Introduction to the Philosophy of Saint Augustine (continued)
respect to themselves. Therefore these three things are marvellously inseparable from each other, and yet each of them is severally a substance, and all together are one substance or essence, whilst they are mutually predicated relatively.
CHAPTER 6 One knowledge of the thing in the thing itself, and
another in eternal truth itself. That corporeal things, too, are to be judged by the rules of eternal truth. 9. But when the human mind knows itself and loves itself, it does not know and love anything unchangeable: and each individual man declares his own mind by one manner of speech, when he considers what takes place in himself; but defines the human mind in another by special or general knowledge. And so, when he speaks to me of his own individual mind, as to whether he understands this or that, or does not understand it, or whether he wishes or does not wish this or that, I believe; but when he speaks the truth of the mind of man generally or specially, I recognize and approve. Whence it is manifest, that each sees one thing in himself, such that another person may believe what he says of it, yet may not see it; but another in the truth itself, such that another person also can gaze upon it; of which the former undergoes changes at successive times, the latter consists in an unchangeable eternity. For we do not gather a generic or specific knowledge of the human mind by means of resemblance, by seeing many minds with the eyes of the body: but we gaze upon indestructible truth, from which to define perfectly, as far as we can, not of what sort is the mind of any one man, but of what sort it ought to be upon the eternal plan.
10. Whence also, even in the case of the images of things corporeal which are drawn in through the bodily sense and in some way infused into the memory, from which also those things which have not been seen are thought under a fancied image, whether otherwise than they really are, or even by chance as they are—even here too, we are proved either to accept or reject, within ourselves, by other rules which remain altogether unchangeable above our mind, when we approve or reject anything rightly. For both when I recall the walls of Carthage which I have seen, and imagine to myself the walls of Alexandria which I have not seen, and, in preferring this to that among forms which in both cases are imaginary, make that preference upon grounds of reason; the judgment of truth from above is still strong and clear, and rests firmly upon the utterly indestructible rules of its own right; and