A Summary of Principal Psychological Doctrines

for Lawrence Cecchi

John Francis Nieto

1. Things are said to live because they feed and grow, sense other things, move about, or think.  So, without hesitation, we say that men and the animals live.  Plants also live, for they vegetate. But, as they do not move to their food but await it where they are, and as their growth and generation seem so clearly actions of the sun, their activity in these processes does not strike us as forcibly.

Clothes and Participation

John Francis Nieto

1. Nakedness is the principal image used by Sacred Scripture to make the fall of our first parents intelligible. Adam and Eve were naked and unashamed when they were yet clothed in grace, a participation in the divine nature. But once they had sinned they recognized in their nakedness the loss of that participation. And when our Lord accepted the death earned by their sin, He was stripped of His garments, to become an image of man without this share in a higher life.

Where Does Metaphysics Begin?

John Francis Nieto

            1. How does one establish a science of metaphysics beyond the science of mobile being? What is the being that must be the subject of another science? How does one know that “to be” is not “to be a mobile being”? To the answer, ‘the proof of a first unmoved mover,’ the objection is raised, that the subject of metaphysics is being to which essence is other than existence, the sort of being that needs a cause of its existence. But the first unmoved mover is not a being of this sort.

The Quantum Leap

A Concise Examination of the Abstraction of Quantity and the Formation of Its Generic Concept

John Francis Nieto

            1. Among the first things known to the human mind is quantity, “so much”. Yet, as St. Thomas teaches, “all conceptions are resolved to that of being,” and thus the understanding of quantity does also. I shall examine how quantity is “resolved to the concept of being” and make some comments about the consequences of knowing quantity in the development of the concept of being. Note well that, while this examination uses many logical and psychological considerations (and may be useful for those sciences ad bonitatem doctrinae), the present concern is metaphysical—this is an examination of being insofar as it is intelligible. Note also that, since I am examining the mind’s first formation, I am nowhere implying that the mind knows that any of the distinctions it makes at this point are really in its object. Most of these distinctions are not real, but only in the mind. Others correspond to some distinction in the thing or res. To know this, however, demands more knowledge than the knowledge examined here.

S. Thomas’ Exposition of Principle Whose Substance Is Act

John Francis Nieto

But if [such a substance] is able to move or able to make, but one not at work [in

act], there will not be movement. For what has a power is able not to

act. So there is not profit, even if one make eternal substances,

15 as those making the forms do, if there will not be in them any principle able to

change [another]. Still, not even this is enough nor another substance

beyond the species. For, if it will not act, there will not be movement. . . .

Right, Left, Forward, or Back?

Or Why I Am Neither Left Nor Right

John Francis Nieto

            1. The following remarks propose to explain why I have no expectation of political gains from either right or left and why rather I distrust both movements, at least in so far as they are political movements arising within modern political theory. Nonetheless, several things I am not claiming should be made clear in the beginning.

Overcoming Irrational Fears of Trusting the Senses

for Julian Pedro Sicam

John Francis Nieto

            1. Many, perhaps all, who share in the intellectual life in our times have some irrational fears of trusting their senses. In saying this I am recognizing that there are rational fears of trusting one’s senses. We reasonably hesitate to judge as real everything that seems to lurk in dark places, especially if we already feel afraid. Again, with reason we do not believe things have the shapes that appear to us in the distorted mirrors of a funhouse. Nor is it irrational for one with nasal congestion to think that what he eats has in itself as little taste he receives.

On the Meaning of the Sabbath

John Francis Nieto

            1. Both the Old and New Testament teach that for one day of each week a man must refrain from working in honor of God. Divine worship is accorded the central place on this day. But the whole of this day is distinguished from other days of the week as dedicated to God precisely by this prohibition of work. The Lord’s day is a day of rest. The following comments will make the ultimate foundations of this practice clear. Among such foundations the principal are the distinction between contemplation and action and God’s transcendent nature, especially manifest in the mystery of the blessed Trinity. The comments will also show that this practice has for its purpose our union with and conformity to God in His transcendence of creation.

Observations on Cogitative Power

John Francis Nieto

Insofar as estimative and cogitative power are the highest sensitive powers and are thereby definitive of the various animals, while each depends upon intellect, human or divine, sensation clearly depends for its real being and definition upon intellect. Hence, Aristotle never resolves sensation immediately to the divine.

The Object of Poetry and Its Truth

John Francis Nieto

            1. The comments I will make this afternoon concern the proper object of poetry and the truth that object admits of. I hope to situate this truth more or less “between” the that of ethics and prudence and the truth of history, taking that word to include not only history proper but also biography, memoir, and the like. Correlative to such a claim is the understanding that history, poetry, prudence, ethics, and philosophy as a whole each involve a satisfaction and pleasure proper to themselves.