The

Mystery of Matter, ON THE FRONTIERS OF MODERN SCIENCE

Part

I:

Chapter 1: David Bohm's Interpretation of Quantum Theory

The three chapters of Part I make considerable demands, for they are non-technical summaries of complex scientific theories. I am not going to compound these difficulties by trying to establish whether these theories are correct or not. It is enough for our purpose to try to become attuned to the language that emerges in the midst of these scientific endeavors. It will demonstrate to us, I believe, that scientists, while pursuing their own disciplines and particularly while exploring their far frontiers begin to almost instinctively create a language with all kinds of philosophical resonances and implications. It is this kind of language that will prepare us for examining the possibilities of the existence of a philosophy of nature. CHAPTER 1: OF QUANTUM THEORY DAVID BOHM'S INTERPRETATION

It is important to see David Bohm's interpretation of quantum theory in the context of the revolution in physics brought about by quantum mechanics at the beginning of this century. The following outline supplies the bare bones of that context which can be filled in by many fine accounts of quantum theory that have appeared in recent years. (1) 1900. In Berlin, Max Planck is struggling with the problem of black body radiation, which is the radiation that a heated, thin-walled, hollow, metal cylinder gives off through a small hole in it. Instead of this radiation being emitted in a smooth fashion, it is given off in lumps or clumps. In a moment of desperation and inspiration, Planck derives a formula which involved a very small constant he calls h that fits the data, but then he begins to struggle to understand its physical implications. 1905. In Bern, Albert Einstein, an unknown patent examiner, submits three papers to the Annalen Der Physik: the special theory of relativity, a proof for the existence of atoms based on Brownian motion, that is, the motion of small particles like grains of pollen by some unseen force, and a third paper on the photoelectric effect in which electrons are given off by a metal bombarded by light, but the emission depends not on the intensity of the light but its frequency. In this last paper Einstein extends Planck's ideas to electromagnetic radiation in order to explain this effect, and concludes that light could be considered not only a wave, as the long prevailing opinion had it, but is made up of distinct particles, or quanta, as well. 1911. Ernest Rutherford in England bombards a thin sheet of gold foil with particles and some of them bounce back, indicating that the atoms of the foil have nucleii. 1913. Neils Bohr, a young Danish physicist, tries to understand how electrons can form a stable structure with these nucleii and not spiral into them. He finds a solution based on Einstein's and Planck's work on quanta in which electrons can only take up certain orbits or states of energy.

1923. Louis de Broglie, a young physics student in Paris, reasons that if light is made up of particles, why couldn't electrons be made up of waves. This opens the door for considering the wave properties of other particles, as well. His thesis advisor, Paul Langevin, sends his work to Einstein who sees its importance. 1925. Werner Heisenberg, a young German physicist, is also apparently influenced by Einstein "who hovers over this entire subject like some sort of magisterial ghost." (2) Heisenberg decides that Bohr's picture of the orbits of the atom which had never been observed could be replaced by a purely mathematical structure. Max Born and Pascal Jordan complete his work which Born had realized made use of a branch of mathematics called matrix mechanics whose strange feature was that the result of two numbers multiplied by each other differed depending on which number was put first. For example, the position of a particle multiplied by its momentum would not be equal to its momentum multiplied by its position, but would be proportional to the constant Planck had found. Paul Dirac, a young Englishman, works out an equivalent mathematical theory. Another young physicist, a brash and aggressive friend of Heisenberg, Wolfgang Pauli, applies matrix mechanics to the light spectrum of hydrogen and comes up with the same answers that Neils Bohr had discovered. 1925-1927. Erwin Schrdinger hears of de Broglie's work through a paper of Einstein's and works out a wave theory of the atom that arrives at the same results as the work of Heisenberg, Born, Jordan and Dirac. These two different approaches were soon shown to be mathematically equivalent, but they are driven by quite different attitudes to the nature of physics, and these attitudes will play an important role in our story. The mathematical formulation of quantum theory is falling into place, but it is being increasingly subjected to two different philosophical interpretations. Schrdinger is initially inclined to look at his wave as a matter wave, which he names after Einstein and de Broglie. They, in turn, think of this wave as a pilot wave that guides the electron. At the same time Born, Heisenberg and Bohr are veering away from trying to picture what the mathematics of quantum theory physically represents. Born has created a probabilistic interpretation of Schrdinger's waves in which the wave indicates the probability of a particle being in a certain place. Heisenberg develops his famous uncertainty principle in which the uncertainty of the position and the momentum of a particle is never zero, but always related to Planck's constant. And Bohr comes up with a principle of complementarity in which the wave and particle properties of the electron are both true, but mutually exclusive. But all these ideas, which come together to create the Copenhagen interpretation and which is going to become dominant among physicists, carry with them a considerable amount of philosophical baggage. Heinz Pagel in his Cosmic Code portrays this dominant position with enthusiasm. Born's probabilistic interpretation of Schrdinger's waves is taken up as an indication of the of the quantum world, itself: "This indeterminism was the first example of quantum weirdness. It implies the existence of physical events that were forever unknowable and unpredictable. Not only must human experimenters give up knowing when a particular atom is going to radiate or a particular nucleus undergo radioactive decay, but these events are even unknown in the perfect mind of God." (3) Heisenberg's uncertainty principle arises not just from our inability to measure the properties of the electron more accurately, but from this indeterminism of the quantum world, itself.

Quantum theory makes statistical predictions and rules out any subquantum or hidden variable theory that would be deterministic. The immense explanatory power of quantum theory comes "at the price of renouncing the determinism and objectivity of the natural world." (4) What we know is what our experiments tell us, which is an inseparable mixture of our experimental methods and what we are experimenting on. We do not know what the quantum world is in itself. Bohr remarks: "It is wrong to think that the task of physics is to find out how Nature is. Physics concerns what we can say about Nature." (5) And Heisenberg comments: "Progress in science has been bought at the expense of the possibility of making the phenomena of nature immediately and directly comprehensible to our way of thought." And again, "Science sacrifices more and more the possibility of making 'living' the phenomena immediately perceptible by our senses, but only lays bare the mathematical, formal nucleus of the process." (6) But this loss of objective reality was highly uncongenial to Einstein, Schrdinger and de Broglie. Einstein had a long running debate with Bohr and others about these matters, and resisted this interpretation to the end of his life. He wrote to Born about his probability wave, "Quantum mechanics is certainly imposing. But an inner voice tells me that it is not yet the real thing. The theory says a lot, but does not really bring us any closer to the secret of the 'old one.' 1, at any rate, am convinced that He is not playing at dice." (7) De Broglie attempted a causal interpretation of wave mechanics in 1927, but it aroused considerable criticism, especially on the part of Pauli, and he dropped it. The whole weirdness of quantum theory was summed up in the two slit experiment. In classical physics this experiment was used to demonstrate the wave theory of light. Light is directed at two narrow slits in a barrier with a screen placed behind it. If either of the slits is covered, the light shines through the other one and a line is created on the screen. But if both are open, then instead of two lines, there is a pattern of light and dark lines caused by the interference of the two waves of light that have gone through the two slits. But what will happen if the experiment is repeated with electrons? If electrons are particles, as much evidence indicates, we should expect that the electrons shot through one slit would form a line on the screen behind it, and if the electrons are shot through both slits, two lines would be formed. In actual fact, what is found is an interference pattern like that created by the waves of light. Even if the electrons are shot one at a time through the slits, the interference pattern is formed. The crux of the mystery is in trying to explain how particles can form a wave interference pattern. In the Copenhagen interpretation, the explanation goes like this: the electron must go through either one slit or the other, but then we should not get a wave interference pattern. Further, if the electron goes through one or the other slit, it should not matter if the one It is not going through is closed. But in actual fact, if we close it, we don't get the interference pattern. So instead, we should say that we cannot talk about which slit the electron goes through until we measure it. If we measure which slit the electron goes through, then the electron acts like a particle and gives a particle pattern. If we don't measure it, the wave distribution will begin to appear. Somehow our act of measurement has forced the probability wave to collapse and the electron to appear at a distinct place. The loss of this probability wave, or wave packet, causes the loss of the interference pattern. According to this Copenhagen interpretation, what is at stake is the nature of physical reality, or classical objectivity.

"There is no meaning to the objective existence of an electron at some point in space, for example at one of the two holes, independent of actual observation. The electron seems to spring into existence as a real object only when we observe it!" (8) It is the probability wave that goes through both slits and causes the build up of the interference pattern, and somehow directs the electrons to the areas of higher probability. Richard Feynman says of the two slit experiment that it is "a phenomenon which impossible, absolutely impossible, to explain in any classical way, and which has in it the heart of quantum mechanics. In reality, it contains the only mystery... the basic peculiarities of all quantum mechanics." (9) John Gribbin explains the matter like this: "The electrons not only know whether or not both holes are open, they know whether or not we are watching them, and they adjust their behavior accordingly. There is no clearer example of the interaction of the observer with the experiment. When we try to look at the spread-out electron wave, it collapses into a definite particle, but when we are not looking it keeps its options open. In terms of Born's probabilities, the electron is being forced by our measurement to choose one course of action out of an array of possibilities. There is a certain probability that it could go through one hole, and an equivalent probability that it may go through the other; probability interference produces the diffraction pattern at our detector. When we detect the electron, though, it can only be in one place, and that changes the probability pattern for its future behavior-for that electron, it is now certain which hole it went through. But unless someone looks, nature herself does not know which hole the electron is going through." (10) It is as if a myriad of ghost or potential particles become one real particle with the collapse of the wave function caused by our act of observation. "What's worse, as soon as we stop looking at the electron, or whatever we are looking at, it immediately splits up into a new array of ghost particles, each pursuing their own path of probabilities through the quantum world. Nothing is real unless we look at it, and it ceases to be real as soon as we stop looking." (11) I don't want to belabor this view of quantum theory, but it is important to begin to fix in our minds how completely a certain philosophical view of reality has become fused with the mathematical formulation of quantum theory. 1932. John von Neumann creates a mathematical proof that purports to show that a hidden variable approach to quantum theory, i.e., that there could be some kind of subquantum level causal explanation, Is impossible. His work compounds the impression that the dominant Copenhagen interpretation goes as far as it is possible to go. 1935. Einstein continues to resist this kind of interpretation, and feels that quantum theory is incomplete. In order to demonstrate this incompleteness he creates a thought experiment, together with Boris Podolsky and Nathan Rosen. He imagines two particles coming from far away, interacting, and then moving far away from each other. He reasons that if we measure the position of the first particle we can deduce from that the position of the second particle, and if we measure the momentum of the first particle, we can deduce the momentum of the second. Therefore we can say there are elements of reality in this second particle that correspond to these deductions. And if quantum theory cannot determine both the position and the momentum of a particle, it is thus incomplete, for this second particle actually has a definite position and momentum, and the only way to avoid this conclusion would be by some "spooky action at a distance" whereby measuring the first particle actually effects the second, a possibility he does not take seriously. For Einstein, if something is real it remains real

whether we measure it or not, whereas for Bohr, "A particle in reality hasneither a position nor momentum. It has only the potential to manifest these complementary properties when confronted by suitable experimental apparatus." (12) This was Einstein's last paper on the subject, but he continued to talk about it until the end of his life. In 1944 he writes to Max Born, "You believe in the God who plays dice, and I in complete law and order in a world which objectively exists, and which 1, in a wildly speculative way, am trying to capture... Even the great initial success of the quantum theory does not make me believe in the fundamental dice-game, although I am well aware that our younger colleagues interpret this as a consequence of senility. No doubt the day will come when we will see whose instinctive attitude was the correct one." (13) 1950. David Bohm has been teaching quantum theory at Princeton and has just finished writing a quantum textbook following the interpretation of Neils Bohr. It is well received, and has two distinctive qualities: more words than formulas, and a mention of the Einstein, Podolski and Rosen paper, which was not usual at the time. (14) But Bohm is dissatisfied with what he has done, and what he perceives as the unresolved issues of quantum theory preoccupy him. His life is about to change, both personally and scientifically. He has refused to testify before the House committee on unAmerican activities about his student days in Berkeley, and he is cited for contempt and suspended by the university, and discouraged from visiting. Bohm is eventually cleared of charges, but his contract is not renewed by Princeton, and he cannot find a job in the U.S. He goes to Brazil, then to Israel, and finally to England. On the scientific front, he sends copies of his textbook to Bohr, who doesn't answer, to Pauli, who is enthusiastic, and to Einstein, who is at Princeton and who calls and invites him to visit. Einstein still feels that something is missing from quantum theory, and it should be possible to go beyond the statistical approach and create some kind of deterministic theory in which there is an objective reality independent of the observer. Bohm is strongly effected by his meeting with Einstein, sets out to look for such a theory, finds the beginning of one, and publishes two papers in 1952, von Neumann's proofs not withstanding. Einstein, however, is not happy with his theory. It involves a new force that Bohm calls a quantum potential, which has as one of its characteristics nonlocality, and instead of breaking entirely new ground with some revolutionary formulation, it evokes ideas similar to those proposed by de Broglie more than twenty years before. Pauli criticizes it and de Broglie rallies to it, but in the world of physicists it only slowly makes headway. It goes against the prevailing mentality which either cares little for the philosophical side of quantum theory, or strongly embraces the conventional interpretation. Objections are raised that Bohm's theory produces no new empirical results, but Bohm replies that if de Broglie's ideas had prevailed in 1927, then the same objection could have been brought against anyone developing the Copenhagen interpretation later. Bohm will continue to develop and expand his ideas until the end of his life in 1992. 1964. If Bohm's 1952 papers did not make much of an impact, they did excite the interest of a young Irish physicist, John Stewart Bell. He, too, had been uneasy about the conventional interpretation, and now he saw Bohm doing what was not possible to do according to the common wisdom of physicists supported by von Neumann's mathematical proofs: creating a causal or hidden variable interpretation of quantum theory.

