PERAUDI, RAIMONDO. - Cardinal, born in 1435 at Sugères in the diocese of Saintes, died at Viterbo on 5 Sept. 1505, Augustinian prior in his homeland then Apostolic protonotary. As papal nuncio in 1487, he was tasked with influencing Frederick III of Germany.
In pure sensation there is the presence of quality (colors, sounds... figures, movements) but with sensation alone (v.) one does not yet have the real “meaning” of the quality, which is obtained only in function of the “whole” grasped by the subject, whose definitive expression lies in the “concept” (v.). Yet even the pure concept, as it may be had by a man who must abstract it from experience (v.), cannot by itself attain the concept of the multiple and mutable and therefore pronounces solely on the formal value of experiential contents without grasping their reality of existence. Perception is the synthetic act of consciousness that enacts and contains both movements in the dynamic unity of sensitive consciousness and intellectual consciousness. In Thomist psychology the perception of the singular existent, when it concerns objects of the external world, does not properly belong to the intellect as such, but insofar as it embraces sensibility in the unity of consciousness and continues in particular with the cogitative faculty (v.), which is the internal sense proper to man by which the intellect performs the “conversio ad phantasmata” and thus its conjunction with existing reality: in this sphere, therefore, perception is immediate though indirect (“Indirecte et quasi per quamdam reflexionem...”: Sum. Theol., 1°, q. 86, a. 1). In spiritual life, however, man has immediate and direct perception of his own acts and of the acts of his very existence (ibid., q. 87, a. 1–4); and this must be called immediate and direct perception even though it is secondary insofar as it is conditioned by the apprehension of the objects to which consciousness first turns. Aristotle speaks of a knowledge “accessory,” “V. περὶ τῆς μετὰ τῆς φύσεως” (Met., XII, 9, 1074 b 36), which St. Thomas clarified by seeking to bring it closer to Augustinian interiority: “Et ideo id quod primo cognoscitur ab intellectu humano est huiusmodi obiectum, et secundario cognoscitur ipse intellectus cuius est perfectio ipsum intelligere” (Sum. Theol., 1°, q. 87, a. 3).
Modern psychology has oscillated between the elementary theory of perception through the association of ideas (v.) and the synthetic theory of Kantian derivation, which received an original interpretation in the “theory of form” (Gestalttheorie).