Thomism and Affective Knowledge (III)

Extract

We have seen, in very general terms, what St. Thomas understands by ‘knowledge.’ We must now try and discover something of what he means by ‘inclination,’ ‘connaturality’ ‘affect’ —with a view, at long last, to trying to understand what he means by knowledge ‘by connaturality,’ ‘by inclination’ or affectiva. It will be convenient to introduce the subject by a preliminary attempt to remove a common misapprehension.

‘Knowledge,’ we have seen, is that kind of being or reality which certain creatures are found to possess, whereby they transcend in various ways and degrees the limitations of their own identity and in a certain sense become another. But this identity they do not thereby lose; they becorpe the other, have the ‘being ‘of the other, without ceasing to be themselves. It is important to remember that such knowledge and its processes and products are but a means, an instrument. Thought is the means whereby a subject attains that which is not itself without losing its own selfhood; that whereby an J becomes a That without ceasing to be I. All our concepts, ideas, judgments, reasonings; all our organisation of these in sciences and philosophical systems, are quo and in quo, and not quod; they are that whereby, with which and in which we know, not that which we know. Words—terms and propositions and syllogisms and the books that contain them—are, in their turn, but further means and instruments whereby these means and instruments are communicated from one mind to another. They are signs of signs; and woe betide us if we fall into the academicism which mistakes the signs for the realities they signify.