De Anima (On the Soul)
Lecture 33: The Common Sense and Discrimination Between Sensibles

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Seeing is being colored, right? And hearing is being sound, right? Because sound is acting upon the ear, right? And that acting upon the ear by sound is the ear's hearing, right? And therefore, it's not so altogether clear that the ear cannot hear its own hearing, right? Because what it hears is sound, right? In a way, hearing is sound, right? Or it's having sound, huh? Okay? So Aristotle's thinking very subtly about this, and he doesn't seem to force the issue here so much from this act, right, to necessity of an inward sense, huh? Although Thomas in other texts when he talks about this seems to see that even that act requires an inward sense, huh? But it's more clear or strongly that Aristotle's going to argue from the other fact that we know the difference between the proper sensibles, the private sensibles, and different senses. We sense the difference between white and sweet, for example. Maybe that word sensible is really kind of misleading because it's really, you'd rather say sense-making or something in that sense of all. Well, again, if you go back to the connection between a power and its object, right, there seems to be only two possibilities. Either the power acts upon the object, right, or the object acts upon the power. Because if one doesn't affect the other or act upon the other, then there seems to be no, what, connection between the two, and therefore no reason to say this is the object of that power, right? So it seems to be an exhaustive division to say either the object acts upon the power, the power acts upon the object. And in the case of the feeding power, the digestive powers would seem to act upon the food, right? But in the case of the sense powers, as he argued in the second book there, the object acts upon the power, right? They can't really, you know, lose sight of that, right? So if the sensible is what acts upon the senses, then the sensible inability is what is able to act upon the senses. And the sensible in act is what is acting upon the senses. So if no one's taking his glass, you know, Aristotle would say that in some sense there's sound in the forest if no one's taking the glass, right? But if you've got something that's taking the glass and nobody there to hear it, then you have something able to be heard, but not actually heard, right? The same with that food, you know? You didn't have any taste. It's not like you didn't have any taste there before I tasted it, right? But is it tasty before I tasted it? In a sense. In a sense, yeah. But Aristotle would say that what? It's fully, yeah, it's fully tasty. You're tasting it. You're tasting it. This is tasty. Was it tasty before you tasted it? Because the agency's saying we're, in a sense, we deny it altogether that it was, right? But again, isn't that an example, really, of what we said here? The inability of our mind to understand ability. You know, the problem we had with matter, huh? That ability is nothing. Yeah, we should probably stop shortly, because we're just at the end of this section. Maybe we can start with the second one, 284, 285, next time, you know? Okay? Let's look at this last paragraph, which is kind of nothing new here. Here, if, however, concord is a certain sound, while the sound and the hearing are as one and are not as one same thing, while concord is a ratio, it's necessary for hearing to be a certain ratio. It means more, again, the sense organ, maybe, huh? And because of this, also, each excessive thing, both the shrill and the strong, destroys hearing. Similarly in flavors, huh? Okay, that's the point he made before, right? But it kind of, he's brought in again at this point, that, because of the likeness of the two. Now, next time, in this 284, in the part going to the end of the thing, he's going to be separating the, he's going to be rather reasoning from this other act, huh? That we sense the difference between the private sensibles and different senses, right? And is one sense able to do that, see? Well, can the sense of sight know the difference between white and sweet? It doesn't know sweet, see? No. Can the sense of taste know the difference between white and sweet when it doesn't know white but knows only sweet? Can the two together know the difference, see? Sometimes I ask students, you know, going back to syllogism. If I know the major premise but not the minor premise, can I syllogize? And if you know the minor premise but not the major premise, can you syllogize, right? So if I know, let's say, that every mother is a woman, but I don't know that no man is a woman, and you know that no man is a woman, but you don't know that every mother is a woman, right? Can either one of us syllogize that no man is a mother, okay? Now, can the two of us together, I know in the major premise, let's say, and you know in the minor premise, can the two of us together syllogize? Or does one of us have to get, at least one of us, have to get both premises into his head, right? So it's the same one. What would it mean for your will to pity somebody? Kind of hard to see, isn't it, huh? See, when God, actually the word that they use for pity there in Greek there, same when they use it for the emotion, right? And you say, God, you