Bell had a deep-rooted realist streak, much like Einstein. He once said: "I think there is a real world and I think it pays very little attention to me." (15) When he looked at Bohm's papers he saw that von Neumann must somehow be wrong, and that Bohm's theory was nonlocal. It wasn't until twelve years later in 1964 that he was ready to formulate his ideas and ask himself: "Do you have to have nonlocality to get agreement with quantum mechanics?" (16) Locality meant local action between two bodies that propagated at speeds below the speed of light, and weakened as the distance between the bodies increased. Bell first refuted all the proofs like von Neumann's for the impossibility of having hidden variables. Then he asked whether there could be a local hidden variable solution which would avoid nonlocality, and he showed by his calculations it was impossible. The kind of locality found in classical physics and favored by Einstein was not compatible with quantum theory. In a Bell type of a thought experiment, a source emits two photons that go off in opposite directions and have correlated polarizations. The photons are in what physicists call a phaseentangled state, and according to quantum theory, neither one of the photons has a definite polarization. If we set a detector in the path of either of the photons, there is a 50% chance that the photon will register as up, and a 50% chance it will register as down. But if the detectors in each direction are both set at the same angle, then the polarization of each photon is shown to be the same. When the detectors are set at a 90 0 angle to each other, the polarizations of the particles are always opposite. But what happens if the detectors are set at some intermediate angle? This is where the possibility comes in of distinguishing a local interaction theory from quantum theory, for in a local theory we imagine that how we set one detector does not influence what happens at the other. If we set the first detector at x 0 and the second detector at x0 in the opposite direction, and we assume what happens at the first detector doesn't influence what happens at the second, then if the error rate at the first detector is one out of four, and the error rate at the other detector is also one out of four, then the total error rate should be no more than two out of four. This is an example of Bell's inequality. But quantum theory predicts the error rate is three out of four. It looks like something must be wrong with our assumption that what happens at one detector does not influence what happens at the other. Quantum theory points to nonlocality. (17) 1969. John Clauser, Michael Horne, Abner Shimony and Richard Holt generalize Bell's theorem so it can be tested. 1972. Clauser does an experiment that shows that quantum theory is correct and Bell's inequality is violated. 1982. Alain Aspect at the University of Paris carries out very sophisticated experiments to close the loopholes left by earlier experiments and he, too, finds that Bell's inequality is violated. Nonlocality appears to be a feature of the universe. No doubt physicists would find many imprecisions in this all too brief history of quantum theory, but it does provide us with some background that will allow us to look deeper into the significance of David Bohm's interpretation of quantum theory and further our inquiry into the philosophically rich language that can develop in such situations. We are going to do this by examining the book that Bohm was working on, together with B.J. Hiley when he died in 1992 entitled, The Undivided Universe: An Ontological Interpretation of Quantum Theory. Bohm and Hiley felt that an ontological interpretation of quantum theory was called for because although quantum mechanics had great operative efficacy, there remained basic questions that were unclarified: its inability to deal with individual quantum events,

nonlocality, wave-particle duality and "above all, there is the inability to give a clear notion of what the reality of a quantum system could be." (18) Quantum theory "merely gives us knowledge of how our instruments will function." But says "little or nothing about reality itself." (19) Bohm and Hiley have created a theory that gives the same statistical results as the conventional interpretation, but which is, as they say, an ontological interpretation, which is "intuitively graspable" so that it is possible to see into the nature of the physical reality underlying the mathematical formalism of quantum theory, and perhaps in this way to advance quantum theory in new directions. While much of the book is given over to demonstrating how this theory will yield all the results of the earlier interpretation, what is important for us is the sense of the ontological thirst that drives the whole process, and the picture that begins to emerge. Classical physics had implied a certain unexamined realism that allowed the physicist to go about his or her work. Particles and fields actually existed, could be known, and that knowledge didn't change them. All this was called into question with the advent of quantum mechanics, as we have seen. With the ascendancy of the Copenhagen interpretation, any quantum ontology like that proposed by Bohm and Hiley was ruled out. What we were left with was a "quantum algorithm which gives the probability of the possible results for each kind of experimental arrangement. Clearly this means that the mathematics must not be regarded as reflecting an independent quantum reality that is well defined, but rather that it constitutes in essence only knowledge about the statistics of the quantum phenomena." (20) Our authors are not satisfied with this kind of approach, for in it science doesn't deal with what is, but is limited to what is observable. There is no way to get below the surface, or in this case, below the indeterminacy that quantum phenomena present. But for Bohm just because quantum phenomena are indeterministic doesn't mean that the quantum world must be, and thus the possibility exists for a quantum ontology. In such an ontology "the electron actually is a particle with a well defined position... which varies continuously and is causally determined" and this "particle is never separate from a new type of quantum field that fundamentally affects it." (21) This field has new features that differentiates it from the fields familiar to classical physics. This "quantum potential is independent of the strength (i.e., the intensity) of the quantum field but depends only on its form." (22) They liken it to a radio wave that guides a ship that is on automatic pilot. The energy to move the ship comes from its engine and not from the intensity of the radio wave, but the form of the wave controls the direction of the ship. In a similar way, "we may therefore propose that an electron too moves under its own energy, and that the form of the quantum wave directs the energy of the electron... Moreover, since the effect of the wave does not necessarily fall off with the distance, even remote features of the environment can profoundly affect the movement." (23) When Bohm and Hiley consider the two slit experiments in this new way, the much proclaimed quantum weirdness dissolves. If one slit is open, the particle passes through that slit as well as its quantum wave. If both slits are open, the particle passes through one or the other, but its wave goes through both, giving rise eventually to the characteristic interference pattern. They compare this quantum field to what they call active information in which "a form having very little energy enters Into and directs a much greater energy." The word information here is taken in its root sense "to in-form, which is actively to put form into something or to imbue something with form." (24) A radio, for example, has unformed energy coming from its

power source which is informed by the radio wave so that the information in the radio wave "ispotentially active everywhere, but it is actually active, only where and when it can give form to the electrical energy which, in this case, is in the radio." (25) When this kind of conception is applied to the electron in the two slit experiment, the particle is seen as having an ability to work, which is released by the active information of the quantum field, which doesn't push or pull the particle, but directs and guides its energy, which suggests "that an electron or any other elementary particle has a complex and subtle inner structure." (26) This conception of a quantum field also points to the fact that the experiment has to be looked at as a whole. The slits themselves effect the way the waves move the particles, and the whole environment of the experiment effects how the final pattern appears on the screen. While at first glance this seems similar to Bohr's point of view, it differs markedly because in this case the wholeness involved "is open to our 'conceptual gaze' and can therefore be analyzed in thought, even if it cannot be divided in actuality without radically changing its nature." (27) Indeterminateness remains in our measurements, but that does not mean that quantum reality itself is indeterminate. Since the strength of the quantum field does not fall off with distance, distant features of the environment can effect the particle. In a similar way, two particles can be coupled over long distances, giving rise to nonlocality. This kind of wholeness goes beyond "the actual spacial relationships" of the particles and transcends any conception of mechanism. The concept of wholeness in mechanism is concerned with the overall arrangement of the parts. "In our interpretation of the quantum theory, we see that the interaction of parts is determined by something that cannot be described solely in terms of these parts and their preassigned interrelationships... Something with this kind of dynamical significance that refers directly to the whole system is thus playing a key role in the theory. We emphasize that this is the most fundamentally new aspect of the quantum theory." (28) Bohm and Hiley are making no claims to more precise quantum measurements because the object to be measured and the measuring instrument are still conceived to be interacting and are "'guided' by a common pool of information implying a quantum potential that connects them in a nonlocal way." (29) There is no way to predict the behavior of the particle even though this motion is determinate in itself, but their interpretation avoids the paradoxes that abound in the normal interpretation of quantum theory. Bohm and Hiley bring out the nonlocality of their quantum theory by considering the Einstein, Podolsky and Rosen thought experiment. They imagine a molecule with a total spin of zero with each of its atoms having a spin of one half. The molecule disintegrates and the atoms move far apart. The spins of the atoms should be opposite to each other. If we measure the first atom we can deduce what the spin of the second atom is, and while our measurement disturbs the first atom, according to Einstein's reasoning, it should not disturb the second atom, and so the reality of the spin of the second atom must have existed before we measured the first atom. We saw that Einstein, Podolsky and Rosen used this kind of reason to point to the incompleteness of the conventional quantum theory because in this way all the elements of spin of the second atom can be determined, which is something that the mathematical formalism of quantum theory does not allow for. But another possibility exists. The two atoms are bound together by some unknown field so that the disturbance caused by the measurement of the first atom is communicated to the second. Considering the early work of Bohm, John Bell had asked whether "nonlocality was necessary for all possible ontological explanations of quantum mechanics." (30) The result, as

we have seen, was Bell's inequality, which experiments have shown to be violated, pointing to the fact that any hidden variable must be nonlocal. In Bohm and Hiley's theory, the state of the second atom is dependent on the measurement apparatus of the first atom, and this interconnectedness is brought about by the quantum potential. The ordinary world of sense experience is a world of relatively stable structures outside of each other which locally interact, but the quantum world has "a radically different nature," for it is a world of nonlocality and indivisible wholeness. "Thus there is a kind of objective wholeness, reminiscent of the organic wholeness of a living being in which the very nature of each part depends on the whole." (31) In many cases the effect of the quantum field can be neglected "so that the classical world can be treated on its own as if it were independently existent. But according to our interpretation it is actually an abstraction from the subtle quantum world which is being taken as the ultimate ground of existence." (32) This intuitive approach stands in strong contrast to one that starts with the mathematical formulation of quantum theory and tries to derive a physical interpretation from it. This latter approach is a reversal of the traditional role of mathematics in physics. But now very often the mathematical equations are seen as providing the most immediate contact with nature. While Bohm and Hiley agree that progress can be made from the mathematical side alone, they do not want to "regard these physical concepts as merely imaginative displays" (33) of the meaning of the equations. This interpretation of quantum theory which can produce the results of the conventional interpretation, and thus has the status of an independent physical theory, was connected, in their minds, with more general considerations. Classical physics can be compared to an optical lens which allows the points of an object to correspond to the points of its image. The new unbroken wholeness that Bohm and Hiley champion is like a hologram in which each part contains an image of the whole object. "So in some sense, the whole object is enfolded in each part of the hologram rather than being in point-to-point correspondence." (34) The order in the hologram is thus called implicate, while the image explicate. To illustrate this difference they imagine a device with two concentric glass cylinders, one inside the other. When the outer one is fixed, and the inner one revolves slowly, and the space between them Is filled with some viscous fluid, then an insoluble ink drop placed in the fluid will be drawn out into a long, thin thread until it is no longer visible. But if the direction is reversed, the thread and then the dot will eventually reappear. If one drop is enfolded in this way, and then another at the same point, and so on, and then the rotation of the cylinders is reversed, what we will see will look like a single drop that is appearing and disappearing. "We thus obtain an example of how form that persists in the explicate order can arise from the whole background and be sustained dynamically by a movement of enfoldment and unfoldment." (35) If a red drop and a blue drop are enfolded until they disappear and then made to reappear, we have an example that illustrates the Einstein, Podolsky, Rosen experiment, for the two explicit particles are intimately connected in the implicate order. The world of classical physics and even the movement of the particle in the quantum world belong to the explicate order, but there is also an implicate dimension to the quantum world in which active information, represented by the quantum potential, plays a fundamental role. We are going to return later to Bohm's scientific and philosophical thoughts, but hopefully we have seen enough here to reach our first objective: important philosophical questions arise in the midst of properly scientific work. In the next two chapters we will see the same process in biology and psychology.

The Mystery of Matter Chapter 2: Rupert Sheldrake's Formative Causation While it is not necessary to set the historical stage as we did with quantum theory in order to understand Rupert Sheldrake's work, we should realize that it is part of a non-mechanistic current in biology that has always existed, although in recent times as a minority. Sheldrake is an English biologist who first came to public notice in 1981 with the controversies that surrounded the publication of his A New Science of Life: The Hypothesis of Formative Causation. Sheldrake's work will give us another opportunity to see important philosophical issues begin to emerge from the careful consideration of scientific problems. Sheldrake had shared the view of most biologists that "living organisms are nothing but complex machines governed only by the known laws of physics and chemistry." (1) But pondering unsolved problems in biology led him to give up this mechanistic viewpoint. One of these problems was biological morphogenesis, or the coming into being of the form of an organism. This development is what biologists describe as epigenetic: "New structures appear which cannot be explained in terms of the unfolding or growth of structures which are already present In the egg at the beginning of development." (2) Other issues, intractable to a purely mechanistic approach, include regulation, regeneration and reproduction. Regulation is the ability of the living being to overcome the loss of one of its parts, and still develop into a complete organism. What guides it to that goal? In regeneration, the organism replaces a part that is destroyed. And in reproduction the organism creates a completely independent form. In all these cases what is observed goes beyond what can be understood by the model of a machine. The difficulty of explaining these morphological issues is matched by a series of behavioral problems: instinct, behavioral regulation, learning, and intelligent behavior. Neither can mechanism create an adequate explanation for psychological views like that of the unconscious proposed by C.G. Jung. Even the explanatory power of DNA has its limits. Chimpanzees and humans share almost 99% of their non-repeated DNA sequences, and yet show enormous behavioral differences. Once Sheldrake realized the limitations of the mechanistic approach, he saw two alternative possibilities. On the one hand there was vitalism, and on the other, some kind of organismic or wholistic approach. Vitalism says there is another causal factor involved in living organisms. One of its most forceful modern proponents was the German embryologist, Hans Driesch. Driesch, who had himself started off as an adherent to mechanism, had conducted a series of experiments on the embryos of sea urchins in which one of their original cells was destroyed, yet the embryos regulated themselves, and reached the goal of normal adult development. No machine, Driesch reasoned, could survive the arbitrary removal of some of its parts and still retain this kind of wholeness. He therefore hypothesized the existence of a non-physical, non-spatial causal factor in living beings which, with a nod to Aristotle, he called entelechy. This entelechy directed the physical and chemical processes during the organism's development. The word entelechy came from Greek and meant 'bearing the goal within itself,' and Driesch thought of it as an "intensive manifoldness." It was, in his mind, a natural factor but not a form of matter or energy.

