All right, so what I'm going to do at this time is walk everyone through what is commonly called the 12 steps of the human act or the 12 steps of a free choice.

Now, already I have to make qualifications up front. They're not steps in a kind of lockstop sequence.

We're going to draw qualifications about that as we go.

You could call them the 12 sub-acts of an overall human act.

That would probably be a more apt description.

The 12 sub-acts are constitutive act. That would probably be a more apt description. The 12 sub-acts or constitutive acts of a human

act. They're not 12 steps per se. They're 12 sub-acts of the human act. Now, the analysis that I'm

about to give you is we could say standard or classic within the

Thomist tradition.

I was just talking with Father Michael Sherwin about who the first Tomist was to lay this out,

and neither of us are certain about it.

Maybe somebody else knows who the first was.

But even if we don't know who the first was,

it's so standard and so common in Thomas' textbooks

that you're going to come across it, so let's walk through it.

And what it does is it lays out what's involved,

it's a schema that lays out what's involved in the human act,

and it's typically distinguished between two columns, and what we'll

do is we'll go back and forth. Now, that already is going to give a kind of impression that there's this

kind of back and forth, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, within the human person.

And real life is not necessarily like that.

There's a lot of temporal overlap, coinciding, co-inhearing.

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