As for the notion (of Anaxagoras) that all is in aU, this clearly is impossible.
Those who (with Anaximander) make the base to be “ the infinite ” must define the term.
If this " infinite ” means “ of endless extension ” there is no infinite among beings ; there is neither an infinity-in-itself (Infinity Abstract) nor an infinity as an attribute to some body ; for in the first case every part of that infinity would be infinite and in the second an object in which the infinity was present as an attribute could not be infinite apart from that attribute, could not be simplex, could not therefore be Matter.
Atoms again (Democritus) cannot meet the need of a base.
There are no atoms ; all body is divisible endlessly : besides neither the continuity nor the ductility of corporeal things is explicable apart from Mind, or apart from the Soul which cannot be made up of atoms ; and, again, out of atoms creation could produce nothing but atoms : a creative power could produce nothing from a material devoid of con-
tinuity. Any number of reasons might be brought, and have been brought, against this hypothesis and it need detain us no longer.
What, then, is this Kind, this Matter, described as one stuff, con- tinuous and without quality ?
Clearly since it is without quality it is incorporeal ; bodiliness would be quality.
It must be the basic stuff of all the entities of the sense-world and not merely base to some while being to others achieved form.
Clay, for example, is matter to the potter but is not Matter pure and simple. Nothing of this sort is our object : we are seeking the stuff which underlies all alike. We must therefore refuse to it all that we find in things of sense — not merely such attributes as colour, heat or cold, but weight or weightlessness, thickness or thinness, shape and therefore magnitude ; though notice that to be present within magnitude and shape is very different from possessing these qualities.
It cannot be a compound, it must be a simplex, one distinct thing in its nature ; only so can it be void of all quality. The Principle which gives it form gives this as something alien : so with magnitude and all really-existent things bestowed upon it. If, for example, it possessed a magnitude of its own, the Principle giving it form would be at the mercy of that magnitude and must produce not at will, but only within the limit of the Matter’s capacity : to imagine that Will keeping step with its material is fantastic.
The Matter must be of later origin than the forming-power, and there- fore must be at its disposition throughout, ready to become anything, ready therefore to any bulk ; besides, if it possessed magnitude, it would necessarily possess shape also : it would be doubly inductile.
No : all that ever appears upon it is brought in by the Idea ; the Idea alone possesses : to it belongs the magnitude and all else that goes with the Reason-Principle or follows upon it. Quantity is given with the Ideal-Form in all the particular species — man, bird, and particular kind of bird.
II. 4* lo]
The imaging of Quantity upon Matter by an outside power is not more surprising than the imaging of Quality ; Quality is no doubt a Reason-Principle, but Quantity also — being measure, number — is equally so.
But how can we conceive a thing having existence without having magnitude ?
We have only to think of things whose identity does not depend on their quantity — for certainly magnitude can be distinguished from existence as can many other forms and attributes.
In a word, every unembodied Kind must be classed as without quantity, and Matter is unembodied.
Besides quantitativeness itself (the Absolute-Principle) does not possess quantity, which belongs only to things participating in it, a con- sideration which shows that Quantitativeness is an Idea-Principle. A white object becomes white by the presence of whiteness ; what makes an organism white or of any other variety of colour is not itself a specific colour but, so to speak, a specific Reason-Principle : in the same way what gives an organism a certain bulk is not itself a thing of magnitude but is Magnitude itself, the abstract Absolute, or the Reason-Principle.
This Magnitude-Absolute, then, enters and beats the Matter out into Magnitude ?
Not at all ; the Matter was not previously shrunken small : there was no littleness or bigness ; the Idea gives Magnitude exactly as it gives every quality not previously present.
But how can I form the conception of the sizelessness of Matter ? How do you form the concept of any absence of quality ? What is the Act of the Intellect, what is the mental approach, in such a case ?
The secret is Indeterniination.
Likeness knows its like : the indeterminate knows the indeterminate.
Around this indefinite a definite conception wiU be realised, but the way lies through indefiniteness.
All knowledge comes by Reason and the Intellectual Act ; in this case Reason conveys information in any account it gives, but the act which aims at being intellectual is, here, not intellection but rather its failure : therefore (in this crippled approach) the representation of Matter must be spurious, unreal, something sprung of the Alien, of the unreal, and bound up with the alien reason.
This is Plato’s meaning where he says that Matter is apprehended by a sort of spurious reasoning.
What, then, is this indetermination in the Soul ? Does it amount to an utter absence of Knowledge, as if the Soul or Mind had withdrawn ?
No : the indeterminate has some footing in the sphere of affirmation. The eye is aware of darkness as a base capable of receiving any colour not yet seen against it : so the Mind, putting aside all attributes per- ceptible to sense — aU that corresponds to light — comes upon a residuum which it cannot bring under determination ; it is thus in the state of the eye which, when directed towards darknesr, has become in some way identical with the object of its spurious vision.
