Categoria: Tratado 12 (II,4)

14. But is Absence this privation itself, or something in which this Privation is lodged? Anyone maintaining that Matter and Privation are one and the same in substratum but stand separable in reason cannot be excused from assigning to each the precise principle which distinguishes it in reason from the other: that which defines Matter…

5. It may be objected that the Intellectual-Principle possesses its content in an eternal conjunction so that the two make a perfect unity, and that thus there is no Matter there. But that argument would equally cancel the Matter present in the bodily forms of this realm: body without shape has never existed, always body…

7. Empedokles in identifying his “elements” with Matter is refuted by their decay. Anaxagoras, in identifying his “primal-combination” with Matter – to which he allots no mere aptness to any and every nature or quality but the effective possession of all – withdraws in this way the very Intellectual-Principle he had introduced; for this Mind…

8. What, then, is this Kind, this Matter, described as one stuff, continuous and without quality? Clearly since it is without quality it is incorporeal; bodiliness would be quality. It must be the basic stuff of all the entities of the sense-world and not merely base to some while being to others achieved form. Clay,…

9. But how can we conceive a thing having existence without having magnitude? We have only to think of things whose identity does not depend on their quantity – for certainly magnitude can be distinguished from existence as can many other forms and attributes. In a word, every unembodied Kind must be classed as without…

10. But how can I form the conception of the sizelessness of Matter? How do you form the concept of any absence of quality? What is the Act of the Intellect, what is the mental approach, in such a case? The secret is Indetermination. Likeness knows its like: the indeterminate knows the indeterminate. Around this…

11. “But, given Magnitude and the properties we know, what else can be necessary to the existence of body?” Some base to be the container of all the rest. “A certain mass then; and if mass, then Magnitude? Obviously if your Base has no Magnitude it offers no footing to any entrant. And suppose it…

12. It is the corporeal, then, that demands magnitude: the Ideal-Forms of body are Ideas installed in Mass. But these Ideas enter, not into Magnitude itself but into some subject that has been brought to Magnitude. For to suppose them entering into Magnitude and not into Matter – is to represent them as being either…

13. Are we asked to accept as the substratum some attribute or quality present to all the elements in common? Then, first, we must be told what precise attribute this is and, next, how an attribute can be a substratum. The elements are sizeless, and how conceive an attribute where there is neither base nor…

15. The further question, therefore, is raised whether boundlessness and indetermination are things lodging in something other than themselves as a sort of attribute and whether Privation (or Negation of quality) is also an attribute residing in some separate substratum. Now all that is Number and Reason-Principle is outside of boundlessness: these bestow bound and…

16. Then Matter is simply Alienism (the Principle of Difference)? No: it is merely that part of Alienism which stands in contradiction with the Authentic Existents which are Reason-Principles. So understood, this non-existent has a certain measure of existence; for it is identical with Privation, which also is a thing standing in opposition to the…

4. The present existence of the Ideal-Forms has been demonstrated elsewhere: we take up our argument from that point. If, then, there is more than one of such forming Ideas, there must of necessity be some character common to all and equally some peculiar character in each keeping them distinct. This peculiar characteristic, this distinguishing…

3. Now it may be observed, first of all, that we cannot hold utterly cheap either the indeterminate, or even a Kind whose very idea implies absence of form, provided only that it offer itself to its Priors and (through them) to the Highest Beings. We have the parallel of the Soul itself in its…

2. We are obliged, therefore, at the start, both to establish the existence of this other Kind and to examine its nature and the mode of its Being. Now if Matter must characteristically be undetermined, void of shape, while in that sphere of the Highest there can be nothing that lacks determination, nothing shapeless, there…

1. By common agreement of all that have arrived at the conception of such a Kind, what is known as Matter is understood to be a certain base, a recipient of Form-Ideas. Thus far all go the same way. But departure begins with the attempt to establish what this basic Kind is in itself, and…

6. We are led thus to the question of receptivity in things of body. An additional proof that bodies must have some substratum different from themselves is found in the changing of the basic-constituents into one another. Notice that the destruction of the elements passing over is not complete – if it were we would…