How can we talk of it ? How can it be the Matter of real things ?

It is talked of, and it serves, precisely, as a Potentiality.

And, as being a Potentiality, it is not of the order of the thing it is to become : its existence is no more than an announcement of a future, as it were a thrust forward to what is to come into existence.

As Potentiality then, it is not any definite thing but the potentiality of everything : being nothing in itself — beyond what being Matter amounts to — it is not in actualisation. For if it were actually something, that actualised something would not be Matter, or at least not Matter out and out, but merely Matter in the limited sense in which bronze is the matter of the statue.

And its Non-Being must be no mere difference from Being.

Motion, for example, is different from Being, but plays about it, springing from it and living within it : Matter is, so to speak, the out-

cast of Being, it is utterly removed, irredeemably what it was from the beginning : in origin it was Non-Being and so it remains.

Nor are we to imagine that, standing away at the very beginning from the universal circle of Beings, it was thus necessarily an active Something or that it became a Something. It has never been able to annex for itself even a visible outline from all the forms under which it has sought to creep : it has always pursued something other than itself ; it was never more than a Potentiality towards its next : where all the circle of Being ends, there only is it manifest ; discerned underneath things produced after it, it is remoter (from Real-Being) even than they.

Grasped, then, as an underlie in each order of Being, it can be no actualisation of either : all that is allowed to it is to be a Potentiality, a weak and blurred phantasm, a thing incapable of a Shape of its own.

Its actuality is that of being a phantasm, the actuality of being a falsity ; and the false in actualisation is the veritably false, which again is Authentic Non-Existence.

So that Matter, as the Actualisation of Non-Being, is all the more decidedly Non-Being, is Authentic Non-Existence.

Thus, since the very reality of its Nature is situated in Non-Being, it is in no degree the Actualisation of any definite Being.

If it is to be present at all, it cannot be an Actualisation, for then it would not be the stray from Authentic Being which it is, the thing having its Being in Non-Beingness : for, note, in the case of things whose Being is a falsity, to take away the falsity is to take away what Being they have, and if we introduce actualisation into things whose Being and Essence is Potentiality, we destroy the foundation of their nature since their Being is Potentiality.

If Matter is to be kept as the imchanging substratum, we must keep it as Matter : that means — does it not ? — that we must define it as a Potentiality and nothing more — or refute these considerations.

II. 6. i]

Quality and Form-Idea

Are not Being and Reality (to on and he oiisia) distinct ; must we not envisage Being as the substance stripped of all else, while Reality is this same thing, Being, accompanied by the others — Movement, Rest, Identity, Difference — ^so that these are the specific constituents of Reality ?

The universal fabric, then, is Reality in which Being, Movement, and so on are separate constituents.

Now Movement has Being (not essentially but) as an accident and therefore should have Reality as an accident ; or is it something serving to the completion of Reality ?

No : Movement is a Reality ; everything in the Supreme is a Reality.

Why, then, does not Reality reside, equally, in this sphere ?

In the Supreme there is Reality because all things are one ; ours is the sphere of images whose separation produces grades of difference. Thus in the spermatic unity all the human members are present undis- tinguishably ; there is no separation of head and hand : their distinct existence begins in the life here, whose content is image, not Authentic Existence.

And are the distinct Qualities in the Authentic Realm to be explained in the same way ? Are they differing Realities centred in one Reality or gathered round Being — differences which constitute Realities distinct from each other within the common fact of Reality ?

This is sound enough ; but it does not apply to all the qualities of this sphere, some of which, no doubt, are differentiations of Reality — such as the quality of two-footedness or four-footedness — but others are not such differentiations of Reality and, because they are not so, must be called qualities and nothing more.

On the other hand, one and the same thing may be sometimes a differentiation of Reality and sometimes not — a differentiation when it

is a constitutive element, and no differentiation in some other thing, where it is not a constitutive element but an accidental. The distinction may be seen in the (constitutive) whiteness of a swan or of ceruse and the whiteness which in a man is an accidental.

Where whiteness belongs to the very Reason-Form of the thing it is a constitutive element and not a quality ; where it is a superficial appearance it is a quality.

In other words, qualification may be distinguished. We may think of a qualification that is of the very substance of the thing, something exclusively belonging to it. And there is a qualifying that is nothing more (not constituting but simply) giving some particular character to the real thing ; in this second case the qualification does not produce any alteration towards Reality or away from it ; the Reality has existed fully constituted before the incoming of the qualification which — whether in soul or body — merely introduces some state from outside, and by this addition elaborates the Reality into the particular thing.

But what if (the superficial appearance such as) the visible white- ness in ceruse is constitutive ? In the swan the whiteness is not con- stitutive since a swan need not be white : it is constitutive in ceruse, just as warmth is constitutive of the Reality, fire.

