BOTH NATURE AND REASON ARE CONTEMPLATION; WHILE UNIVERSAL REASON IS BOTH SOUL AND NATURE.
3. (2). How does nature produce? And how, in producing, does she arrive at contemplation ? Since she produces while remaining immovable within herself,
and as she is a “reason,” she is a contemplation also. Indeed, every action is produced according to a “reason,” and consequently differs from it. Reason assists and presides over action, and consequently is not an action. Since reason is not an action, it is a contemplation. In universal Reason, the reason which holds the last rank itself proceeds from contemplation, and in this sense still deserves the name of contemplation because it is produced by the contemplation (of the soul). However universal Reason, which is superior to the latter reason, may be considered under two points of view, as soul and as nature. (Let us begin by nature.)
THE REASON OF NATURE IS THE RESULT OF AN IMMOVABLE CONTEMPLATION.
Does reason, considered as nature, also derive from contemplation ? Yes, but on condition that it has contemplated itself somewhat; for it is produced by a contemplation and a principle which was contemplated. How does it contemplate itself? It does not possess this mode of contemplation which proceeds from (discursive) reason; that is to say, which consists in discursively considering what one has in himself. Being a living “reason” and a productive power, how could it fail discursively to consider what it contains? Because one considers discursively only what he does not yet possess. Now as nature possesses, she produces by the mere fact that she possesses. To be what she is and to produce what she produces are identical. Because she is “reason,” she simultaneously is contemplation and contemplated object. As she is all three: contemplation, contemplated object, and “reason,” nature produces by the mere fact that it is in her essence to be these things. As we have shown, evidently action is a sort of contemplation; for it is the result of the contemplation that remains immutable, which does nothing but contemplate, and which produces by its mere contemplation.