Prima Secundae
Lecture 48: The Nature of Counsel and Its Structure

Transcript
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In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit, Amen. Thank you, God. Thank you. Guardian Angels, thank you, Thomas Aquinas. God, our Enlightenment, Guardian Angels, strengthen the lights of our minds, order the room in our images, and arouse us to consider more correctly. St. Thomas Aquinas, Angelic Doctor. Pray for us. And help us to understand all that you have written. God, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, Amen. Notice the order here, and the order down here. Sing joyfully to the Lord, all you lands. Serve the Lord with gladness. That's the first thing you have to do, right? To serve the Lord with gladness. And then come before him a joyful song, and then you can know, and I often refer to this when I talk about the Summachai Gentiles, right? Know that the Lord is God, he made us, his we are, his people, the flock, he tends. That's the way the books 1, 2, and 3 are divided, right? God in himself. God is the maker of things. Things, but why we are his. And then God's providence, right? It's in the end of all things, huh? And then, at least this is the one I learned in years ago. Notice the word down here. Enter his gates with thanksgiving, his courts with praise. Now sometimes you'll see Thomas even calling thanksgiving a part of praise, right? But it seems to me there's a sort of distinction between thanksgiving and praise. Because you're thanking God for what he's given us, right? Or you're praising God for what he is in himself, right? And so, when we go from prayer in the sense of the Our Father asking God for suitable things, right? You know, that you need. Then you go to thanksgiving, you're being a little bit less, what, me? Because you're thanking God for what he's given you, right? And it's kind of a stepping stone to praise, which you really forget about yourself, right? And you're just praising God for what he is in himself, what he's with us itself, right? And it follows the same word as the next line. Give thanks to him, which is thanksgiving, of course. And bless his name, which is praising him, right, huh? And then, you know, as Augustine says, because God is good, we are. Okay? And then his mercy and faithfulness is a bit like justice, but it's kind of justice to oneself, right? God is true to his things, huh? Now, what connection is there between this and the 13th chapter of John, huh? Well, I've got a little Protestant New Testament here. I don't want to bring the real good one, you know, the Greek and Latin one now. This has got the Greek and the English, but it's a good text, nonetheless. Yeah, well, you've got the Protestant Bible. The Catholic Bible says 90-90. 90-90. Yeah, yeah. When I grew up, it would speak of the Catholic numbering and the Protestant numbering, right? And then there must be these darn scriptural scholars who decided to compromise and adopt the Protestant numbering, right? But it files it all up, you know, when Augustine and Thomas following Augustine divides the Psalms into 350s. And the 50th Psalm, in the correct numbering, is a Psalm of what? Asking forgiveness, right? That favorite Psalm of St. Teresa of Avila, right? The 100th Psalm is a Psalm of good deeds, right? The 150th Psalm of resting in God. With the three orders, three levels of charity. First, where you're fighting your sins, then where you're progressing through the virtues, and then finally resting in God, contemplating. It's beautiful. 50, 100, and 150. It's all followed up now. They make the, this, the, anyway. But, you guys, this. So, the, um, wait, one more thing I want to say up here. Notice how the order here is a little bit like what you have in the, in the ethics of Aristotle. Where you take up the moral virtues before the speculative virtues of reason, right? And Thomas Aquinas, the commentary on Aristotle, says that he takes up the moral virtues before the virtues of reason. There are two reasons. Because they're more known to us, and because by them we are disposed for the life. So, we have to, in a sense, serve the Lord with gladness here, right? Before we're ready to learn all about him, right? Okay? I think that makes sense, huh? It's like the order which you have in the things. Well, in the 13th chapter, that's where our Lord washes the feet, right? Among other things, give them this example. But the words in particular, what Christ says, huh? So, after he had washed their feet, and had taken his garments, and was set down again, he said unto them, Know ye what I have done to you? Ye call me Master and Lord, right? Okay? And ye say, Well, for so I am. If then, if I then, your Lord and Master, have washed your feet, you also ought to wash one another's feet, huh? So, what do the Apostles call our Lord? Two things. I've got to be careful about the translation here, right? Because when you translate the Greek word didaskalos, by Master, you think of Master, which is opposed to Slave, yeah. Why, it's really Master in the sense of