know, Kyrie eleis in God have pity. It's the same, right? God have mercy we usually translate, right? It's the same word Aristotle has in the book on the tragedy there, right? He talks about pity and fear. He is the same one you have when you talk about pity and rhetoric, right? You know, you get the jury feeling pity for the guy and they let him go or they don't punish him so much, right? Now, I don't think when you speak of the mercy of God, I don't think that's a metaphor, but it's taken from metaphor, right? What is the mercy of God? God feeling sorry for us in our misery? He's sad. It's, you know, it's God's will to relieve our misery, isn't it? He really is, huh? That's so different, in a way, from this feeling of pity we see when we see somebody hurt or somebody in pain or something like that, right? Or they've lost somebody, you know? He asks somebody, what is love, you know? I remember asking a girl one time, what is love? And she said, oh, it's a very special feeling, she says. I mean, people are, you know, they can't get beyond that, really, you know? Right? In the long friendship course, it says, what is love? It's a feeling. It's a soul's anger. It's a soul's sadness. But, I mean, you know, apart from what feeling is in particular, you know, they can't say that very well. But they can't get beyond the love that is a feeling, huh? So, I say, you know, I say to them, if you put the marriage there, you know, and he comes out and he says, what does he say, you know? Do you have a wonderful feeling about so-and-so? No, no. He's saying, you know, are you choosing this person, right? Do you choose someone as your spouse, right? Right now? As soon as you have wonderful feelings, but he doesn't ask you, would you have? Have good or nasty feelings about this person, right? I don't think they really know that, right? I mean, they think that you get married because you have these feelings about this person. Well, I suppose you do in some way, but it's not a feeling that, you know, they say, you know, that it's not really the priest or the minister that marries you, you marry yourself, right? But you don't get married by two feelings. You get married by two acts of the will, right? Right? It's a choice, huh? You don't realize how much people are stuck on the original meanings of these things, huh? They can't move the word, as Monsignor Dion would say. But, you know, if I say to the students what my mother used to say, you know, I see to the blind man, but he couldn't see at all, they can, you know, kind of right away, they're kind of aware of the different meanings of the word see. See, it's much more clear. The word see is meaning, you know, with the eye and seeing, the sense of understanding. But love, you know, the two loves, they don't see that clearly, right? You know, if I say, I love you, but I don't love you, you know, the pun wouldn't be clear, you know. I see to the blind man, but he couldn't see at all, I think, you see that right away. I love you, but I'm not in love with you. It's said that way, huh? Okay, so we're going to pursue next Wednesday our inward course, right? The following week, we begin school on the 26th, right? Yeah. So I think this semester I've got a Monday, Wednesday, Friday schedule mainly. So I can't really come up on a Wednesday, so it should be either Tuesday or Thursday, which is, you know, it probably doesn't make a difference for me, usually, but whether it's Tuesday or Thursday, what's better for you people? Next week we can, on Wednesday, you know. The following week I'll be, you know, we start the 26th. Is Thursday better than Tuesday or what? Traditionalists will argue against certain ecumenical prayer gatherings, like getting together to pray with the Jews or the Protestants. Yeah. Because they'll say, you can't pray together because we don't have the same God, because the Jews say God isn't a trinity, and we say God is a trinity, therefore it's not, it's a different God, so we don't, it would be like praying with someone who worshiped the devil or something, and we get together and let's pray together, but it seems like in some sense we can. And so, what would you say, even the Muslims would be more upset about, you know, Allah is not God, you know, so our God, so we can't ever pray with the Muslims in any way. Well, again, it seems that, you know, John Paul II has done that, right? Yeah, sure. I mean, if you pray with those who have a perfect understanding of God, that's one thing, you know. It's another thing if they, you know, perverse notion of God, right? False notion of God. But in some ways, sometimes it's mixed up, they'll have some false notions, but, you know, they still have started with a kind of a general vague notion that we would share about God, but then they have some, you know, obstacles. Yeah, that's true. So, you say you can kind of... Otherwise, because I think a lot of, like Catholics in the future probably think that God is emotions. He's a theologian saying that nowadays, right? Amen. So... Yeah. Yeah, we just said recently, I thought he comes often here, he's very pious, but he was gotten us, it is a surprise, he's like, you mean, God is not a father with a big white beard? And he's very serious, and you know, he couldn't, he really couldn't figure out. Yeah, I was wondering, if he closes the doors and