It was the firm belief of Albertists that humans can have direct knowledge of separate substances already in their earthly life. On this point, Albertism distinguished itself from Thomism and Nominalism. For representatives of both these schools argued that, according to Aristotle, all human knowledge begins with the senses. Therefore substances that are not perceived by the senses, such as separate substances, cannot be known directly, but only indirectly through the sensible effects they produce. The Albertist, however, maintained that this reading of Aristotle is too narrow. When dealing with the knowledge and being of separate substances in his Metaphysics, Aristotle had remarked that separate substances know themselves and that human beings sometimes, for a very brief moment, possess the same knowledge as separate substances. For the Albertist, this passage clearly confirmed that Aristotle was of the opinion that humans sometimes know separate substances directly, as they do themselves, even if this is the exception rather than the rule. To further corroborate their reading of Aristotle, Albertists referred to the theory of the intellectus adeptus as put forward in the writings of Avicenna and Averroes. If humans have collected sufficient sense data, they are able to turn their intellect immediately to the source of the intelligibility of that sense data, namely the agent intellect, which is itself either a separate substance or a direct emanation of a separate substance. In both cases, humans can know separate substances without first turning to the senses. It is in the immediate knowledge of separate substances that humans grasp the first principles of both theoretical and practical knowledge, such as the principle of noncontradiction or the rule that the good is be striven for and the bad avoided.
World History
