RATIONAL THOUGHTS

BOOK ONE

Obstacles are removed which impede the concepts of Spiritual Things.

CHAPTER ONE.

1. Five opinions concerning the knowledge of spiritual things. 2. The first is refuted. 3. 4. 5. The three causes of this assertion are repelled.

I. Ornamental drop cap 'Q' featuring leafy vines and floral motifs within a square frame. The deceptions offuciæ; literally "smears" or "veils" used to cloud the sight placed in the way of knowing spiritual things are not of just one kind. There are those who want the knowledge of Minds to be acquired by no means at all; some by mere words; some by external sensations; some by imagination; and some by a purer thought or intellect. Nor do those who stand on the side of truth lack their own flaw original: "nævus", literally a mole or blemish, used here to mean a minor error—as will occasionally be seen in what follows—in those things which they often propose as true. The others will now be confronted.

II. Although those who thrust forward mere words, or those things presented to the senses or imagination, as the idea or knowledge of spiritual things, are consequently in the same group as those who assert no knowledge of them at all, they differ in this: while the former profess knowledge in word but hawk their own fantasies phantasmata; deceptive mental images or apparitions in its place, the latter expressly deny it. This opinion joins impiety with absurdity—not to mention that it is an embrace of the principle of Atheism and the doctrine of the extinction of Souls (for who would attribute life to a thing plainly unknown? Otherwise, if it is recognized as living, then it is certainly already recognized in some way); indeed, it even denies all knowledge of the true and the good. To correct such people, it should suffice to remind them that they are conscious of thought: whether they are thinking about themselves, or about a chimera original: "chimæra"; a mythical hybrid creature, used here to represent a figment of the imagination, or about bodily things, if they wish. They have a consciousness of volition (if I may express the act thus), of affirmation, of assent, of dissent, and similar things. To be conscious of some "something" original: "non-nihili", literally a non-nothing that thinks, affirms, dissents, and is capable of representing a figure or chimera to itself—that is already to know a spiritual thing to some extent. But because in all that follows, these people will be repelled in "exercised act" in actu exercito; a Scholastic term meaning 'in the performance of the action itself' rather than in mere theory, we shall address the others, if only first...