Page:The Conception of God (1897).djvu/265

228 the composite called man, the body exists for the sake of the soul, and not vice versa. The being thus primarily individuated exists in order that his intellect may attain self-possession, a knowledge of the truth, and the right ultimate relation to God. But in the ideal condition of ultimate perfection thus defined, the intellectual individual, whose character as this man has its material basis in the body, attains, as his completed individuality, to an exercise of free will and of reason which will assimilate him to the angels. Separated from the body at death, the soul will be reunited thereto at the end; and the completed individual in his final state will be subsistent both materially and formally, — through matter, yet not merely as matter.

If we finally pass to the world of the individuals below the human level, namely, to animals and to inanimate objects, we reach the realm where matter, as the true principle of individuation, becomes at last paramount. To be sure, even here, matter of itself causes no individuality, since form is everywhere the final cause, and since every individual is a composite of form and matter, in which the matter exists for the sake of the form. Only matter, as the materia signata, or matter of “determinate dimensions,” is the conditio sine qua non of individuation. The fact that whiteness, cold, crystallisation, etc., as these accidents, here inform the particular materia signata whose substantial form is water, and whose place is in yonder cloud, — this gives you, as result, this individual snow-flake. To be sure, there are many hints, in Thomas, that the sensuous, immediate, and, in so far, appar-