Chapter 2

The origin of the ontological notions of matter and form,
of potency and act

741. The word act means every entity, and from this point of view cannot be defined. It must be taken as understood.(6) However, its meaning, which is not restricted to mere entity, also bears a mental relationship to potency. The mind is led to this distinction between act and potency by its experience of the contingent things with which it finds itself in communication. It draws this distinction from the finite realities which fall under its feelings; the distinction is found in feeling itself, which is reality. This shows that we could never deduce it a priori from 'ideal being', which we intuit through nature without assistance from anything else. Ideal being intuited by us makes us know pure being, not the mode of being per se nor the order that being holds within itself. This order pertains entirely to the reality we experience in feeling.(7)

742. This explains why the interior order of being is never revealed to us. Human beings are something real, but limited; they communicate with a part of reality only, and in a limited manner.(8) This essential limitation of human knowledge imposes modesty befitting our human limitation on philosophers who intend to propound ontological teaching resulting from their meditation. In other words, we should not 'claim to describe being or the order of being in its totality, but acknowledge that our thought takes in only a tiny fraction of this immense order, the little our human intelligence has been given to know.' This modesty is a religious duty for human beings as such, and is even more incumbent on the individual. However intellectually gifted the individual may be, he has to believe that his research is very far from reaching what is attainable by the understanding of the whole human species. To do otherwise would be very foolish.

743. We are conscious, therefore, that we can reach out only to those elements of the order of being which are presented to our knowledge in the limited portion of reality we are given to perceive and experience, and that even here we are dependent on the strength of our individual, limited intelligence. With these elements or fragments of doctrine as it were, we have to make up the imperfect ontology which is conceded to mankind and to us in particular.

744. The reality communicated to us is comprised in our feeling where the mind, as we said elsewhere,(9) can indeed take in real beings but only to the extent that feeling represents them. The mind cannot in any way perceive or recognise HOW other realities, outside feeling, are made. We have to ask ourselves, therefore: 'What are the realities communicated to us in our reality?'

745. We have already seen that they are reduced to three: 1. bodies, 2. the soul in so far as it is sensitive in a bodily way, and 3. the same soul in so far as it is intellective. These are the only realities perceptible by us. Besides them, we have, however, intuitible ideality, the means with which we know these realities through perception.

746. Hence, all the ontological notions concerning the order of being, and all the notions of matter and form as well as those of potency and act, have to be drawn from the experience we have of matter, animal feeling and intellective feeling. But these realities, which are all finite and contingent, can furnish us only with notions pertaining to the order of finite, contingent being. Consequently, they are not equivalent to being except through some kind of analogy, about which we shall speak more at length elsewhere.

Notes

(6) AMS , 10-13.

(7) NE , vol. 3, 1438-1460.

(8) Teodicea , 397-410.

(9) Teodicea , 86-87, 153.