ds out the corporeal substance, and from thence
the spiritual. His actions (some say) are apprehension, composition,
division, discoursing, reasoning, memory, which some include in invention,
and judgment. The common divisions are of the understanding, agent, and
patient; speculative, and practical; in habit, or in act; simple, or
compound. The agent is that which is called the wit of man, acumen or
subtlety, sharpness of invention, when he doth invent of himself without a
teacher, or learns anew, which abstracts those intelligible species from
the phantasy, and transfers them to the passive understanding, [1012]
"because there is nothing in the understanding, which was not first in the
sense." That which the imagination hath taken from the sense, this agent
judgeth of, whether it be true or false; and being so judged he commits it
to the passible to be kept. The agent is a doctor or teacher, the passive a
scholar; and his office is to keep and further judge of such things as are
committed to his charge; as a bare and rased table at first, capable of all
forms and notions. Now these notions are twofold, actions or habits:
actions, by which we take notions of, and perceive things; habits, which
are durable lights and notions, which we may use when we will. Some reckon
up eight kinds of them, sense, experience, intelligence, faith, suspicion,
error, opinion, science; to which are added art, prudency, wisdom: as also
[1013]synteresis, _dictamen rationis_, conscience; so that in all there be
fourteen species of the understanding, of which some are innate, as the
three last mentioned; the other are gotten by doctrine, learning, and use.
Plato will have all to be innate: Aristotle reckons up but five
intellectual habits; two practical, as prudency, whose end is to practise;
to fabricate; wisdom to comprehend the use and experiments of all notions
and habits whatsoever. Which division of Aristotle (if it be considered
aright) is all one with the precedent; for three being innate, and five
acquisite, the rest are improper, imperfect, and in a more strict
examination excluded. Of all these I should more amply dilate, but my
subject will not permit. Three of them I will only point at, as more
necessary to my following discourse.

Synteresis, or the purer part of the conscience, is an innate habit, and
doth signify "a conversation of the knowledge of the law of God and Nature,
to know good or evil." And (as our divines hold) it is r