There is vision, then, in this approach of the Mind towards Matter ?
Some vision, yes ; of shapelessness, of colourlessness, of the unfit, and therefore of the sizeless. More than this would mean that the Soul is already bestowing Form.
But is riot such a void precisely what the Soul experiences when it has no intellection whatever ?
No : in that case it affirms nothing, or rather has no experience : but in knowing Matter, it has an experience, what may be described as the impact of the shapeless ; for in its very consciousness of objects that have taken shape and size it knows them as compounds (i.e. as possessing with these forms a formless base) for they appear as things that have accepted colour and other quality.
It knows, therefore, a whole which includes two components ; it has a clear Knowledge or perception of the overlie (the Ideas) but only
Ii. 4. 1 1]
a dim awareness of the underlie, the shapeless which is not an Ideal- Principle.
With what is perceptible to it there is presented something else : what it can directly apprehend it sets on one side as its own ; but the something else which Reason rejects, this, the dim, it knows dimly, this, the dark, it knows darkly, this it knows in a sort of non-knowing.
And just as even Matter itself is not stably shapeless but, in things, is always shaped, the Soul also is eager to throw over it the thing-form ; for the Soul recoils from the indefinite, dreads, almost, to be outside of reality, does not endure to linger about Non-Being.
“ But, given Magnitude and the properties we know, what else can be necessary to the existence of body ? ”
Some base to be the container of all the rest.
“ A certain mass then ; and if mass, then Magnitude ? Obviously if your Base has no Magnitude it offers no footing to any entrant. And suppose it sizeless ; then, what end does it serve ? It never helped Idea or quality ; now it ceases to account for differentiation or for magnitude, though the last, wheresoever it resides, seems to find its way into embodied entities by way of Matter.”
" Or, taking a larger view, observe that actions, productive opera- tions, periods of time, movements, none of these have any such sub- stratum and yet are real things ; in the same way the most elementary body has no need of Matter ; things may be, all, what they are, each after its own kind, in their great variety, deriving the coherence of their being from the blending of the various Ideal-Forms. This Matter with its sizelessness seems, then, to be a name without a content.”
Now, to begin with : extension is not an imperative condition of being a recipient ; it is necessary only where it happens to be a property inherent to the recipient’s peculiar mode of being. The Soul, for example, contains all things but holds them all in an unextended unity ; if mag- nitude were one of its attributes it would contain things in extension. Matter does actually contain in spatial extension what it takes in ; but
this is because itself is a potential recipient of spatial extension : animals and plants, in the same way, as they increase in size, take quality in parallel development with quantity, and they lose in the one as the other lessens.
No doubt in the case of things as we know them there is a certain mass lying ready beforehand to the shaping power : but that is no reason for expecting bulk in Matter strictly so called ; for in such cases Matter is not the absolute ; it is that of some definite object ; the Absolute Matter must take its magnitude, as every other property, from outside itself.
A thing then need not have magnitude in order to receive form : it may receive mass with everything else that comes to it at the moment of becoming what it is to be : a phantasm of mass is enough, a primary aptness for extension, a magnitude of no content — whence the identifica- tion that has been made of Matter with The Void.
But I prefer to use the word phantasm as hinting the indefiniteness into which the Soul spills itself when it seeks to communicate with Matter, finding no possibility of delimiting it, neither encompassing it nor able to penetrate to any fixed point of it, either of which achievements would be an act of delimitation.
In other words we have something which is to be described not as small or great but as the great-and-small : for it is at once a mass and a thing without magnitude, in the sense that it is the Matter on which Mass is based and that, as it changes from great to small and smaU to great, it traverses magnitude. Its very undeterminateness is a mass in the same sense — that of being a recipient of Magnitude — though of course only in the visible object.
In the order of things without Mass, all that is Ideal-Principle possesses delimitation, each entity for itself, so that the conception of Mass has no place in them : Matter, not delimited, having in its own nature no stability, swept into any or every form by turns, ready to go here, there and everywhere, becomes a thing of multiplicity : driven into all shapes, becoming all things, it has that much of the character of mass.
Ii. 4- 1 2]
It is the corporeal, then, that demands magnitude ; the Ideal- Forms of body are Ideas installed in Mass.
But these Ideas enter, not into Magnitude itself but into some subject that has been brought to Magnitude. For to suppose them entering into Magnitude — and not into Matter — is to represent them as being either without Magnitude and without Real-Existence (and therefore undistinguishable from the Matter) or not Ideal-Forms (apt to body) but Reason-Principles (utterly removed) whose sphere could only be Soul ; at this, there would be no such thing as body (i.e. instead of Ideal-Forms shaping Matter and so producing body, there would be merely Reason-Principles dwelling remote in Soul.)