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Human Reason
The highest form of knowledge, which Philosophy argues is available only to God. To an extent unfathomable by human beings, this ability allows God to grasp “the simple form” of things, including humans themselves, through “pure vision of the mind.” It gives God knowledge of “universals,” “shape,” and “matter”—the proper objects of reason, imagination, and sense-perception, respectively—and is also the means by which God is capable of certain foreknowledge about human events with “no certain occurrence,” which (according to humans’ worldly perception of time) have not yet happened.
Intelligence Quotes in The Consolation of Philosophy
The The Consolation of Philosophy quotes below are all either spoken by Intelligence or refer to Intelligence. 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 V, Part V
Quotes
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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Intelligence Term Timeline in The Consolation of Philosophy
The timeline below shows where the term Intelligence appears in The Consolation of Philosophy. The colored dots and icons indicate which themes are associated with that appearance.
Book V, Part IV
...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 alone without...
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...continues by arguing that each progressively “superior” way of knowing “includes [all] the inferior [ones].” Intelligence is the highest of all. So through intelligence, one can understand “universals,” “shape,” and “matter”—the...
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Book V, Part V
...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 form “transcends the others”—for instance,...
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