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PREFACE xix analogies of structure in which the literal determinants are dropped, i.e. by an increasing remotion of attributes. To the extent that the sciences cut off some special aspect of nature and examine its properties by abstraction in order to formulate propositions about the natural entities, the Thomistic program for knowledge is not out of harmony with the methods of modern science. For St. Thomas, however, a nature is a substance primarily and only secondarily a qualified thing, as for instance quantity is its first accident but not commen- surately equivalent to substance. The synthetic interpretation rests throughout on analysis. Logic is the instrument which works with analytic forms, modes of composition and division, and thus exploits the structural forms by means of which propositions are about the things of nature. But science has an analytic remotion, or formal distance, from individuated natures, seeing that science deals with the universal which is always true or at least true for the most part. 1 From this it is to be understood that the terms which enter into propositions of science must be univocal signs of many, namely, universals abstracted from all contingent increments, so that the abstracted quiddity or whatness of the thing is grasped by way of a mode of rational being expressive of the essential or necessary features of the thing of nature. For St. Thomas philosophy passes through science to God, whereas modern science simply passes beyond the fact to the proposition about the fact, and worships, if at all, efficiency. Where the adherents of St. Augustine, namely, the Platonists generically, discovered innate ideas and infused illumination, St. Thomas posited an a posteriori program for grades of con- tinuous abstraction whereby not absolute but only relative knowledge is possible. His neglect of the ontological proof of 1 St. Thomas Aquinas, In II x. DC Anima, 12. "Scientia non cst par- ticularium, singularium, corruptibilium."