Page:Theory of Mind of Roger Bacon.djvu/38

 to take it for granted that the Species of Species, being inherently weak, must produce effects which differ essentially from the Species’ Agent. And he probably thought that the reactive activity of the Patient’s Matter might therefore the more readily help in producing an effect essentially different from the Agent. But precisely how light can produce fire, and so putrefaction and so death or life, he wholly fails to say. And possibly his unclearness concerning the Matter made this omission necessary.

Finally, Bacon’s notion of the Species as composite, consisting of inseparable Matter and Form, was one which he did not frame with such clearness as to enable him consistently to avoid the notion that Form is the intermediary through which the change is effected. For we find him slipping into this notion on the very pages where he is seeking to prove the opposite; the notion, namely, that the phenomenon of change is to be explained by the simple dictum of Form as the means through which the Agent assimilates the Patient to itself. On the one hand, he is found developing the idea that all effects come from the action of the Agent on the Patient; and in the sense that all the effects are the product of Form (the Form of the Agent) from Matter (the Matter of the Patient). But the Matter of the Agent remains, and the Matter of the Patient must remain too if the Form is being produced from it. Here his necessary condition of a matter common to both is in point. The Form of the Agent remains but is duplicated in the Patient; the Form of the Patient disappears—back into the Matter of the Patient from which it originally arose. The only change here is change in the form of the Patient. On the other hand, he develops the idea that there must be diversity in the Matter of the Patient as well as in its Form. Here the virtue of the Agent is not only Form but Matter as well. The Species is the effect; the effect is the new thing resulting, and as such it must be both Form and Matter. In this sense the Effect is identical with the Agent. Here then there is change in Form and change in Matter of the Patient.

In the one case the Species is conceived of as the Form (of the Agent) whose correlate is Matter (of the Patient); here the Species cannot change its Matter but the Matter of another. In the other case it is a Composite, made up of Form and Matter, and as such can do that which its Principal, the Agent, could do if it were actually present. He is therefore here repeating what he later does