Cause Principle Unity

Fourth dialogue
matter produces forms from itself, so to speak, and does not receive them
as from outside. In a way, this is what Plotinus, prince of Plato’s school, also
understood. In establishing the difference between the matter of higher
things and that of lower, he says that the first is everything at the same time
and that, since it possesses all, there is nothing into which it changes, while
the second, by means of a certain renovation at the level of parts, becomes
everything, and becomes successively one thing after another – always,
therefore, in a state of diversity, alteration and movement. In consequence,
neither the one nor the other matter is ever formless, although each is
formed differently; one in the instant of eternity, the other in the instant
of time; one in simultaneity, the other in succession; one by way of enfolding,
the other by way of unfolding; one as a unity, the other as multiplicity;
one as being all and each thing, the other individually and thing after thing.
DICSONO. So, you wish to infer that, not only according to your principles,
but also according to those of other philosophical methods, matter
is not prope nihil [almost nothing], pure potency, bare, without act, without
virtue and perfection.
TEOFILO. Exactly. I say that it is deprived of forms and without them,
not in the way ice lacks warmth or the abyss is without light, but as a pregnant
woman lacks the offspring which she produces and expels forth from
herself, and as the earth is without light at night in our hemisphere, which
it can reacquire by its turning.
DICSONO. So, even in these inferior things, act coincides in the end – if
not entirely, at least to a great extent – with potency.
TEOFILO. I leave you to decide.
DICSONO. And what would happen if, finally, this potency from below
became one with that from above?
TEOFILO. Judge for yourself. You can henceforth rise to the concept, I
do not say of the supreme and most excellent principle, which has been
excluded from our inquiry, but to the concept of the world soul, insofar as
it is the act of everything and the potency of everything, and insofar as it is
present in its entirety in everything – whence it follows that (even if there
exist innumerable individuals) all things are one, and the knowledge of that
unity is the object and term of all philosophies and all meditation on natural
things – leaving in its domain the highest speculation of all, that which,
surpassing nature, is impossible and vain for the unbeliever.
DICSONO. That is true, for one ascends there guided by supernatural
and not natural light.
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