Create successful ePaper yourself
Turn your PDF publications into a flip-book with our unique Google optimized e-Paper software.
Third dialogue<br />
GERVASIO. He may perhaps construe the shaft, which after all is<br />
neither very obscure nor very veiled, and answer, ‘It is you who have no<br />
intellect: I have more than all your sort.’<br />
TEOFILO. You will, then, credit him no more than you would a blind<br />
man who retorted that it is you who are blind, and that he sees much<br />
better than all those who believe they see like you.<br />
DICSONO. You have said enough to demonstrate in more detail than I<br />
have ever heard what the word ‘matter’ means and what must be understood<br />
by ‘matter’ in natural things. In the same way Timaeus the Pythagorean 13<br />
teaches us to find, through the metamorphosis of one element into another,<br />
the matter that is hidden and that can be known only in analogical terms.<br />
‘Where the form of the earth was’, he says, ‘there afterwards appeared the<br />
form of the water’, and here we cannot say that one form receives the other,<br />
because a contrary thing does not accept or receive another. That is, the dry<br />
does not receive the wet, or rather the dryness does not receive the wetness,<br />
but there is a third thing from which the dryness is expelled and into which<br />
wetness is introduced, and this third thing is the substratum of both contraries,<br />
not being itself contrary to any. It follows that, since we cannot think<br />
of the earth as reduced to nothing, we must conjecture that something<br />
which was in the earth has subsisted and is found in the water. For the same<br />
reason, that same thing will subsist and will be found in the air, when the<br />
water is transmuted into air (under the effect of the heat which reduces it<br />
to fumes or vapour).<br />
TEOFILO. From this we may conclude (in spite of our adversaries) that<br />
nothing is ever annihilated and loses its being, except for the external and<br />
material accidental form. That is why both the matter and the substantial<br />
form of any natural thing whatever (that is, its soul) can be neither<br />
destroyed nor annihilated, losing their being completely. Certainly this<br />
cannot be true of all the substantial forms of the Peripatetics and others like<br />
them, which consist of nothing but a certain complexion and a certain set<br />
of accidents; all that they are able to designate outside of their primary<br />
matter is nothing but accident, complexion, disposition of qualities, a principle<br />
of definition, quiddity. Hence, some cowled and subtle metaphysicians<br />
among them 14 , wishing to excuse rather than accuse their idol<br />
Aristotle, have come up with humanity, bovinity, oliveness as specific substantial<br />
forms. This humanity – for example, Socratiety – this bovinity, this<br />
13 The pseudo-Timaeus of Locri, in his De anima mundi et natura, 94, A.<br />
14 The Franciscans of the school of Duns Scotus.<br />
59