ABSTRACT
St. Thomas Aquinas, in his Commentary on Boethius' De Trinitate, insisted that although sensorial images accompany every act of intellection, they operate in a peculiarly negative fashion in metaphysical discourse. Metaphysical reasoning, even though it aims at concluding to truths about those principles that need not exist in matter and motion, nevertheless is human and hence follows the pattern proper to man's entire cognitive life. St. Thomas often approaches the issues from the angle of the essence- esse relationship. In technical Thomistic jargon, the "self" emerges when the intellect in total reflection knows that what it is intentionally, its own form or structure, has being in a thing. Predication in judgment is the logical expression of this noetic taking-in-hand of an act by itself through total intellectual reflection. The prolongation of this act terminates in the existential and concomitant knowledge of the soul in act. But ego is neither intellect nor soul nor intellection of the other.
