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Human Free Will
Knowledge about “shape as constituted in matter,” obtained through the senses (sight, touch, smell, taste, and hearing). According to Philosophy, sense-perception is the lowest of the four ways of knowing, below imagination, reason, and intelligence. It is common to all animate beings, from “mussels and other shellfish” to other animals, humans, and even God. It is included in all these higher ways of knowing. In one of Philosophy’s songs, she notes that some philosophers compared sense-perception to the way a seal makes an impression on a piece of wax.
Sense-Perception Quotes in The Consolation of Philosophy
The The Consolation of Philosophy quotes below are all either spoken by Sense-Perception or refer to Sense-Perception. 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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Sense-Perception Term Timeline in The Consolation of Philosophy
The timeline below shows where the term Sense-Perception appears in The Consolation of Philosophy. The colored dots and icons indicate which themes are associated with that appearance.
Book V, Part IV
...it or 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...
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...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 insights of imagination...
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...Philosophy interrupts it with a song praising the Stoic school of philosophers, who believed that sense-perception involved an object making an impression on the human mind much like a seal makes...
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Book V, Part V
...ways: animals without “power of movement, like mussels and other shellfish,” can only know through sense-perception, while other animals have sense-perception and imagination, and only humans have reason in addition to...
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Book V, Part VI
...divine foreknowledge,” but not necessary when “considered by themselves.” 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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