become anything; there is a fixed fitness in things. Hence, while the Matter has a receptive potentiality in itself, it has also an active potentiality,[1] which is demanded by this very adaptation of things to each other. It is a cause that co-operates with the formal cause; and it is self-active and resistant. With this, then, is given the distinction between passive and active potentiality of Matter;[2] the Matter not only receives, but it “enables” too.
To return to Bacon. All grant without question, he says,[3] that effects produced in Nature are generated from the active potentiality of Matter, as Aristotle says. And since the Species too is a natural effect of the Agent it is similarly educed. It is impossible that it should come from the receptive potentiality of mere Matter without Form—to which in Creation God as the Giver of Form[4] corresponds. For, in that case we should be forced to speak of all natural generation as a process of continual creation.[5] It is not the Species of “materia prima” that are renewed, but of “materia specifica.”[6] For Matter as such is wholly passive, and in no way can it be said to produce Species.[7] But through the action of the Composite and of Form, the Species of the specific Matter is generated;[8] for, the Species is not the likeness of Form or Matter alone, but of the Composite.[9] The Matter here involved is, therefore, that which is connected with some Form; and this Form is replacable, like its “materia propria,”[10] with some new Form and Matter. Or, if you will, it is not merely the Form which is generated, but a new Composite out of new Matter and new Form.[11]
Thus there must be in the Patient an active potentiality corresponding to the active potentiality, or virtue,[12] of the Agent; and which “enables” the Agent to alter the Patient. And it is so that
- ↑ Cf. Baeumker, ibid. 265ff.
- ↑ There is another (the original) distinction between active and passive; namely, the moving- and the material-cause. In this sense the Form, or Agent, is active, the Matter, or Patient, is passive (op. cit. 224). The activity of the Matter diners from that of the Form, in that it is essentially mechanical (it proceeds from the necessity of an inner impulse), whereas that of Form is essentially teleological. In all change, however, Matter and Form go together; the change is from one Composite to another (op. cit. 285).
- ↑ See II—433.
- ↑ A notion which comes from the Arabian philosophy, and of Neo-Platonic origin. See Baeumker, Witelo, Beitr. III, 2, p. 387, n. 1. It is a development of the notion of pure Form corresponding to pure Matter, as indicated in our text. The purely negative aspect of Matter is emphasized by the earlier Arabian philosophers (so Alfarabi and Avicenna, v. Stoeckl, op. cit. 20, 27). Averroes (cf. Stoeckl, op. cit. 67ff. He is less highly estimated than Avicenna by Bacon; thus "homo solidae supientiae"; I—56, "maximus post eos" (Arist. et Avic.) I—14), who attempts to reconcile Aristotle and Plato, makes fundamental the Substance, which is the subject of all change. Its principles are Matter and Form, the latter immanent in the former; but they are united through an efficient cause working according to pattern. Active and passive potentiality are characteristic of Form and Matter respectively; thus following Aristotle's original distinction. Hence clearly he elaborates rather the notion of primary than of specific Matter. And on this basis he explains the eduction of the Forms from Matter. Bacon, therefore, in his theory of Species, remains more faithful to Aristotle.
- ↑ Bacon subscribes in a sense to this conception. Cf. inf. ch. II.
- ↑ See II—430.
- ↑ See II—426.
- ↑ Ibid.
- ↑ See II—423.
- ↑ The Aristotelian notion that Form belongs to its Matter. Cf. II—415, 435, 240.
- ↑ See II—424.
- ↑ Bacon frequently uses "potentia" as convertible with "virtus"; thus, e.g., II—452, 458, 436, 424.
