Cause Principle Unity

Cause, principle and unity
(although it is not entirely clear what he intended, his words having been
reported by a commentator who is not particularly reliable). 6
You say that all the differences seen in bodies, from the point of view of
formation, constitution, figures, colours and other individual or common
characteristics, are nothing but the diverse aspects of the same substance:
fleeting, mobile and corruptible aspects of an immobile, persistent and
eternal being in which all forms, figures and members exist, though indistinctly
and (so to speak) conglomerated – exactly as in the seed, where the
arm is not distinct from the hand, nor the bust from the head, or the nerve
from the bone, and where differentiation and separation do not produce
another or a new substance, but bring into act and accomplish certain qualities,
differences, accidents and dispositions related to that substance. And
what is said of the relation between the seed and the members of animals
may also be said of food in relation to chyle, to blood, to phlegm, to flesh
and seed. This goes for any other thing which precedes the alimentary
state, or other state. It also goes for all things, from the lowest level of nature
to the highest, climbing from the physical totality philosophers know to the
archetype in which theologians believe, if you like, until we reach a single
original and universal substance, the same for all, which we call being, the
basis of all species and all different forms. Similarly in the art of carpentry
there is a single substance of wood which is subject to all dimensions and
shapes, which are not themselves wood but are of wood, in the wood or
involving the wood. That is why everything that makes for the diversity of
genera, species, differences, properties, all that which consists in generation,
corruption, alteration and change, is not being, is not essence, but
condition and circumstance of being or essence, which is one, infinite,
substratum, matter, life, soul, truth and goodness.
You say, then, that, since being is indivisible and absolutely simple,
because it is infinite, and is act in its fullness in the whole and in every part
of it (in the same way we speak of parts in the infinite, but not of parts of
the infinite), we cannot think in any way that the earth is a part of being,
nor that the sun is part of substance, since the latter is indivisible. But it is
quite reasonable to speak of the substance of the part, or better still, of the
substance in the part; just as it is not reasonable to say that a part of the soul
is found in the arm or another part in the head, but it is legitimate to say
that the soul is in the part that is the head, and that the substance is substance
of the part – or in the part – that is the arm. For to be portion, part,
6 Aristotle. See the end of the third dialogue, where Aristotle’s opinion of Parmenides is mentioned.
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