The multiplicity here must be based upon some unity which, since it has been brought to Magnitude, must be, itself, distinct from Magni- tude. Matter is the base of Identity to aU that is composite ; once each of the constituents comes bringing its own Matter with it, there is no need of any other base. No doubt there must be a container, as it were a place, to receive what is to enter, but Matter and even body precede place and space ; the primal necessity, in order to the existence of body, is Matter.
There is no force in the suggestion that since production and act are immaterial, corporeal entities also must be immaterial.
Bodies are compound, actions not. Further, Matter does in some sense underlie action ; it supplies the substratum to the doer : it is permanently within him though it does not enter as a constituent into the act where, indeed, it would be a hindrance. Doubtless, one act does not change into another — as would be the case if there were a specific Matter of actions — but the doer directs himself from one act to another so that he is the Matter, himself, to his varying actions.
Matter, in sum, is necessary to quality and to quantity, and, there- fore, to body.
It is, thus, no name void of content ; we know there is such a base, invisible and without bulk though it be.
If we reject it, we must by the same reasoning reject qualities and
mass : for quality, or mass, or any such entity, taken by itself apart, might be said not to exist. But these do exist, though in an obscure existence : there is much less ground for rejecting Matter, however it lurk, discerned by none of the senses.
It eludes the eye, for it is utterly outside of colour : it is not heard, for it is no sound : it is no flavour or savour for nostrils or palate : can it, perhaps, be known to touch ? No : for neither is it corporeal ; and touch deals with body, which is known by being solid, fragile, soft, hard, moist, dry — all properties utterly lacking in Matter.
It is grasped only by a mental process, though that not an act of the intellective mind but a reasoning that finds no subject ; and so it stands revealed as the spurious thing it has been called. No bodiliness belongs to it ; bodihness is itself a phase of Reason-Principle and so is something different from Matter, as Matter, therefore, from it : bodiliness already operative and so to speak made concrete would be body manifest and not Matter unelaborated.
Are we asked to accept as the substratum some attribute or quality present to all the elements in common ?
Then, first, we must be told what precise attribute this is and, next, how an attribute can be a substratum.
The elements are sizeless, and how conceive an attribute where there is neither base nor bulk ?
Again, if the quality possesses determination, it is not Matter the undetermined ; and anything without determination is not a quality but is the substratum — the very Matter we are seeking.
It may be suggested that perhaps this absence of quality means simply that, of its own nature, it has no participation in any of the set and familiar properties, but takes quality by this very non-participation, holding thus an absolutely individual character, marked off from every- thing else, being as it were the negation of those others. Deprivation we will be told comports quality : a blind man has the quality of his lack of sight. If then — it will be urged — Matter exhibits such a negation.
Ii. 4. 13]
surely it has a quality, all the more so, assuming any deprivation to be a quality, in that here the deprivation is all comprehensive.
But this notion reduces all existence to qualified things or qualities : Quantity itself becomes a Quality and so does even Existence. Now this cannot be : if such things as Quantity and Existence are qualified, they are, by that very fact, not qualities : Quality is an addition to them ; we must not commit the absurdity of giving the name Quality to something distinguishable from Quality, something therefore that is not Quality.
Is it suggested that its mere Alienism is a quality in Matter ?
If this Alienism is difference-absolute (the abstract entity) it possesses no Quality : absolute Quality cannot be itself a qualified thing.
If the Alienism is to be understood as meaning only that Matter is differentiated, then it is different not by itself (since it is certainly not an absolute) but by this Difference, just as all identical objects are so (not by themselves but) by virtue of Identicalness (the Absolute principle of Identity).
An absence is neither a Quality nor a qualified entity ; it is the negation of a Quality or of something else, as noiselessness is the negation of noise and so on. A lack is negative ; Quality demands something positive. The distinctive character of Matter is unshape, the lack of qualification and of form ; surely then it is absurd to pretend that it has Quality in not being qualified ; that is like saying that sizelessness constitutes a certain size.
The distinctive character of Matter, then, is simply its manner of being — not something definite inserted in it but, rather a relation towards other things, the relation of being distinct from them.
Other things possess something besides this relation of Alienism : their form makes each an entity. Matter may with propriety be de- scribed as merely alien ; perhaps, even, we might describe it as “ The Aliens,” for the singular suggests a certain definiteness while the plural would indicate the absence of any determination.
But is Absence this privation itself, or something in which this Privation is lodged ?
Anyone maintaining that Matter and Privation are one and the same in substratum but stand separable in reason cannot be excused from assigning to each the precise principle which distinguishes it in reason from the other : that which defines Matter must be kept quite apart from that defining the Privation and vice versa.
There are three possibilities : Matter is not in Privation and Priva- tion is not in Matter ; or each is in each ; or each is in itself alone.
Now if they should stand quite apart, neither calling for the other, they are two distinct things : Matter is something other than Privation even though Privation always goes with it ; into the principle of the one, the other cannot enter even potentially.
If their relation to each other is that of a snubnose to snubness, here also there is a double concept ; we have two things.
