Cause Principle Unity

Cause, principle and unity
of being a constitutive cause of corporeal nature, the fact of being the substratum
of all sorts of transformations, and the fact of being a part of composites,
agrees with matter in its proper essence. For the same matter (or,
to put it more clearly), the same that can be made, or that can exist, is either
made, and it exists through the dimensions and extension of the substratum
and the qualities that have their existence in quantity – and this is
called corporeal substance and presupposes a corporeal matter – or else it
is made (supposing that its being has an inception) and is without those
dimensions, extensions and qualities, and it is called incorporeal substance,
and similarly presupposes the above mentioned matter. Thus, to an active
potency, in the case of both corporeal and incorporeal things – that is, to
both corporeal and incorporeal beings – there corresponds a passive
potency, which is both corporeal and incorporeal, and a possibility of being
which is both corporeal and incorporeal. If, then, we wish to speak of composition
in the one nature as much as in the other, we must understand it
in two different senses. We must also consider that, in eternal things, we
speak of matter which is always under the same act, while in variable things,
matter contains now one, now another act. With the former case, matter
possesses, at once, always and together, all it can possess, and is all it can be;
with the latter case, it has all it can possess and is all it can be, but at different
times and according to a certain order of succession.
DICSONO. Some, though they admit matter in incorporeal things,
understand it in a very different sense.
TEOFILO. However different their particular natures are, through
which one thing descends to corporeal being and the other does not, and
one thing receives sensible qualities and the other not, and however impossible
it seems that there can be an essence common to, on the one hand, that
matter which is incompatible with quantity and with the fact of being the
substratum of qualities which have their existence in dimensions, and, on
the other hand, that matter which is neither incompatible with the one nor
with the other, nevertheless, they are one and the same thing, and the whole
difference (as has been said many times) depends on the contraction of
matter into corporeal being or incorporeal being. Similarly, in the animal
being, all beings endowed with sense are one, but if we contract the genus
to a particular species, the essence of a man is incompatible with that of a
lion, and that of the lion with another animal. To this I add, if you please
(since you might say that what is never found must be considered impossible,
and unnatural rather than natural), that, primary matter never
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