Despite the merits of Driesch's position, Sheldrake was unhappy with the fact that the entelechy was non-physical, and thus led to a dualistic conception of the organism, for how could it act on physical and chemical processes if it, itself, was not physical? "The physical world and the non-physical entelechy could never be explained or understood in terms of each other." (3) Then Sheldrake turned to organicism, which tried to solve the problems of morphological development by proposing that the wholeness exhibited came from embryonic or developmental or morphogenetic fields. But as potentially fertile as this idea was, it had remained more of a description of morphogenesis than an explanation of it. Sheldrake took the best in Driesch's vitalism and of these field theories, and created a new hypothesis he called formative causation. Forms are all around us, and they cannot be completely comprehended in purely quantitative terms. Biologists recognize forms like flowers and butterflies directly, and classify them. "As forms they are simply themselves; they cannot be reduced to anything else... If the forms of things are to be understood, they need not be explained in terms of numbers, but in terms of more fundamental forms." (4) These kinds of reflections brought to mind the doctrine of Plato in which the things of daily experience were reflections of the archetypal forms, but this didn't explain how these eternal forms were related to our earthly ones. "Aristotle believed this problem could be overcome by regarding the forms of things as immanent rather than transcendent: specific forms were not only inherent in objects, but actually caused them to take up their characteristic forms." (5) Sheldrake realized that physics dealt with energy as a principle of change, but not really with form, and so he proposed a new type of causation. "The hypothesis of formative causation proposes that morphogenetic fields play a causal role in the development and maintenance of the forms of systems at all levels of complexity. In this context, the word 'form' is taken to include not only the shape of the outer surface or boundary of a system, but also its internal structure." (6) He recognized that the energetic cause in physics was like Aristotle's efficient cause, while his formative causation resembled Aristotle's formal cause, and he uses the analogy of building a house to illustrate this kind of causality. In order to build a house we need the raw materials, the carpenters who do the actual building, but also a plan "which determines the form of the house." And this plan, too, is a cause. (7) Morphogenetic fields are not kinds of energy, but they play a causal role in determining the forms of the systems with which they are associated." (8) They are " spatial structures detectable only through their morphogenetic effects on material systems.. Thus there must be one kind of morphogenetic field for protons; another for nitrogen atoms; another for water molecules; another for sodium chloride crystals; another for the muscle cells of earthworms; another for the kidneys of sheep; another for elephants; another for beech trees; and so on." (9) In morphogenesis a morphogenetic field surrounds an already organized system which becomes the germ of the higher level system to come, and the field is probably associated with this germ because of their similarities in form. This germ develops under the direction of the field which is not yet filled out or completed, but contains the final goal in virtual form, and directs the activities of the seed system so it realizes that goal. "(M)orphogenetic fields differ radically from electromagnetic fields in that the latter depend on the actual state of the system - on the distribution and movement of charged particles whereas morphogenetic fields

correspond to the potential state of a developing system and are already present before it takes up its final form." (10) There is a certain constancy to form. This is readily understandable if forms are a result of changeless physical laws like a mechanistic approach supposes. But Sheldrake is trying to break out of that framework, and he comes up with what he considers a radically different approach: "Chemical and biological forms are repeated not because they are determined by changeless laws or eternal Forms, but because of a causal influence from previous similar forms. This influence would require an action across space and time unlike any known type of physical action." (11) The question immediately occurs to him about the origin of the first forms which will, according to this hypothesis, then begin to influence subsequent ones. He feels that no scientific answer is possible because the origination of forms is a unique event, while science deals with repeatable events. "The initial choice of a particular form could be ascribed to chance, or to a creativity inherent in matter; or to a transcendent creative agency." (12) A form influences subsequent forms by a kind of morphic resonance, and since this resonance is non-energetic like the morphogenetic fields themselves it need not be limited by space and time. It is the morphic resonance aspect of the idea of formative causation that gives rise to testable predictions, and this is, no doubt, an important reason why it recommended itself to Sheldrake, and he goes on to suggest various ways in which it could be tested. These include the speed of formation of new crystals and experiments in plant breeding, and their basic principle is simply that if a form or behavior has been repeated in the past, then it will be more readily repeatable in the present, for the past form and behavior resonate with and influence the present. The interaction between the physical and chemical processes of the organism and morphogenetic fields and their power of resonance can be compared to a radio playing music. The physical structure of the radio and its power source are essential to its functioning, but it receives radio waves without which there would be no music. "In terms of the hypothesis of formative causation, the 'transmission' would come from previous similar systems, and its 'reception' would depend on the detailed structure and organization of the receiving system." (13) Sheldrake then goes on to apply this hypothesis to a wealth of biological problems ranging from inheritance, to the evolution of biological forms, the movement of plants and animals, instinct, and behavior. In The Presence of the Past: Morphic Resonance and the Habits of Nature which appeared in 1988, Sheldrake takes up the same theme of formative causation but with a different emphasis. He is going to place it "in its broad historical, philosophical, and scientific context." (14) "Things are as they are because they were as they were." (15) There is a memory inherent in nature that is passed on from one generation to another by means of morphic resonance. Memory does not have to be conceived as something engraved on our brains, but rather, might be directly present to us. The morphic fields of past organisms might somehow continue to be present to us. Sheldrake feels that immutable laws of nature are tied to a view of the universe as an eternal machine, and both these perspectives are not in harmony with what we now know about evolution. "Rather than being governed by eternal laws, the nature of things may be habitual." (16)

In the past the laws of nature were presented as if they had an objective existence which somehow transcended space and time, and were even imagined by scientists to have existed before the creation of the universe. To this Sheldrake responds: "How could we possibly know that the laws of nature existed before the universe came into being? We could not ever hope to prove it by experiment. This is surely no more than a metaphysical assumption." (17) "Eternal laws made sense when they were ideas within the mind of God, as they were for the founding fathers of modern science. They still seem to make sense when they govern an eternal universe from which God's mind had been dissolved. But do they any longer make sense in the context of the Big Bang and an evolving universe?" (18) Sheldrake feels that these eternal laws should be replaced by the notion of habits, but if we do so, we are still left with the question of how these habits originated and sustained themselves. Somehow habits arise within nature and influence subsequent events. The idea of eternal laws is deeply rooted in Western tradition and goes back much further than the rise of modern science. Here he again summarizes some of that philosophical tradition in which the eternal forms of Plato were seen by Aristotle to be immanent in things. For Aristotle all living beings had souls that directed their development and activities toward a goal. But Sheldrake feels that these souls, or natures, were also conceived by Aristotle as fixed and changeless. Another problem with Aristotle's conception is that "the forms of all kinds of organisms arise from non-material organizing principles inherent in the organisms themselves." (19) This, as we remember, gave rise to the dualism that Sheldrake objected to in Driesch's work. Aristotle's viewpoint was highly influential in later theories of vitalism and organismic philosophies, and Sheldrake is making himself heir to this tradition, but trying to put it in an evolutionary context. There is something so fundamental about the idea of form in biology that it keeps on reappearing. "All attempts to force the organizing principles of life into material objects such as genes have failed: they keep bursting out again. The concept of purposive organizing principles which are non-material in nature have been reinvented again and again." (20) Even the idea of the universe as a machine implies a plan of organization. Whether we look to the laws of nature or information theory, we return to the fundamental idea of form. "Information is what informs; it plays an informativerole..." (21) "Is the information Platonic, somehow transcending time and space? Or is it immanent within organisms?" (22) For Sheldrake this kind of biological information, or morphogenetic fields are immanent in organisms and "inherited in a non-material manner." (23) These morphogenetic fields are physically real fields with their own spatio-temporal organization. Past fields influence present ones by "a non-energetic transfer of Information." (24) Therefore, while physically real they are not like the fields physics knows, and involve "a kind of action at a distance in both space and time" which doesn't decline with distance in space and time. (25) As a scientist the idea of testing this hypothesis by experiment was central to Sheldrake's thinking, and he suggested various ingenious experiments that could be carried out. One that was actually done was the result of a competition held to develop ways to test the idea of formative causation. In the actual experiment non-Japanese speaking participants are asked to chant three different Japanese rhymes. One was a traditional Japanese nursery rhyme, another was a similarly structured Japanese rhyme created for comparison, and a third was a chant that made no sense in Japanese. The theory, of course, was that the traditional rhyme, established by millions of repetitions would have a stronger field which would influence the learning of these non-Japanese speaking participants. In actual fact they did, Indeed, find

learning the Japanese nursery rhyme easier than the other two, but as Sheldrake pointed out, it is difficult to demonstrate that the original nursery rhyme was identical in learning difficulty to the others. Sheldrake felt that morphogenetic, or morphic fields, might also help us to understand the mysterious nature of memory, and he goes into a wealth of detail of how these fields could shed light on this whole realm. Not only will an organism tune into its own past by a kind of self-resonance, it will also tune into the collective memory of past fields. Something like telepathy could be explained as a tuning into the fields of other people. Even belief in reincarnation could be related not to one person having lived a former life, but having tuned in to the morphic field and the associated memory of the person who lived before. Societies of animals and insects often act as if they have a morphic field common to them. How else can we explain the elaborate behavior of a hive of bees, or the coordinated movements of schools of fish and flocks of birds? Sheldrake recounts the work of the South African naturalist, Eugene Marais, who drove a large steel plate through the center of a termite mound in such a way that it was divided into two separate parts. Marais concluded: "The builders on one side of the breach know nothing of those on the other side. In spite of this the termites build a similar arch or tower on each side of the plate. When eventually you withdraw the plate, the two halves match perfectly after the dividing cut has been repaired. We cannot escape the ultimate conclusion that somewhere there exists a preconceived plan which the termites merely execute." (26) Of particular interest to us is the link that Sheldrake forges with Jung's idea of the collective unconscious. Jung found similar patterns in the myths and dreams of people from all over the world and from different periods of time, and concluded to the existence of a collective unconscious, "a kind of inherited collective memory." (27) "Even if it were to be assumed that the myths of, say, a Yoruba tribe could somehow become coded in their genes and their archetypal structure be inherited by subsequent members of the tribe, this would not explain how a Swiss person could have a dream that seemed to arise from the same archetype. (28) But the idea of morphic resonance makes it a lot easier, in Sheldrake's mind, to understand how such a thing could take place. For Jung, the contents of the collective unconscious is made up of archetypes which are innate psychic structures, and Sheldrake likens these archetypes to morphic fields that contain "the average forms of previous experience." (29) Sheldrake's remarks on Jung form a bridge to chapter three where we will look at Jung's synchronicity, but he also has some interesting comments on the work of David Bohm. The nature of life and consciousness have not yet been integrated into the theories of modern physics. "There is a need for a new natural philosophy that goes further than physics alone can go but remains in harmony with it." (30) And it is David Bohm's ideas on the implicate order that Sheldrake sees as one of the best candidates for this natural philosophy. "Bohm emphasizes the importance for physics, biology, and psychology of the notion of formative causation as 'an ordered and structured inner movement that is essential to what things are.' Any formative cause must evidently have an end or goal which is at least implicit what Aristotle called a final cause. Thus, for example, it is not possible to refer to the inner movement from the acorn giving rise to the oak tree without simultaneously referring to the oak tree that is going to result from this movement. Bohm points out that in the ancient view, 'the notion of formative cause was considered to be of essentially the same nature for the mind as it was for life and for the cosmos as a whole.'" (31)

