POWER, ACTION, AND MOVEMENT.
The word “motion” is now commonly used for movement, but it properly means the action by which a thing is set into movement. This action, or motion, of course proceeds from an agent, and consists in the production of an act, or momentum, which must be terminated or received in a patient. The active power of the agent is its substantial act as virtually containing in itself all the acts which the agent is ready to produce, according to its nature. This active power may therefore be called the virtuality, or terminability, of the act by which the agent is. The momentum produced by such a power stands to the power in the same ontological relation as the now of time to the virtuality of God’s eternity, and as the ubication of a point in space to the virtuality of God’s immensity; for in all these cases there is question of nothing else than of an extrinsic terminability and an extrinsic term. We may, therefore, in treating of motive powers and momentums, follow the same order of questions which we have followed in our articles on space and duration.
But the subject which we are about to investigate has a special feature of its own; because in the exertion of active power, and consequently in the momentums produced, there is something—intensity—which is not to be met with either in the when or in the where. For the when and the where are mere terms of intervals or distances, and do not partake in their continuity; from which it follows that they are not quantities, but merely terms of quantities, whereas the momentum of motion is the formal principle of the real changes produced by the agent in the patient. And these changes admit of different degrees, and thus by their greater or less magnitude reveal the greater or less intensity of the exertion. The reason of this difference is very plain; for the when and the where are not efficiently produced by God’s eternity and immensity, for these divine attributes do not connote action. Their origin is not to be traced to action, but to resultation, as we have explained in our preceding articles. The entity of every creature, on the contrary, proceeds from God as efficient cause—that is, it does not merely result from the existence of other things, but it is actively produced; and, since an act produced must have some degree of perfection, creatures are more or less perfect as to their entity, and therefore have in their own act a greater or less power of acting, according to the degree of their entitative perfection. This explains why it is that there is intensity in all action and in all act produced, whereas there is no intensity in the when and the where.
But, apart from this special feature, the questions regarding active powers, actions, and the acts produced are entirely similar to those which we have answered in treating of space and of duration. Nay, more, the same questions may be viewed under three distinct aspects—viz., first, with reference to the divine power and its causality of contingent things; secondly, with reference to second causes, their actions, and the momentums produced by them; and, thirdly, with reference to these momentums themselves and the local movements resulting from them. This third view of the subject is the only one immediately connected with the notions of space and of time, and we might limit ourselves to its consideration. Nevertheless, to shed more light on the whole treatise, we propose to say something of the other two also; for, by tracing the actions and the phenomena of the material world to their original sources, we shall discover that all different grades of reality are linked with their immediate principles in such a manner as to exhibit a perpetual analogy of the lower with the higher, till we reach the highest—God.
To ascertain the truth of this proposition, let us recall to mind the main conclusions established by us with respect to space. They were as follows:
1st. There is void space—that is, a capacity which does not imply the presence of anything created.
2d. Void space is an objective reality.
3d. Void space was not created.
4th. Absolute space is the virtuality, or extrinsic terminability, of God’s immensity.