"Nothing is in the mind that is not first in the senses." In other words, medieval philosophy was grounded in the ability of the mind to abstract universals from those particulars, but without first grasping the particular there was no way in which the universal could be reached. See Dante, The Comedy. And Maritain starts a keey argument in his book with the demand tht we first grant the existence, independently of the mind but graspable by themind, of a single bladwe of grass.
Contrast to this Descartes's invention of analytic geometry: With that breakthrough it was possible to understand the very essence of a circle without ever seeing a circle. Ezra Pound, whose sympathies were in important respects medieval, thought that Descartes had perhaps queered our geometry by separating it from sense perception. In fact, not that almost all the princiles of modern science have to be understood without recourse to sense perception. Mathematicians can speak of 25-dimensions. Try to imagine that in sensuaus terms!
Also, contrast with one of the great passages in PL, the dance of the angels, most regular when most irregular they seemed. In other words the essence of their dance was totallyindependent from the apperance of their dance. One had to grasp it in some other way than in abstraction from the visible.
Carrol
Chuck Grimes wrote:
>
> I found The Machiavellian Moment. It's on Google Books. It's by
> J.G.A.Pocock. Here is a teaser quote:
>
> ``The following generalizations may be advanced. Medieval philosophy tended
> to debate whether the sole true objects of rational understanding were not
> universal categories or propositions which were independent of time and
> space. The process of arriving at knowledge of them had indeed to be carried
> out within time and space, but recognition of their truth or reality was
> grounded upon perceptions independent of either; there was a self-evidence
> which was timeless and non-circumstantial, Reality of this order consisted
> of universals, and the activity of reason consisted of the intellect's
> ascent to recognition of the timeless rationality of universals. The truth
> of a self-evident proposition was self-contained and did not depend upon
> contingent recognition of some other proposition, still less upon evidence
> transitory in time and space; it was in this self-contained quality that
> timelessness largely consisted. In contrast, the knowledge of particulars
> was circumstantial, accidental, and temporal. It is based upon the
> sense-perception of the knower's transitory body, and very often upon
> messages transmitted to his senses by other knowers concerning what their
> sense-perceptions had permitted them to sense, to know, or to believe. Both
> for this reason and because propositions concerning particular phenomena had
> to be constructed by moving through a dimension of contingency, in which one
> proposition was perpetually dependent up another, knowledge of particulars
> was time-bound, just as the phenomena of which it was knowledge, localizd by
> particularity in space and time, were time-bound themselves.'' (4-5p)
>[clip]