 James’ longest discussion of cognition occurs in question 12 of his first Quodlibet, which asks whether it is necessary to posit an agent intellect in the human soul that is distinct from the possible intellect (for discussion see Côté 2013, and Solère 2018a and 2018b). Since the view that there is such a distinction was an important component of abstraction theories of knowledge, what was really at stake was whether abstraction theory provided the correct account of knowledge acquisition. According to abstraction theory, of which Aquinas was one of the most famous exponents, the mind derives its content from an engagement with sense-images (phantasms). The agent intellect, a “part” of the intellectual soul, was held to abstract intelligible species from the sense-images, and these species were then “received” by the possible intellect. Since the same power could not be both active and passive, the two intellects had to be distinct. As can be gathered from the preceding section, James would not be favorably disposed to such a theory. Since intelligibles, for him, preexisted in the soul in the form of “aptitudes” or “fitnesses,” there was no need for them to be abstracted; and since the main reason for positing an agent intellect was to perform abstraction, there was no reason to suppose that such a faculty existed — which is exactly the position he defended in question 12. James’ theory of innate  idoneitates in the soul thus entailed a wholesale rejection of abstraction theories of knowledge and of the model of the soul on which they rested (Côté 2013). 