Is this true? Is there any intelligence, or group of intelligences, intermediate between men and God, such that man's understanding, insufficient in itself, is dependent on this intermediary for all that it knows? If so, the 'separate intellect' of Averroes and Avicenna, -- higher than human, yet short of divine, at least according to Averroes, -- is not 'the baseless fabric of a vision' after all, but the blurred and ill-apprehended outline of a profound truth (B. II, Chapp. LIX sq.). This would be a discovery indeed in psychology, if it could be established. It might empty all the virus of pantheism out of the doctrine of the Absolute, showing that the Absolute, while real, is not God. It might assign their true places in creation to the Arian Logos, to the Gnostic Aeons, as also to the Platonic Ideas. -- Modern Psychology meanwhile is serenely oblivious of angels. Catholics still believe in them, dread the evil ones (devils), and pray to the good ones, who now see the face of God. Catholics believe that good angels are often the vehicles through which 'actual graces,' that is, warnings and impulses in order to salvation, descend from God to men. But that man owes his ordinary knowledge of mathematics, chemistry, sanitation, railway management, or even of religion, to any action whatsoever of angelic intelligence upon his mind, -- I do not know any man living who thinks so. For all that I can tell, I should know all that I do know, just as I know it now, if if there were no angels at all. The psychological discovery of which I have spoken, remains to be made, for he discovers who proves. Yet St Thomas seems to have accepted it.

Of God and His Creatures: 3.91