If all this is so, then (the secret of creation is that) the Soul of the All abides in contemplation of the Highest and Best, ceaselessly striving towards the Intelligible Kind and towards God : but, thus absorbing and fiUed full, it overflows — so to speak — and the image it gives forth, its last utterance towards the lower, will be the creative puissance.
This ultimate phase, then, is the Maker, secondary to that aspect of the Soul which is primarily saturated from the Divine Intelligence. But the Creator above all is the Intellectual-Principle, as giver, to the Soul that follows it, of those gifts whose traces exist in the Third Kind.
Rightly, therefore, is this Kosmos described as an image continuously being imaged, the First and the Second Principles immobile, the Third, too, immobile essentially, but, accidentally and in Matter, having motion.
For as long as divine Mind and Soul exist, the divine Thought-Forms will pour forth into that phase of the Soul : as long as there is a sun all that streams from it will be some form of Light.
Matter in its Two Kinds
By common agreement of all that have arrived at the conception of such a Kind, what is known as Matter is understood to be a certain base, a recipient of Form-Ideas. Thus far all go the same way. But departure begins with the attempt to establish what this basic Kind is in itself, and how it is a recipient and of what.
To a certain school, body-forms exclusively are the Real Beings ; existence is limited to bodies ; there is one only Matter, the stuff under- lying the primal-constituents of the Universe : existence is nothing but this Matter : ever3rthing is some modification of this ; the elements of the Universe are simply this Matter in a certain condition.
The school has even the audacity to foist Matter upon the divine beings so that, finally, God himself becomes a mode of Matter — and this though they make it corporeal, describing it as a body void of quality, but a magnitude.
Another school makes it incorporeal : among these, not aU hold the theory of one only Matter ; some of them while they maintain the one Matter, in which the first school believes, the foundation of bodily forms, admit another, a prior, existing in the divine-sphere, the base of the Ideas there and of the unembodied Beings.
We are obliged, therefore, at the start, both to establish the existence of this other Kind and to examine its nature and the mode of its Being.
Now (it will be reasoned) if Matter must characteristically be un- determined, void of shape, while in that sphere of the Highest there can be nothing that lacks determination, nothing shapeless, there can be no Matter there. Further, if all that order is simplex, there can be no need of Matter, whose function is to join with some other element to form a compound : it wiU be found of necessity in things of derived existence and shifting nature — the signs which lead us to the notion of Matter — but it is unnecessary to the primal.
And again, where (it will be asked) could it have come from ? whence did it take its being ? If it is derived, it has a source ; if it is eternal, then the Primal- Principles are more numerous than we thought, the Firsts are a meeting-ground. Lastly, if that Matter has been entered by Idea, the union constitutes a body ; and, so, there is Body in the Supreme.
Now it may be observed, first of all, that we cannot hold utterly cheap either the indeterminate, or even a Kind whose very idea implies absence of form, provided only that it offer itself to its Priors and (through them) to the Highest Beings. We have the parallel of the Soul itself in its relation to the Intellectual-Principle and the Divine Reason, taking shape by these and led so to a nobler principle of form.
Further, a compound in the Intellectual order is not to be con- founded with a compound in the realm of Matter ; the Divine Reasons are compounds and their Act is to produce a compound, namely that (lower) Nature which works towards Idea. And there is not only a differ- ence of function ; there is a still more notable difference of source. Then, too, the Matter of the realm of process ceaselessly changes its form ; in the eternal. Matter is immutably one and the same, so that the two are diametrically opposites. The Matter of this realm is all things in turn, a new entity in every separate case, so that nothing is permanent and one thing ceaselessly pushes another out of being : Matter has no identity here. In the Intellectual it is all things at once : and therefore has nothing to change into : it already and ever contains all. This means that not even in its own Sphere is the Matter there at any moment shapeless ; no doubt that is true of the Matter here as well ; but shape is held by a very different right in the two orders of Matter.
As to whether Matter is eternal or a thing of process, this will be clear when we are sure of its precise nature.
The present existence of the Ideal-Forms has been demonstrated elsewhere : we take up our argument from that point.
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If, then, there is more than one of such forming Ideas, there must of necessity be some character common to all and equally some peculiar character in each keeping them distinct.
This peculiar characteristic, this distinguishing difference, is the individual shape. But if shape, then there is the shaped, that in which the difference is lodged.
There is, therefore, a Matter accepting the shape, a permanent substratum.
Further, admitting that there is an Intelligible Realm beyond, of which this world is an image, then, since this world-compound is based on Matter, there must be Matter there also.
And how can you predicate an ordered system without thinking of form, and how think of form apart from the notion of something in which the form is lodged ?