"Bohm's theory of the implicate order is more fundamental than the hypothesis of formative causation, but the two approaches appear to be quite compatible." (32) Sheldrake and Bohm discussed their relationship, and Bohm considered that the movement from the explicate back to the implicate order and back again, if repeated enough, could give rise to a fixed disposition. "The point is that, via this process, past forms would tend to be repeated or replicated in the present, and that is very similar to what Sheldrake calls a morphogenetic field and morphic resonance. Moreover, such a field would not be located anywhere. When it projects back into the totality (the implicate order), since no space and time are relevant there, all things of a similar nature might get connected together or resonate in totality." (33) We certainly have not exhausted the richness of Sheldrake's thought, but I believe that once again we have seen how the notion of formal cause appears in the midst of deep scientific reflection and points to the need for a dialogue between science and a philosophy of nature. We will continue to make this point in the chapter that follows. The Mystery of Matter Chapter 3: C.G. Jung's Synchronicity C.G. Jung (1875-1961), the noted Swiss psychotherapist, did not write at length about synchronicity until 1952 when he published an essay called, "Synchronicity, An Acausal Connecting Principle" which appeared together with an essay on archetypes in Kepler by Wolfgang Pauli whom we have already met in connection with quantum theory. Jung had been long aware of events in his own life and those of his patients that seem to defy the normal laws of causality. For example, one of his patients whose treatment had resisted progress because of her excessively rationalistic cast of mind, had a dream in which she received a golden scarab, an insect that plays an important role in Egyptian mythology. Later, when she was telling Jung the dream, he heard a gentle tapping at the window, and when he opened it, in flew a scarabaeid type beetle which was Switzerland's equivalent to the golden scarab, and he caught it in his hand and handed it to her and said, "Here is your scarab." This uncanny event had the effect of breaking through the rationalistic shell that she had built around herself. In another case, a woman whose husband Jung was treating told him that when both her mother and grandmother had died birds had come and sat outside the house. Her husband developed some physical symptoms, and Jung sent him to a heart specialist who could find nothing wrong with him. After he left the doctor's office he collapsed dying in the street, and was carried home. His wife was already upset, for a large flock of birds had landed about the house after he had gone off to see the doctor. These kind of events, that could be multiplied over and over again, led Jung to what he called synchronicity, or meaningful coincidence. There seemed no way to explain them through the normal action of cause and effect, and yet it seemed wrong to write them off as pure chance. Therefore Jung, with reluctance because of the difficulty of the matter, set out to try to make some sense of what could be going on. He reasoned that if these events were not causally connected, perhaps they were the manifestations of some acausal connecting principle. He was encouraged along these lines because it seemed that modern physics, in developing quantum theory, had broken with causality, and "shattered the absolute validity of natural law and made it relative.. The philosophical principle that underlies our conception of natural law is causality. But if the connection between cause and effect turns out to be only statistically valid and only relatively true, then the causal principle is only of relative use for explaining natural processes and therefore presupposes the existence of one or more other factors which

would be necessary for an explanation. This is as much as to say that the connection of events may in certain circumstances be other than causal, and requires another principle of explanation." (1) Jung's association with Pauli would have only strengthened this impression of the meaning of quantum theory because Pauli was a firm believer in the conventional Copenhagen interpretation. Therefore since causal connections in these meaningful coincidences seem inconceivable, Jung wants to move in the direction of an acausal principle, a kind of "meaningful cross-connection" between causal chains of events. (2) He reviews the history of similar ideas from Albertus Magnus in the Middle Ages to Schopenhauer, to Paul Kammerer and J.P. Rhine in recent times. Rhine's work, statistically demonstrating extra-sensory perception by guessing cards over various distances in space and time, suggested to Jung that "the fact that distance has no effect in principle shows that the thing in question cannot be a phenomenon of force or energy... We have no alternative but to assume that distance is psychically variable, and may in certain circumstances be reduced to vanishing point by a psychic condition." (3) He concludes, "We must give up at the outset all explanations in terms of energy, which amounts to saying that events of this kind cannot be considered from the point of view of causality, for causality presupposes the existence of space and time in so far as all observations are ultimately based on bodies in motion." (4) Therefore it would be best to look for an explanation by starting with "a criticism of our concepts of space and time on the one hand, and with the unconscious on the other." (5) For Jung space and time are only apparently the properties of bodies in motion, and are essentially psychic in origin, and therefore it is not unthinkable that the deep contents of the collective unconscious, that is, the archetypes and the powerful energies connected with them, could effect them. Jung had been puzzling over the question of synchronicity for a long time, and he cites one of his earlier conclusions: "'Causality is only one principle and psychology essentially cannot be exhausted by causal methods only, because the mind (=psyche) lives by aims as well."' He goes on to comment on this passage: "Psychic finality rests on a 'pre-existent' meaning which becomes problematical only when it is an unconscious arrangement. In that case we have to suppose a 'knowledge' prior to all consciousness. Hans Driesch comes to the same conclusion (Die Seele als elementarer Naturfaktor)." (6) Somehow there must be something in the unconscious like an "a priori knowledge." (7) In some way the unconscious must become activated by intent or fear or hope, or some other strong emotion, and this activation is accompanied by a lowering of the level of consciousness and leads to the relativization of space and time. The resulting coincidence of inner subjective state and outer object is brought about not by causality, but by meaning or even "transcendental meaning." Jung finds historical parallels to this kind of meaning in the Chinese idea of Tao which, too, can be understood as meaning. The Taoist "Nothing" "is evidently 'meaning' or 'purpose,' and it is only called Nothing because It does not appear in the world of the senses, but is only its organizer." (8) Jung also cites Agrippa von Nettesheim's inborn knowledge in living organisms which he sees taken up again by Driesch. (9) And he comments: "Whether we like it or not, we find ourselves in this embarrassing position as soon as we begin seriously to reflect on the teleological processes in biology or to investigate the compensatory function of the unconscious, not to speak of trying to explain the phenomenon of synchronicity. Final causes, twist them how we will, postulate a foreknowledge of some kind. It is certainly not a

knowledge that could be connected with the ego, and hence not a conscious knowledge as we know it, but rather a self-subsistent 'unconscious' knowledge which I would prefer to call 'absolute knowledge."' (10) For Johannes Kepler the very fact that flowers have a definite color and number of petals points to an "instinctus divinus, rationis particeps." (11) In short, in earlier ages there had always been a principle parallel to causality, but the rise of modern science had pushed it out of consciousness. Synchronicity points to "self-subsistent meaning" outside the realm of the ego, and is akin to Plato's forms, or formal factors in nature. Synchronicity "ascribes to the moving body a certain psychoid property which, like space, time, and causality, forms a criterion of its behavior." (12) Such a view of synchronicity could help clarify the relationship between body and soul with its "causeless order" or "meaningful orderedness." Jung goes on to reflect on a near death experience, and wonders if events of this kind indicate "whether there is some other nervous substrate in us, apart from the cerebrum, that can think and perceive, or whether the psychic processes that go on in us during loss of consciousness are synchronistic phenomena, i.e., events which have no causal connection with organic processes." (13) Such a substrate might be related to the sympathetic nervous system. Bees, for example, have a highly developed dance language which is probably unconscious and connected with the sympathetic system, and indicates the "existence of transcerebral thought and perception." (14) If this begins to remind us of Sheldrake's formative causation, the impression is only strengthened when Jung writes, "On the organic level it might be possible to regard biological morphogenesis in the light of the synchronistic factor." (15) And then he goes on to bring forward the case of radioactive decay, which has suggested to certain physicists that the ultimate laws of nature are not even causal. Jung therefore concludes that synchronicity, understood as a psychoid factor, should be added to the classical triad of space, time and causality. It is the manifestation of a deeper and wider principle of "acausal orderedness" which embraces "a priori factors such as the properties of natural numbers, the discontinuity of modern physics, etc." (16) It is in synchronicity that this more general acausal orderedness, becomes observed. Jung saw that numbers were not just artifacts of the conscious mind, but had a deeper significance, a mysterious numinous aspect, which is why they appeared so frequently in divinization procedures like that of the I Ching, which he felt was based on ideas similar to that of synchronicity. Number was, therefore, connected to synchronicity. It brought order and had an archetypal foundation, and so Jung defined it as an "archetype of order." (17) Number appeared, as well, in the symbols of the self that Jung called mandalas that often have a fourfold structure, or some multiple of four. Number seems to be used by the unconscious to create order. Near the end of his life Jung realized there was more here to explore than he would ever have the opportunity to do himself, so he gave the task to one of his close colleagues, Marie-Louise von Franz, and she developed these ideas inNumber and Time, and explored the notion of synchronicity in a series of essays that were eventually collected under the title of Psyche and Matter. The psyche cannot be reduced to the ego. It embraces a much wider reality that Jung called the collective unconscious, and the lowest level of that unconscious is nature. Therefore, when the deep levels of the unconscious become activated, it is not surprising that synchronistic events would occur. These events, in turn, could be looked upon as empirical

evidence that there is a unity underlying psyche and matter, a unity of existence that Jung called the unus mundus. (18) The world of the physicist and the psychologist is ultimately the same world, and the empirical world around us is somehow based on a "transcendental background." (19) Matter and psyche are rooted in this unus mundus which is a "potential structure" which becomes activated in synchronistic events which connect the inner and outer worlds by way of meaning. (20) Synchronistic events are, as we have seen, manifestations of the wider principle of acausal orderedness. This helps us to understand why mathematical theories, which are often born out of intuitions coming from deep in the psyche, can be applied to explain physical realities. Von Franz brings forward various eastern and western examples that suggest "that the unconscious is able spontaneously to produce mathematical structures consisting of natural numbers, and even in certain cases, matrices, in order to express a form of orderedness." (21) In short, "numbers appear to represent both an attribute of matter and the unconscious foundation of our mental processes. For this reason, number forms, according to Jung, that particular element that unites the realms of matter and psyche... As the active ordering factor, it represents the essence of what we generally term 'mind'." (22) Jung relates the nature of spirit to "a spontaneous principle of movement in the unconscious psyche which engenders, autonomously manipulates, and orders inner images" and von Franz comments: "Number is, as it were, the most accessible primitive manifestation of this transcendental spontaneous principle of movement in the psyche." (23) Von Franz feels that there are striking similarities between the three-fold structure of the genetic code, and the structure of the I Ching, which point to how number regulates psyche and matter. In all this the archetype is not viewed as the cause of synchronistic events. Rather, "acausal orderedness appears or manifests itself in these phenomena.. The archetype is the structure, which can be perceived through introspection, of an a priori psychic orderedness." (24) Then she comes to the question that we saw preoccupying Sheldrake about the origin of the forms or laws of nature, but this time it is a question of the origin of the very similar archetypes, and she responds: "In Jung's view, the basic structures were always there, but within them ever-new acts of creation are taking place. Jung came to the view that the archetype is something we can never get beyond; it is the ultimate, the most fundamental structure of our psychic being, which we cannot transcend." (25) We will return to the topics of these three chapters later, but then, in dialogue with a Thomist philosophy of nature. But first, the obvious question is whether such a Thomist philosophy of nature exists or is even possible. The Mystery of Matter Part REDISCOVERING A THOMIST PHILOSOPHY OF NATURE Chapter 4: A Thomist Philosophy of Nature? Our first section could be called a sad, but mercifully short, history of a Thomist philosophy of nature, but one that ends on a promising note. A Thomist philosophy of nature? Just what could that possibly be? Naturally we are going to have to look at this matter in considerable detail, but for now we can define it as a distinctively philosophical point of view of matter, space and time, in short, nature, or the sensible real that is the very subject matter that the physicist, biologist or psychologist looks at from the perspective of his or her own discipline. This is very definitely a philosophy of nature, and not a science of nature, and not some pale appendage to science which forlornly and belatedly follows in its wake. This amounts to II:

saying that there are two very different ways in which to look at nature, and these two ways, if a dialogue could be established between them, could find very interesting things to say to each other. But the obstacles to such a dialogue are enormous. A brief glance at the history of the philosophy of nature will show us why. We have already seen a number of references to Aristotle (384-322 B.C.), and the history of a Thomist philosophy of nature begins with him. Aristotle was both a great scientist and a wonderful philosopher, and Thomas Aquinas (1225-1274) derived much of his philosophy of nature and his understanding of science from him. Thomas, himself, certainly had no where near the scientific interest of Aristotle, or even the omnivorous curiosity in the field of science of his own teacher, Albert the Great. He was primarily a theologian and philosopher. But the critical point is this: neither Aristotle nor Thomas distinguished their science from their philosophy of it nature. How could they? Science as we know it didnt begin to exist until the 16th century. Even then it was going to be a long and difficult process for the sciences to discover their own distinctive ways of proceeding, and even the first modern scientists thought of themselves as philosophers of nature. So when we look at the philosophy of nature to be found in St. Thomas, we are going to see it mixed with various bits and pieces of Aristotelian science and Greek science, in general. The long Aristotelian tradition that stretches from Aristotle to the 16th century is, therefore, an undifferentiated mixture of these two elements, and what is more, it is easy to see how in it blind repetition of supposed scientific findings could take the place of the actual examination of facts. Even on the philosophical side of things, rote often took the place of striving for insight. Since science and the philosophy of nature were so closely bound up with each other for so long, the birth of modern science took on some of the characteristics of the breakup of a long marriage. The modern sciences began to discover their distinctive methods, revel in this newfound freedom and make tremendous progress. They had little patience with a philosophical tradition that would keep them chained to the handed down fragments of Greek science. They needed to go their own way, but having broken with the science of the past, they at the same time broke with the philosophy it was mixed with. While it was true that the scientists did not need a philosophy of nature in order to do science, it was also true that they presupposed certain philosophical principles like the existence of the world around them, and our ability to know it, and that they were led by their scientific work to pose certain philosophical questions. In short, there is an incurable philosophical bent in scientists, not precisely as scientists, but as men and women searching for a wider context in which to place their scientific findings. The history of science then becomes in part the story of the many philosophical partners that science has taken on and discarded over the last 400 years. Even when science did not pick out an already existing philosophy, it often blithely created one out of whole cloth in the image and likeness of science. Science then became the one true way to know things, and philosophy was discredited altogether. We don't need to pursue this chapter in the history of thought in any detail. Jacques Maritain, whom we will meet in a few moments, has carefully examined its philosophical implications, and more recently, Stanley Jaki, in The Relevance of Physics and many essays, with the keen eye of a historian of science, has clearly pointed out the philosophical substructures, both overt and hidden, in the work of many scientists. What we do need to do is look at what happened to the old philosophy of nature. Angry and uncomprehending of its rejection by science, it withdrew from it. It reflected on its metaphysical foundations, and the principles it had derived from the examination of nature, but it failed to see that it needed a living and vital dialogue with science in order to be stimulated to reflect on the findings of science in its own way, and thus stay alive. The

