Section

To complete the discussion of this subject, you should understand that we can know what lies beyond our experience only through knowing what we have experienced. We know things through our outward or inward senses, and this knowledge concerns particular, specific things. Then, through reason, we infer what lies beyond our experience from what we have experienced, leaving general, universal propositions in our minds. Thus, when something beyond our experience is described to us, we understand what we are told only through our knowledge of what we have experienced. Had we not experienced within ourselves hunger and thirst, satiety and the quenching of thirst, love and hatred, pleasure and pain, contentment and displeasure, we would not understand the reality of these things when they are described to us and we are told that others experience them.

Likewise, had we not known life, power, knowledge, and speech in the realm of our experience, we would not understand what we are told when something beyond our experience is described in these terms. Similarly, had we never experienced anything that exists, we would not know of the existence of anything beyond our experience. There must therefore be a shared element between what we have experienced and what lies beyond our experience: this is what a univocal term denotes. Through this agreement, commonality, similarity, and correspondence, we understand what lies beyond our experience and affirm its reality. This is the distinctive function of reason. Without it, we would know only what we perceive through our senses; we would know neither general truths nor things beyond our outward and inward senses. Hence, whoever has never perceived a thing or anything comparable to it cannot know its reality.