in the case of the soul;[1] under one aspect it is taken to be pure Form, under another it is taken to be composed of true Form and true Matter.
One may wonder, how Bacon could have allowed himself to be so confused. But the real wonder would be, that he had avoided doing so. For, he is seeking to combine the Aristotelian conception of change “through true eduction and assimilation,” that is through the action of the Form on the Matter, with the conception of the indissolubility of Form and Matter and the variety in Matter as well as in Form. It was therefore the most natural thing for him to think of the virtue of the Agent in one instant as Form, and in the next as Form and Matter. The Agent as such was Form, and the Patient as such was Matter; but the Agent as a thing possessing virtue was composite, its virtue was therefore composite, and made up of Form and Matter—and the same would be true of the Patient as thing. Thus it is that the Patient may be conceived of as active and the Agent as passive, during the very act of assimilation. Had he actually made a synthesis of these two conceptions of the species, that of it as Form alone and that of it as Form and Matter, how different reading Bacon would present to us.
With, then, three such important concepts as the foregoing not sharply defined in his mind, we see how Bacon could have been guilty of the inconsistencies which are to be found in his presentation. It is therefore not our task to make Bacon consistently state the pure eduction theory; we have already sought to do this and found it impossible. It is rather our task to make plain that he was not able to work himself loose from the emission theory; and accordingly to seek to make him state some form of a modified emission theory, which may possibly be stated with clearness and consistency.
The general problem which is before Bacon’s mind is this: How can an Agent, in part or as a whole at a distance from the Patient, produce in the Patient an Effect like itself? And first we may take those cases where the Agent and the Patient, each an object with a particular essence, are in immediate contact at their surfaces. Through immediate contact, and without the intermediation of a third element, the Patient is to be made like the Agent; that is to say, the change in its essence is made, or the new Effect comes into being. But how can one speak of immediate contact between the whole of the Agent and the whole of the Patient, when obviously the only contact at hand is that of the surfaces of the two? By recourse to the notion of the Species, as the means through which the effect in the depths of the Patient is worked. Not, be it said at once, that the Species is something which is given off from the
- ↑ Cf. inf. ch. II.
