsistit. Sicut ergo deitas est Deus, ita paternitas divina est Deus Pater, qui est persona divina. Persona igitur divina significat relationem ut subistentem. Et hoc est significare relationem per modum substantiae quae est hypostasis subsistens in natura divina; licet subsistens in natura divina non sit aliud quam natura divina. Based on texts like this I could give more credence to an objection that there were not really three at all than to the objection that according to this doctrine God is not really one.

Reply to the Maverick Philosopher

Dr Vallicella has honored me by responding to my last post at his blog, here:

Here is most of the reply that I posted there:

According to him: You write that God is a nature, and that this nature is thrice instantiated in the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost. But the reader may notice that I never wrote any such thing. It is clear that Dr Vallicella taken the word “nature” in the wrong sense, and read “instantiation” into it when this is doctrinallly inappropriate. Again, he writes, Your talk of instantiation suggests that God is a multiply instantiable entity whose instances are F, S, HG.

But I very much wish to deny this. It is central to monotheism that there is only one instance of the divine nature, and so whatever the multiplication of persons in God may be taken to mean, it cannot mean that there is more than one instance of God or individual God, which as he rightly points out compromises monotheism. As St Bonaventure says (In Sent. I.2.1): “It is impossible for there to be several gods, and if the meaning of the word ‘God’ is correctly received it is not only impossible but even unintelligible.”

So his use of “nature” to mean “multiply instantiable entity” suggests that the divine nature is a universal which is individuated in three instances. But the divine nature is not a universal, apt to be applied to or predicated of many, but a “form” which is singular by necessity. Theologians explain this necessity because of God’s simplicity (in order for a universal to be multiply instantiated it has to enter into composition with some individuating factors, but the divine nature is neither composible nor composed), God’s infinity (the divine nature is without limitation, but every case of instantiation involves a delimitation of one instance from all others), and so forth. Duns Scotus writes (in Reportatio I-A 2.3.3), “Whatever is of itself just a ‘this’ cannot possibly be multiplied, but whatever exists in the divine that is of one sort, is just of itself ‘this’ [i.e. is individual per se]”.

Every orthodox theologian, therefore, denies that in the Trinitarian productions – the generation of the Son by the Father or the spiration of the Holy Ghost by the Father and the Son – God produces another God, precisely because the divine nature cannot be multiplied. Again, Scotus (Reportatio I-A 5.1.1): “The essence neither procreates nor is procreated, and all the arguments that I find why it does not generate really come down to this. If this thing generates, then it procreates a real thing distinct from this essence. For no real thing generates itself. Therefore, it procreates some real thing that is not in the divine nature, because intrinsically there is no diversity there . . .”

If the divine nature were multiplied, there would be a plurality of Gods, and so a plurality of divine existences, operations, etc. But it’s intrinsic to the doctrine of the Trinity that the being or existence of the Father and the Son is one being. The operation whereby God creates the world is one operation, equally belonging to all three persons, not three cooperative activites. The Father, Son, and Holy Ghost are not one God because they are each a (different) instance of the divine nature, but because they are each the same instance of the divine nature. Scotus once more (Reportato I-A 4.2): God is Father, Son, and Holy Ghost “by a singularity which is shared, by which ‘this God’ is common to all three. And a singularity or haecceity similar to this is not to be found in creatures, because in creatures nothing is a ‘this’ except by the ultimate haecceity, which is completely incapable of being shared.”

That is, for creatures a supposit or hypostasis is only distinguished from another one of the same nature by the multiplication of the nature through an individuating difference. “Humanity” is not a singular individual nature by itself, but only by an additional instantiating factor. But “deity” is a singular individual nature by itself.

This is why the divine persons are said to be distinguished from one another only by their relations of origin. The Son has the very same deity that the Father has, which means he shares every single attribute belonging to the Father, except Paternity. In begetting the Father communicates his numerically identical essence and existence to the Son, and fails to communicate only his ingeneracy, the fact that he is unbegotten. St Bonaventure writes (In Sent. 1.4.1.1): Whatever the Son has, he has either freom himself or from another; but he has deity, and not from himself, for then he would be unbegotten, therefore he has it from another.”