Magister, right? Like the Tomasia for Lombard, right, in the sentences. It's called the Magister, right, with the capital M. So, but the Greek word is actually didaskalos, which means what? Teacher. Teacher, yeah, yeah. Notice when Christ first refers to what they say, right? He says, Humeis phonete me, huh? You call me ho didaskalos, huh? The teacher, kai ho kurias, huh? The Lord, and the Lord. And you speak well, right? You speak truly, that is to say, right? You know, that's the, Socrates there at the Apology, right? You know, his accusers have said, Watch out for Socrates, he's a good speaker, you know. And Socrates up there says, I don't know what they meant by saying that, you know. Unless they meant by a good speaker, one who speaks truly, right? Then I am a good speaker. And he's, I don't know what they meant by saying that, See, wait a second, he says, huh? Kai kalos legete, you speak well, right? Calling me, see? My goodness. For I am, he says that, right? If then I walk, I wash your feet, right? I un ego inipsa, you moan tus podas, your feet. Ho kurias, kai ho didaskalas, huh? Then you ought to do the same song, okay? But don't see a verse of the order now, right? What he says. And he says, first, I am your kurios, I am your lord, and I am your didaskalas, I am your what? Teacher, right, huh? And in the linear, there's a word teacher, right? Which is the correct word. I mean, master is ambiguous in English, right? Okay. And that's what a boy used to call a young Christian behavior, so the boy was master, and the woman was miss, you know? And what master meant was you have mastered your emotions to some extent, so you control your passions and so on, right? But it's about how many of you get a master, right, huh? So, okay. But notice now the first two couples here. When you serve the Lord, are you doing him as teacher or as kurios? Kurios. As Lord, yeah. But when you come before me, joyful son, and you come to know these things, you come before him like a, what? Teacher. And so, kurios and didaskalas. The same order, right? I am your kurios, therefore you should serve me, right, huh? Faithfully and so on, right? And I am your didaskalas, right? A teacher, right? Faithfully and so on, right? That's interesting, huh? What is a teacher? If you had to say what a teacher is, without saying the way someone teaches us, but what would be the best way of describing it? What is a teacher? What does he do? What does he do to us? This guy was first teaching college. He said, why are you doing this to me? That's what the expression of our faces look like. Why do you care? He communicates. What? He communicates. Yeah, yeah. But it's even a better thing than that. Perfects our knowledge. Yeah. What's the best way of describing it? Forms. What? It forms. Yeah, yeah. To me, it seems the best thing you can say about a teacher is that he enlightens you. He enlightens you about something, right? You know how it says in the beginning of the Gospel of John, this is the true light of light is every man coming to this world, right? But even in the beatific vision, right? When Thomas refers to it, you know, the prayer for the Eucharist, he calls it what? Lux vera, true light, right? So, when somebody dies, what do we say? Eucharist. Yeah, yeah. And that perpetual light, I suppose, is the light of, what? We hear light, we shall see light, right? So, in a sense, in the beatific vision, God is, above all, the teacher, right? So, Christ is the teacher because he's enlightened him, son. And so, we come before him, right, to be enlightened, huh? But we don't dare come before him to be enlightened, or we shouldn't, really, until we've, what? Obeyed him, right? And served him, right? And then we can come, we're well disposed, right, to come before him and learn in this order, right, of the summa conjuntiles. Okay? I was rummaging around some of my books there in one of the other rooms there, and I found my whole volume there of things from Pius X, right? And it's got the Latin text there, you know, and it was in his translation. And I was looking again at the, his, I guess it's a, it was an apostolic letter, I think something like that was a category of it, but the one called the Angelic Doctor, right? Son Thomas, right, huh? I looked it up on the Vatican website, couldn't find it, but they had the Latin text there, you know? But anyway, I'm pleased to note that he quotes John XXII, who's the pope who I think canonized Thomas, right? But I referred to what John XXII said before, I think, that he said you can, he has illuminated, enlightened the church, right, more than all the rest, huh? And you can learn more from a year of studying him than from a lifetime than the others. That was, that was kind of a really impressive thing that John XXII says, but I'm impressed with Pius X, they're reiterating it, you know, and saying that that's been shown to be true, right? So, we can go do it with some Thomas, huh? Well, I forget the exact year, but, I think it was before then, I think, yeah, yeah. Now we're ready to take the... about consul, right? Question 