302. Relations between Intellect and Will. -- These furnished matter for lively controversies among the contemporaries and successors of St. Thomas. The alternative solutions have been recently described by a pair of epithets borrowed from modern philosophy: voluntarism and intellectualism. Lest the employment of this terminology in the domain of medieval scholasticism should prove in any way misleading, it is important to note that neither the voluntarists who emphasized the primacy of the will, nor the intellectualists who defended the primacy of the intellect, at all wished to overthrow or interfere with the hierarchy of the psychic functions. The dictum "Nihil volitum nisi cognitum" had the same absolute value for both parties; and hence the controversies of the thirteenth century on the "primacy" of intellect or will, had none of the criteriological significance which attaches to such controversies since the rise of the Kantian philosophy. They first arose from the opposition offered to the traditional teaching of St. Augustine and the earlier scholastics: the doctrine that the will plays a preponderating part in the psychic life. St. Thomas Aquinas was the leader of this opposition, and his teaching here inaugurated new traditions in scholasticism. His intellectualism shows itself: -

(1) In the superior nobility which he claims for the intellect. This superiority results principally from its way of attaining its object.

(2) In the dependence of the voluntary act on the intellectual act. The action of the will is necessitated if the absolute good be presented by the intellect; it is free only when the good presented is contingent and accordingly unable fully to satisfy the will. Even the free choice of a particular good presupposes an irresistible tendency towards the good in general as perceived through abstraction.

(3) In the extensive scope of the normal power of the intellect. The special illumination which, in the view of some scholastics, removes from the empire of normal knowledge the acquisition of certain truths (see e.g., 244 and 323) is incompatible with Thomistic intellectualism.

(4) In the respective moral roles of intellect and will, and in the act which puts us in possession of happiness. Finally, the intellectualism of St. Thomas is reflected by analogy in his study of the Divine life and of the angelic life; just as voluntarism applies to these same beings its theories on the will of man.