all the windows, how can his angel come in, you know, he's going to fit through the keel? I remember listening to a conversation with my cousin and his mother, you know, and my cousin started explaining to his mother, you know, that God, you know, in his divine nature has no body, right? Yeah. She just can't understand that God has no body, right? And finally, you know, he's talking about, what do is he making me? She says, you know, you know, but you don't realize, she was a, you know, good Catholic, I mean, you know, and, you know, church bill and everything, you know, but they just don't, I'm kind of surprised you, you know? So what would you say when, when... I mean, he's a person who's thinking of God, you know, as a body, right, you know? But you wouldn't say, you'd have to make some distinction, you wouldn't say, well, therefore, you know, we have a different God than I do. You're going to pray to a God with a body, right? Yeah, you're going to stumble. Like you said, you know, even Catholics would have some mistakes about God, but that doesn't mean they haven't. Well, it's good. I mean, there are texts that are Thomas, you know, where, you know, he talks about God being simple, you know, and that any mistake about God, almost, it's like a denial of God, right? Yeah. And that was very strong, you know, and you've got to be careful about that. But as Thomas says, in one place there, it wasn't quite hard to see, it wasn't our father without being distracted. I said one word, I said, here's really more human than I used to see. Thomas said that? Yeah, yeah, yeah. And, uh... Good. So, somewhere he's talking about, you know, the intention and so on. And, you're praying and searching somebody's, you know, next to you, he's wandering his mind, he's wandering about somewhere, you know? And, uh, uh, you know, sometimes I'm saying prayers, and he was taking, actually, he said prayer over again, you know? Right, yeah. You know, like I was, I was thinking about something, and I, when I said that prayer, something else. I'm glad he said that. Yeah. So, I mean, am I praying with you when you're not even praying? You're thinking about something you have to do or something, or something, right? Like that, that Psalm 18, you know, which ends up with the, that the words of my mouth and the thought of my heart find fear before you, O Lord. It says, that the words of my mouth. And that goes to the thought of my heart, right? You know, they say to our Lord, teach us how to pray. And, you know, since he gives them the words in which to pray, right? Our Father, Lord, never, right? You know? And, uh, then you have to eventually, what? Have the thoughts correspond to the words, right? And you keep on seeing maybe more in that prayer, right? There's, there's, there's, uh, one of the scenes there, in the, in the rabbis there, you know, St. Therese of Yeshua's sitting there, and she says, what are you doing? She's just meditating in the words, our Father. How sweet it is to call him our Father, right? Yeah. And, uh, so, I mean, uh, you keep getting seen. More and more in these words, right? You know, and more devotion, huh? But you have to get, you know, you have to be kind of led by the words first, huh? Second philosophy, you know, where you, you may learn the words of a definition, and, uh, it takes a long time to understand what the words mean, right? Like the definition of reason by Shakespeare, right? You know, I remember first learning the words of definition of motion. See, now I understand what motion is. Now I understand what my brother Richard is saying now. You may think you understand what motion is. You know, and so, I mean, you know, you, you, uh, you get to get the words straight first, you know. You see more and more. More and more in the words. Because that's how he's wondering, you know, you're saying the, the rosary or something like that, right? Can you think of what the words mean at the same time that you're meditating on the mystery? No. Huh? No. I don't think you can, can you? If I'm saying, I'm saying Hail Mary, the Hail Mary. I'm trying. And, uh, what am I supposed to be doing, you know? Am I supposed to be thinking of the words of the Hail Mary? Or am I supposed to be thinking about the mystery that Mary's here? Well, can you actually do both, actually, at the same time? It's your pocket's Hail Mary. Yeah, well, what is it? Well, did they say, you said three, one, rosies, or whatever, everything? You see what that? It's an interesting thing. They're being a crash, they're being a crash, they're being a crash, they're being a crash in their, the capuchins or whatever, they're sending one of these little Padre Pio cards, you know? Yeah. A little thing about prayer, you know, Padre Pio, kind of interesting. Oh, yeah. You've seen that, yeah? They told us about it. Yeah, kind of interesting. Worried is useless, he says. Yeah. I remember reading some guy about the interview with Padre Pio, you know, and of course, he had a heck of a time getting down to that place and all that thing, you know? Padre Pio says, one Hail Mary would have been worth all this, you know? Instead of going, you know, he just said a Hail Mary would have been better off. The first thing I read about Padre Pio, my cousin down, had this, one thing, what was this, Meditation of the Passionary, right? It