14 in the Prima Secundae. Then we're not to consider about consul. And about this, six things are sata. First, whether consul is an inquisition, right? Investigation, right? Inquiry, right? Secondly, whether consul is about the end, or only about those things which are towards the end. Third, whether consul is only about those things which are done by us. Fourth, whether consul is about all the things which are done by us. Fifth, whether consul proceeds in the order of resolution. A very thorough guy is Thomas, huh? Most people have not even seen the question, right? Let alone the answer. And whether consul proceeds in infinitum, huh? Forever, right? In the Inlets, huh? Kind of like Xeno, you know? Yeah, yeah. You know, they give us an example, you know, how they say that statistics don't lie, but what? Politicians do. Yeah, yeah. Statisticians do, you know, huh? Anyway, there's this dispute now going on there between, well, you've got the governor of Texas is running, right, for our office, right? And then there's a big dispute there in Wisconsin there between the labor unions, you know, teacher unions, and the governor there, right? So, of course, the Democrats and the Republicans and so on are on different sides, right? These things, huh? And the question was, is the schooling better in Wisconsin or in Texas? That kind of comes up, right, huh? Because in Texas, the unions are not strong, right? Like they are in Wisconsin, right? Well, this kind of lackey there for the Democrats, Paul Krugman now, the kind of famous economist, but he's got a call now in the New York Times, he's always saying these things. Well, on these national tests, the Wisconsin students have a higher average than the ones from Texas, right? So the users must be doing something right, he's saying, right, huh? That sounds, you know, prima facie, you know, true, you know? But now when they go into the category, they found out that the white students in Texas are scoring higher than the white students in Wisconsin, and the black students in Texas are scoring higher than the black students in Wisconsin, and the Hispanic students, right, in Texas are scoring higher than the, what, Hispanic students in Wisconsin. So which schooling is better, see? Well, nationwide, blacks and Hispanics don't do as good as whites because of their family background and other reasons like that, and that's not the fault of the schools, right? That's something that takes place over the country, right? So because Texas has many more Hispanic students, at least, than Wisconsin has, the overall average in Wisconsin is what? Higher, right? But actually, they're not doing as good a job, right? But it shows you how tricky it is, huh? These statistics, right? You know, there's all kinds of things that, you know, I think it's kind of an interesting example that came out recently there, huh? Mark Twain's common statistics. Yeah, yeah. So you've got to be, people are always throwing these things out, though, you know, you say, oh, maybe that's so, you know? You know, and of course you have to really go into these things, huh? Some length, huh? That's what, I think that's what Twain said, you've heard that. There's lies, there's damn lies from the statistics. Yeah, yeah. Now this reading on Consul, of course, is very important for, you know, moral theology or for ethics, for that matter. But also, because Consul is something so much a part of our life, it's like things in other parts of the life of the mind. It's interesting to compare, right? To the first, then, one proceeds thus. It seems that Consul is not a inquiry, shall we say, right? For Damascene says that Consul is, what, a penitous desire, right? But it does not pertain to desire to inquire. Therefore, Consul is not a, what, inquiry, right? Well, we'll see, we'll see, you know? Because it might be, what, a desire that is before Consul, right? I desire to be wealthy, right? Therefore, I take counsel as to how I can, you know, make money off people. Moreover, the, what, to inquire of the understanding, to inquire is of the understanding, what? Discourse, right? That's the word that Shakespeare has, right? In the definition of reason, right? Civility for large discourse, looking before and after, huh? And thus, it does not belong to God, right? Thomas has a chapter in the first book of the Summa Canto Gentiles, there's no discourse of God, huh? Whose knowledge is not discursive, as is also had in the first book here of the Summa. But Consul is sometimes attributed to God, right, huh? According to that of the Epistle to the Ephesians, huh? He does all things according to the counsel of his will. Therefore, counsel is not an inquiry, huh? Moreover, inquiry is about doubtful things, huh? Dubious things, huh? The rabies dubies, huh? But counsel is given about those things which are certain goods, huh? According to that of the Apostle. Now, that's the, what, Antonia Messiah for St. Paul, huh? St. Paul and, what, St. Peter are called Apostles by Antonia Messiah. John the 20, John Paul II called them, what, the Princes of the