 (v) The root of the weakness of the “peculiar/distinctive function” argument is that it is looking in the wrong direction, towards a metaphysical proposition concerning the nature of things, instead of towards what is intelligibly good as an opportunity, perhaps even the supreme opportunity, for me and anyone like me (any human being). And it is a truly fundamental methodological axiom of Aquinas’s philosophy, from beginning to end of his works, that in coming to understand the nature of a dynamic reality such as human being, one must first understand its capacities, to understand which one must first understand its act(ivities), to understand which one must first come to understand those activities’ objects. But the objects of human activities are intelligible opportunities such as coming to know, being alive and healthy, being in friendship with others, and so forth – objects whose attractiveness, fittingness, opportuneness, or appropriateness is in no way dependent upon, or even much enhanced by, the thought that they are distinctively characteristic of human beings as opposed to other animals.