was Meditation of the Immaculate, I think, a couple of little things. That's very impressive, I thought, you know, at the time. I didn't know who he was, you know, but then you do a thing sometime at the time. Finally, they caninized him, you know? I guess he had a lot of skeptics there in Rome, you know, for a long time, you know? People weren't too sure about it. You know, that he was a tired of the children. And so it's kind of, you know, a little cross here with the bear, I suppose, and you celebrate the Assumption tomorrow, or what? Right. You have the same, today they had, now they had Maximilian Kolbe, and you probably didn't do that to do that. It's, he started a little order of some sort, you know, devoted to Mary, something about the Immaculate Heart. It was kind of probably right before the Assumption, you saw it, devoted to Mary, that Polish Pope, you know, in this Polish thing. Yeah, about praying with people of better religions. Oh no. I mean, you try to teach a child how to pray, you know, how the child pray with you or something, you know. The child has a very perfect understanding of whom he's praying, right? You hear these things. At one time, my son Marcus thought that Father Manjeluso was Jesus Christ. He was going to be a priest. I don't know. Everybody got that idea. You never know what's going on with all heads, right? An Irish girl used to take from Ireland and help my grandparents when they were getting older. She thought the priest was God because they said, you know, we're going to church to see and we'll see God. You know, God's in the church. The priest came out. That's a pretty strong heresy, you know. It's a false notion, right? You know? So, I mean, is that wrong to try to pray with such a person? You know? So you can show them by analogy? I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit, Amen. God our enlightenment, guardian angels, strengthen the lights of our minds, coordinate luminary images, and arouse us to consider more correctly. St. Thomas Aquinas, angelic doctor, and help us to understand all that you've written. St. Pius X, pray for us. Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit, Amen. It happens to be the Feast of Pius X there, you know, and the priest at the Mass this morning, as I was at, was singing. I guess his parents... The statue of Pius X, they're quite devoted to him. And he says they're always, you know, praying to Pius X, you know. Mainly for my getting through school, he said. Well, I guess he succeeded, right? He says, do you know who else has a statue of Pius X? Well, nobody else in the congregation sees that have a statue of Pius X. But did I tell you some of those little anecdotes about his miracles and so on? Didn't I hear about those? The one that they described is a kind of public audience, more or less. Some father came up with his little boy who was crippled and had all kinds of ailments, right? And Sal takes that, you know, he took the little boy in his arms like this. He went on lecturing, you know, getting something taught. And before long, the little boy slipped down from his arms and ran around. Oh, that's right, right? Didn't he tell you that story? And then there was another story. I guess there was two old nuns who were just, like, tottering on the edge of the grave. And they could hardly move, you know, and so on. But it was, I guess, a special privilege. They were allowed to have little tiny audience with the Pope, you know. And it was not going to be very long, you know, but kind of a farewell to this world. And they traveled in a taxi to the Vatican, right? And, of course, they were working there for a very short time to see the Pope. And so they asked the taxi man, you know, to wait. Wait, yeah. So they went in, and apparently he cured them, right? They come out, you know, bouncing out. And the taxi cab guy would not believe it was the same two nuns that went in that came out. Look how interesting, the apples, huh? I've used something for me that's cyclical that we've been here one time talking about causes of error. Interesting text. Okay, we're down to page 29 in your text, number 285, which is the start of the third Lectio in Thomason. And here, Aristotle's going to take up another act where it's more clear that it goes beyond the capability of the altered senses. And it's a kind of discrimination that is made, which he's going to reason could not be made by any, what, one of the exterior senses, or even two or three of them working, what, together, right? So he begins by pointing out what each sense seems to be capable of discriminating. Each sense, therefore, he says, is of its underlying sensible. By underlying sensible, he means what? What we called before the private sensible, right? The sensible that comes under that as its, what, object, right? And is present in the sense organ as a sense organ. And it discerns the differences of its underlying sensible. So if the underlying sensible of sight is, for example, color, then by sight we can distinguish between white and black, or yellow and green, or red or blue or something, right? Okay, by the eye, huh? Or taste could distinguish between the sweet and the, what, bitter, or the sweet and the, what, sour, and so on. The case is similar to the cases. But now in 286, he goes on to a discernment that he's going to argue