Matter Versus privation

Others have apprehended the nature in question, but not adequately.

1. They allow that a thing may come to be without qualification from not being.

This accepts the statement of Parmenides.

2. They think that if the substratum is one numerically, it must have also only a single potentiality-which is a very different thing.

I distinguish between matter and privation.

• Matter is not-being only in virtue of an attribute which it has.
• The privation in its own nature is not-being*.
• Matter is nearly substance.
• The privation is not a substance.

They, on the other hand, identify their Great and Small alike with not being, and that whether they are taken together as one or separately.

Their triad is therefore different from ours.

Theirs has some underlying nature which is one.

Even if a philosopher makes a dyad of it, as Great and Small, the effect is the same, for he overlooked the other nature.

The one which persists is a joint cause, with the form, of what comes to be-a mother, as it were.

But the negative part of the contrariety may often seem, if you concentrate your attention on it as an evil agent, not to exist at all.

I agree with them that there is something divine, good, and desirable.

But I believe that there are 2 other principles:

• The one contrary to it
• The other such as of its own nature to desire and yearn for it.

But the consequence of their view is that the contrary desires its opposite.

Yet the form cannot desire itself, for it is not defective; nor can the contrary desire it, for contraries are mutually destructive.

The truth is that what desires the form is matter.

This is similar to how the female desires the male and the ugly the beautiful-only the ugly or the female not per se but per accidens.

The matter comes to be and ceases to be in one sense, while in another it does not.

As that which contains the privation, it ceases to be in its own nature, for what ceases to bethe privation-is contained within it.

But as potentiality it does not cease to be in its own nature, but is necessarily outside the sphere of becoming and ceasing to be.

For if it came to be, something must have existed as a primary substratum from which it should come and which should persist in it; but this is its own special nature, so that it will be before coming to be.

(For my definition of matter is just this-the primary substratum of each thing, from which it comes to be without qualification, and which persists in the result.) And if it ceases to be it will pass into that at the last, so it will have ceased to be before ceasing to be.

The accurate determination of the first principle in respect of form, whether it is one or many and what it is or what they are, is the province of the primary type of science; so these questions may stand over till then.

But of the natural, i.e. perishable, forms we shall speak in the expositions which follow.