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Updated: June 10, 2025
When in contact with the human body it partakes of the nature of other sublunar forms exhibiting its activity through matter and being inseparable from it. But it is not destroyed with the death of the body. It continues as a separate form after death. The soul, Aristotle defines as the first entelechy of the body.
In reality they form a unit, their union varying in perfection according as they are nearer or further away from their origin. Hence the union is closest in Intelligence, the first divine emanation, and least close in corporeal objects of the sublunar world, where plurality is the order of the day. This process by which universal matter and form issue from God may be called creation.
There are various gradations of matter, to be sure; for the prime matter as it emerges from the essence of the Creator pervades all existence from highest to lowest, and the further it extends from its origin the less spiritual and the more corporeal it becomes until in the sublunar world we have in the matters of its particular objects, corporeal matter, i. e., matter affected with quantity and magnitude and figure and color.
It is not wet, for it would then roll like the waves of the sea. Nor is it dry, for it would condense and not move at all. Not being any one of these qualities, which constitute our four elements, the sphere is not a composite of them either; for the simple is prior to the composite, and we cannot regard the elements of the sublunar world as prior and superior to the spheres.
Hence it is not reasonable to suppose that the Active Intellect who, as we know, orders the sublunar world, has more important work to do than God. Nor do we need waste words in proving that man cannot be the author of miracles, for in that case the knowledge of them would not come to him through prophetic inspiration, since they are due to his own will.
If, however, we adopt Aristotle's theory, which is more plausible, that the matter of the heavenly bodies is different from that of the sublunar world, we may defend dualism by supposing that one God controls the heavens and the other the earth.
This may be answered by saying that the impossibility of matter existing without form applies only to the actual objects of nature. God put in sublunar matter the nature and capacity of receiving all forms in a certain order. The primary qualities, the hot and the cold and the wet and the dry, as the forms of the elements, enable this matter to receive other higher forms.
A general principle to help us distinguish a thing having an origin from one that has not is the following: A thing which came into being in time has a purpose. An eternal thing has no purpose. Applying this principle to the heavens we find that all about them is with a purpose to ordering the sublunar world in the best way possible.
It is called the Active Intellect, and its business is to govern the sublunar world of generation and decay. As pure thought the Active Intellect embraces as its content the entire sublunar world in essence.
But we must admit that in this way we prove only the existence of a God who is the cause of the heavenly motions, and through these of the processes of genesis and decay, hence of all the life of our sublunar world. This is not the God of Jewish tradition, who creates out of nothing, who is the cause of the being of the universe as well as of its life processes.
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