Cause Principle Unity

Fourth dialogue
it is ‘that thing from which each natural species is produced’, never saying
that it is ‘that in which things are made’ – as we would say if acts did not
come out of it and if, consequently, it did not possess them?
POLIINNIO. Certe consuevit dicere Aristoteles cum suis potius formas educi
de potentia materiae quam in illam induci, emergere potius ex ipsa quam in ipsam
ingeri [Certainly, Aristotle and his followers usually say that forms come out
from matter, rather than that they are introduced into it, that they emerge
from it rather than being absorbed into it], but I would say that Aristotle
preferred to call ‘act’ the unfolding of form rather than its enfolding.
DICSONO. And I say that the expressed, sensible and unfolded being
does not constitute the fundamental essence of actuality, but is a consequence
and effect of it. In the same way, the principle being of wood and
the essence of its actuality do not consist in being a bed, but in its being a
substance so constituted that it can be a bed, a bench, a beam, an idol and
anything else formed out of wood. Not to mention that all natural things
are more genuinely produced from natural matter than artificial things are
from artificial matter, for art generates forms from matter either by subtraction,
as when it forms a statue from stone, or by addition, as when a
house is formed by joining stone to stone and wood and earth. But nature
produces everything out of its own matter by means of separation, parturition
and effluxion, as the Pythagoreans thought, as Anaxagoras and
Democritus understood and the sages of Babylon confirmed. Moses, himself,
also subscribes to their opinion when, describing the generation of the
things ordered by the universal efficient cause, he speaks thus: ‘Let the
earth bring forth its animals, let the waters bring forth living creatures.’ 18
It is as if he had said: Let matter bring them forth. For, as he says, water is
the material principle of things – which explains why he also says that the
efficient intellect (which he calls spirit) ‘brooded on the waters’: 19 that is,
he gave the waters a procreative power and produced from them the natural
species, which he says afterwards are waters in substance. Thus, speaking
of the separation of lower and higher bodies, he says, ‘the spirit separated
the waters from the waters’, and deduces from this that dry earth
appeared in their midst. Everyone claims, then, that things come from
matter by way of separation, and not by means of addition and reception.
Therefore, rather than saying that matter is empty and excludes forms, we
should say that it contains forms and includes them. This matter which
18 Paraphrase of Genesis 1, 20 and 24.
19 Genesis 1, 2: Bruno translates ferebatur as covava, ‘brooded’.
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