Cause Principle Unity

Second dialogue
being dominated by it, given that the spiritual substance cannot be
surpassed by the material substance, but, rather, contains it.
DICSONO. This seems to me to conform not only to the thought of
Pythagoras, whose thesis the Poet states when he says:
Principio caelum ac terras camposque liquentis,
lucentemque globum lunae Titaniaque astra
spiritus intus alit, totamque infusa per artus
mens agitat molem, totoque se corpore miscet; 7
[First, the heaven and earth, and the watery plains,
the shining orb of the moon and Titan’s star,
a spirit within sustains, and mind, pervading its members,
sways the whole mass and mingles with its mighty frame.]
but also the thought of the Theologian, who says, ‘the spirit pervades and
fills the Earth, and what contains all things.’ 8 Also, another, speaking perhaps
of the relationships of form with matter and potency, says that act and
form dominate.
TEOFILO. If, then, spirit, soul, life is found in all things and in varying
degrees fills all matter, it can assuredly be deduced that it is the true act and
true form of all things. The world soul, therefore, is the formal constitutive
principle of the universe and all it contains. I say that if life is found in
all things, the soul is necessarily the form of all things, that form presides
everywhere over matter and governs the composites, determines the composition
and cohesion of the parts. That is why it seems that such form is
no less enduring than matter. I conceive this form in such a way that there
is only one for all things. But according to the diversity of the dispositions
of matter and the capacity of the material principles, both active and passive,
it happens to produce different configurations and realize different
potentialities, bringing forth sometimes non-sensitive life, sometimes sensitive
but not intellective life, sometimes seeming to suppress or restrain all
outside signs of life, because of the incapacity or some other characteristic
of matter. Thus, changing site and state, this form cannot be annihilated,
because spiritual substance is no less real than material. So only the external
forms are changed, and even annihilated, because they are not things,
but of things, and because they are not substances, but accidents and
particularities of substances.
7 Virgil, Aeneid, VI, 724–7.
8 The author, supposed to be Solomon, of the Wisdom of Solomon, 1, 7.
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