Cause Principle Unity

Third dialogue
no better than those who begin from the perceptible elements, or, more
profoundly, from absolute elements, or from the one matter, which of all
principles is the highest and most eminent. Sometimes, he who takes the
longest way round does not make the best journey, especially if his purpose
is not so much contemplation but action. As for the manner of doing philosophy,
it will be no less advantageous to explicate forms as proceeding
from something implicated than to distinguish them as from a chaos, or to
distribute them, as from an ideal source, or have them pass into act as from
some state of possibility, or draw them out as from a womb, or bring them
out into the light as from a blind and gloomy abyss. For every foundation
is good, if it is strong enough to support the edifice, and every seed is
suitable, if the trees and the fruit are desirable.
DICSONO. To come now to our objective, please present us with your
own detailed theory of this principle.
TEOFILO. Certainly, this principle, called matter, can be considered in
two ways: first, as potency; second, as substratum. Regarded as potency,
there is nothing in which it cannot be found in a certain way and in the
appropriate sense; the Pythagoreans, the Platonists, the Stoics and others
have placed it in the intelligible as well as in the sensible world. But we, who
do not understand it exactly as they did, but in a more elevated and broader
sense, speak of potency or possibility in the following way. Potency is commonly
divided into active potency, through which its substratum can operate,
and passive potency, through which it can exist, or receive, or have, or
be the substratum of the efficient in some manner. Without taking active
potency into consideration for the moment, I say that potency, in its passive
sense (although it is not always passive), may be considered either relatively
or absolutely. Thus, there is nothing to which we can attribute being
without also attributing to it the possibility of being. And this passive
potency corresponds so perfectly to active potency that one cannot exist
in any way without the other, so that, if the power to make, produce and
create has always existed, so, likewise, has the power to be made, produced
and created, for one potency implies the other. I mean that in positing one
we necessarily posit the other. Since this passive potency does not indicate
any weakness in that to which it is attributed, but confirms, rather, its virtue
and efficacy, and since the active potency and the passive potency are, in the
end, one and the same thing, there is no philosopher or theologian who hesitates
to attribute it to the first, supernatural principle. For the absolute
possibility, through which the things that are in act can exist, does not come
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