If we thought like angels or God, we could wake up in the morning and immediately know that dad was in the kitchen making breakfast. We would not need to move through the senses, reflect on things, refer to memory, analyze, make inferences, and draw conclusions. We would simply know.
Instead, there is an order in learning which is more fundamental to our creaturehood. Rather, a person wakes in their bedroom and realizes they smell something. They reach out, almost unconsciously, into memory and recognize the smell, perhaps that of sliced oranges or bacon cooking.
By reaching into the mind through memory, one actually reaches into the world without. Through reason, one might conclude that it is Saturday, so dad is probably in the kitchen cooking or getting breakfast ready. All the cozy feelings of being in bed, knowing that someone is out their cooking is arrived at not by immediate intuition (angelic insight), but by moving through the senses and experience to memory and reason.
This has a peculiar glory to it. Human knowledge has the glory of traversing the whole of creation and uniting it in the knower–reaching through material creation, animal life, and rational comprehension. In fact, the peculiar glory of human rationality is that each of the lower orders of reality are united by and illuminated in the intellect and drawn into what is a distinctly human life.
Through the order of knowing, we reach out to the creation while simultaneously reaching into ourselves and thus the interior is united to the world without.
In this way, God has made man a site of unity, a kind of nexus or node of all reality. He has done so, by making man like unto himself in very particular way. In this manner, all the levels and modes of being (material, vegetative, animal, and spiritual) find a meeting place and an order, and in this order they give glory to their Source.
Same & Other 