"The gift of angels is suddenness — all is comprehended in a flash".

I am going to speak of science and knowledge so I shall start in this surprising, some would point out unscientific, way with a question about angels.
Why did teachers in Oxford ask their young philosophy students (often as young as 14 years): "How many angels can stand on the point of a needle?".
The answer is of course that what is conceived to have no corporeal body does not occupy space. It might be like asking how much hate can you squeeze into a capillary? or how many theorems can a boy put in his pants pocket?
Which brings me to this power of the mind to indulge concepts that seem to have no spatial reality. A wise man is said to have mused as to whether the angels envy us who build understanding of God and of creation in a lapidary manner, i.e. brick by brick? Angels are described as "pure intelligences" and, if they exist, they therefore surely see at once the profoundest explanation of phenomena, while we who may never see its meaning at all must be content with synthetic processes of rationalization and analyses which enable our limited minds to contain a woeful sufficiency by economising knowledge through universals, abstracts, theories, laws, hypotheses and the like. Of course some folks follow the stout British bulldog denial course and refuse to accept that there exist such problems as "meanings". Positively no meaning for Positivism you might say. However, only that sort of man (the contrary positivist philosopher with no philosophy) would dare to pretend that by observing a simple cause and effect he had thereby explained the reality underlying not only that which caused and that which it caused, but the very mystery of causation itself; or the mystery of the fact of being. In this edifice of intellect, while other thinkers have a place, as would engineers or labourers at work on a cathedral, the true philosopher is sometimes described as the architect. Non positivist thinkers may wonder what can be said of the philosopher whose dogmatic scepticism threatens reason, perhaps at times the peace of society but that is for ethics and we are here pondering on some simple aspects of what knowing is all about..

Some imagine that they can plumb the meaning of creation's existence and activity with no more than the tools of physically supported hypotheses; and then confidently conclude that all material, together with its activity, was auto-originated and is self-directing - as though the most exquisitely elaborate order to which it conforms were a perfectly straightforward matter and quite to be expected. Such thinkers are called natural determinists which is also contrary since they actually deny that any will exists to determine anything. Not even the paradox of human knowledge seems to cause them to pause; it is as if that very faculty by which meaning qua meaning is determined and determinedly sought after is beneath their considering. They may not admit either the word design into their vocabularies or the necessary corollary which is designer. For them, in this half lit rationale, the cosmos is random but ordered, non-created but creative. It is as though a programmer claimed to have discovered a computer which had made itself and written its own software, nay, which having done all that and explained, to those of whose existence it could not know, how to operate its various applications, their optimum activity and the purpose for the whole, had then given every indication of chaotic randomness. The last bit is the hard bit. How does our programmer demonstrate any single element in such a machine's making and operation which can be considered random? Even if this marvel could select from a large set of numbers random results, how would he demonstrate random selection for until today, nothing is less random that the procedures by which items may be consistently produced in a pattern that appears random. How can evidence be given to what lacks the consistency to receive evidence. What can be perceived in random flux long enough even to be described. Alas, what may even be described? The programmer was a liar; the computer was made by a computer maker, and anybody who believed the story was a fool.
And indeed such is the cosmos they seem to apprehend; programmed without programme or programmer, designed without design and without designer. These are they who effortlessly managed to fuddle the top legal brains in America and forced them to sit down at once in solemn conclave to make it a crime for a public school to teach little children how to use their brains the way Aristotle did and instruct them how best to ask questions of the world outside. (Read professor Phillip Johnson's Reason in the Balance. He was one of the top lawyers who did have enough brains to judge justly but not enough political leverage to convince his fellow judges that it was shameful for them not to do the same. Their decisions were reached by considerations other than evidence and justice - a bit like Pontius Pilate's only worse; he was scared of Caesar and a horrible mob, they were terrified of Spencer Tracy and a silly Hollywood movie). Who can be surprised at anything such lawmakers can achieve. At about the same time these Swiftian clowns made it not a crime to commit murder and a crime to attempt to prevent murder - all on the grounds that the murderer's privacy was inviolate. Since the victims were children in their mother's womb, and since the mothers were the first plotters in the crime, this all seemed to make sense. Certainly the dead kids are unlikely to sue them or vote for the other party.