Apostles, right? But this is the figure of speech, right? About virgins, he says, I do not have a command of the Lord, right? You don't have to be a virgin, right? Get married, huh? But I do give a, what, counsel, right? Okay? That's a very important text. But this is something certain, right, huh? This is a good counsel, so. Therefore, counsel is not a, what, inquiry, right? But against this is what Gregory and, of course, might have a text here, Dionysius, right? They must be understanding it, right? You know, it's the, I used to think that the Liber de Causis, right, by Aristotle, and Thomas and some of the other works, you know, is kind of following that opinion, you know? But then he figured out who was by, you know, and it's a shortening of a larger work by somebody else. It was almost like, you know, the continuation of the metaphysics, right? You know, and he had a great deal of authority, you know? But against this is what Gregory and Amicia says, right? Every counsel is a, what? A question, yeah, yeah. Seeking question. A quest. Not, however, every quest is a, what? Consul, right, huh? Okay? I'm doing logic there at my house there on Wednesday nights there, and we're doing dialectic now, right? Well, this is not counsel, right? This is about universal things, right? But there's similarity there between taking counsel and dialectic, huh? I answer it should be said that choice, as has been said, follows the judgment, huh, of reason about things to be, what? Done, done, huh? But in things to be done, multa, incertitudo, much lack of certitude, right? Much incertitude is found, huh? Because actions are about singular things that are, what? Contingent, right? Which, on account of their variability, are, what? Uncertain, huh? But in doubtful things and uncertain things, reason does not put forth a judgment without a... Inquiry preceding, huh? Unless you're a fool, right? And therefore, necessarily, there's necessary an inquiry of reason before the judgment about things to be what? Done, right? Now this is like what you have in philosophy, where you have dialectical investigation, right? Before you try to judge what the truth must be, right? So Aristotle, in most of his works, will have a dialectic before he tries to determine with certitude what the truth is. The only science we might not do this would be, say, geometry or arithmetic, right? I think I've spoken before of how our reason guesses before it knows, and that's probably the reason why we're very often mistaken, right? Because if you guess, you obviously can be mistaken. But for the most part, in geometry, if you guess, you're right, huh? Like if you take an equilateral triangle, will those three angles be equal? I think we'd all guess they'd be equal, right? Now that's not to know with certitude, but, you know, is it? So you can go right away trying to get the certitude about the thing, the reason why it must be so, right? But in other sciences, when people guess first, you might guess one thing, that water's the beginning of all things, and you think it's Mother Earth, and you think it's air, and you think it's all these, and so on, right? And so right away there's disagreement, and so on. So Aristotle says that dialectical reasoning is reasoning from probable opinions, even to contradictory conclusions, right? And so every article in the Seuland begins with a kind of miniature dialectic, right? Where you have this side and then that side, right? But in the questionis disputati that Thomas has, you might have 10 or 15 arguments on one side and 10 on the other side, or something like that, right? Here Thomas kind of cuts it down for the beginners, right? Giving them milk, right? Not the whiskey of the questionis disputati, right? And this inquiry is called, what? Consul, right, huh? Okay. An account of which the philosopher says, now that's another, what? Antonia Messiah, right? The philosopher. He says in the third book of the Ethics, that choice is the desire of the thing which has been consuled beforehand, right? Of the pre-counsult. Okay? Now maybe the word consul is used in some other senses too, but that's something, but a sense of consul that we're concerned with here, right? He's love these accounts, you know, of the Incheon landing, you know? Yeah. And of course, they sent these guys down from Washington, you know, to try to convince MacArthur that it was too risky, you know? And I heard, you know, several people, you know, describing these things, you know, people are very nervous, you know, because the way of MacArthur to speak, you know, he goes to the board, he starts very slowly, you know, kind of destroys them, you know? But then, you know, the people described MacArthur on the way to the Incheon landing, you know, and he called his officer and he went over the whole thing again once more, right? And he says, yep, that's the right decision, MacArthur said, you know, and then he picked up his Bible and started reading it. So is he sure that, you know, the Incheon landing, right? Apparently the Japanese had made an Incheon landing during the war with