philosophy of nature lived on as a seldom visited province in the world of Thomist philosophy, and its dialect became more and more archaic and less understandable to the outside world. If scientists had wanted to dialogue with it, they could have hardly found it or understood it. This kind of a Thomist philosophy of nature made its way down to the end of the 19th century when a far-reaching renewal of Thomist philosophy began. By the eve of World War II it had made a brilliant recovery of the revolutionary metaphysics of St. Thomas centered on the act of existence, and it had made substantial advances in other areas, as well, but the Thomist philosophy of nature was not one of them. It existed as an artificial construct composed of the opinions of Aristotle and Thomas that were extracted from their work and put in logical form in order to be better packaged in college textbooks and seminary manuals. But the vital ingredient of living contact with the sciences was still missing. To be sure, it still contained philosophical gems, but they were lost in a barren plain of abstraction. This kind of philosophy of nature was taught in Catholic colleges and seminaries right down to the 1960's, and perhaps there are still places where it is being taught today, but on the whole it produced a profound stupor in both its students and professors. Thomism as a whole also suffered from bad pedagogy and was too often imposed from without instead of given the chance to capture the minds and hearts of its students from within. With the advent of the Second Vatican Council and the freedom it brought in its wake, this kind of Thomism quickly fell apart, and if anything, a Thomist philosophy of nature disintegrated even more. It could almost be said that even the Thomists, themselves, could hardly believe in it. All this should not be taken as a demonstration of deep-seated flaws in the principles of this philosophy of nature. I think the situation is much like a banked fire where the coals are still alive under the ashes, or a tree in winter that shows no apparent life, but could blossom magnificently when the spring returns, and this sad history does, as I said, have a promising end. Although the 20th century renewal of Thomism in general did not extend to the philosophy of nature, there was a notable exception. Jacques Maritain, one of the most dynamic and creative Thomists of this century or any other, made a concerted effort to reestablish the foundations for such a philosophy. Maritain (1882-1973) grew up in Paris in a liberal Protestant setting, and studied both science and philosophy at the Sorbonne, but neither one of them satisfied his deeper aspirations. He went on to discover Henri Bergson, and then, together with his wife Raissa, converted to Catholicism. From that point on they faced a difficult but exhilarating challenge. How could science, philosophy and faith be reconciled? There was to be no ready-made answer to this question, but rather, a long journey of discovery. Unsure of what road to follow, Maritain went off to Heidelberg in 1906 to study new developments in biology with the help of Hans Driesch. It was in that setting that he came to the reluctant conclusion that Bergsonian philosophy was not compatible with the faith he had embraced. He sensed in an instinctive way the kind of philosophy he was looking for, and a bit later, found it in St. Thomas. But the Thomism that Maritain discovered had little to do with the dry scholastic manuals, or even the external structure of medieval thought. Maritain made living contact with the fundamental intuitions that animated the philosophy of St. Thomas, and so he could apply these principles to contemporary situations, as he did with good effect in fields as diverse as art, poetry and politics. But he never forgot his dream to relate science to philosophy and to faith, and it was one of his major achievements to develop an epistemological framework, a veritable noetic typology in his masterpiece, The Degrees of Knowledge, that maps out the relationship between the

sciences of nature, the philosophy of nature, metaphysics, faith, theology and mysticism. Late in his life he called the development of a Thomist philosophy of nature a vanished dream of his youth, but by that he didn't mean that he had given it up as a lost cause, or had had a change of heart about the foundations for such a philosophy of nature that he had laid down, but rather, that time and circumstances had not allowed him to do more in the field of the actual dialogue between such a philosophy of nature, and the contemporary sciences. He did, in fact, make some Interesting applications, which we will look at later, but he saw that so much remained to be done. Let's try to get some idea of the map of the mind that he created in regard to the sciences and the philosophy of nature. Following Aristotle and St. Thomas, he accepted that when the mind grappled with reality, it discovered three distinct territories: physical reality, or the world of nature, the world of mathematics, and the realm of metaphysics. We have seen that for the ancients, and even for the first scientists, there was not yet any distinction between science and the philosophy of nature, and one of the main tasks that Maritain set for himself was to make that distinction clear, to clarify the epistemological types of the individual sciences, and contrast them with that of the philosophy of nature. Further, he wanted to carry out this process by making contact with the best of the Thomism of the past, and bringing its fundamental principles to bear on this new question. The sciences have their distinctive ways of trying to Understand physical reality, and this was at the root of their need to break with the old philosophy of nature. But this does not mean and this is a point that is much more difficult for our modern age to accept - that there cannot be a distinctively philosophical way of looking at this same physical reality. Indeed, our whole first part was devoted to showing that the more scientists pursue the deep issues of their science, the more apt they are to begin to pose questions that point to a need for a philosophy of nature. Naturally, given the history of a Thomist philosophy of nature that we have seen, it is not at all surprising that they did not look in that direction, nor is it surprising that scientists today would, for the most part, have great difficulty believing that there even could be a philosophy of nature. But let's go a little further and see how Maritain describes the differences between the sciences of nature and a philosophy of nature. Both the sciences and the philosophy of nature deal with the same subject matter, which is the world of nature or sensible beings. But they have very distinctive ways of looking at it. The scientists look at it by way of measurement and observation, while the philosophers of nature look at it from the perspective of its ontological content, the essences of things, or their basic constitutive principles. The scientists focus on "sensible being, but first and foremost, as observable or measurable." (1) The philosophers of nature grasp the same sensible being, but they see this sensible being "first and foremost as intelligible." (2) We will return to these distinctions later and see the delicate instruments that Maritain has fashioned that can be applied with good effect to the dialogue between the sciences and the philosophy of nature. Our task now is to accustom our ears to the texture and feel of the language to be found in St. Thomas, both in his philosophy of nature and the metaphysical vision that underlies it. The following quotes from St. Thomas will help us make a beginning.

Nothing but the divine goodness moves God to produce things. (3) God does not preserve things in existence except by continually pouring out existence in them. (4)

Since God is very being by the divine essence, created being must be God's proper effect, as to ignite is the proper effect of fire. Now God causes this effect in things not only when they first begin to be, but as long as they are preserved in being; as light is caused in the air by the sun as long as the air remains illuminated. Therefore, as long as a thing has being, God must be present to it, according to its mode of being. But being is innermost in each thing and most fundamentally inherent in all things, since it is formal in respect to everything found in a thing. Hence it must be that God is in all things, and most intimately so. (5) The preservation of things by God is a continuation of that action whereby God gives existence. This action is without either motion or time, just as the preservation of light in the air is by the continual influence of the sun. (6) Just as the soul is whole in every part of the body, so is God whole in all things and In each one. (7) Now God and nature and every other cause work for the optimum total effect and for the completion of each and every part, not in isolation but in relation to the entire system. (8) Nothing among creatures is so weak that it does not share in some divine gift, from which sharing it takes a part so that it has a friendship of shared nature with the other creatures. If all things are united with all things, they not only come together in the one shape of the whole, but they also come together in this fact: that all things are united according to one form, devised by the One who is the Author of all things. For this very unity of all things proceeds from the unity of the divine mind, as the shape of a house that is in the materials comes from the shape of the house that is in the mind of the architect. (9) Some people presume that because God works in every active thing it is God alone who does the work and that no created power produces anything real. For example, that fire does not burn, but that God does. This is impossible, however. For such a situation would destroy the causal structure and interplay of the universe. And it would lead to positing a weakness in God, since it is from strength that any cause gives the power of causing to its offspring. Furthermore, if causal powers in fact did nothing and God did it all, then things would simply not have any power. They would be shams if you took away their proper activity, for they exist for their work. Thus, when speaking of God's universal causality, we must be careful to safeguard the proper activity of creatures. God attributes power of action to created things, and this is not out of a weakness on God's part, but rather out of God's most perfect fullness, which is sufficient for sharing with all beings. (10) God wills that human beings exist for the sake of the perfection of the universe. (11) Human nature is of an excellent making - it communicates with all the creatures. We have being in common with the stones; life in common with the trees; sense knowledge in common with animals; intelligence in common with the angels. Human beings occupy a m place between God and the brute animals, and they communicate with each of these extremes. With God according to intellectuality; with brute animals according to sensuality. (12) The soul is in the body as containing it, not as contained by it. (13) The rational creature tends, by its activity, toward the divine likeness in a special way that exceeds the capacities of all other creatures, as it also has a nobler existence as compared with other creatures. The existence of other creatures is finite, since it is hemmed in by matter, and so lacks infinity both in act and in potency. But every rational nature has infinity either in act or in potency, according to the way its intellect contains ideas. Thus our intellectual nature,

considered in its first state, is in potency to its ideas; since these are infinite, they have a certain potential infinity. Hence the intellect is the form of forms, because it has a form that is not determined to one thing alone, as is the case with a stone, but has a capacity for all forms. (14) The entire universe is constituted by all creatures, as a whole consists of its parts. In the parts of the universe every creature exists for its own proper act and perfection, and the less noble for the nobler... each and every creature exists for the perfection of the entire universe. Furthermore, the entire universe, with all its parts, is ordained toward God as its end inasmuch as it imitates, as it were, and shows forth the divine goodness, to the glory of God.. The divine goodness is the end of all corporeal things. (15) The human body is something supreme in the genus of bodies and is harmoniously tempered. It is in contact with the lowest of the higher genus, namely, the human soul, which holds the lowest rank in the genus of intellectual substances, as can be seen from its mode of understanding. Thus one can say that the intellectual soul is on the horizon and on the confines of things corporeal and incorporeal. (16) That which can exist, but does not, is said to be in potentiality. That which now exists is said to be in actuality.. The name "matte?' can be given both to what is in potentiality to substantial existence and to accidental existence; that which is potential to substantial esse is said to be prime matter... Matter, however, is said to have existence because esse comes to it, since its own esse is incomplete (or, rather, it has no esse, as the commentator says in On the Soul II). Thus, understood absolutely, the form gives existence to matter... Because form brings existence into actuality, we state that form is act... generation does not come from any nonentity whatsoever, but from nonentity that is an entity in potentiality, as a statue comes from bronze, which is a statue in potentiality and not in actuality. But three things are required for any generation: existence in potentiality, which is matter; nonexistence in actuality, which is privation; and that by which a thing is made to be in actuality, which is form. For example, a statue made out of bronze, which in potentiality to the form of statue, is matter; its shapeless or unformed state is privation; and the shape that allows it to be called a statue is its form. But this is not a substantial form, because before the shape is imposed, the bronze already has existence in actuality, and this existence does not depend upon the shape. Rather, this is an accidental form, for all artificial forms are accidental... Thus the matter destined for a statue is itself composed of matter and form. Therefore, since bronze possesses a form, it is not called prime matter. Matter, however, without any form or privation but subject to form and privation is called prime matter because there is no matter prior to it... It is evident from all we have said that there are three principles of nature: matter, form, and privation. But generation requires more than these. Whatever exists potentially cannot make itself exist actually. The bronze potentially a statue cannot cause itself to be a statue; an agent is needed to bring the form of the statue from potentiality to actuality. Nor can form extract itself from potentiality to actuality. I am referring to the form of the reality generated that we call the aim of generation. In other words, form exists only when the reality is achieved; but whatever does the achieving is present within the very becoming or while the reality is being achieved. In addition to matter and form, therefore, there must be a principle that acts, and this is called the efficient or the moving or the agent cause, or that which is the principle of motion. And since, as Aristotle comments in Metaphysics II (2; 994 b 15), nothing acts without some aim, there has to be a fourth thing, namely, the aim of the agent; and this is called the end. (17) It is clear that we have quite a gap to bridge from St. Thomas to contemporary science. Even the final selection which comes from St. Thomas' Principles of Nature, leaves us wondering

what relevance such a view could have. In Part III we are going to once again look at quantum theory, formative causation and synchronicity, but this time from the perspective of a Thomist philosophy of nature brought up to date with the help of Maritain. But before we undertake that difficult work, a little recreation Is in order in the form of a tongue-in-cheek Thomistic view of the creation of the universe, which might actually help us to penetrate a little more into the Thomistic vision of things. The Mystery of Matter Chapter 5: A Thomist Story of Creation Before there was even a beginning there was God. And God was peaceful and contented, as is only fitting when you possess the fullness of being which is identical with the fullness of knowledge, love and consciousness. There was nothing to want and no way to be lonely. One day - in those days before there were any - God had a brilliant idea. God said, "I am enjoying existing so much, what would it be like if someone else existed and enjoyed their own existence and mine?" So God thought about this strange idea for a while, and being very reasonable, decided that the more the person created was like God, that is, the more being it had, the more it would enjoy itself and God, too. So God created the first creature in the form of a spiritual being who could know and love, and was the highest spiritual being that it was possible to create. Now how did God do this? Since there was nothing outside of God, the Thomists say that God created out of nothing, but this nothing was not like some preexisting material. It was simply nothing. (Nor was it a nothing like the nothing of the mathematician, or the empty space, or vacuum, of the physicist.) And since there was nothing outside of God, the model God used was God's own self. God couldn't create something equal to God, but God chose some aspect of God's own being, and modeled the creation of this first creature after that. So God created the first and highest creature, according to God's own image, and God enjoyed the whole process, and presumably, so did the creature. But then God saw that the job was over. There could only be one, first and highest creature. It filled up the idea that God had of its being. Let's say that it filled up the first rung of the ladder of creation completely. There could only be one purely spiritual creature of a kind, for if there were another identical one, what would separate them? (This is what Thomas Aquinas thought, and he was not called the Angelic Doctor for nothing. The study of angels for a metaphysician like St. Thomas is something like the study of pure mathematics. In fact, each angel could be compared to a different whole number, which represented its distinctively different nature.) God so enjoyed this first act of creation that God decided to create someone else. And so God did, and filled the second rung of the ladder of creation. Once God got into it, God kept on going. Why not? It didn't cost any more. So God, after the model of God's own being, which was the fullness of existence itself, created one spiritual creature after the other, filling up the myriad of rungs of the ladder of creation. Finally one day God had created all the spiritual beings, at least, all God wanted to. God had mirrored the major aspects of God's being and had represented, as it were, all the major whole numbers, and had no desire to go into fractions. God had filled the ladder of creation, putting a creature on every rung. It had been fun, and it was fun to have these creatures about. But now it looked like the fun of creation was over. The whole point of creating something was so that it could enjoy existing, and enjoy the fact that God existed, and this demanded self-awareness and the ability to love. But now God saw that all the major kinds of spiritual beings had been made.