So there is no individuting factor in the three divine Persons except their relations of origin, and these relations are within the single divine nature or essence rather than multiplications of it. Paternity and Filiation are ways in which the one God is related to himself. The divine persons as distinct from one another have only relative subsistence, as opposed to the absolute subsistence of the divine nature. Again, this is contrast to the state of things we’re familiar with, in which for there to be many human persons there have to be many humanities. St Bonaventure once more (In Sent. 1.4.1.2): “Father and Son and Holy Ghost are united in this name ‘God’, not from diverse causes [of individuality] but by reason of one deity or essence. [In contrast] there is a union of diverse causes, for example, when Peter and John are united in ‘man’, but by reason of diverse instances of humanity, because the humanity of Peter is one thing while that of John is another. . . . but Father and Son and Holy Spirit are united in one deity or essence but are distinct by reason of the plurality of persons.”

Any nature except the divine nature is a “multiply instantiable entity”, not individual through itself, and so the multiplication of hypostases, persons, or supposits requires the multiplication of the nature through some individuating factor in addition to the essence, whereby John’s humanity is specifically identical to but numerically distinct from Peter’s humanity. But, as I said before, the divine nature is necessarily individual through itself, and so in the multiplication of supposits in God the nature “deity” remains numerically as well as specifically identical, and the supposits or person are only distinct through their constituting relations.

Theoremata Scoti, Pars III B 2

Now we proceed with the second part of the section section of part three of Scotus' Theoremata, on conceptual analysis. After the lone conclusion about act we begin the numbered conclusions about concepts.

Conclusion 1: The analysis of concepts has a stopping-point.

This is of course the same as the first conclusion in section A. The explanation is also similar. For otherwise by definition nothing would be perfectly knowable, because none of the more primary things which might belong to it would be perfectly knowable either. Analysis has to stop at something which just is understood. "For neither can we conceive of infinites in one act, nor in infinite [acts], which could not be passed through," and so forth.

Conclusion 2: Every analyzable concept is primarily analyzed into determinable and determining [concepts], since into potential and actual or into material and formal. The determinable concept is called quidditative, the determining qualitative. Therefore essentially [predicative concepts] exceed quidditative ones.

This is quite different from the second conclusion in section A, although related to material presented later on there. But Scotus has decided not to continue with the previous thought and see where this determinable/determining set of concepts leads him--which is somewhere quite different. Read on.

Conclusion 3: Determinable and determining essentially include nothing the same, nor does one include the other, and this they are fundamentally [primo] diverse.

This is of course related to the corollary following the second conclusion in section A, and follows from the same reasons given there.

Conclusion 4: There is some last determining [concept] of every analyzable [from Conclusion 1]; [it must be] unique [from the unnumbered conclusion at the end of the last post]; [it must be] simple, because it is the last [therefore not further analyzable].

"And this one is properly called the determining one, because whatever else in included in that concept is determinable with respect to it, although with respect to [something] prior it might be determining in some way, but not [with respect to] the total concept."

Corollary 1: Therefore there are as many analyzable concepts as there are properly determining ones [which are] primarily diverse from the determinable ones. . . . Corollary 2: Therefore there is no concept which is common to all, [...] but the analysis of anything stops with what is qualitatively unanalyzable.

Again, otherwise there is an infinite progression. And if there were not more than one primary and irreducible concept, then there could be no different concepts at all, since each would contain the same formal content.

Conclusion 5: Not just any concept is analyzed at once into qualitatively unanalyzable ones.

This is the converse of the preceding corollary. Because if it were otherwise, then any two concepts whatsoever would be primarily diverse, rather than (as is the case) many concepts sharing something in common as well as having something different. If every concept were immediately analyzable into primary constituents, everything would be in its own genus.

Conclusion 6: Quidditative concepts are more common than analyzed ones, but in analysis the posterior are more common than the prior.

Conclusion 7: There is a stopping-point in quidditative analysis at one first concept.

"But this concept is the most common [from Conclusion 6], and it is the concept of being."