But, US lawmakers aside, our intelligence remains for all that. What we know about angels is from authorities like the great World Religions. We admit that their existence is perfectly reasonable so long as we do not limit the existence of things to what can be measured, hefted, or demonstrated as an a priori opinion. We further know that we cannot prove the existence of a non-corporeal thing in a positive way. for example those who attempt to prove the existence of God do so by negative proofs, e.g. "nothing can be uncaused according to the laws of thought, matter requires a cause, therefore what caused it is non-matter and had no material cause ... this all men call God!"
But why approach the problem of bad science and worse theology (or anti-theology) from such a transcendental position which is utterly beyond the frame of examination at any testable level? well because for the purposes of examining the properties of thought and knowing, angels propose one simple power which no matter how it is conceived of will not submit to proofs. And since we also seem to posses that power, albeit to a lesser or limited extent, and since its mysteries remain closed, why should I not speak of angels? At the very worst, being "pure intelligences" we can conceive of them as uncluttered analogies of the problem. From this we can distinguish exactly what we mean when we speak of intelligence. But, if nothing else, we may, by isolating the meaning of the term "intelligence", draw the line in the sand clearly and challenge the world to deny us. We can believe in angels even if we cannot prove them, because we can experience the intelligence we own which is also beyond the power of that same intelligence to prove by objective methods. In short, intelligence and the possession of it is the very first principle of everything that men call science, philosophy, theology or religion, anti-theology or anti-religion. If it is not given, nothing may be taken.
But is this fair and can it ever be called science? Yes and no. It is fair to approach a problem in the fairest way possible and to keep an open mind about the existence of what cannot at once be discerned is reasonable. The one certain and absolute bar to knowledge is contempt prior to examination. Furthermore, if I adopt this democratic attitude to the notion that an unseen Creator has the power to create beings more like himself than, say like apes, I am certainly better disposed for science than if I should begin by declaring that "Angels" are contradictions in terms (As Hobbes famously said) when any good grammarian could at once prove otherwise.
Is it scientific? Of course not, but then neither is heroism or greed. Science is a system of proving what can be proven, or demonstrating what can be demonstrated. Logic is a science, as is philosophy right up to metaphysics - even theology is science  so long as one accepts as givens the postulates claimed to have been revealed by supernatural powers.
Therefore I make no excuse and even dare to go further - that is to ask that every mind, having accepted the proofs of the existence of God or even that nothing may be proved or explained that does not look for its first cause in God - come to thinking of the human mind against those angels compared, to unclutter it and put its amazing powers in bold relief.
So what can angels, our fellow creatures, give God in effort to compare with our sweet labour of the mind as we caress his creation with careful, lapidary consideration? Thus do I imagine that angels admire the effort man has to make to reach truth; that they see in this patient labour our ennoblement. Indeed, as I have already suggested, were they not good angels they would be moved to the envy of us, as no doubt the fallen intelligences do with exasperated contempt.

Now we who rise by the scaffolds which we ourselves must build can obviously describe those very structures. We call them the sciences and philosophy — and where the scaffolds get higher and our gaze deeper we speak of metaphysics. This highest of all sciences serves many purposes but not the least is the authority it lends to the human mind to distinguish each strand in the covering web of human intellectual disciplines and methods or systems of enquiry. When metaphysics fails sciences become the subjective servitors of small groups of men. Weird things result! One, today is the conviction that people who describe things  have thereby changed those things; as though distant mental reflection could move the phenomena as by witchcraft. Others seem to imagine they have created what they had simply described; others still that by restructuring a few mechanical parts within the greater machine they have made themselves gods of the entire machinery of the cosmos.

We can change exterior things, of course, but that is, as I say, mechanics. What is changed by thinking is to some extent ourselves for where we were less we become greater, ignorant knowing, careless filled with wonder. And as the habit of good thinking increases our facility for learning, so also it creates a desire for what it feeds upon. But in this too there is the dark side; and whoever abuses his wonderful intellect, reducing it to a court of denial where proofs are tortured to fit alien problems, and reason stands accused of nameless crimes, he too increases his will to unlearn and sickens on what he cannot stop drinking

The mind freed from denial wishes to feed upon all knowledge, even on the understanding of its own processes — when we look at this mind scaffold itself, into this or that structure of thought, say grammar or logic, or algebra, they seem almost as pleasant as what they consider. The truly free mind approaches the angelic; it has its own suddenness to recognize at once a false and a true distinction. Scholarly objectivity and a healthy awareness of the effort we must make to refine causes by painstakingly excluding merely apparent causes is no new thing. But it is never to be confused with the "critical spirit" which makes as its first cause and end the implausibility of truth itself. Our spirit is one of confident discovery. Our method is rigorous honesty applied.

But the fact that we have the power in the first place, not just to look at what is good but to prepare and focus our individual faculties for that purpose leaves us marvelling at that power and wondering about its cause and nature. There is a valid psychological dimension in our understanding of things. Alas this too throws a shadow and by an admixture of the witchcraft folly already mentioned together with dafter vanities, some deem the activity of the individual mind vain; others go further and claim that we cannot think as individuals at all but that flows of social consciousness may arrive at conclusions - as though a mob could play chess.

