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Imagination
The second-highest of the four ways of knowing, and the greatest one available to human beings. Philosophy argues that reason includes the insights of imagination and sense-perception, because the universal concepts that reason formulates “can be both imagined and perceived by the senses.” Philosophy also emphasizes to Boethius that reason is human beings’ best tool for knowing the world, since it looks at universal patterns rather than particular instances. Therefore, for humans, reason should supersede imagination and sense-perception. However, Philosophy emphasizes that God’s divine intelligence is still greater than reason, and therefore holds that “human reason [should] bow before” it.
Human Reason Quotes in The Consolation of Philosophy
The The Consolation of Philosophy quotes below are all either spoken by Human Reason or refer to Human Reason. For each quote, you can also see the other terms and themes related to it (each theme is indicated by its own dot and icon, like this one:
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Book III, Part X
Quotes
It is the universal understanding of the human mind that God, the author of all things, is good. Since nothing can be conceived better than God, everyone agrees that that which has no superior is good. Reason shows that God is so good that we are convinced that His goodness is perfect. Otherwise He couldn’t be the author of creation. There would have to be something else possessing perfect goodness over and above God, which would seem to be superior to Him and of greater antiquity. For all perfect things are obviously superior to those that are imperfect. Therefore, to avoid an unending argument, it must be admitted that the supreme God is to the highest degree filled with supreme and perfect goodness. But we have agreed that perfect good is true happiness; so that it follows that true happiness is to be found in the supreme God.
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Book IV, Part VI
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The relationship between the ever-changing course of Fate and the stable simplicity of Providence is like that between reasoning and understanding, between that which is coming into being and that which is, between time and eternity, or between the moving circle and the still point in the middle.
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Book V, Part IV
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We all agree that we cannot deduce a proof firmly founded upon reason from signs or arguments imported from without: it must come from arguments that fit together and lead from one to the next.
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Book V, Part V
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In the same way, human reason refuses to believe that divine intelligence can see the future in any other way except that in which human reason has knowledge. This is how the argument runs: if anything does not seem to have any certain and predestined occurrence, it cannot be foreknown as a future event. Of such, therefore, there is no foreknowledge: and if we believe that even in this case there is foreknowledge, there will be nothing which does not happen of necessity. If, therefore, as beings who have a share of reason, we can judge of the mind of God, we should consider it most fitting for human reason to bow before divine wisdom, just as we judged it right for the senses and the imagination to yield to reason.
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Human Reason Term Timeline in The Consolation of Philosophy
The timeline below shows where the term Human Reason appears in The Consolation of Philosophy. The colored dots and icons indicate which themes are associated with that appearance.
Book I, Part I
...woman grows furious and accuses them of making his illness worse by elevating “Passion” above “Reason.” Worse, Boethius isn’t a regular person, but rather a scholar “nourished on the philosophies of...
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Book II, Part V
Philosophy tells Boethius that, although he has “a godlike quality in virtue of his rational nature ,” he wrongly “thinks that his only splendor lies in the possession of inanimate goods.”...
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Book V, Part II
...will.” She says she does: it is necessary “for any rational nature to exist,” because reason is based on people’s ability to decide “what to avoid and what to desire.” Some...
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Book V, Part IV
...about Providence,” but accuses his argument of lacking “care and rigour” and admits that “human reasoning” will never fully grasp Providence because it cannot “approach the immediacy of divine foreknowledge.” She...
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...by touching it. Similarly, one can understand human beings through four different methods: “sense-perception, imagination, reason and intelligence.” Sense-perception looks at humans’ “shape as constituted in matter,” imagination at their “shape...
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...highest of all. So through intelligence, one can understand “universals,” “shape,” and “matter”—the domains of reason, imagination, and sense-perception, respectively—all through “the single glance of the mind.” Similarly, reason includes the...
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Book V, Part V
...only know through sense-perception, while other animals have sense-perception and imagination, and only humans have reason in addition to these. “Intelligence,” in turn, “belongs only to divinity.” And, again, each higher...
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Book V, Part VI
...This is similar to how any sense-perception looks “universal if considered with reference to [human] reason, but individual if considered in itself.”
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