Wait a minute! Hold on! Section A, especially Conclusions 2 and 5, were looking like a direct rejection of the univocity of the concept of being, which was strange and disconcerting, because this is Scotus after all. But now, after largely similar definitions and conclusions, Scotus is clearly affirming a univocal concept of being! What's going on? Perhaps the explanation which follows here explains the difference in the thinking between the earlier and later versions:

"Now there can be certainty about this and yet doubt remain; this is not true of any other quidditative concept: it would be certitude and doubt about the same concept. {*Interpolated note: One can know quidditatively that potency is a being, yet not know what kind of being or whether subject or accident.}

There is some more stuff on this subject, less clear than the foregoing, in the next few paragraphs. More helpful are the parallel texts from other works the editors give us. The key point here is that we can have the concept of being confusedly in a way that we can't with any other concept. I cannot really be unclear whether white is a quality or a quantity without simply failing to have the concept. I either know it or I don't. But I can be sure that it is something.

More immediately relevant to us is the application this have to Conclusion 5 in section A, which was, as we recall, "No identical concept is per se common to the created and the uncreated." Why does Scotus not repeat this? Because he's now being more clear about the difference between the concept of being and other concepts. Remember that properly-formed concepts about extramental things are not fictions, but have real adequation to the external world. And our concepts if true need to reflect the structure of things outside of ourselves. I can't think that man is a quality or that white is a place. This is not merely false but nonsense.

Now it is also nonsense to think that God and creatures have anything whatsoever in common. God does not exist in the way that man does; he does not belong to the genus of substance as man does, nor does he fall under any other genus. He's not the sort of thing that the rest of things are. And yet! He exists, and because the concept of being is indeterminate in any sense whatsoever, we can think that God is and not be wrong, as we would be wrong to attribute to him any other creaturely determination. So--just as Scotus says above that I can know that potency is a being while unsure whether it's a subject or accident or what kind of being--I can think accurately that God exists, without being sure whether God is temporal or eternal, material or immaterial, willing or bound by necessity, etc.

St Bonaventure makes this exact same point in his Disputed Questions on the Mystery of the Trinity. And it simply must be accepted as true, or else what philosophers and theologians have been doing for the last three thousand years is simply nonsense. Homer thought that divinity was plural and finite and was wrong, but he really was talking about the providential order of the universe. Aristotle thought God knew only himself and made the world by necessity, and was wrong, but he was talking about God. Tertullian and Manes thought God was a finely diffused material substance, and they were wrong, but they were talking about God. Therefore we allude to God using the same concept of "something that is" that we do to everything else, even though in point of metaphysical fact there is nothing whatsoever really in common between God and any creature.

Conclusion 8: There is only one most common quidditative concept.

Everything else will fall into some category. "Because if there were two, both would be included in any other quidditative [concept]. Therefore either one would be in the other and then one would be most common, or else neither in either and then one is determinable and the other determining, and so only one is quidditative." See Conclusions 1 and 6.

Conclusion 9: Some quidditative concepts are immediately contained under the first quidditative [concept].

These are "famously posited to be only ten," the categories which cannot be reduced to each other or to anything more common, except being, and are the ten primary genera. Being itself does not fall under any genus.

Conclusion 10: There is some qualitative concept denominating any quidditative one [...]

"This is proved, because the first denominating [concept] per se denominates whatever is below. These first ones denominate being as one, true, good. Thus they will denominate per se any quidditative [concept]. These are called the most common denominatives."

Conclusion 11: No most common denominative concept includes per se the first quidditative concept, nor therefore any inferior one, and so [they are] in no genus . . . Thus they are qualitative transcendentals.

Otherwise it would be nonsense to say "one being", since "one" and "being" would have an identical meaning, which they obviously don't.

So here we conclude with Scotus coming upon four transcendentals, one quidditative, three qualitative, which neither fall into any categories, describe any genera, nor follow the general rules applying to nearly every concept. None of this was included in the version of Theoremata part III labeled section A. Is it perhaps the case that we can't simply speak in the realm of concepts without examining the metaphysics behind them, since not every concept has the same kind of reference to the extramental world? Could it be the case that a denial of conceptual univocity comes from an insufficient examination of the uniqueness of the transcendentals? And--interesting as this conclusion may be--what does the difference between the two sections here tell us about the nature of the work we are examining? What exactly is Scotus doing in the Theoremata?