Let us take one consideration to exemplify this gift and point the fallacy that comes with it:

We may consider the idea of matter, knowing by experience that it is likely to be in a state of change; we name the idea of that capacity to change and call it potential even although we know that no such solid thing as potential actually exists.

So we again examine a power of the mind to recognise what has not even happened yet — the absolute antithesis, say, of an empiricist. How shall an empiricist deny when he was at the point of assembling his case against the man who recognizes potential in things, he was himself moving from potential to active argument. Or how may the man who denies the existence of what cannot be touched or measured explain away the "sceptical spirit"? Can he measure it? Is it more than a mood? Is it a tendency of his will? Is this unarguable factor of his psychology capable of being confined in such a narrow frame as, say, logical positivism?

We, simply by staying free of prejudice, accept our minds as they are instead of how others would wish to form them. We then accept the fact that the human mind can set out to span the limitless spectrum of causalities without any sense of despair that the whole is beyond us and filled with delight that so much is nevertheless ours to gather. In this immense garden we can watch for changes as a peasant waits expectantly for the seasons, like a good chemist we may observe this cause producing that effect, or to recognise time and to measure it as naturally as a man with a time-table waits for his train and computes both which one he has missed and which next one he can catch if a break in the service occurs.

This wonderful mind can produce a concept before any other man may touch it or measure it; even before he himself can confirm it with affirmation. We can actively consider a quality of something as nothing more than a bare spark of intelligibility, something stripped of everything except that last property without which it would not be anything — certainly not itself. An idea like man; unadorned, unspecified, unlooked at but just the thought; which nevertheless throws itself brightly on reason as nothing else but man. We call this consideration of matter, of that element of being, essence. Matter in its first intelligibility.

David Hume sought to deny this by the specious argument from a well known thing so simple in form that the first notion of it co-incided with the intellectual judgement that identified it. He said that nobody could think of a triangle without at once conceiving it to be either isosceles or scalene. Did anybody ever ask him to consider a myriagon? Such a thing may be considered but never remotely affirmed as to its exact shape… and not just because the word itself avoids exactness. And speaking of such wonderful words that come with shape to describe what has no shape, or form to convey the less formed, do these not defy Hume at once?
A well educated man gapes in amused wonder as the father of British atheism, Thomas Hobbes, blandly conceives of Angels, admits that he had conceived of angels by actually using the word "angel" and conveys his conception to others by written and spoken word, then denies that the word has meaning; insisting that it is a contradiction in terms like "round square". A little child would understand that if the Ginger Bread man couldn't run as fast as the story told it down his local High Street, it certainly did scamper faster than all its pursuers down the halls of his lucid imagination and that therefore it had a form of existence. It existed as a concept. A gingerbread man is not even a contradiction in terms. It is merely a most unlikely creature, and admittedly far less likely than the pure intelligences that God is said to have created. But the point is that while Hobbes and Hume, in not believing in Angels, not even in God, were perfectly free to state that dogma of disbelief;  they had absolutely no right at all to pretend the dogma was based on science, never mind proved by scientific method; even the science of grammar.
In fact it violates both science and grammar; violates each so badly that for the first it had to propose a method of proofs that would forever excise the right of the intellect a say in the selection of whichever proofs were best suited to a subject (a task seemingly beyond the skill of Hume whose attempt to squeeze every process into a grammatical absolute even offended good English) , and, in the second, had to raise an entirely new grammar which palpably obliterates not only grammar as an adjunct of logic, but as the sine qua non of communication. It hoodwinks objectivity which is another way of saying it played tricks with common sense. I do not deny that people like Wittgenstein assembled the most complex and entertaining mazes for the mind to get lost and play in, but I absolutely insist that he was not a scientist and certainly no philosopher - unless one admits the writing of fairy tales and the rhyming of riddles into that solidly puritanical domain.
But fairy tales do not of themselves contradict common sense, which is why the scientist brothers Grimm made a life's work of collecting them.
Common sense is the safe idea that every other man can understand what I understand, that he sees what I do, that he knows when things do not add up, that at the least two or more men being gathered together can witness to that fact and to what they have assembled to observe. When a teacher orders the boys to gather round at the stinks experiment he doesn't doubt the existence of the experiment or the presence of the boys. Were he ever to do so he would have gone mad. Sane confidence in what we are and what we see is what we mean by objectivity. The "science" of linguistics is the complex justification of the exact opposite. It is merely dressed in the accoutrements of science and was  raised by atheists to deny both. It is therefore the complete anti science. Fairy tales on the other hand may be the subject of science, they may never of themselves be science, but they do not set up to bewitch science and turn it into a toad as Wittgenstein attempted to do when he began to take himself seriously. Two common sense men can compare notes about the Times crossword which is their witness to common sense without ever imagining that two across is anything other than a trick with words and ten down does not really dwell inside another word like omelettes in allotments.
A friend of mine tells of the poseur who sailed into his linguistics class proclaiming "we do not communicate with words!" A large dude unrolled his frame from a bench and asked: "Hey, What you tellin' us man?" another "teacher" sought to impress his sophomores by writing on the chalk-board: "This sentence is false." He beamed around looking for reaction and finally a shy girl said: "I don't think the board really realises what it's saying!"

