St. Thomas, following St. Augustine, teaches that in the creation, the divine idea in the Word was communicated in a twofold way, spiritual and corporeal. In the latter mode this light was made to reverberate from the visible universe. In the former it was made to shine in the superior and intellectual beings――that is, the angels――producing in them ideally all that which exists in the universe really. As they approximate in intelligence to God, these ideas or intelligible species by which they know all things have a nearer resemblance to the Idea in the Divine Word――that is, approach to its unity and simplicity of intuition――are fewer and more general. As their grade of intelligence is more remote from its source, they depart to a greater and greater distance from this unity by the increasing multiplicity of their intelligible species. Moreover, the inferior orders are illuminated by those which are superior; that is, these higher beings present to them a higher ideal universe than their own, and are as if reflectors or mirrors of the divine ideas, by which they see God mediately in his works. The human soul, being the lowest in the order of intelligent spirits, is not capable of seeing objects distinctly, even in the light of the lowest order of angels. It is made with a view to its informing an organized body, and it is aided by the bodily senses and organic operations to come out of the state of a mere capacity of intelligence, in which it has no innate or infused ideas, into actual intelligence. It is naturally turned, as an embodied spirit, to inferior objects, to single, visible things, for the material term of its operation, and from these abstracts the universal ideas which are the principles of knowledge. The necessity of turning to these sensible phantasms is therefore partly the inchoate state of the intelligence of man at the beginning of his existence, partly its essential inferiority, and, in addition, the actual union of the soul with the body. There is, however, in the soul, a power, albeit inferior to that of angels, of direct, intellectual vision and cognition, without the instrumentality of sensation. When the soul leaves the body and goes into the state of a separate spirit, it has the intuition of its own essence, it retains all its acquired ideas, and it has a certain dim and confused perception of higher spiritual beings and the ideas which are in them. It is therefore, in a certain sense, more free and more perfect in its intellectual operation in the separate state than it was while united with the body. All this proceeds without taking into account in the least that supernatural light of glory which enables a beatified spirit to see the essence of God, and in him to see the whole universe.