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16. But all knowledge according to species is like the thing which
it knows. For there is another knowledge according to privation,
according to which we speak a word only when we condemn. And this
condemnation of a privation is equivalent to praise of the species, and
so is approved. The mind, then, contains some likeness to a known
species, whether when liking that species or when disliking its
privation. And hence, in so far as we know God, we are like Him,
but not like to the point of equality, since we do not know Him to the
extent of His own being. And as, when we speak of bodies by means of
the bodily sense, there arises in our mind some likeness of them,
which is a phantasm of the memory; for the bodies themselves are not at
all in the mind, when we think them, but only the likenesses of those
bodies; therefore, when we approve the latter for the former, We
err, for the approving of one thing for another is an error; yet the
image of the body in the mind is a thing of a better sort than the
species of the body itself, inasmuch as the former is in a better
nature, viz.. in a living substance, as the mind is: so when we
know God, although we are made better than we were before we knew
Him, and above all when the same knowledge being also liked and
worthily loved becomes a word, and so that knowledge becomes a kind of
likeness of God; yet that knowledge is of a lower kind, since it is
in a lower nature; for the mind is creature, but God is Creator.
And from this it may be inferred, that when the mind knows and
approves itself, this same knowledge is in such way its word, as that
it is altogether on a par and equal with it, and the same; because it
is neither the knowledge of a lower essence, as of the body, nor of a
higher, as of God. And whereas knowledge bears a likeness to that
which it knows, that is, of which it is the knowledge; in this case
it has perfect and equal likeness, when the mind itself, which knows,
is known. And so it is both image and word; because it is uttered
concerning that mind to which it is equalled in knowing, and that which
is begotten is equal to the begetter.
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