Having addressed annoying little absurdities standing against the full power of human thought let us continue with our consideration of essence. We  find that it may concern on one hand, the mere thought of some thing or, on the other hand, a thing in itself, a thing in existence, and so we separate this simple glance at reality which impressed itself on our intellect, and we call the first one, quite simply, Essence (and in its light potential) and we name the ‘existing’ essence, Substance.

Now we address existing essences or substances and we observe amazing properties.

In an iron bar’s substance potential for change lurks, evolution into change and new act is there for one thing. How do we know? Why we observed this over many thousands of years even before we could particularise what we had come to expect.

[But note here, Thomas Aquinas says "We observe most matter to be in motion." Compare that to Hobbes: "All matter is in motion..!"
Thomas never strays beyond our capacity, even when he must accept this or that hypothesis as being scientifically probable, his method never precludes its perfection or even refutation later on unless it is of its own nature immutable or incorrigible.]

To continue, a cold bar may become a hot bar or a straight one or a bent one and so on. But we have a means of discerning signs of alteration, signs sent out from changing properties therein which could not exist outside of the substance of the bar itself, and which depend upon the bar. These are the accidents — things like hotness, or luminosity, or enlargement etc.

You may  move on to examine certain specific properties of accidents, none of which can exist without substance but some of which are essential to the existence of the substance they inhere to. But already we recognise the ancient place of philosophy in our language and grammar. Accident may have a new, lesser, meaning now; but it arose as a concept which a man once had of reality. He knew that greenness wasn't grass but that it was the colour of grass. While others considered the grass as a thing, he looked on his manner of considering it. He was the first philosopher. Such a man if he ever chose to study the chemistry of things, or their structures, or their mysterious life forces, might call himself a chemist, a physicist, an engineer or even a biologist - what we would call a scientist; but because he was first a philosopher he would be a better scientist. In his keeping, phials would be no less magical, bottles would enclose liquid wonders in their glassy half-lights, and powders would stir in examining draughts as in any other laboratory;  but for the philosopher these would ask profounder questions. And Aristotle heard them as four things in all which he called four causes for explanation; primary, efficient, formal and final. That is, he saw a statue and saw the stone, the design, the hand of sculptor, and asked him why he had made the figure of a being that had never existed, Dyonisus.
We should ask why modern, atheist science and philosophy is so ferocious in its denial of what the mind does by natural inclination, even going so far as to pretend that a man who can perform such a violent lobotomy upon his own intellect is henceforward to be called an "intellectual". There were no such creatures labelled before Compt and this fact suggests another essay. Probably older folk considered that everybody, including the village blacksmith had an intellect because common sense was then more generally admitted in the world, when those who lacked it were considered to be at a disadvantage. If everybody had an intellect why should some be set apart as intellectuals. Was there irony intended here? Should we smile a knowing smile when intellectuals pity us, trapped as we are in the iron bands of common sense where two and two may never ever be other than four? I think, yes!

What we do that modern method lost by refusing to consider all the questions asked by  the genie in the bottle is an activity we share with angels but must work hard at as men. It is the possession of an intellectual power or light which God bestowed upon us all to mark us for His very own. It is the sight, of sorts, not just to see His creation, but to see that it is good. Indeed, to see that it is His! The problem of atheism or agnosticism is not with the gift, nor that it is a gift, but that the gift-maker seems diffident as though he prefers some anonymity -- at least in the sense that He doesn't shout about it. Ingrates would rather he kept it that way, fools cannot summon the effort to find him to thank him; but we who enjoy the gift in its wholesome plenitude see its hallmark everywhere and do both

The angels keep their ancient places, turn but a stone and start a wing;
'Tis ye, 'tis your estranged faces that miss the many spendoured thing!.