Disputatio de phrenitide

to the whole breadth of its object is manifest, because it does not suffer corruptively from an excellent intelligible, but is rather perfected: which also Aristotle, in On the Soul, book 3, text 7, taught us beautifully, when he says: "That there is not a similar impassibility of sense and intellect, is manifest from the sensory organs and the sense: for sense is not impassible according to the whole breadth of its object: since it suffers corruptively from an excellent sensible: the intellect, however, is impassible according to the whole breadth of the object, since it is not corrupted by an excellent intelligible, but is rather perfected."

XXV.

That Reason or the Intellect is unmixed and not bound to a corporeal instrument is proven because it understands all things, as has been demonstrated by Aristotle in On the Soul, book 3, text 4. For if it were mixed with the body, and had an organ, it would not understand all things and would be harmed by an excellent intelligible, just as the sense is harmed by an excellent sensible: which, since it is against reason, the other thing will also not be true, namely that the ratiocinative faculty is mixed with the body and bound to an organ.

XXVI.

The very mode of its operating also proves this, because it understands by abstracting: for when a certain form, joined to the conditions of matter, is offered to it by the phantasy, it abstracts it from the conditions of matter: and the reason is because it understands the quiddity the essential nature and the form. Now, indeed, if it were mixed with the body, it could not understand universals, unless we wished to affirm that an agent can act beyond its own grade.

XXVII.

But what they say, that memory is more excellent and perfect than the intellect, is also very absurd: for it is the same as if they were to say that the perishable is more excellent than the eternal, the corruptible than the incorruptible. Whether, indeed, it is fitting for philosophers to affirm such things, I leave it to them to judge.