could not be done by one of the exterior senses, and not even by them in, what, combination, huh? However, he says, since we discern white and sweet, we sense the difference there between white and sweet, and each of the sensibles in addition to each other. We sense by something that they differ. They're talking about the sensible difference between these things, not, you know, what the philosopher by reason might say, what white is, or what color is, or what sound is, right? But this very sensible character, quality there, of whiteness, or the sensible quality of sweetness, huh? And we distinguish between those two sensible qualities, okay? Now, it's going to be by some kind of sense, for they are something, what, sensible, right? Okay? By which it is also clear, he says, that the flesh is not the ultimate sense organ, for it to be necessary for the discerning to discern by touching it. That seems kind of like almost out of place there, but as Thomas points out, this common sense that Aristotle is approaching seems to me especially close to the sense of, what, touch, huh? Because the sense of touch is the most fundamental of all the senses, and if you have a sense of touch, you don't necessarily have the other senses, but you don't have the other senses without having the sense of, what, touch, huh? So it's very close to this inward sense that he calls the common sense, huh? Okay, right? Sometimes it's called the central sense, because of the many equivocations of the word common sense, right? In sentence, if we use the word common sense, we mean, what, reason's ability to judge things are not too difficult to judge, huh? Right. Okay? And, you know, we borrow the words from the senses to express the judgments of reason. So I say to you sometimes, that makes sense, right? That's a confirming achievement. That doesn't make sense. That doesn't make sense. We hear people saying that, right? But there you're talking about reason rather than senses, huh? Nonsense. Okay? But in those ways of speaking, the connection there between the senses which judge in some way, and reason, which also judges the scene, but also the fact that reason ultimately goes back to the senses as a starting point of our knowledge in making it, what, judgments, huh? Okay? That makes sense. It doesn't make sense, huh? He's a man, a sensible man, right? So as I say, when you use the word common sense, sometimes people will use another sense. So sometimes they call it simple sense. Because you have the idea that it's reason, right? And it's a phenomenon of statements. And also, if you want to avoid that mistake of thinking the common sense, that was the common sensibles, right? That seems to go. So, no, the common sense is this common beginning, you might say, of all the ultimate senses, this common term or end of all their changes, huh? Okay? But the sense of touch especially seems to be close to that being very fundamental, huh? In kind of the root sense, huh? And so he said that if you thought of it as being flesh, the organ of the sense of touch, in so far as it's like the common sense, then I have to be, what, touching the color of your clothing here, right? In order to compare blackness with whiteness, blackness with sweetness or something of that sort, right? But I'm obviously, my skin not in touch, right? With you. Now, I'll continue in the main thought here. 287 here now on page 30. Nor can one discern that the sweet is different from the white, that the sense quality is different, by something separated. But both must be clear by some one thing, huh? It makes a nice comparison, right? For in this way, even if I should sense this, if I should sense, for example, white but not sweet, and you should sense that, let's say you sense sweet but not white, huh? It would be clear that they are different from each other, but something one must say that they are, what? Different, huh? For the sweet is different from the, what? White, huh? That sense quality, right? Of sweetness is different from the color white. The same thing, therefore, says this. Now, is that clear, right? Two things here to see, really. The first thing to see is that the sense of sight, obviously by itself, cannot distinguish between white and sweet because it doesn't know sweet. So you can't judge that whiteness and sweetness are different, huh? Likewise, for the same reason, the sense of taste can't judge or discern the difference between sweetness and white because it doesn't know white at all. But could the two of them together, knowing white by my sight and knowing sweet by my sense of taste, could I then know the difference between the two? Or would that be like you knowing white and I knowing sweet? It has to be one in the same ability that knows, what, both, right? and judges them to be different, huh? Mm-hmm. Now, sometimes I use some homely comparisons to a similar thing in reason there. I could say, you know, in the word cat, all you know is the letter C. And all you know is the letter A. And all I know is the letter T. Can any one of us spell the word cat? No. Together, can we? Now, one of us has to get into his head all three letters, right? See? Okay. The same way in reasoning, you know, in a syllogism you have two premises, usually. And if you know one premise, and I know the other premise, but not vice versa, we don't