Read Concerning Being And Essence Online

xx PREFACE 

God's existence in favor of a posteriori arguments taken from 
principles of Aristotelian physics sums up his rejection of the 
a priori. Moreover the multiplicity of the natural order can only 
be drawn from that order and not from rational psychology 
as an independent moment of intellectual intuition. The divine 
light exists indeed in a remote sense, though not as ideas 
immediately instrumental in analytic thought. Man's active in- 
tellect, operating according to the conditions of abstraction, is 
sufficient to explain how the intellect knows. 

The basis of formal certitude rests in the reflexive act of the 
soul, the 'reflection of the intellect on its own act/ It is on this 
level and through this mode that the intellect grounds the 
syntax of logic respecting both complex and incomplex modes 
of reason. Logic is a discipline dealing with rational entities 
knowable apart from things of nature, and hence the logician 
does not have to know all sciences before he can formulate the 
modes of logic. Logic asserts forms of discourse, but the natural 
sciences use the forms to make assertions about things existing 
in the natural order. Accordingly, the logician unversed in 
biology, for example, will not know the natural entities of 
biology, yet he will know the incomplex and complex dis- 
cursive modes by means of which things biological are for- 
mulable. 

This presents two aspects: i. The reflexive analysis of modes 
of thought, and 2. Natural entities existing independently of 
the knowing intellect. God did not create man and leave man 
to create the inferior beings in the order of creation. Logic is 
then presupposed for science, but in addition the propositions of 
natural science are about univocal signs of many. This latter 
relationship must be conditioned by the thing if there is to be 
an adequation between the sign and the thing signaled based 
on some other principle than the power of the mind to for- 
mulate arbitrary associations.