Taking the idea materially, the distinction takes the idea as an act or operation of the intellect.
The phantasm is therefore the efficient cause of intellectual knowledge, or better, of the first operation of the intellect (that of simple understanding).
And as we also know, when an idea is taken as an act or operation of the intellect, we take the idea materially.
It can also be said that intentions really exist in a res, but only potentially, whereas their distinction is an operation of the intellect alone.
The question boils down to whether relations exist in some manner in extra-mental reality or solely through the operation of the intellect, like second intentions (species and genera).
Intentio is thus the fruit of an operation of the intellect, which delves inside (for Henry intentio comes from intus tentio) the thing to which the intention itself belongs, by considering its constitutive 'notes' and giving rise to different concepts.
In all, three causes account for the operation of the intellect, according to James: 1) God as efficient cause; 2) the soul and its propensities as formal cause, and 3) the object presented by the senses as "excitatory" cause.
This entails that for Burley, the cognitive process is aimed at the second operation of the intellect, namely judgment (e.g., "Sortes est homo"), and not simply to abstraction, since it is by means of judgment that the intellect subsumes a given token (the material thing) under its type (the natural species).
Chatton explains his idea of divine cognition by recourse to an analogy, a distinction, and a claim about all operations of the divine intellect.
This is a theme found in Descartes that depends on an important distinction between the scope of the two basic operations of the mind that of the intellect and that of the will.
