Olivi thinks his opponents will have to maintain that in some way the verbum is the product of one act of intellect and the object of a second.
These intellectual acts are less clear and distinct than acts of pure intellect, and may indeed be obscure and confused (as in the case of color sensations).
Acts of pure intellect occur without the need for any accompanying brain processes; these are purely intellectual perceptions.
It both facilitates the individual intellect's operations and, serving as an example of perfect being, draws it back towards itself through acts of intellection.
The first is through the faculty of sight and the second through the intellect.[34] For the eye, like the intellect, is illumined by means of light, thereby establishing a relationship between the eye, the object seen, and the space that separates them.[35] Just as the sun supplies light to the eye, the divine intellect illumines the human intellect during the act of intellection.
So if there were no distinction whatsoever between the intellectual soul's faculties of will and intellect, then presumably a cognition of any given object, as an act of the intellect, would be identical to the will's volition regarding the same object.
"Seriousness arises from the way in which the traditional arts and crafts are dealt with, and the unassuming nature of folk art is transcended through an act of the intellect".
As unforced belief, faith is "an act of the intellect assenting to the truth at the command of the will" (Summa theologiae, II/II, Q. 4, art. 5); and it is because this is a free and responsible act that faith is one of the virtues.
There are, therefore, two aspects of spoken language: on the one hand, the vox, as an articulate sound, causes a natural change in both the medium and the ear of the one who hears it (DOS 147; NLPA 127 128); on the other, the utterance, as something heard, brings about an act of the intellect of the listener (DOS 425; NSLPery I.1).
This act is not simply a reception or a reproduction in some fashion of an object coming to it from outside, but is what might be called semi-creative, that is, the act of the intellect is the act of conceiving its object.
