Excerpt from The Function of the Phantasm in St. Thomas Aquinas The intellect directly knows universals and only by very obscure and complicated reasoning can Aquinas bring the intellect to know particulars. On meeting this at first, it strikes us as rather ridiculous to say that it is difficult to explain how man as an intellectual creature can know individuals. We think that we do know individuals. As a matter of fact, a little reflection will show that the real difficulty is to explain how even in sense knowledge an animal can ever know the individual. Aristotle says that the intellect grasps only the universal. No man since his time more perfectly assimilated this than Thomas Aquinas. One could wish that Aristotle too had considered a point of View and a very important one, on which he is silent. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.