CatholicTheology.info

Choose a topic from Part 1:

• God and His Attributes
• The Blessed Trinity
• Creation
• The Angels
• The Days of Creation
• Man
  • 75. Man's Soul
  • 76. Union of Soul and Body in Man
  • 77. Faculties of the Human Soul: In General
  • 78. Faculties of the Human Soul: In Particular
  • 79. The Intellective Human Faculties
  • 80. The Appetitive Human Faculties
  • 81. The Sensitive Appetite in Man
  • 82. The Intellective Appetite in Man: The Will
  • 83. Free Will
  • 84. Man's Knowledge of Bodily Reality
  • 85. The Manner or Mode of Man's Understanding
  • 86. What the Intellect Knows in Material Things
  • 87. Man's Knowledge of Himself
  • 88. Man's Knowledge of Nonmaterial Things
  • 89. Knowledge in the Separated Human Soul
  • 90. The First Production of Man's Soul
  • 91. The Production of the First Human Body
  • 92. The Production of Woman
  • 93. Man as the Image of God
  • 94. The Intellect of the First Man
  • 95. The Will of the First Man
  • 96. The Ruling Power of Man in the State of Innocence
  • 97. The Preservation of Man in the State of Innocence
  • 98. The Preserving of the Human Race in the State of Innocence
  • 99. The Bodily LIfe of Offspring in the State of Innocence
  • 100. The Righteousness of Offspring in the State of Innocence
  • 101. The Knowledge of Offspring in the State of Innocence
  • 102. Paradise
• The Divine Government

78. Faculties of the Human Soul: In Particular

1. A plant takes food and is nourished; it tends to grow to maturity, and to reproduce its kind. Thus the plant faculties are the nutritive faculty, the augmenting or growing faculty, and the generative faculty. An animal has all the plant faculties; in addition, it has the faculty or power of sensing (that is, knowing by the use of senses), the power of tending to go after what the senses grasp as good or desirable (and away from what the senses grasp as harmful), and the power of moving in accordance with that tendency. Thus an animal has, in addition to the vegetal powers or faculties, the faculties of sensing, appetizing, moving locally. Man has all the vegetal and the sentient (or animal) faculties; in addition, he has the specifically rational faculties of understanding and choosing in the light of understanding; that is, he has the faculties of intellect (or mind, or understanding) and will.

2. It is manifest that the vegetal functions or operations are three; for plants (and all living bodies inasmuch as they have vegetal life) tend to take food, grow to maturity, and reproduce their kind.

3. The sensitive faculties are the exterior and interior senses. The exterior senses have their organs, that is, the special body-parts that serve their operation, in the outer body. These exterior senses are five: sight, hearing, smell, taste, and feeling or touch. Sight is the noblest of these sense faculties, and hearing is next to it in excellence; these two senses are often called the superior senses. The other three, or inferior, senses are more sheerly material in their operation than sight and hearing.

4. In addition to the exterior senses, there are four interior senses: consciousness (often called the central sense, or the common sense), imagination, instinct (or the estimative sense), and memory.

"It is vanity to love what passes quickly and not to look ahead where eternal joy abides. "
Thomas á Kempis

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"God looks neither at long nor beautiful prayers, but at those that come from the heart."
The Cure D'Ars

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"A man should keep himself down, and not busy himself in mirabilibus super se."
St Philip Neri

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