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The present article pertains to the notion of operans intrinsecum that Siger of Brabant, in response to Thomas Aquinas, places at the heart of his De anima intellectiva in order to reconsider the intellect’s relationship to the body. Drawing upon the model of celestial auto-motricity, the author aims to show two things. First, Siger finds in the Aquinate the elements for his own solution (without simply transferring the thomasian position). Second, he does so pertinently by recovering in Thomas Aquinas one of the muted but decisive sources for his cosmology: Averroes. Far from being a miserable escape hence decried, or even a first step toward Thomas’ noetic, the “intrinsic operant” is the subtle and sound concept of a master capably enriching his contested exegesis of the De anima with averroist physics.