…avail him in the least in coming to know concrete particulars; yet they go on gluttonously feeding their minds with impossibilities fashioned out of such abstractions.
Hence the very subject of what they call “First Philosophy” or “the highest wisdom” is nothing but the universal notion of being that is said to be common to all existents and then divided into substance and accident, cause and effect. Yet this supposed subject has no reality outside the mind, and the knowledge of “absolute being” imparts not the slightest information about any determinate entity that actually exists. Every existent is a particular, set apart from all else, and its properties—if they are substances—belong to it alone, while if they are accidents, they are definite accidents inhering in a definite substratum. One who knows nothing but the shared universal has, in truth, learned nothing about the beings that truly exist; he has merely grasped a universal that is universal only in thought, not in external reality.
The soul of the lunar sphere knows only a fraction of events
Fourth: According to them, souls are nine in number, matching the nine celestial spheres, and it is the motions of those spheres, they say, that generate happenings here below. It is admitted, moreover, that each soul knows only the motion of its own sphere; thus the soul of the moon has no knowledge of what is in the soul of the outermost sphere, of the sphere of the fixed stars, and so forth. Human souls, if they make contact at all, make contact solely with the soul of the lunar sphere, and whatever overflows upon them comes only from the Active Intellect. Consequently, they come to know but a very small portion of the causes of events—so whence, then, could they know the events themselves in their totality?
The motion of the spheres is not a sufficient cause for events
Fifth: Even were it granted that those souls knew all the celestial motions and that nothing caused events save those motions, the movement of the spheres would still not be a complete cause. Its effects vary with the dispositions of the recipients, acting upon each thing in accordance with that thing’s specific capacity. One who is ignorant of the states of the recipients as well as of the agents cannot know the events and therefore cannot be said to have knowledge of them. At their highest, the celestial souls know only the motions of their own spheres; they know nothing that lies beyond them.