Cause Principle Unity

Cause, principle and unity
to the three aforesaid elements, and who recognize another kind of soul,
apart from this world soul, which we must define here.
DICSONO. Excellently said. And very satisfactory reasoning, for I see
some people so lacking in judgement that they do not distinguish the causes
of nature taken absolutely, according to the entire extension of their being,
as philosophers do, and those taken according to a limited sense appropriate
to their work. The first mode is excessive and vain for physicians as
such, and the second is restricted and insufficient for philosophers as such.
TEOFILO. You have touched on that very point which earns Paracelsus
praise. In discussing medical philosophy, he reproves Galen for having
introduced philosophical medicine, and for having created such an annoying
mixture and tangled web that, in the last analysis, he comes across as a
very shallow physician and a very confused philosopher. But let that be said
with some reserve, since I have not had the leisure to examine all parts of
his work.
GERVASIO. Please, Teofilo, first do me the favour, since I am not so
competent in philosophy, of making clear what you mean by the word
‘matter’, and what matter is in natural things.
TEOFILO. All who want to distinguish matter and consider it in itself,
without form, resort to the analogy of art. So it is with the Pythagoreans,
the Platonists and the Peripatetics. Take, for example, the art of carpentry:
it has wood as substratum for all its forms and all its work, as iron is for the
blacksmith and cloth for the tailor. All these arts produce various images,
compositions and figures in their own particular material, none of which is
natural or proper to that material. Nature is similar to art in that it needs
material for its operations, since it is impossible for any agent who wishes
to make something to create out of nothing, or to work on nothing. There
is, then, a sort of substratum from which, with which, and in which nature
effects her operations or her work, and which she endows with the manifold
forms that result in such a great variety of species being presented to
the eyes of reason. And just as wood does not possess, by itself, any artificial
form, but may have them all as a result of the carpenter’s activity, in a
similar way the matter of which we speak, because of its nature, has no natural
form by itself, but may take on all forms through the operation of the
active agent which is the principle of nature. This natural matter is not perceptible,
as is artificial matter, because nature’s matter has absolutely no
form, while the matter of art is something already formed by nature. Art
can operate only on the surface of things already formed, like wood, iron,
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