We must approach the Summa Theologica with the awareness that the supreme mind thought the world, that is; the world is a product of divine thought. We will base our investigation of his work on this principle, the creative capacity of divine thought. Regarding man, Saint Aquinas made some rather - for the time - radical statements. Thomas Aquinas declares that human beings possess two things that are not similar between any two men. The soul and the active intellect, both, he says, "multiply according to the number of men" (Summa Theologica, 74). This means that each man or woman possesses a unique soul and an active intellect. What is the active intellect? At the end of the Summa Theologica Aquinas comes to a conclusion to this question. The active intellect is described as "the part of the intellect endowed with a certain faculty of making things actually intelligible through the abstraction of species from material conditions" (Summa Theologica, 72-73). This act of creating an insubstantial kind from what has been observed in the material world is the role that Aquinas assigns to the active intellect. The active intellect, which Dr. Hankey describes as “the part of the intellect, which creates in thought all things” (FYP lecture). Since the divine mind and the active intellect both share this ability to create. We must examine the relationship between the two, in hopes of discovering the similarity and difference between human and divine intellect. Some might argue that these immaterial kinds of things must have already been present for the human mind to abstract them from the environment. That human being cannot create but simply interpret his own environment. This statement is both true and false. It is true, as Go... middle of paper... nothing that man can fully know in the immaterial world as he is its creator, and therefore the immaterial is also all that he or she can govern. So man is a creator, just as he was created. Man is the ruler of the immaterial, but the slave of what is already present in the material. Humanity can only fully know that which is beyond matter. The human intellect is at the same time infinitesimally close to the divine and yet so radically distant. The human mind, within its own realm – the realm of the immaterial – possesses the spark of divinity, that of the creator. This is the truth buried in the words of St. Thomas Aquinas. Works Cited by Aquino. Theological Sum. Foundation Year Program Manual. Halifax: University of Kings College, 2011-2012Genesis. The Bible. Revised standard version. Hankey WJ, “Union of Opposites,” Founding Year Lecture, October 24, 2011