But one day God was admiring the beautiful ladder of spiritual beings, with each of the beings glowing on its own rung, and God happened to notice that the bottom side of the bottom rung of the ladder had nothing on it. It was, of course, of no possible use. Or was it? This was the most interesting problem that God had faced in quite some time. Obviously it was not possible to make another purely spiritual being, for all the rungs of the ladder were filled. Then God had a daring insight. What about making a creature that was a potentially spiritual being. It would have the capacity to become actively spiritual. But how would such a spiritual being in potency ever get activated? It couldn't pull itself up by its own bootstraps. It would have to get the assistance of something below it. But there was nothing below. In this way God came face to face with a very strange possibility. Spiritual beings, even this hypothetical spiritual being in potency had a transparency to themselves. They grasped themselves with a tenacious grip on their own natures in such a way that they would never let go, and never cease to exist. But what if there were a creature that wasn't transparent to itself, and wasn't in potency to being a spiritual being, but was in potency to its own nature and existence? It would simply lack the ontological density to be once and for all what it was. Naturally, God had never thought about such things before. There had been no reason to. But now they exercised a certain fascination. If such a non-spiritual creature would not even be potentially spiritual, but would be in potency to its own nature and existence, then this meant it could cease to be what it was and become something else! Furthermore, if it didn't exhaust its whole nature, why couldn't there be more than one thing of the same kind! Perhaps there could even be more than one spiritual being in potency. This was truly bizarre, but exciting. But more problems immediately came up. If this spiritual being in potency needed to be activated by something just below it, what would activate the thing that activated it? It, too, would have to be activated by something just below it, and on and on. God saw that in order to make these spiritual beings in potency, it would be necessary to make the simplest and most elemental things possible, and let them interact and build each other up into more complex and more conscious systems until they had all evolved to the degree necessary that this spiritual being in potency could then take its place. This was certainly a very bold experiment, but one day, just before the first day, God decided to try it. The most elemental and simple being came sizzling out of real nothingness, and immediately began to interact and organize, and move toward their distant goal where they would some day help the spiritual beings in potency realize their natures. But as soon as creation began, God saw that it was stranger than God had imagined. So used to infolded being was God that it was mind-boggling to see that these new beings, because of their lesser ontological density, outfolded instead. They were not present to themselves and where they acted, like spiritual beings, but literally folded out into part outside of part, and the relationships between the outfolding of one being to the outfolding of another gave rise to space, and the interaction of these beings gave rise to motion and time. Thus came about these strange beings with a fundamental capacity towards their own natures and existence, which capacity the Thomists call matter, and these material beings were all part of one system, as the very word universe implies, and all work together to finally produce the complex and increasingly conscious material creation that could help bring forth the spiritual beings in potency, and help activate them to realize their spiritual natures so that they become the awareness of the universe, that we are.

The Mystery of Matter Part THE DIALOGUE BETWEEN AND THE PHILOSOPHY OF NATURE Chapter 6: Quantum Theory and the Philosophy of Nature We need to look again at Bohm's causal interpretation of quantum theory, Sheldrake's formative causation and Jung's synchronicity, but this time beginning the difficult process of trying to bring them into dialogue with a Thomist philosophy of nature. THE III: SCIENCES

CHAPTER QUANTUM THEORY AND THE PHILOSOPHY OF NATURE

6:

There are three main questions around which a dialogue between quantum theory and a Thomist philosophy of nature could coalesce: the epistemological type of modern physics, the principle of causality, and wholeness and nonlocality.

The Epistemological Type of Modern Physics A Thomist philosopher of nature like Maritain would certainly have been pleased at the sound philosophical instincts that moved Bohm to avoid philosophical indeterminism as a direct consequence of quantum theory, and embrace a realism that believed in the existence of the objective world and our ability to know it. But our philosopher of nature would be somewhat dismayed to see how marginalized Bohm became because he acted on those instincts in regard to quantum theory. A belief in the objectivity of the world and our ability to know it, as well as causality, are all implicit in the work of the natural sciences. Without them science would not be possible. Why, then, would Bohm be isolated by his attachment to them? Perhaps the answer lies in the fact that Bohm had a more developed philosophical sense than is common among physicists. From his early years he felt an intense desire not only to know the details about things, but he was fascinated with the question of wholeness. "I learned later that many of my fundamental interests were what other people called philosophical and that scientists tended to look down on philosophy as not being very serious. This created a problem for me, as I was never able to see any inherent separation between science and philosophy. Indeed in earlier times, science was called natural philosophy and this corresponded perfectly with the way I saw the whole field." (1) When he worked later on electron plasma in which electrons seemed to exhibit a collective behavior, it was this wholeness with its similarity to living beings and society that interested him more than the formulas he developed. When he saw these formulas taken up and developed in an abstract way and the ideas behind them ignored, he lost interest in the field. He was to approach quantum theory in the same way. Even his textbook on quantum theory that followed Bohr showed a different attitude to doing physics. N never could think in terms

of formalism. When I wrote my book on the quantum theory, I always worked out the results intuitively. I knew you had to put in a certain number of formulae between the beginning and the end, so I put them in. Though the results were always right, the formulae that I had put in between them were often wrong. I went over the book two times myself. A student went over it once, and still quite a few errors remained!" (2) He realized that science among the Greeks had been largely speculative and had needed to be corrected by an emphasis on experimentation, but he felt that observations and their mathematical coordination now held sway to such a degree that philosophical insight that could give rise to experimentation was looked down upon. Physicists could give rein to their mathematical imagination, but not their philosophical one. (3) Bohm, in one of the passages we have just seen, seems to identify physics with natural philosophy. This is an area to which Maritain devoted a great deal of energy, and he clarified the relationship between these two disciplines. We live in a world of concrete existing things, of trees and birds and stars, fire and ocean, and it is a world of constant change and interaction. Both the physicist and the philosopher of nature explore that world, the world of the physically or sensibly real, but each in a distinctive way. It is an understanding of the distinctiveness of these ways that has the power to resolve the conflict that has raged between the sciences and philosophy and religion for the last 300 years, and Maritain excelled at that kind of epistemological analysis. He starts his analysis by summarizing the Aristotelian-Thomistic tradition of the three degrees of abstraction, or put in more modern terms, the three fundamental ways in which the mind can carve out intelligible cross-sections in actually existing things. Let's imagine I have a steel ball bearing in my hand. If I were a mathematician I could abstract from the fact of its matter and focus on its spherical shape and its properties even though that sphere could only actually be realized in some concrete existing thing. If I were a metaphysician, I might abstract from matter completely and simply consider the primordial fact that this certain kind of thing exists. But both the philosopher of nature and the physicist would look at the ball bearing as part of the world of the sensible real, as an object that falls under our senses and is subject to motion and change. They wouldn't look at it as this particular concretely existing steel ball bearing. They would abstract from its individual matter. But each of them would cut a different intelligible cross section. The physicist looks at the world of the sensible real inasmuch as it is measurable. The philosopher of nature looks at that same world, but tries to fathom its deepest nature. If the physicist would drop the ball bearing out the window, he or she would then be caught up in discovering the law of the motion of falling bodies. The philosopher of nature, in contrast, would be trying to discover the nature of change in terms of potency and act. In Aristotle the philosophy of nature embraced what we call today both natural philosophy and physics. It tried to be at once an examination of the basic principles of nature and of phenomena, and in this it failed. The newly emergent sciences of nature had to discover their own distinctive ways of proceeding. They broke with the old philosophy of nature and allied themselves to mathematics. In this way physics became a genuine science of phenomena, but it also believed that it had no longer any need of a philosophy of nature, or even it, itself, was a philosophy of nature. Let's look at this issue in a more nuanced and detailed way by examining Maritain's masterpiece, The Degrees of Knowledge. The alliance of physics with mathematics instead of

philosophy Maritain ranks as one of the great discoveries of modern times. Physics is "materially physical and formally mathematical." (4) Physics both starts and ends in the physically real, but submits the measurements it has drawn from the physical world to the rule of mathematics. But if natural philosophy had to learn that its domain did not extend to the phenomenon of nature, physics has its own difficult lesson to learn. The method it uses to capture phenomena does not touch the inner nature of things. "It grasps the essence in a substitute which is scientific law..." (5) It is certainly founded on the stable ontological core of things, but it grasps it blindly in a web of measurements submitted to the formal rule of mathematics. It is a true and valuable knowledge of the physically real, for both its measurements and the mathematics it uses are derived from that real world, but it doesn't yield a direct insight into the underlying ontological structure of things. It presupposes that there are stable structures that give rise to universally valid scientific laws. But if this is true, then "a physico-mathematical theory will be called "true" when a coherent and fullest possible system of mathematical symbols and the explanatory entities it organizes coincides, throughout all its numerical conclusions, with measurements we have made upon the real; but it is in no wise necessary that any physical reality, any particular nature, or any ontological law in the world of bodies, correspond determinately to each of the symbols and mathematical entities in question." (6) This is a statement of the highest importance if we are ever going to unravel the philosophical issues that surround quantum theory. There is no way in which we can establish a one-to-one correspondence so that each mathematical symbol corresponds to a certain physical reality. Therefore, it becomes extremely difficult to discover the philosophical implications of something like quantum theory which takes such a highly mathematical form. If this knowledge of a physico-mathematical kind were erected into a philosophy of nature, we would be left in a state of serious confusion, as has happened in the case of the Copenhagen interpretation. This is a very difficult and delicate issue. It would be completely wrong to imagine that physics doesn't deal with the sensible real and come to a true knowledge of it. Yet, without an understanding of its epistemological type we are very liable to misconstrue what it tells us. Physicists, like the rest of us, have a desire to understand the inner nature of things, and this thirst can generate certain explanations of the physical world based on the results of physics but without a clear awareness that these explanations are only indirectly rooted in physical reality. It is enough that the physics is good for the explanatory picture constructed upon it to satisfy the physicist's implicit ontological thirst. These imaginative reconstructions of the physical world then find a more general audience that uncritically accepts them as the way the world actually is. Then we are left with the impression that the real world is based on the noncausal world of microphysics, or that real space and time are like the space and time that Einstein described. But the intelligible cross-section that physics takes out of concrete existing things embraces only one aspect of reality. Neither its physico-mathematical constructs nor the explanations built on them have a direct ontological value. The old philosophy of nature could only purify itself if it admitted it was blind when it came to the study of natural phenomenon. The new physics is equally powerless when it comes to the inner nature of things, but it has been as reluctant to admit its limitations as the old philosophy of nature was. "The physicist wishes to penetrate the secrets of matter; but the

very type of knowledge to which he is bound prohibits him from attaining the nature of matter in itself. He attains it in the observable and measurable, and thereby real, determinations which are for him the substitutes for the essence, and he scrutinizes it and fathoms it to the very degree that he mathematically symbolizes it." (7) There is no way for physicists to fully satisfy their ontological thirst if they believe that there is no other way to know nature than by the method of physics itself. But if the philosophy of nature is not another physics or some pale appendage that follows in the wake of the natural sciences, then what is it? It is a science not of the phenomenon of nature, but its constitutive principles. "For example, it belongs to the Philosophy of Nature to instruct us about the nature of the continuum and of number, of quantity, of space, of motion, of time, of corporeal substance, of transitive action, of vegetative and sensitive life, of the soul and its operative powers, etc." (8) This philosophy of nature must receive scientific facts from the natural sciences, but not uncritically. It needs to bring to bear on them its own distinctive philosophical light in order to draw out their ontological implications. How does all this work out in practice? Let's briefly look at some concrete cases.

