 Since the First has no matter, it would follow that it is actually intelligence and actually intellectually cognized. Fârâbî’s first premiss, that anything would be intellectually cognizing if it did not have a matter blocking it, initially seems strange and ill-motivated. But Fârâbî would see the second premiss, that matter is the obstacle to something’s being intellectually cognized, as grounded in an Aristotelian analysis of intellectual cognition: the mind intellectually cognizes the form of a material thing precisely by abstracting it from its matter, and if the object had no matter to begin with, then there is nothing further to do to it and it is already intellectually  cognized.[55]  And Fârâbî apparently sees the first premiss as following from the second: if X is intrinsically without matter, it is actually intellectually cognized intrinsically, and not through a relation to something else which would cognize it: and this can only because it actually intellectually cognizes itself, and does so intrinsically or essentially, not in dependence on some other  cause.[56]  Following this Aristotelian analysis, the First’s act of intellectually cognizing its object would not be an accident of the First, but would be its essence; put the other way around, the First would be an intelligence, not by being a power for intellectually cognizing various objects, but by being an act of cognizing its object, namely the First itself. So, as Fârâbî says,