Further reflection will have to wait for later posts.

Theoremata Scoti, Pars I

The first part of Scotus' infamous Theoremata is concerned with the universal, and its relation to the singular existent on the one hand and the intellect on the other hand. There are six main propositions, with explanations and--as always with Scotus--some rabbit trails. This preliminary study will be English-only, since I don't feel like typing in the Latin (hey, if you want real scholarship, read a print journal!), but for the record I'm using as my text Vol. II of Scotus' Opera Philosophica.

I. The intelligible precedes intellection by nature.

"Which is because reception [passio] presupposes an agent and every action is about something." If we are to understand something there must be something to understand. The intellect does not create all of its own intelligible content, any more than the sense power creates the objects of the senses: sight presupposes the visible object as well as light and a working eye. Unlike sight, of course, the intellect can create some of its intelligible content.

II. It is impossible for the first intelligible to be caused by intellection.

"Which is from comparing intellection and the intelligible to the same intellect." Even if the intellect received no information from outside itself it would still have to understand something other than its own concepts: no intellect could know nothing but logic. The intellect itself is an intelligible object before it understands or is understood.

III. We understand the universal first.

Scotus spends a lot of time arguing this point. Unlike, say, Thomas, Scotus admits that the singular is intelligible per se, since for him singularity is a formal property, not some material detritus. Why then is the singular not the first intelligible object? After all, it is the singular thing which acts, not its abstracted universal nature, and so the singular should be the first thing to act on the intellect. Scotus reminds us, however, that there is for us no science of the singular, that the intellect forms a universal by separating the intelligible nature from the leftover singularity. "It is true [that it is the singular which acts], but not insofar as it is singular. For the nature is the ratio of acting." Just as in natural generation the species is multiplied, but not the individual, so in cognition the singular gives rise to an intelligible universal, not a proper concept of the singular.

Our lack of knowledge about the singular per se is neither because we fail to actualize our capacity for it, nor because the singular is unintelligible per se, but because our intellect is too imperfect to achieve it. Just as an intrinsically visible object might not be seen by feeble eyes in weak candlelight, the light of our intellect is strong enough to illumine the nature but not the singularity. Our knowledge then is always imperfect. "For although in a precise comparison the nature is a more perfect knowable than the singularity, nevertheless the cognition of a singular nature is more perfect than that of the nature alone, because it is more distinct."

Scotus goes on to discuss possible reasons for this weakness of the intellect at some length, with more comparisons to the sense powers.

IV. To any universal there corresponds in reality [in re] some grade of entity, in which the things contained under the universal itself coincide.

Scotus says this should be clear from I. and II. For if the universal is not created by the intellect then it must have something corresponding to it in reality. This correspondence is not fictional, but real, or else there could be no true quidditative predication and metaphysics would not differ from logic.

V. In essential predication it is impossible to go to infinity.

Otherwise nothing would be knowable, since we can't pass through an infinite series, nor can our finite intellect apprehend an infinite series all at once. Definition has a limit, and we can really know what something is, even if only confusedly.

VI. It is simply impossible for the first and most universal to be plural.

There cannot be a plurality of first and most universal concepts or grades of entity. In analyzing we always proceed to the simpler concept, and therefore eventually to the first and simplest. And as in any order it is impossible to find two firsts, it is even more so in the highest order, to which multitude is more repugnant.

To conclude:

I. The universal, although produced by the agent intellect, is strictly speaking not caused by it, because something in reality corresponds to it. II. That universal, insofar as it has being in something or with something singular, we first understand as a kind of primary whole object, although the intellect from its imperfection can per se understand the nature as a quasi-part of the primary whole object, and can distinguish this from that [i.e., can distinguish the nature as such from the whole object], while not conceiving the other part, namely the singularity.--For which intellection the action of the agent intellect is required. Whence any part of the first whole object can be first for the intellect, and afterwards the intellect can per se distinguish it from another. Whence a child first distinguishes his father from non-man, then from non-father.