om a diversity
of intellectual light, which is common to every prophetic vision, but
from a diversity of species, whence similitudes also result.
Therefore it seems that in prophetic revelation new species of things
are impressed, and not merely an intellectual light.

_I answer that,_ As Augustine says (Gen. ad lit. xii, 9), "prophetic
knowledge pertains most of all to the intellect." Now two things have
to be considered in connection with the knowledge possessed by the
human mind, namely the acceptance or representation of things, and
the judgment of the things represented. Now things are represented to
the human mind under the form of species: and according to the order
of nature, they must be represented first to the senses, secondly to
the imagination, thirdly to the passive intellect, and these are
changed by the species derived from the phantasms, which change
results from the enlightening action of the active intellect. Now in
the imagination there are the forms of sensible things not only as
received from the senses, but also transformed in various ways,
either on account of some bodily transformation (as in the case of
people who are asleep or out of their senses), or through the
coordination of the phantasms, at the command of reason, for the
purpose of understanding something. For just as the various
arrangements of the letters of the alphabet convey various ideas to
the understanding, so the various coordinations of the phantasms
produce various intelligible species of the intellect.

As to the judgment formed by the human mind, it depends on the power
of the intellectual light.

Now the gift of prophecy confers on the human mind something which
surpasses the natural faculty in both these respects, namely as to
the judgment which depends on the inflow of intellectual light, and
as to the acceptance or representation of things, which is effected
by means of certain species. Human teaching may be likened to
prophetic revelation in the second of these respects, but not in the
first. For a man represents certain things to his disciple by signs
of speech, but he cannot enlighten him inwardly as God does.

But it is the first of these two that holds the chief place in
prophecy, since judgment is the complement of knowledge. Wherefore if
certain things are divinely represented to any man by means of
imaginary likenesses, as happened to Pharaoh (Gen. 41:1-7) and to
Nabuchodonosor (Dan. 4:1-2), or even by bodil