the Russians in 1905. MacArthur was a witness of that. So he knew it could be done, right? So, but anyway, those things are not certain, right? Just got through, my son gave me a book on the Peloponnesian War, you know, and all these, all these things that could have gone this way, that way. The military. That's consul, right? I'm going to take consul. Military improvement. Yeah. Now why should Damascene make this mistake, right? Well, there must be a reason, huh? Because he's not a dummy, huh? The first, therefore, it should be said that when the acts of two powers are ordered to each other, right? In both, there is something that pertains to the other power, right? And therefore, what? Both acts is able to be denominated, named from either power, right? Now it is manifest that the act of reason that is directing in those things which are towards the end, and the act of the will, according to what? The rule of reason tending towards it, that those two acts are what? Ordered to each other, right? And those two powers, therefore, which is of the acts. Whence in the act of the will, which is choice, there appears something of reason. To wit, order, right? Who knows how, that's something of reason, before and after that order, right? That's great Shakespeare, right? I teach you. And in counsel, which is an act of reason, there appears something of the will as the matter about which the counsel is being taken, right? Because counsel is about those things which man wills to what? To do. And also as a motive, because from the fact, or from this, that man wills the end, he is moved to taking counsel about those things which are towards the end. So because I want to be wealthy, right? I take counsel as to how I might become wealthy, right? And therefore, as the philosopher says in the sixth book of the Ethics, that choice is intellectus appetitivus, right? That to choice, what, both, he shows both run together for choice, right? Thus, Damascene says that counsel is appetitus inquisitivus, right? An inquiring desire, right? Okay. So the counsel in some way pertains both to the will about which and from which there is the inquiry, right? And it pertains to reason, what, inquiry, right? But it's more, what, an act of the reason than of the, what, will, right? Just as choice is more an act of the, what, will than the reason. But you can speak, you know, denominating in some way each of these acts, right? So both counsel and vachna have sometimes spoken of as being an act of the other power, right? Counsel of the desire and choice of the reason, right? But because the two acts are connected, right? Ordered out. But just as choice is more really an act of the will, so counsel is more an act of the reason, right? Now, what about this use of counsel said of God, huh? Did Paul there, the apostle? To the second, then, he said it should be said that those things which are said about God, right? are taken without every defect which is found in us, right? As in us, now science is of conclusions through a, what, discourse, running from the causes to the, what, effects. Sometimes it's a reverse, right? Right, for the effect of the cause. From opposite to opposite. From like to like. But science said of God God signifies, what, certitude about all effects in the light of the first cause, without any, what, discourse. So when you carry these words over from creatures to God, you have to draw, throw out, every, what, imperfection, right? It's found in the creature. That's why often they carry a word over, they drop the genus and keep the difference, huh? What really is science for us? Well, it's a syllogism making us know the cause and that which is a cause cannot be otherwise. Well, there's no syllogism there in God, right? Though he knows what syllogism is. But there is knowing the cause and that which is a cause cannot be otherwise. He knows all that, right? So you keep the difference there and you drop the genus. But the genus is taken more from matter, which is imperfect, right? And the difference from form, which is godlike, perfect, as Aristotle says. And likewise, consul is attributed to God as regards the certitude of his position or judgment, right? Which in us comes from the inquiry of what? Consul, right? It's like a little bit like, you know, if you apply the word science to God, right? Because of the certitude, right? But not because of the discourse, from the premises to conclusion, right? So when you ask God something, you say, just a minute, I've got to think about that a little bit. But this inquiry has no place in God. And therefore, consul in this way, according to this, is not attributed to God, right? And according to this, Damascene says, right, that God does not take counsel of someone ignorant to take, what, counsel, right? My son-in-law had a copy of Bush's book, you know, the one about decision points, right? It's a very interesting book, you know, because it's all about the decisions he made as president, right? But you can see the man was, you know, taking counsel when he made these decisions. You know, not, you