No doubt that Realm is, in the strict fact, utterly without parts, but in some sense there is part there too. And in so far as these parts are really separate from each other, any such division and difference can be no other than a condition of Matter, of a something divided and differentiated ; in so fat as that realm, though without parts, yet consists of a variety of entities, these diverse entities, residing in a unity of which they are variations, reside in a Matter ; for this unity, since it is also a diversity, must be conceived of as varied and multiform ; it must have been shapeless before it took the form in which variation occurs. For if we abstract from the Intellectual-Principle the variety and the particular shapes, the Reason-Principles and the Thoughts, what precedes these was something shapeless and undetermined, nothing of what is actually present there.
It may be objected that the Intellectual- Principle possesses its con- tent in an eternal conjunction so that the two make a perfect unity, and that thus there is no Matter tliere.
But that argument would equally cancel the Matter present in the bodily forms of this realm ; body without shape has never existed.
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always body achieved and yet always the two constituents. We discover these two — Matter and Idea — by sheer force of our reasoning which dis- tinguishes continually in pursuit of the simplex, the irreducible, working on, until it can go no further, towards the ultimate in the subject of enquiry. And the ultimate of every partial-thing is its Matter, which, therefore, must be all darkness since light is a Reason-Principle. The Mind, too, as also a Reason-Principle, sees only in each particular object the Reason-Principle lodging there ; anything lying below that it declares to lie below the light, to be therefore a thing of darkness, just as the eye, a thing of light, seeks light and colours which are modes of light, and dis- misses all that is below the colours and hidden by them, as belonging to the order of the darkness, which is the order of Matter.
The dark element in the Intelligible, however, differs from that in the sense-world : so therefore does the Matter — as much as the forming- idea presiding in each of the two realms. The Divine Matter, though (like the Matter here) it is the object of determination has, of its own nature, a life defined and intellectual ; the Matter of this sphere while it does accept determination is not living or intellective, but a dead thing decorated : any shape it takes is an image, exactly as the Base is an image. There on the contrary the shape is a real-existent as is the Base. Those that ascribe Real Being to Matter must be admitted to be right as long as they keep to the Matter of the Intelligible Realm : for the Base there is Being, or even, taken as an entirety with the higher that accompanies it, is illuminated Being.
But does this Base, of the Intellectual Realm, possess eternal exist- ence ?
The solution of that question is the same as for the Ideas.
Both are engendered, in the sense that they have had a beginning, but unengendered in that this beginning is not in Time : they have a derived being but by an eternal derivation : they are not, like the Kosmos, always in process but, in the character of the Supernal, have their Being permanently. For that differentiation within the Intelligible which pro- duces Matter has always existed and it is this cleavage which produces the Matter there : it is the first movement ; and movement and differen-
tiation are convertible terms since the two things arose as one : this motion, this cleavage, away from the first is indetermination ( = Matter), needing The First to its determination which it achieves by its Return, remaining, until then, an Alienism, still lacking good ; unlit by the Supernal. It is from the Divine that all light comes, and, until this be absorbed, no light in any recipient of light can be authentic ; any light from elsewhere is of another order than the true.
We are led thus to the question of receptivity in things of body.
An additional proof that bodies must have some substratum different from themselves, is found in the changing of the basic-constituents into one another. Notice that the destruction of the elements passing over is not complete — if it were we would have a Principle of Being wrecked in Non-being — nor does an engendered thing pass from utter non-being into Being : what happens is that a new form takes the place of an old. There is, then, a stable element, that which puts off one form to receive the form of the incoming entity.
The same fact is clearly established by decay, a process implying a compound object ; where there is decay there is a distinction between Matter and Form.
And the reasoning which shows the destructible to be a compound is borne out by practical examples of reduction : a drinking vessel is reduced to its gold, the gold to liquid ; analogy forces us to believe that the liquid too is reducible.
The basic-constituents of things must be either their Form-Idea or that Primal Matter (of the Intelligible) or a compound of the Form and Matter.
Form-Idea, pure and simple, they cannot be : for without Matter how could things stand in their mass and magnitude ?
Neither can they be that Primal Matter for they are not indestruc- tible.
They must, therefore, consist of Matter and Form-Idea— Form for
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quality and shape, Matter for the base, indeterminate as being other than Idea.
Empedokles in identifying his “ elements ” with Matter is refuted by their decay.
Anaxagoras, in identifying his “ primal-combination ” with Matter — to which he allots no mere aptness to any and every nature or quality but the effective possession of all— withdraws in this way the very In- tellectual-Principle he had introduced ; for this Mind is not to him the bestower of shape, of Forming Idea ; and it is co-aeval with Matter, not its prior. But this simultaneous existence is impossible : for if the com- bination derives Being by participation. Being is the prior ; if both are Authentic Existents, then an additional Principle, a third, is imperative (a ground of unification) . And if this Creator, Mind, must pre-exist, why need Matter contain the Forming-Ideas parcelwise for the Mind, with unending labour, to assort and allot ? Surely the undetermined could be brought to quality and pattern in the one comprehensive act ?