What is Substance?
Table of Contents
Neither the last matter nor the last form comes to be. This is because everything that changes is something and is changed by something and into something.
- The immediate mover is the thing that changes the matter.
- Matter is the thing changed.
- Form is to what the matter is changed into.
This process will go on to infinity.
- The bronze becomes round.
- The round or the bronze comes to be.
Therefore there must be a stop.
Note, next, that each substance comes into being out of something that shares its name.
(Natural objects and other things both rank as substances.) For things come into being either by art or by nature or by luck or by spontaneity. Now art is a principle of movement in something other than the thing moved, nature is a principle in the thing itself (for man begets man), and the other causes are privations of these two.
There are 3 kinds of substance:
- Matter (This is the Callias)
This manifests as it is
- The nature (This is the Socrates)
This manifests as a positive state towards which movement takes place
- The abstract art that leads to the creation of those two
In some cases, this does not exist apart from the composite substance, e.g. the form of house does not exist unless the art of building also exists
- The creation and destruction of these forms can only occur if there is this ideal
If the this exists apart from the concrete thing, it is only in the case of natural objects.
And so Plato was not far wrong when he said that there are as many Forms as there are kinds of natural object (if there are Forms distinct from the things of this earth).
The moving causes exist as things preceding the effects, but causes in the sense of definitions are simultaneous with their effects. For when a man is healthy, then health also exists; and the shape of a bronze sphere exists at the same time as the bronze sphere. (But we must examine whether any form also survives afterwards.
In some cases there is nothing to prevent this; e.g. the soul may be of this sort-not all soul but the reason; for presumably it is impossible that all soul should survive.) Evidently then there is no necessity, on this ground at least, for the existence of the Ideas. For man is begotten by man, a given man by an individual father; and similarly in the arts; for the medical art is the formal cause of health.