Simultaneous with Reason

'Nihil est in intellectu quod non sit prius in sensu.' 
Nothing is in the intellect that was not first in the senses.
Thomas Aquinas

Human words are simultaneous with reason and are the expression of that reason. They are the other side of the same coin. Sensuous and emotional experiences are processed in post hoc rationalisations which result in the ability to express truths in words. The attempt to explain the world is a difficult one in which the right words are searched for to clothe barely understood concepts which assert themselves from the depths of our consciousness as inarticulate responses to that experience. The moment when the right words are found is a victory for reason as it is born, in this way, into the light of day as the public event which language makes it. We should not forget, though, that something precedes this moment - the raw stuff of felt experience. This part of our lives is at least as large as the rational part and affords as many if not more pleasures than the rational part. Perhaps this is what Aquinas, the great champion of reason and the enemy of fideism, meant when, after his vision, he abandoned the writing of the Summa because, afterwards, it all seemed as so much straw.

In the meantime the battle to articulate is hardest in writing critically of sensuous experience as in criticising art or food. As also in poetry, trawling the depths to find the right words is always a victory for words, reason and civilisation.