If they stand to each other as fire to heat — heat in fire, but fire not included in the concept of heat— if Matter is Privation in the way in which fire is heat, then the Privation is a form under which Matter appears but there remains a base distinct from the Privation and this base must be the Matter. Here, too, they are not one thing.
Perhaps the identity in substance with differentiation in reason will be defended on the ground that Privation does not point to something present but precisely to an absence, to something absent, to the negation or lack of Real-being : the case would be like that of the affirmation of non-existence, where there is no real predication but simply a denial.
Is, then, this Privation simply a non-existence ?
If a non-existence in the sense that it is not a thing of Real-being, but belongs to some other Kind of existent, we have still two Principles, one referring directly to the substratum, the other merely exhibiting the relation of the Privation to other things (as their potentiality) .
Or we might say that the one concept defines the relation of sub- stratum to what is not substratum (but realised entity) while that of Privation, in bringing out the indeterrninateness of Matter, applies to
Ii. 4.15]
the Matter in itself (and not in its relationships) : but this stiU makes Privation and Matter two in reason though one in substratum.
Now if Matter possesses an identity — though only the identity of being indeterminate, unfixed and without quality — how can we bring it so under two principles ?
The further question, therefore, is raised whether boundlessness and indetermination are things lodging in something other than them- selves as a sort of attribute and whether Privation (or Negation of quality) is also an attribute residing in some separate substratum.
Now all that is Number and Reason-Principle is outside of bound- lessness (is fully delimited) : these (Number and Reason) bestow bound and settlement and order in general upon all else : neither anything that has been brought under order nor any Order-Absolute (apart from themselves) is needed to bring them under order. The thing that has to be brought under order (e.g. Matter) is other than the Ordering Principle which is Limit and Definiteness and Reason-Principle. There- fore, necessarily, the thing to be brought under order and to definiteness must be in itself a thing lacking delimitation.
Now Matter is a thing that is brought under order — like all that shares its nature by participation or by possessing the same principle — therefore, necessarily. Matter is The Undelimited (the Absolute, the " thing ” Indefiniteness) and not merely the recipient of a non-essential quality of Indefiniteness entering as an attribute.
For, first, any attribute to any subject must be a Reason-Principle ; and Indefiniteness is not a Reason-Principle.
Secondly, what must a thing be to take Indefiniteness as an attribute? Obviously it must, beforehand, be either Definiteness (the Principle) or a defined thing. But Matter is neither.
Then again Indefiniteness entering as an attribute into the definite must cease to be indefinite : but (since Matter remains true to its Kind, i.e. is indefinite as long as it is Matter) Indefiniteness has not entered as an attribute into Matter : that is. Matter is essentially Indefiniteness.
The Matter even of the Intellectual Realm is the Indefinite, (the undelimited) ; it must be a thing generated by the undefined nature, the illimitable nature, of the Eternal Being, The One — an illimitableness, however, not possessing native existence There (not inherent) but engendered by The One.
But how can Matter be common to both spheres, be here and be There ?
Because even Indefiniteness has two phases.
But what difference can there be between phase and phase of In- definiteness ?
The difference of archetype and image.
So that Matter here (as only an image of Indefiniteness) would be less indefinite ?
On the contrary, more indefinite as an Image-thing remote from true being. Indefiniteness is the greater in the less ordered object ; the less deep in good, the deeper in evil. The Indeterminate in the Intellectual Realm, where there is truer being, might almost be called merely an Image of Indefiniteness : in this lower Sphere where there is less Being, where there is a refusal of the Authentic, and an adoption of the Image- Kind, Indefiniteness is more authentically indefinite.
But this argument seems to make no difference between the indefinite object and Indefiniteness-essential. Is there none ?
In any object in which Reason and Matter co-exist we distinguish between Indeterminateness and the Indeterminate subject : but where Matter stands alone we make them identical, or, better, we would say right out that in that case essential Indeterminateness is not present ; for it is a Reason-Principle and could not lodge in the indeterminate object without at once annulling the indetermin- ateness.
Matter, then, must be described as Indefinite of itself, by its natural opposition to Reason-Principle. Reason is Reason and nothing else ; just so Matter, opposed by its indeterminateness to Reason, is Indeter- minateness and nothing else.
II. 4. i6]
Then Matter is simply Alienism (the Principle of Difference) ?
No : it is merely that part of Alienism which stands in contradiction with the Authentic Existents which are Reason-Principles. So under- stood, this non-existent has a certain measure of existence ; for it is identical with Privation, which also is a thing standing in opposition to the things that exist in Reason.
But must not Privation cease to have existence, when what has been lacking is present at last ?
By no means : the recipient of a state or character is not a state but the (negation or) Privation of the state ; and that into which deter- mination enters is neither a determined object nor determination itself, but simply the wholly or partly undetermined.
Still, must not the nature of this Undetermined be annulled by the entry of Determination, especially where (as in Matter) this is no mere attribute (but the very nature of the recipient) ?