Relativity and the Philosophy of Nature If Einstein possessed some of the same instinctive realism that we have admired in Bohm, that doesn't mean we should take his theory of relativity as a description of how the world actually is in itself. Or put in the terms we have just been seeing, relativity, while it is based on physical measurements and leads to successful predictions, does not coincide in the formal mathematical structures and symbols that it creates with things taken from an ontological point of view. That simply is not the concern of the physicist. But physicists, because of their thirst for deeper and more universal ways of explaining the world, are prone to interpret their physico-mathematical. constructs as depictions of what reality in itself is like, and in this Einstein was no exception. Maritain listened to Einstein address French philosophers in Paris in 1922, and he was struck by the fact that when Einstein spoke about simultaneity it was always in direct relationship to what simultaneity should mean to a physicist and how it could be measured. The notions of simultaneity, as well as space and time, are recast according to the demands of measurement and mathematical organization. There is no explicit metaphysical questioning going on here, nor should there be. But the vital question is whether the space-time of Einstein, or the fabric of the universe curved by the mass of the objects in it, or the uniform velocity of light, no matter what its frame of reference, or the shrinking of measuring rods and the slowing of time, describes the universe as it actually is. Certainly we have been led to believe they do, and we struggle with the paradox of the astronaut leaving earth for what appears to be two years, and coming back to discover all his family and friends long dead. Philosophers and theologians are urged to take these results of modern science and update their own disciplines. But what if Maritain is correct? What if these images we take for the way reality is must be subjected to a very searching philosophical analysis before they yield up their ontological content? Maritain, in a long article on simultaneity according to Einstein, points out the kind of metaphysical confusion that results if we confuse the findings of physics with the ontological

nature of the world. (9) Einstein's simultaneity, which he demonstrates to be relative, is not the same as real simultaneity in the philosophical sense. Two events from a philosophical point of view are either simultaneous or they are not. They either happen at the same instant or they do not. They cannot both happen and not happen at the same moment no matter what their frames of references are. We may construct a situation, as Einstein does with his famous example of the observer on the train and the observer on the right-of-way, both trying to decide if two events are simultaneous, and from that example conclude to the relativity of simultaneity. But this is simultaneity as measured which is the only thing that the physicist is interested in, and it does not have any ontological content despite the fact that Einstein implied that it did.

The Copenhagen Interpretation Maritain has left us, as well, with some suggestive remarks on quantum theory even though he did not devote the attention to it that he did to relativity. Quantum theory clearly illustrates the emergence of physic's distinctive epistemological type. In fact, it represents one of the limiting cases of that type because of the dominance of mathematical symbols which do not readily lend themselves to causal explanations. The creators of quantum theory, themselves, were at a loss of how to interpret their own discoveries. As Bohm points out, the so-called Copenhagen interpretation actually is a bundle of allied interpretations with significant differences between them, and a definitive interpretation of the quantum formalism has yet to appear. But Maritain realized that the mathematical symbols of quantum theory "are just awaiting a chance to leave the realm of pure analytical form and become explanatory entities." (10) And these explanatory entities have to be carefully examined from a philosophical point of view in order to discover their ontological content. When Maritain looked at quantum theory around 1930 when he was preparing his Degrees of Knowledge, de Broglie had already given up his causal theory and accepted the dominance of the Copenhagen school. This loss of causality did not bother Maritain as such because he saw it as a direct result of the increasingly physico-mathematical structure of physics. Physics has the right to create a non-determinist view of microphysics and to look at quantum waves as waves of probability as long as it doesn't give these constructs a philosophical interpretation. Maritain felt there was no need to hope with Einstein that strict causality would regain the upper hand. If the old physics tended to lend its authority to a philosophically determinist view of the world, the new physics could be as indeterminist as it wanted as long as it realized the nature of the results it had achieved and refrained from giving them a philosophical meaning. For Maritain our inability to know the precise position and velocity of a particle stemmed from the disturbances our measurements create. It is not the place of physics to elevate this fact into a philosophical conclusion that speaks of the indeterminacy of nature itself, but this is the kind of self-discipline that comes hard to physicists. Maritain saw the possibility that the new physics of 1930 will give rise to an inchoate philosophy. "Doubtless public opinion will be stirred up by a prejudice in favour of contingency and liberty only by casting doubt on the substantiality of matter and the principle of causality." (11) And public opinion certainly was stimulated by the philosophical baggage that came with the Copenhagen interpretation: the indeterminate nature of the quantum world, events happening

without causes, observer-created reality, and so forth. Here we are back to the delicate problem that Maritain has been grappling with. It is all well and good and even necessary to distinguish the physico-mathematical theory of quantum mechanics from its interpretation, but physicists are driven almost irresistibly to interpret it, for they want to know, despite Bohr, what nature is like. Put in another way, physics can't rest content in understanding itself in a minimalist positivistic fashion. But if we can't erect a philosophy directly on its findings, where does that leave us? The only way to explore the ontological meaning of physics is through a genuine philosophy of nature which would enter into a profound dialogue with it.

Bohm's Causal Interpretation There are some important philosophical lessons to be drawn from Bohm's causal interpretation. It makes abundantly clear that the quantum formalism does not have to be interpreted in an indeterminate sense. This alone is of great importance because it allows philosophers and theologians a chance to avoid the metaphysical confusion that would result if they felt constrained to believe that quantum theory had demonstrated philosophical noncausality. It might be objected that we have been attracted to Bohm all along precisely inasmuch as he is a philosopher of nature rather than a physicist. This objection ought to be taken seriously because it can teach us something valuable about the dialogue between the philosophy of nature and the natural sciences that we are suggesting. We would be wrong to simply characterize Bohm as a philosopher of nature because this wouldn't explain his well-admired work in fields like electron plasma and the BohmAharanov effect, not to mention his quantum theory textbook. As strange as it may seem, what interests a philosopher of nature about Bohm's work is not those moments where he tries to be the most philosophical with his talk of the holomovement, society and noetic fragmentation, consciousness, etc. I am not denying that philosophers and theologians could profit by a careful examination of these ideas, as well as find any number of points they would like to clarify or criticize, but what most fascinates the philosopher of nature are those places where Bohm's philosophical instincts are in direct contact with scientific questions like the interpretation of quantum theory, and remain anchored there. There is, we could say, a zone of interaction between quantum theory and Bohm's instincts for a philosophy of nature that are the most fruitful areas for us to explore. Bohm published his initial papers on the causal interpretation in 1952, as we have seen. "Because the response to these ideas was so limited, and because I did not see clearly at the time how to proceed further, my interests began to turn in other directions." (12) In the 1960s he turned to questions about order and language and their relationship to doing physics. This led him to see the importance of the drops of ink in the cylinders and holograms as examples of enfolding and unfolding and their possible application to quantum theory. From there it was only a step to generalize this movement from the implicit to the explicit and arrive at the idea of the holomovement. The holomovement, in a reversal of our usual perspective, becomes primary and the stable forms of our experience become expressions of it. This insight pleased Bohm, for such a theory would put some philosophical ground under the idea of wholeness that he had encountered in the form of the quantum potential.

But to illustrate the zone of interaction I spoke of a moment ago, it is not the holomovement in its universal form that most interests the philosopher of nature, but the ideas of wholeness and nonlocality as they directly emerge out of Bohm's causal interpretation. Bohm's intellectual trajectory illustrates an important point. After his insight that led to the 1952 papers he didn't know how to develop his ideas on quantum theory further. His excursion into the realm of philosophy stimulated the creative process and allowed him to look at quantum theory fruitfully again. This kind of interaction was present up until his final book and is worth reflecting upon. It gives us a very different picture than one in which Bohm is incessantly tinkering with the formal presentation of his quantum theory in order to meet various objections. His philosophical excursion gave birth to new insights which he then explored and tested in the context of his physics. But no matter how useful this process might have been in forming Bohm's creative interpretation, it doesn't mean that philosophers of nature ought to focus on the holomovement. As a purely philosophical idea, in fact, it poses any number of difficulties: the primacy given to movement, the denial of direct causation as particles appear and disappear into the implicate order, the infinite series of implicate and explicate orders, etc. (13) The implicate order is a philosophical attempt on Bohm's part to understand the wholeness and nonlocality that his causal interpretation seems to demand. For the philosopher of nature the scientific fact of wholeness and nonlocality is much more fascinating than Bohm's particular philosophical reflections on it. We will return to this issue in a little while. What can we say about Bohm's work? We have already seen that Bohm was not only a physicist, but he was also gifted with some of the instincts of a philosopher of nature. Even in his physics he was not attracted to mathematics with the intensity that it draws many of his fellow physicists. Let us say he experienced the strong pull of a philosophy of nature, and since no philosophy of nature was visible on the horizon he set about creating his own. In this way he brought about within himself the very dialogue between physics and natural philosophy that we have been suggesting. This dialogue, far from being detrimental to his physics, he felt inspired it, and vice versa, and his inchoate philosophy of nature provided a nurturing matrix for the development of the causal theory. This fact, of course, does not in itself validate either side of the dialogue that took place within Bohm. His physics can be wrong, and his philosophy of nature, as well, but it does point to an important conclusion. If a genuine philosophy of nature is reborn, it will not be to the detriment of physics, but to its benefit, and to its own.

Causality and Quantum Theory Bohm has certainly made the life of a Thomist philosopher of nature much easier. Imagine if she or he were faced with the unanimous opinion of physicists that causality does not hold sway at the quantum level. The alternative interpretations of quantum theory are not very promising to the Thomist eye whether it is the case of a quantum logic at odds with our normal one, or a world in which consciousness creates reality, or a many worlds approach in which each collapse of the wave function creates a new universe and observers to inhabit it. But even the Copenhagen interpretation in its various permutations is not palatable, and we owe some of the most trenchant criticisms of it to Bohm. He took pains to point out that the development of a causal theory of quantum mechanics was hindered not only by the

complexity of the physics involved, but by philosophical considerations, as well. Heisenberg's indeterminacy principle was not seen as flowing from the current state of quantum theory, and thus changeable as the theory evolved and developed, but was erected into a universal law of nature which could not be surpassed. (14) Thus, any hidden variable theory was automatically ruled out because these variables could not be known. It is not a question of our ignorance that may one day be remedied, but the fact that nature, itself, is indeterminate, and yet gives rise to the determinate events of our experience. "Real and observable physical phenomena are being assumed to have no causes." (15) The individual click of the Geiger counter is caused by the disintegration of a particle which has no cause for its disintegration. The statistical nature of quantum theory is no longer in continuity with classical statistics, for classical statistics rests on complex interacting causal trajectories that we cannot decipher in detail, but which are decipherable in principle, while quantum statistics rests on no such causes. It is Bohm's contention that these kinds of philosophical consequences do not inevitably flow from either the experimental facts or the mathematics of quantum theory itself. This conclusion alone is worth its weight in gold to the Thomist philosopher of nature who can then avoid to bring philosophy and then theology into line with what is not good physics, but bad philosophy. Unfortunately, the philosophy that surrounds the Copenhagen interpretation has by a certain cultural osmosis pervaded many other fields, and it is rather common to hear asserted the unexamined assumption that the principle of causality has failed, and we need to realign our thinking accordingly. This general atmosphere makes it difficult for philosophers and theologians to seriously contemplate the possibility that philosophical noncausality in the quantum realm simply does not exist. Several examples will illustrate the difficulty of coming to such a judgment. In a conference on science and consciousness held in Cordoba, Spain, David Miller - of Hillman style Jungian psychology fame - summed up what he felt was the cultural heritage of quantum theory and the new physics. This new way of thinking: "(1) blurred the distinction between organic and inorganic, (2) showed the notion of causality to be of limited value ("Events do not develop", writes Zukav), (3) implied that "field" is more important to consciousness than is "matter", (4) dispensed with the Aristotelian idea of "noncontradiction", (5) dislocated the concept of the distinguishability of subject and object ("How can we know the dancer from the dance", writes Yeats), (6) noted that probability or tendency to exist is a more useful way of imagining things than is that of discrete quantity or existence of solid object, and (7) hinted that a sort of "consciousness" is attributable to quantum phenomena which seem to make "decisions" or "know" what is happening elsewhere." (16) I would be surprised if either he or the audience was prepared for the response of J.P. Vigier, a colleague of both Bohm and de Broglie in the formation of the causal interpretation who said, "Unfortunately I am in complete disagreement with all that Mr. Miller has said... The ultimate issue in this debate is the very existence of matter and the objectivity of things." (17) In another intervention during the conference he stated, "I feel, however, that it is much too soon to bury Einstein's materialism and determinism. By materialism I mean simply the objective existence of phenomena, independently of any observation. I assure you that if I leave this room I shall continue to exist even though you cannot see me. As to causality, I am absolutely convinced that the order of cause and effect cannot be altered, and you will allow me to await conclusive experiments to the contrary, checked and verified, before I abandon this idea." (18)

