On the other hand, when Saint Thomas Aquinas says that numerus stat ex parte materiae he is speaking of quantitative number, thereby affirming decisively that quantity has an immediate connection with the substantial side of manifestation. The word ‘substantial’ is used here because materia in the scholastic sense is not by any means the same as ‘matter’ as understood by modern physicists, but is properly ‘substance’, whether that word be taken in its relative meaning, as when it is put into correlation with forma and referred to particular beings, or whether it be taken, when materia prima is in question, as the passive principle of universal manifestation, that is, as pure potentiality, and so as the equivalent of Prakriti in the Hindu doctrine. However, as soon as ‘matter’ is in question, in whatever sense the word be taken, everything becomes particularly obscure and confused, and doubtless not without reason;[4] and therefore, while it has been possible to give an adequate account of the relation of quality to essence without developing a long argument, it will be necessary to go more deeply into the relation between quantity and substance in order to present a clear picture of the various aspects assumed by the Western conception of ‘matter’ even before the advent of the modern deviation in which this word was destined to play so great a part: and it is all the more necessary to do so because this question is in a sense at the very root of the principal subject of this study.
2
Materia Signata Quantitate
The scholastics gave the name materia, generally speaking, to what Aristotle had called ὕλη; but this materia, as has already been said, must in no way be identified with the ‘matter’ of the moderns, for the idea of ‘matter’, complex and even in some ways contradictory as it is, seems to have been as strange to the ancient Westerners as it still is to Easterners. Even admitting that materia can become ‘matter’ in certain special cases, or rather to be more accurate, that the more recent conception can be made to fit into the earlier one, materia nevertheless includes many other things at the same time, and it is these other things that must be carefully distinguished from ‘matter’; but for the purpose of naming them as a group by some comprehensive term like ὕλη or materia, we have no better word at our disposal in Western languages than the word ‘substance’. In any case, ὕλη, as a universal principle, is pure potency in which nothing is distinguished or ‘actualized’, and it constitutes the passive ‘support’ of all manifestation; it is therefore, taken in this sense, precisely Prakriti or universal substance, and everything that has been said elsewhere about Prakriti applies equally to ὕλη thus understood.[5] Substance, understood in a relative sense as being that which represents analogically the substantial principle and plays its part in relation to a more or less narrowly restricted order of existence, furnishes the term ὕλη with a secondary meaning, particularly when this term is correlated with εἶδος, to designate the two sides, essential and substantial, of particular existences.
The scholastics, following Aristotle, distinguish these two meanings by speaking of materia prima and materia secunda, so that it can be said that their materia prima is universal substance and their materia secunda is substance in the relative sense; but, since terms become susceptible of multiple applications at different levels as soon as the relative is considered, what is materia at a certain level can become forma at another, and inversely, according to the more or less particularized hierarchy of the degrees of manifested existence under consideration. In no case is a materia secunda pure potency, although it may constitute the potential side of a world or of a being; universal substance alone is pure potency, and it is situated not only beneath our world (substantia, from sub stare, is literally ‘that which stands beneath’, a meaning also attached to the ideas of ‘support’ and ‘substratum’), but also beneath the whole of all the worlds and all the states comprised in universal manifestation. In addition, for the very reason that it is potentiality, absolutely ‘undistinguished’ and undifferentiated universal substance is the only principle that can properly be said to be ‘unintelligible’, not merely because we are not capable of knowing it, but because there is actually nothing in it to be known; as for relative substances, insofar as they participate in the potentiality of universal substance, so far do they also participate in its ‘unintelligibility’. Therefore the explanation of things must not be sought on the substantial side, but on the contrary it must be sought on the essential side; translated into terms of spatial symbolism, this is equivalent to saying that every explanation must proceed from above downward and not from below upward; and this observation has a special relevance at this point, for it immediately gives the reason why modern science actually lacks all explanatory value.
Before going further it should be noted here that the physicists’ ‘matter’ can in no case be anything but a materia secunda, since the physicists regard it as being endowed with properties, on the nature of which they are incidentally not entirely in agreement, so that their ‘matter’ is not potentiality and ‘indistinction’ and nothing else besides; moreover, as the physicists’ conceptions relate to the sensible world and do not go beyond it, they would not know what to do with the conception of a materia prima. Nonetheless, by a curious confusion, they talk all the time of ‘inert matter’, without noticing that if it were really inert it would have no properties and would not be manifested in any way, so that it could have no part in what their senses can perceive; nevertheless they persist in pronouncing everything that comes within range of their senses to be ‘matter’, whereas inertia can actually only be attributed correctly to materia prima, because it alone is synonymous with passivity or pure potentiality. To speak of the ‘properties of matter’ while asserting at the same time that ‘matter is inert’ is an insoluble contradiction; and, by a strange irony, modern ‘scientism’, which claims to eliminate all ‘mystery’, nonetheless appeals in its vain attempts at explanation only to the very thing that is most ‘mysterious’ in the popular sense of the word, that is to say most obscure and least intelligible!
4
It must be pointed out, in connection with essence and substance, that the scholastics often translate as
5
The primary meaning of the word ὕλη is related to the vegetative principle; here there is an allusion to the ‘root’ (in Sanskrit