No doubt we may be told that the Reality in fire is (not warmth but) fieriness and in ceruse an analogous abstraction : yet the fact remains that in visible fire warmth or fieriness is constitutive and in the ceruse whiteness.

Thus the same entities (warmness, whiteness and fieriness) are represented at once as being not qualities but constituents of Reality and not constituents but qualities.

Now it is absurd to talk as if one identical thing — (wcirmth, whiteness or the like) changed its own nature according to whether it is present as a constituent or as an accidental.

The truth is that while the Reason-Principles producing these entities contain nothing but what is of the nature of Reality, yet only in the Intellectual Realm do the produced things possess real existence : here they are not real ; they are qualified.

il-6.2] QUALITY AND FORM-IDEA 205

And this is the starting-point of an error we constantly make : in our enquiries into things we let realities escape us and fasten on what is mere quality. Thus fire is not the thing we so name from the obser- vation of certain qualities present ; fire is a Reality (not a combination of material phenomena) ; the phenomena observed here and leading us to name fire call us away from the authentic thing ; a quality is erected into the very matter of definition — a procedure, however, reasonable enough in regard to things of the realm of sense which are in no case realities but accidents of Reality.

And this raises the question how Reality can ever spring from what are not Realities.

It has been shown that a thing coming into being cannot be identical with its origins : it must here be added that nothing thus coming into being (no “ thing of process ”) can be a Reality.

Then how do we assert the rising in the Supreme of what we have called Reality from what is not Reality (i.e. from the pure Being which is above Reality) ?

The Reality there — possessing Authentic Being in the strictest sense, with the least admixture — is Reality (not so much by being produced as) by existing among the differentiations of the Authentic Being ; or, better. Reality is affirmed in the sense that with the existence of the Supreme is included its Act so that Reality seems to be a perfectionment of the Authentic Being, though in the truth it is a diminution ; the produced thing is deficient by the very addition, by being less simplex, by standing one step away from the Authentic.

But we must enquire into Quality in itself : to know its nature is certainly the way to settle our general question.

The first point is to assure ourselves whether or not one and the same thing may be held to be sometimes a mere qualification and sometimes a constituent of Reality — not staying on the point that qualification could not be constitutive of a Reality but of a qualified Reality only.

Now in a Reality possessing a determined quality, the Reality and the fact of existence precede the qualified Reality.

What, then, in the case of fire is the Reality which precedes the qualified Reality ?

Its mere body, perhaps ? If so, body being the Reality, fire is a warmed body ; and the total thing is not the Reality ; and the fire has warmth (not essentially but) as a man might have a snub nose.

Rejecting its warmth, its glow, its lightness — all which certainly do seem to be qualities — and its resistance, there is left only its extension by three dimensions : in other words, its Matter is its Reality.

But that cannot be held : surely the form is much more likely than the Matter to be the Reality.

But is not the Form a Quality (and not therefore a Reality) ?

No, the Form is not a Quality : it is a Reason- Principle.

And the outcome of this Reason-Principle entering into the under- lying Matter, what is that ?

Certainly not what is seen and bums, for that is the something in which these qualities inhere.

We might define the burning as an Act springing from the Reason-Principle : then the warming and lighting and other effects of fire will be its Acts and we still have found no foothold for its quality.

Such completions of a Reality cannot be called quahties since they are its Acts emanating from the Reason-Principles and from the essential powers. A quality is something persistently outside Reahty ; it cannot appear as Reality in one place after having figured in another as quahty ; its function is to bring in the something more after the Reahty is estab- lished, such additions as virtue, vice, ugliness, beauty, health, a certain shape. On this last, however, it may be remarked that triangularity and quadrangularity are not in themselves quahties, but there is quahty when a thing is triangular by having been brought to that shape ; the quahty is not the triangularity but the patterning to it. The case is the same with the arts and avocations (by which human beings take the quahty of being instmcted, etc.).

Ii. 6. 3]

Quality and Form-Idea

Thus : Quality is a condition superadded to a Reality whose exist- ence does not depend upon it, whether this something more be a later acquirement or an accompaniment from the first ; it is something in whose absence the Reality would still be complete. It will sometimes come and go, sometimes be inextricably attached, so that there are two forms of Quality, the moveable and the fixed,

The Whiteness, therefore, in a human being is, clearly, to be classed not as a quality but as an activity — the act of a power which can make white ; and similarly what we think of as qualities in the Intellectual Realm should be known as activities ; they are activities which to our minds take the appearance of quality from the fact that, differing in character among themselves, each of them is a particularity which, so to speak, distinguishes those Realities from each other.

What, then, distinguishes Quality in the Intellectual Realm from that here, if both are Acts ?