Note (return) — Chapter XII

The human mind, he tells us, has two kinds of intelligence--the passive intelligence (νοῦς παθητικός), which is the receptacle of forms (δεκτικὸν τοῦ εὶδους); and the active intelligence (νοῦς ποιητικός), which impresses the seal of thought upon the data furnished by experience, and combines them into the unity of a single judgment, thus attaining "general notions." 688 The passive intelligence (the "external perception" of modern psychology) perceives the individual forms which appear in the external world, and the active intelligence (the intellect proper) classifies and generalizes according to fixed laws or principles inherent in itself; but of these fixed laws--πρῶτα νοήµατα--first thoughts, or à priori ideas, he offers no proper account; they are, at most, purely subjective. This, it would seem, was, in effect, a return to the doctrine of Protagoras and his school, "that man--the individual--is the measure of all things." The aspects under which objects present themselves in consciousness, constitute our only ground of knowledge; we have no direct, intuitive knowledge of Being in se. The noetic faculty is simply a regulative faculty; it furnishes the laws under which we compare and judge, but it does not supply any original elements of knowledge. Individual things are the only real entities, 689 and "universals" have no separate existence apart from individuals in which they inhere as attributes or properties. They are consequently pure mental conceptions, which are fixed and recalled by general names. He thus substitutes a species of conceptual-nominalism in place of the realism of Plato. It is true that "real being" (τὸ ὄν) is with Aristotle a subject of metaphysical inquiry, but the proper, if not the only subsistence, or οὐαία, is the form or abstract nature of things. "The essence or very nature of a thing is inherent in the form and energy" 690 The science of Metaphysics is strictly conversant about these abstract intellectual forms just as Natural Philosophy is conversant about external objects, of which the senses give us information. Our knowledge of these intellectual forms is, however, founded upon "beliefs" rather than upon immediate intuition, and the objective certainty of science, upon the subjective necessity of believing, and not upon direct apperception.