Motion is Existed Before Creation

There are 3 kinds of substance:

• two of them are physical
• one is unmovable
  • This is an eternal unmovable substance

Substances are the first of existing things. If they are all destructible, all things are destructible.

But it is impossible that movement should either have come into being or cease to be (for it must always have existed), or that time should. For there could not be a before and an after if time did not exist.

Movement also is continuous, then, in the sense in which time is; for time is either the same thing as movement or an attribute of movement. And there is no continuous movement except movement in place, and of this only that which is circular is continuous.

But if there is something which is capable of moving things or acting on them, but is not actually doing so, there will not necessarily be movement; for that which has a potency need not exercise it.

Nothing, then, is gained even if we suppose eternal substances, as the believers in the Forms do, unless there is to be in them some principle which can cause change; nay, even this is not enough, nor is another substance besides the Forms enough; for if it is not to act, there will be no movement.

Further even if it acts, this will not be enough, if its essence is potency; for there will not be eternal movement, since that which is potentially may possibly not be.

There must, then, be such a principle, whose very essence is actuality. Further, then, these substances must be without matter; for they must be eternal, if anything is eternal. Therefore they must be actuality.

Philosophers think that everything that acts is able to act, but that not everything that is able to act acts. To them, this means that the potentiality comes before actuality.

But if this is so, nothing that exists needs to exist; for it is possible for all things to be capable of existing but not yet to exist.

The theologians generate the world from night.

The natural philosophers say that ‘all things were together’. These result in the same impossibility. How will there be movement, if there is no actual cause?

Wood will surely not move itself-the carpenter’s art must act on it; nor will the menstrual blood nor the earth set themselves in motion, but the seeds must act on the earth and the semen on the menstrual blood.

This is why Leucippus and Plato suppose eternal actuality. They say there is always movement.

But why and what this movement is they do say, nor, if the world moves in this way or that, do they tell us the cause of its doing so.

Nothing is moved at random. There must always be something present to move it. A thing moves in one way by nature, and in another by force or through the influence of reason or something else.

What sort of movement is primary? This makes a vast difference.

But for Plato, it is not permissible to name here that which he sometimes supposes to be the source of movement-that which moves itself; He says that the soul is later and equal with the heavens.

To suppose potency prior to actuality, then, is in a sense right, and in a sense not; and we have specified these senses.

Anaxagoras says that actuality comes before potentiality because reason to him is actuality.

Empedocles also says this in his doctrine of love and strife.

Leucippus says that there is always movement.

Therefore chaos or night did not exist for an infinite time.

Instead, the same things have always existed either passing through a cycle of changes or obeying some other law, since actuality is prior to potency.

If there is a constant cycle then something must always remain, acting in the same way. If there is creation and destruction, there must be something else which is always acting in different ways.

This must act in one way in virtue of itself, and in another in virtue of something else-either of a third agent, therefore, or of the first.

Now it must be in virtue of the first. For otherwise this again causes the motion both of the second agent and of the third.

Therefore it is better to say ’the first’. For it was the cause of eternal uniformity; and something else is the cause of variety, and evidently both together are the cause of eternal variety.

This, accordingly, is the character which the motions actually exhibit. What need then is there to seek for other principles?