Chapter 15

How potencies are contained in the soul

897. After considering the acts of the soul, we must consider its potencies. But first, a summary of what I have said.
Second acts of the soul can be reduced to two kinds: necessary and free (bilateral freedom). Necessary acts are made known through the changes that arise in substances adhering ontologically to the soul; strictly speaking they are revealed through their reality, which has the power (when unopposed) to determine the actuality of the soul. Free acts manifest themselves in accord with the nature of ideal being which, adhering ontologically to the soul, actuates the soul not to a determinate action but in such a way that it acquires the faculty to determine itself, as I explained. Ideal being must present all, not some realities, and also reveal their value. Thus, through ideal being, the soul knows different realities and their value, but is not determined by these realities. Although it knows them, they are not all connected to it ontologically. The soul has the faculty to choose between them and also to join itself ontologically to the full, moral good to which it is not connected. This good imparts to the soul the determinate activity which enables it to rise above the impulse of every other reality pulling it in another direction.

898. These realities, joined ontologically to the soul and arousing its activities, are variable and therefore the origin of the soul's potencies which necessarily act.

899. On the other hand, ideality, joined ontologically to the soul, is universal. By means of this universality, it reveals all realities, even those not yet actually operating in the soul; it reveals the supreme Being, the order of being, the necessity of this order, and moral good. Ideality therefore is the origin of the potency of freedom.

900. The soul can by itself use this potency of freedom to change the terms to which it is ontologically united and on which it rests. But in the case of its other potencies, we still need to show how the realities change which maintain and actuate the soul.

901. Experience tells us that bodies are in continual movement. Their movements alter the soul's felt element, that is, they alter one of the substances and realities that maintain and actuate the soul. But how do we explain the movement of bodies?

902. We have seen that the concept of bodies does not contain the explanation of their movement; matter, as we saw, is inert (cf. 816-822). Influenced by this fact, some of the greatest philosophers thought that the principle of movement could be explained only by direct recourse to God's action. Others, including nearly all modern thinkers, saw no necessity for making God intervene in nature. They took the view that matter was not inert, and wrote books to show how it had an energy of its own. If however they had firmly grasped the concept of matter at its very origin in our soul, they would never have held this view. If we are to have pure, genuine concepts of things, we have to grasp concepts at the moment they are born in our spirit. Otherwise, they are quickly changed by the activity of our spirit, and even become composed of and mixed with other concepts. This explains the error of attributing to one entity the properties of another; two concepts become a single concept, which although composed, is seen as simple.

I certainly grant God all his creative and maintaining activity, but I do not think he intervenes by imparting movement to bodies, any more than he does in any other fact of nature. In keeping with good philosophy, I think there must be a second cause of motion, which must not be referred directly to divine action. I have discussed this second cause in the first part, beginning from a definite datum of experience which tells us that properly speaking the sensitive principle is a motor activity. Consequently, I tended to the opinion that all atoms are joined to a sentient principle (cf. 500-553) which never alters the law or implementation of its own activity, as I explained in the previous chapter. Granted therefore a particular distribution of matter at the beginning (a first, all-wise distribution that must be attributed solely to the Creator, because no other explanation exists),(62) there is no contradiction in supposing that in virtue of sentient activity this distribution continually and ceaselessly changes to another in a certain order. This supposition may not explain the laws of communication of movement (which must be attributed to the corporeal principle), but it does explain all movements in the universe. An example in miniature is found in the animal body.

As I said (and will demonstrate later at greater length), all animal movements, which follow a cycle whose complex process I call the 'zoic course', are most fittingly explained by the supposition that their sole cause is sensitive activity, an activity that never changes in law or implementation. By means of this sensitive activity, given to it at the beginning, the animal passes through all stages of life and modifies its own organisation, until it dissolves in death.

Experience also supplies us with another indubitable cause of motion: intelligence. It is not impossible for intelligences unknown to us to intervene and produce mondial movements. There is more philosophical foundation for such an opinion than for the absurdity of denying the inertia of matter or for the unbalanced attribution of such movements to God as proximate cause.

All these changes take place in the terms of the soul. We must therefore grant to the soul potentiality, which in the last analysis is only activity susceptible of being differently modified by its term.

Notes

(62) Teodicea , 238-242.