EIGHTH ARTICLE: WHETHER CREATION IS MINGLED IN THE WORKS OF NATURE AND ART

We are dealing not with the creation of the human soul but with the generation of brute animals and plants. St. Thomas replied that the answer depends on the manner of conceiving the pre-existence of forms in matter.

If we say that forms pre-exist actually in matter, as the atomists and Anaxagoras (theory of the involution of forms), there is no substantial becoming or substantial change. This opinion reveals an ignorance of the nature of matter because those who hold it were not able to distinguish between potency and act.

If we say that forms in no way pre-exist in matter but are caused by some superior agent, then they are created. This seems to have been the opinion of Avicenna, and it is based on an ignorance of the nature of form, as though the form were that which is and not that by which a thing is.

But if forms really pre-exist in the potency of matter, they are not created but educed, and that which becomes is not the form but the composite. The form, as we know, is that by which something is such a being or in such a species.

Hence St. Thomas concludes: Creation is not mingled in the works of nature and art; it is found nowhere except in the production of the spiritual soul, which, as spiritual, is not in the potency of matter and cannot be educed from matter. The soul is intrinsically independent of any organism in its specific act, and therefore it is also independent of the organism in its being and its becoming because operation follows being.[854]

By way of an appendix some commentators explain:

1. that many worlds are possible,[855] because the creation of one world does not exhaust the infinite power of God;

2. that actually there is but one world, one by unity of coordination and subordination;

3. that the world is perfect, not the best of all possible worlds, but perfect in the sense that whatever imperfections are in the world exist for the perfection of the universe, as the shadows in a painting serve to accentuate the colors.[856] Moreover, things that are harmful in one way are useful in another, as, for example, certain poisons like arsenic, which in moderation serve as medicine.[857]