Hervaeus Natalis on Mental Reflection

Abstract This article investigates how Hervaeus Natalis accounts for three modes of the human intellectual soul’s awareness of its own acts. The first is an implicit awareness that the soul has of its acts before it engages in mental reflection. Second, relying on this pre-reflective mode of awareness, the soul can make itself explicitly aware of its states through mental reflection. Third, once separated from the body and beholding God, the soul perceives in God’s essence its direct act represented in God. Mental reflection and divine mirroring have in common that part of the content of the principal object is the act of cognition pre-reflectively given to the cognizing soul.