know, jumping here to, you know, quickly these things, huh? The last Bush, the last one? The last one, yeah, yeah, yeah. Is it a new book then? Yeah, yeah, it's been out for a while. It was said of his father, too, I know, in the Gulf War, about all these stuff, that he consulted with several American bishops before he went to the war, and said, I don't know what counsel they gave him, but he wanted to have counsel. This is a common thing, huh, that's one way that a word becomes equivocal by reason, right? It's carried over, but you drop out, part of it's what? Meaning, yeah, in the part that pertains to the imperfection of the creature when you carry the name over to God. Thomas has a very nice part there in the first part of the Summa there, or the Sukha Jantilas, where he's talking about how the names of the emotions are carried over to the will, right? You drop the, what, the bodily aspect of it, right? The imperfection of it, huh? But you keep some of the formal meaning, right? So you keep, you know, words like desire, and love, and liking, right? And so on. But you drop the bodily change that's associated with the emotions, huh? So there's a kind of double aspect, right, huh, in the emotion. Kind of a formal aspect of the material thing, huh? One part is dropped out, huh? That's how you can carry it over, right? Then you can, sometimes carry it over from the will of the God. The God's built it, then. You have to drop some things. Is there any fear in God? Is there a boldness in God? But Thomas says, you know, some of them can be carried over metaphorically, right? But some can't even be carried over metaphorically, yeah? There's no fear in God. That's a metaphor. Talk to the third thing, right? Nothing prevents some things from being, what? Most certain goods, according to the judgment of the wise, right? And of spiritual men, huh? Which, nevertheless, are not certain goods, according to the judgment of the many, right? Or carnal men, right? Or fleshly men, right? And therefore, about such counsels are, what? Given, huh? There's a story about the priest who wanted to leave the priesthood there with John Paul II. He was a bishop, I guess, huh? He did what he did, you know? He said, let's go into church and pray about this, right? He's going to pray for us a long time. And they came out, and John Paul said, what do you think? He said, I think I should still leave. Let's go back and pray about some more. And I'm telling you to go back into church. Finally, the guy goes, I think I should stay, you know? It's kind of a marvelous story, though, you know? You know? Who was it? One guy went into the Abbey there at Gethsemane, you know? He said, no. The first time he went to the confession inside the Abbey, right? You're going to be tempted someday to leave this place, you know? And that's what this priest was, right? He was under this temptation. It should be expected. Yeah, yeah. It should be expected, yeah. Kind of warning him, you know? Okay. Let's go to the second article. It is an inquiry, and the answer is yes, right? Contrary to all those objections. It's kind of interesting the way Thomas forces himself in every article to zoom into this kind of form, right? Because to a lot of thinkers, that would seem to be something artificial to always adapt to that form, right? Would you say? I mean, it's kind of valid. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, but is that really an impediment, you know, to the mind's freedom? It might be impediment to its freedom, right? But it makes you what? Stop and think a little bit about the thing, right? You think of reasons. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. And if other thinkers do this, they might, you know, not be so rash in their judgments and in what they put forward, you know? I was thinking, I was reading an article the other day there about the Constitution and so on, and how they put certain forms in there, you know, that kind of stop both the mob and even the experts, you know? They're all kind of hand-strung a bit, huh? And there's kind of an article that was suggested because recently one of the big shots in the Obama administration said we need less democracy, you know? You know, so we need the experts, you know, deciding for us, you know, freedom and so on. And they were kind of suspicious of this sort of thing, you know? So they built in these kind of forms that seemed to be impeding, you know, what you want to do, but they really keep you, make you stop and think a little bit more, right? Before you do things. It reminds me of what C.S. Lewis there, you know, spoke of how the great artists, you know, they adopt themselves to a form, and it seems to us, you know, an impediment, you know, but it actually helped them to what? Reduce these things, right? You think of, you know, Shakespeare's 154, is it, sonnets, you know, but they're all in that, all 14 lines, all ambient pentameter, all with the same rhyme scheme. I mean, that's going to ruin the guy's ability to express himself. Tell that to him. Yeah, you know what I mean? And when I read