2. Real faith is nothing else than an acknowledgment that a thing is so because it is true. For someone who possesses a real faith thinks and says, "This is true. Therefore I believe it." For faith is a faith in the truth, and truth is the object of faith.

By the same token, if the same person does not understand a thing to be true, he says, "I do not know whether it is true. Therefore I do not yet believe it. How am I to believe what I do not comprehend? Perhaps it is not true."

11. Because faith is an internal acknowledgment of truth, and because faith and truth are bound up together, as said in nos. 2, 4-6 above, it follows that an outward acknowledgment without an internal one is not faith, and that being persuaded of some falsity is not faith. An outward acknowledgment without an internal one is a faith in the unknown, and a faith in the unknown is mere information, stored in the memory, which, if affirmed, becomes a persuasion. Moreover, people caught up in such persuasions think that something is true because someone else has said so, or think that it is true because they have been convinced of it. And yet one can be as convinced of falsity as he can be of truth, and sometimes more strongly so.

By thinking that something is true from having been convinced of it, we mean thinking that something someone else has said is true and not pondering it before then, but only affirming it.