ABSTRACT
The long first article of question seventy-six aims to work out in fuller detail the relationship between Aquinas’ teaching on the soul, as set out in question seventy-five, and the Aristotelian theory of matter and form. The positive discussion of this issue takes its start from the traditional definition of a human being, ‘man is a rational animal’. In the scholastic jargon, animal is the genus, man is the species, and ‘rational’ indicates the specific difference which marks out the species within the genus. But a specific difference is, according to Aristotelian theory, a form. Therefore, the intellectual principle which is denoted by the word ‘rational’ must be the human being’s form.