about Mozart, you know, he was more conservative, you know, than Hayd and anybody else, you know, about keeping the form the same way it was. And yet it enabled him to express himself, right? There's something about that discipline, right? But in all these things, it seems at first sight, you know, to other people, kind of an artificial thing, you know, or artificial, automatic, you know, not, you know. I want a little... It's like Sherlock Holmes said. A good art knows when to stop. I mean, for sure, I mean, you get the fully blown up question and disputate, right? You don't have any like them in the moderns, huh? They just... They just stay out of people's feelings. Yeah, yeah. I mean, the thing I noticed, we in the modern philosophers, you know, they'll often be saying, and very basic things, important things, exactly the opposite, let's say, what Aristotle said, without mentioning that he said the opposite, without recalling in any way the reasons he might have given, let alone giving any refutation of that position or that, any answer to that argument, right? Well, what kind of a way of proceeding is that? You know, it doesn't make any sense. Aristotle, the third book of wisdom there, he recalls all the things his predecessors were saying about the causes, right? And why they were saying them, and then you give reasons against both sometimes, right? You know? Well, if you force yourself to do that, I mean, you're going to proceed with... Like a man who's taking counsel, right? But, yeah, on universal matters, huh? Second article, whether counsel is about the end or also or not only about those things which are to the end. To the second one proceeds thus, it seems that counsel is not only about those things which are towards the end, but also about the end itself, right? Well, whatever things have, what, doubt, right? In the sinitude, about these is possible to investigate. But about human operable things, right, doable things, there happens to be, what, doubt about the end, and not only about those things which are towards the end. We see that a lot of times, right? You don't know what to aim at in life, right? You pick up the magnetics, and then you'll find out. Since, therefore, inquiry about things to be done is counsel, it seems that there can be counsel about the end. Moreover, the matter of counsel are human operations, but some human operations are ends, as is said in the first book of the Ethics. Therefore, counsel can be about the end, right, huh? Should I be a philosopher? Should I be a philosopher? Well, it's the end of life, right? Take the philosophy. It's the end of your income. Kind of funny, you say, you know, what are your philosophers doing for the common good, right? Of course, the flip and quick answer is, we are the common good. But against this is what some Gregory, right, says. I hope we have doubts. That not about the end, but about those things that are towards the end, there is counsel, right? Well, Thomas answers. I answer, it should be said that the end in things to be done has the notion of a beginning, right, huh? In that reasons or arguments about those things which are towards the end are taken from the end itself. But the beginning does not fall under the, what, question. But the beginnings ought to be supposed in every, what, investigation. It goes back to that kind of, that fixer portion, right? That the end is, like, the, what, premise in the syllogism, right, huh? Okay. And you must begin from some premise that is not, what, to be investigated. Then you have to investigate, investigate, you know? Okay. Whence, since counsel is a, what, a quest, shall we say, I'll translate it to just the word question there, huh? It doesn't seem to be better to say question, question. Those of you who did, those two words, huh? Question and quest, huh? The terminology of it, of course. About the end there is not counsel, but only about those things which are, what, towards the end, right? Nevertheless, it can happen that what is an end with respect to some things is ordered to, what, another end, huh? Aristotle talks explicitly when he distinguishes the four kinds of causes, right? The physics and the metaphysics. Just as that which is a principle or premise of one demonstration is the conclusion of a, what, another, right? So he speaks sometimes of, what, continuous demonstrations, right? Not really continuous. That's an interesting word, huh? Because if you go back to logic there where you first meet this idea of continuous, the continuous is a quantity whose parts meet at a common boundary, right? But then in arithmetic, which is about, what, discrete quantity, like, say, the number seven, right? The three and the four don't leave anywhere, right? By any circle, you know, the two semicircles meet at a line in the center called diameter, right? Or the two parts of the line meet at a point, and so on. But sometimes they carry the word continuous over to arithmetic, and one example they do is when you have a continuous, what, proportion, right? 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