is a separate Form, graspable only by the mind. By contrast, the whiteness we see in white bodies around us is mixed together with matter, and so available to sense perception. Bernard coined the phrase formae nativae, or “inborn forms,” for the images of transcendent Ideas that appear in material bodies. The resulting picture of the world is true to the one we find in Plato’s Timaeus. Bernard’s divine Creator is distinct from the intelligible Forms, and fashions the physical cosmos by putting immanent images of those Forms into matter.
