Page:Theory of Mind of Roger Bacon.djvu/20

 reason these secondary effects are called also equivocal. And indeed the distinction is also the same as that between principal and accidental action of the Species.

It is obvious, then, that Bacon seeks to identify the Species with the Agent, in essence and in nature and in operation. But, for all this, they are not numerically identical. For, after all the Species is an effect, with incomplete being, and serves as the medium through which the other effects are produced.

—The Species is just as different from the Patient as the latter is from the Agent; so much is clear from the foregoing. But it is in the Patient and occupies just the space of the Patient. It can do this because of its incomplete being; it is not a body at all. The Species is simply that through which the Patient is assimilated to the Agent; and the two remain forever just as opposed as Agent and Patient. More than this one cannot say.

A similar unclearness lurks in the relation of Species to Effect. Since it precedes the Effect, and disappears when once the Effect is produced, it would seem to be different from the Effect. But this is not what Bacon means to say; it is only a question of terms. The “effect” is one and the same, and numerically the same, which is at first incomplete and afterwards complete. The species is the “effectus incompletus vadens ad effectum completum.” It is of the same essence as the complete Effect, and turns into it when the Agent prevails over the Patient. In short, if it is identical with the Agent in all save space and completeness, it is identical with the Effect in every way.

But there is a negative side to his conception of the Species; the reader may also learn, less directly, what the Species is not. And since these scattered statements furnish valuable sidelights for his theory, it is important to recount them.