  But passages of this last kind are misleading, because Aquinas does see something especially mysterious about human cognition, and he appeals to God as a way of solving this mystery. The agent intellect, on Aquinas’s view, accounts for our capacity to grasp self-evident truths. We have an immediate and direct grasp of the truth of first principles, such as the principle of noncontradiction (see, e.g., Summa contra Gentiles II.83.1678). We do not infer the truth of this principle, we do not discover that it is true through any kind of induction. Instead we simply see its truth, as soon as we are confronted with an instance where it applies. This is not innate knowledge; we are not born knowing these principles. What we are born with is the capacity to recognize their truth as soon as we are confronted with instances of them. These first natural conceptions are “the seeds of all the things that are subsequently cognized” (De veritate 11.1 ad 5). In this sense, Aquinas is even willing to speak of the soul’s having a prior knowledge of everything that it knows: