Cause Principle Unity

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