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