know each other's premise, can either one of us syllogize? I'll take a simple syllogism there, like, every mother is a woman, no man is a woman, therefore no man is a what? Mother. Mother, right? Now, if you know that every mother is a woman, you don't know that no man is a woman. And I know that no man is a woman, but I don't know that what? Every mother is a woman, right? Can we syllogize that no man is a mother? No. Not even together, right? One of us would have to get into his head, right? One of us at least would have to know both, what, premises, right? Okay. The same in multiplying, right? If I know four, but I don't know six, and you know six, but you don't know four, can we multiply four times six together? Now, one of us would have to get both four and six into his head, and then multiply the two in order to get to 24. And the same way in a, what, definition, right? If I know that the square is a quadrilateral, I don't know anything else about it. And you know it's equilateral, but that's all you know. And you know it's right-angled, but that's all you know. Can we define it, any one of us? No. And even together we can't define it unless what I know gets into your head, right? Or what you know gets into my head, right? One of us, at least, will have to know quadrilateral, equilateral. Quadrilateral, right angle, you see? So Estelle says that in order to discriminate between white and sweet, even the two senses that know individually, right, or separately, white and sweet, they together put in what? Know the difference, huh? So it has to come back then to a kind of what? Common, what? Center, right? And what you might call the common sense or the central sense. It's still a kind of sense power, but it's an inward sense. We could call it to distinguish it from those outward senses, sight, hearing, smell, taste, and touch, huh? So he says there in 287, The same thing, therefore, says this. When says it says, so does it understand and sense. And notice how he uses the word understand as well as sense there, right? And Thomas says, why did he do that, huh? Well, because, as he'll say in the next reading, the philosophers before him had not really distinguished between sense and reason. That's one reason why he makes sense, right? And it's Aristotle's custom, which you see many times in his works, that he'll speak in the opinion of his contemporaries, right, before he's tried to determine the truth, right? Right. And then after he determines the truth, he'll speak differently. As Thomas points out, you could also say that reason also as well as the central sense compares the, what, object of the different senses. So as a physicist, we might talk about color, right? And we might talk about, what, sound, right? So, reason as well as the central sense compare the different senses, compare the objects of the different senses. But notice, the understanding of reason, as we'll see that around when we take it up, its object is more the what it is of these things, huh? What is sound, right, huh? What is color or what is light, huh? Why this central common sense is merely concerned with the sensible quality, of these, of whiteness and sweetness and so on, and the sound, huh? Okay? So he concludes at the end of 287. It's clear, therefore, that it's not possible to discern separated things by separated powers. Now, let me make another point about what I was saying before. It's possible sometimes to know the same thing in different ways, huh? And we talked about how the first example of that, perhaps, in our knowing, is the outward senses, two or more of them knowing, saying, common, sensible. You mentioned how I could know the shape of this table. You know, if you brought me in here blindfolded, I could feel this table and more or less get to know the shape of the table just by feeling it, huh? Okay. Without touching the table, I could look at the table and see the shape of it. So the eye knows shape through color, and the touch knows it through hardness or something like that, huh? Okay. If the air was as hard as this, I wouldn't be able to know it, huh? Okay. Well, in a more different case, but again an example of this, when we study the senses and the inward senses, we can study them in two ways, huh? We can study them from inward experience, huh? Inward experience of sensing, right? And of discriminating between the objects of the different senses, right? And so on. Or we can, what? Maybe dissect, right? And do certain experiments, too, maybe, in some cases. But so we dissect the organs, right? Okay. So you might find out from, what? A dissection of the head, right? That the outward senses are somehow connected with, let's say, the brain, right? Okay. So that the outward senses come back to an inward, what? A joint place, huh? But here, we're coming to that same conclusion by, what? Inward experience, huh? Okay. Sometimes that I teach the soul, and these three books about the soul, I'll say that the Deanima, I think you should call these three books about the soul from the Latin words about the soul, that they're about the, this is based upon our common inward experience of life. And those are the same, common inward experience of life, huh? We talked before, if you recall, at the beginning of our study of natural philosophy, how the eight books of natural hearing are based in our common experience of natural things, huh? Meaning the experience which all men have and cannot avoid having, huh? And here we're talking about a common experience, but a, what? Inward, huh? Okay. And, as someone has said, we know ourselves more by inward experience, huh? We know by inward experience the dog or the cat, less so, right? We, in some sense, know what it is for the dog or the cat to be angry, right? Or for the dog or the cat to be experiencing thirst or something like that, right? For hunger, right? Because of the proximity of them to us, right? But by inward experience we would know least of all the, what, life, right? And even if you take us, right, I'm more aware inwardly of my thinking and so on and of my emotions than I am of my, what, digesting food, right, huh? And my growing, right, you know, I mean, I don't seem to have much experience when I was a child of growing, right? I mean, you know, the old idea, you hit the kid up here against the wall here, you know, and you mark off the height of the head there and so on. You know, that was the way you were so-and-so time, now you're here and so on, right? But that's more outward experience, isn't it, huh? You know, you measure the body and I guess, you know, the baby's brought to the checkup and so on. They talk about how much the baby's growing, you know, and the baby's growing, you know, as it should be growing and so on. But without an experience, we know best of all the, what, the plant, and less so the animal, and least of all, what, man, huh? Now you can dissect a plant and interfere with it less than if you start to dissect an animal that's alive, right? And, as you know, how men are very much, what, influenced by things, right? You know, they always talk about, for example, in teaching, huh? When a guy first starts teaching, maybe he's going to have a dean or somebody come in and sit at the back of the class and see how he's doing, right? And, of course, this makes maybe a young professor or teacher or something like that kind of, what? Nervous. Tense or nervous, you see? And they know they're being evaluated or something like that, right? And even when they interview people, you know, for a job at a college university, sometimes they have them give a kind of, you know, mock class, you know? Maybe they run to a few students there and so on, right? But it's a tense thing because they're, what, it's interfering with what they would normally be doing, right? So they're, you know, it's the old idea, you know, of trying to watch yourself fall asleep, right? And so, from the point of view of outward experience, the plant is more able to be known by us than the animal and the animal more so than the, what, man, right? But from the point of view of inward experience, man himself, it seemed to be, what, folks know, huh? Then we kind of know the animal because those things we have in common with the animal, but are growing and digesting our food. We're not very much aware of that, huh? By inward experience. So, there are things you're going to know by inward experience, you wouldn't know by outward experience, and vice versa. But maybe there are some things you might know by both of them. So it might be that the outward senses come back to a common center, called a central common sense, right? It's something we can investigate by inward experience of discerning between white and sweet, right? And someone, by outward experience, dissecting, might come and see some connection between the two, huh? Okay. NERS going back here or something of that sort, right? NERS going back here or something of that sort, right? NERS going back here. NERS going back here. NERS going back here. Now, in 288, he adds that it must be the same thing, judging these to be different, now, in two ways you may place the now one. Not only in the sight of the knower, that now he judges, right, that these are different, but now he judges that these two things are different now, right? That is, not any separated time is seen for the following. For just as the same thing says that the good is different from the bad, thus also when it says the one to be different from the other, the win is not accidental. I mean, I now say that it is different, huh? But not that it is, what? Different now. But it speaks thus both now and that they are different now, therefore at the same time, whence it is unseparated in an unseparated time. And that's what he's saying there, right? I mean, to take that, something different from that. I can remember now the past, right? I can remember yesterday, now. And there the now is only on the side of the, what? The knowing, right? And not to the known, right? Because I don't remember the past to be now, but I now remember the past to be past, right? See? But in the case of this common sense, right? I'm tasting my licorice, right? Okay? So I'm comparing the color of the licorice with the, what? Taste of the licorice, huh? And they're not the same thing, the color of the licorice, the taste of the licorice, huh? So I'm saying now that these two things are not different. The blackness and the licorice taste there, right? And the licorice are, what? Different, huh? Now, in the rest of this reading, he's going to do, I'll raise, first of all, an objection, right? To this, uh... I'll raise, first of all, an objection.