Given what is at stake, we could imagine that philosophers and theologians would be inclined to favor Bohm's point of view rather than the Copenhagen interpretation. But this does not seem to be the case. Christopher Mooney in "Theology and the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle" feels that theologians have not come to terms with quantum theory. "Relatively few have been willing to familiarize themselves with the anomalies of quantum reality, or to grapple with their revolutionary implications for understanding divine grace and human freedom, God's creative action in the world, and indeed the doctrine of God itself." (19) In order to avoid his own strictures, he goes on to give an excellent summary of the history of quantum mechanics and its various interpretations, and this only whets our appetite to know what these revolutionary implications are. Unfortunately, his final section comes as a disappointment. He decides not to follow Bohm because Bohm denies "the ontologically open character of quantum entities." (20) But this is a fateful choice that seems to yield little that is truly revolutionary. Mooney will end up patterning God's action in the quantum world after the model of God's action in the realm of human freedom. Somehow God exercises a "voluntary self-limitation" in regard to matter. "From this perspective the vulnerability of the divine Word in history would be a reflection of a certain precariousness in the creative process itself, and the indeterminacy of quantum reality would illustrate this divine patience at matter's roots. Because God relates to every creature according to its nature, these roots would be allowed to explore their own potential, because matter's nature, like freedom's nature, is to do precisely this." (21) But this does not really engage the truly revolutionary implications that would exist if we took the philosophy of the Copenhagen interpretation seriously. Just how does God create and sustain matter in existence if the realm of matter is literally a place where causality does not function? Just what metaphysical sense can we make out of something -that is so ontologically open as to have no cause? If someone like Mooney who had devoted considerable energy to mastering the history and interpretation of quantum theory failed to come up with a rich philosophical and theological harvest in relationship to the Copenhagen theory, we can begin to wonder if it can really be done. A possible rejoinder is a point we touched on before. Choosing Bohm is choosing the easy way out, and he has little acceptance among physicists. This would certainly be a problem if Bohm's work was a marginal enterprise that had bloomed briefly in the 1950s and then faded away because it was bad physics, and we were dragging it out in order to bolster outmoded ideas on physical causality. In actual fact Bohm continued to strengthen his interpretation until the end of his life, as we have seen, and as hisUndivided Universe demonstrates. Nor can the strong support that he received from Bell and the role that his work played in the development of Bell's theorem be overlooked. Is Bohm's work really on the way out? That is for physicists to decide. But the 1993 appearance of Peter Holland's The Quantum Theory of Motion: An Account of the de Broglie - Bohm Causal Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics, and the resurgence of interest in nonlocality would make it rash to discount Bohm's work too quickly. Holland's Quantum Theory of Motion shows the same kind of iconoclastic rigor that we saw in Bohm as it extends his scientific work to new areas. A few examples will suffice. We need not remain satisfied with an account of quantum theory that "contains no account of the constitution and structure of matter" (22) or a theory that demands wave or particle instead of wave and particle. The de Broglie - Bohm theory aims at "a complete description of an

individual real situation as it exists independently of acts of observation." (23) There is an "unspoken contradiction at the heart of quantum physics: physicists do want to find out 'how nature is' and feel they are doing this with quantum mechanics, yet the official view which most workers claim to follow rules out the attempt as meaningless!" (24) The wave function need not be interpreted exclusively in a probabilistic way. "On the contrary, one may take the view that the characteristic distribution of spots on a screen which build up an interference pattern is evidence that the wave function indeed has a more potent physical role than a mere repository of information on probabilities, for how are the particles guided so that statistically they fall into such a pattern?" (25) Bohm at the very beginning of Causality and Chance in Modern Physics gives us a way to return to and to intensify our dialogue on causality. "In nature nothing remains constant. Everything is in a perpetual state of transformation, motion, and change. However, we discover that nothing simply surges up out of nothing without having antecedents that existed before... everything comes from other things and gives rise to other things. "This principle is not yet a statement of the existence of causality in nature. Indeed, it is even more fundamental than is causality, for it is at the foundation of the possibility of our understanding nature in a rational way. "To come to causality, the next step is then to note that as we study processes taking place under a wide range of conditions, we discover that inside of all of the complexity of change and transformation there are relationships that remain effectively constant... we interpret this constancy as signifying that such relationships are necessary, in the sense that they could not be otherwise, because they are inherent and essential aspects of what things are. The necessary relationships between objects, events, conditions, or other things at a given time and those at later times are then termed causal laws. "At this point, however, we meet a new problem. For the necessity of a causal law is never absolute. For example, let us consider the law that an object released in mid-air will fall. This in fact is usually what happens. But if the object is a piece of paper, and if "by chance" there is a strong breeze blowing, it may rise. Thus, we see that one must conceive of the law of nature as necessary only if one abstracts from contingencies, representing essentially independent factors which may exist outside the scope of things that can be treated by the laws under consideration, and which do not follow necessarily from anything that may be specified under the context of these laws. Such contingencies lead tochance." (26) In this dense statement Bohm touches on many of the principles that are at the heart of a Thomist philosophy of nature. For the philosopher of nature the world of nature is the world of mobile or mutable beings. "Nothing simply surges out of nothing" is an expression of the philosophical principle of sufficient reason. "Everything which is, to the extent to which it is, possesses a sufficient reason for its being." (27) If we were to deny this principle, we would violate the still more fundamental principle of identity in which we affirm that each being is what it is, that it possesses existence which maintains it outside of nothingness, that being and nothingness cannot be identified. Mutable being is contingent being. It does not have to be what it is. It can come into existence and go out of it. "Every contingent being has a ground other than itself, exterior to itself, that

is to say an efficient cause." (28) If the scientist will discover in change necessary relationships that are somehow related to the "inherent and essential aspects of what things are" the philosopher of nature will try to fathom these inherent and essential aspects of what things are, or in philosophical terms, their essences or natures more directly. There is only science of the necessary. Science is certain knowledge through causes, as the ancients put it, and this is true whether we are considering physics or the philosophy of nature. But this strong view of causality never gave rise to philosophical mechanism. It was recognized that our sciences were abstractions that cut different intelligible cross-sections out of actually existing things, and these things in themselves were much richer than the concepts we tried to capture them in. The world could never be reduced to points and lines of force connecting them. It was a world of contingency and chance, mystery and adventure. Let's look at the case of radioactive decay from the perspective of a Thomist view of causality. The Copenhagen school will talk about individual quantum events as being "radically uncaused." (29) Even though the half-life of the radioactive element can be determined, nothing determines when a particular atom will disintegrate even though we can register the individual decay event on our Geiger counter. The decay of this or that particular atom is literally uncaused. What can a Thomist philosopher of nature make out of this? The particle, given off by the decay of the atom, is a contingent being, a being that is subject to change, that does not have to be what it is. Whatever is contingent is caused, that is, has "a ground, a sufficient reason other than itself." "Every contingent being has a ground other than itself, exterior to itself, that is to say an efficient cause." (30) No one would deny that the particle came to be out of the decay of the atom, but if it came to be, it did not have its own ground of being in itself. But then it has its ground outside itself which is the very notion of being caused. This might be more readily graspable in terms of potency and act. An acorn sprouts and becomes an oak tree, so we can say the acorn possessed the potency or capacity to become that oak. Potency, then, is a certain capacity for becoming what actually is. Potency cannot be understood outside of the context of what actually is or act. Potency is the capacity of some act for further act. It never stands alone. There cannot be a pure potency that actually exists. An equivalent way of stating it is that there cannot be a pure indeterminacy. All indeterminacy is a particular capacity for act and is measured by that act. The acorn has a very definite indeterminacy. It won't turn into a canary or an elephant, and this indeterminacy is rooted in the determinacy of the existing acorn. To return to the question of efficient cause we can say "That every being compounded of potency and act, inasmuch as it is potential does not pass of itself to act, does notreduce itself to act. It passes to act by the operation of another being in act which causes the change." (31) In the case of a radioactive atom which decays we can say it had the capacity to decay, the potency or indeterminacy to release the particle, but that this capacity cannot reduce itself to act. If it could, it would be at once in act and in potency. It would give itself the very being it does not have. So from a Thomist point of view to say that the event is radically uncaused is to say that the atom somehow picks itself up by its bootstraps and gives itself what it does not have, that being somehow comes out of nothingness. But if causality holds sway in the microworld even though physicists cannot measure it, then the statistics of that world do not differ in essence from those of the ordinary world, nor are we faced with trying to explain how a radical lack of causality gives rise to a world in which causality reigns.

It is also important to distinguish this view of potency and act from that of Heisenberg who also made use of these Aristotelian concepts, but transformed them to suit his own purpose. For Heisenberg the denizens of the quantum world possess ranges of potentialities, or tendencies to exist which have a strange kind of reality in the middle between possibility and actuality. (32) But from a Thomist point of view potency cannot exist except in relationship to act. There can be no potency floating around by itself. It is entirely possible that the inhabitants of the quantum world possess more potency than other beings, but their potency must be anchored in act, that is, in an actual being with a determinate nature, and therefore their potency is of a very definite sort. This defense of causality is entirely compatible with a view of the world in which chance plays a large part, but chance in the Thomist view rests on causality. It is the intersection of different causal chains of events. I am driving to the supermarket because my wife has decided that she wants to have spaghetti for dinner, and she has discovered that the last time at the store she has forgotten to buy the sauce. At an intersection a car comes through a red light and bangs my fender because its driver was distracted by a small boy who ran out into the street to get his ball. There is nothing in either chain of events that is uncaused, but the intersection of these two chains does not have a cause in the usual sense of the term. "That is to say there is no nature, no natural agent predetermined by its structure to this encounter... nor any created intelligence that designed it." (33) Chance comes about because of the genuine causality that things exercise. It is not predetermined by those things, but neither can it be at the origin of things for it presupposes the causal chains that interact. We can sum up some of the themes we have seen in these last two sections dealing with the epistemological type of physics and the question of causality by looking at an article by Robert John Russells who is both a physicist and theologian, called "Quantum Physics in Philosophical and Theological Perspective." His method is to "use philosophy as a bridge between physics and theology, in particular focusing on a philosophy of nature informed by quantum physics and addressing questions both to metaphorical and systematic theology." (34) This methodology highlights the pivotal role that a philosophy of nature is called to play in the dialogue between physics and theology, but as Russell proceeds, he runs into the same difficulty that we saw in Mooney because he, too, tries to draw philosophical implications from the Copenhagen interpretation. Russell makes some interesting remarks about the epistemological nature of quantum physics. "What seems to be coming under increasing pressure, at least in the realm of quantum physics (and, I would argue, in cosmology as well), is the further and more specific claim of correspondence, that the structure of the theoretical concepts corresponds to some extent with the structure of their references in nature. Also being challenged by quantum physics, in my opinion, is the claim of convergence, that the sequence of these terms generated by successive theories stand in increasingly more accurate correspondence to these structures. For it is above all true that in quantum physics "picturability" breaks down (though not, I would agree, referentiality in a broader sense). We surely believe there is something "out there" and that we are in some sense gaining a more complete understanding of it as we gain more increasing predictive accuracy through successive theories. However our ability to think up an ontology for what's "out there" is now under serious and sustained attack." (35) Maritain's analysis of the epistemological type of modern physics is compatible with a loss of correspondence and convergence. But in his mind there is no way that an ontology can directly emerge from quantum physics. The very lack of physical correspondence and

convergence with nature prevents this from happening. When Russell writes, "Suddenly atoms literally at random begin to decay. Each event is, as far as we can tell, without cause," (36) we can understand this statement in two different ways. If it is a question of the epistemological limits of modern physics, then "without cause" means unable to be measured by physics' current methods. But if "without cause" is a philosophical statement, then there is little wonder that a coherent philosophy cannot be built upon it. But if no genuine philosophy of nature develops, then the theological implications of quantum theory will remain undeveloped, as well. Russell suggests that the indeterminacy of the quantum world can remind us of the working of divine providence, or that nonlocality and the wholeness it implies is a metaphor for inter-religious unity, or the complementarity that Bohr speaks of might be analogously found in theology. But all these suggestions will remain no more than that because there is no philosophy of nature. There is certainly something very fascinating about the quantum world, but this is not a lack of causality, but nonlocality and wholeness. It is only if we were to identify all causality with efficient causality that we would feel compelled to state that causality has failed in the quantum world. This brings us to the third basic issue in the dialogue between quantum theory and a Thomist philosophy of nature.

Wholeness and Nonlocality While John Bell did not possess the explicit philosophical interests of Bohm, he did share some of his sound philosophical instincts. As a student he went through a philosophical period asking, "How do we know the world is really there?" and what he called other "standard questions." "I very soon found that what one had said was contradicted by another. Philosophy was very frustrating, and physics was the next best thing. You could come to reasonably certain conclusions in physics, whereas you could not in philosophy." (37) But the instincts that prompted this foray into philosophy expressed themselves in his scientific work in a variety of ways: a dissatisfaction with the conventional interpretation of quantum mechanics, an admiration for Einstein's idea of what physics was all about, an interest in Bohm's initial papers on the causal theory, and a fascination with the measurement problem in terms of where the dividing line between the quantum world and the world of our experience should be placed, and these interests were to play a role in the creation of his famous theorem. This same attitude also allowed him to take a remarkably positive view of Bohm's work and to try to call attention to it in various articles, and perhaps this sense of realism added some extra enthusiasm to his demolishing of von Neumann's proof. When asked whether he thought that the fact of nonlocality had been established he replied, "Yes. But I don't know what it means. That is to say, Einstein's locality is disestablished, but we have not put anything in its place. To say that 'locality is dead; therefore we must believe in nonlocality,' is already to say something too positive." (38) Bell attempted to explain this nonlocality in lay terms by using the example of identical human twins reared apart. When we find that a pair of identical twins reared apart look alike, we ascribe it to genetics. In physics when we ask twin photons the same question, and they

answer it in the same way, we are led to believe that they were predetermined to have that answer before we questioned them. But human twins reared apart sometimes exhibit traits that seem to defy a purely genetic explanation. They may both like the same kind of automobile, or give their dogs the same name. Could there be some other kind of force, some form of telepathy, that would account for this? In physics the idea of predetermination breaks down when we ask the twin photons different questions, and we are led to the idea that our questioning of the one photon has, despite its distance from the other, effected the other photon. (39) When Bell destroyed von Neumann's proof ruling out hidden variables, he discovered that any hidden variable theory had to be nonlocal. By locality he meant "the idea that what you do has consequences only nearby, and that any consequences at a distant place will be weaker and will arrive there only after the time permitted by the velocity of light"' (40) And Bell's theorem "tells you that maybe there must be something happening faster than light, although it pains me even to say that much. The theorem certainly implies that Einstein's concept of space and time, neatly divided up into separate regions by light velocity, is not tenable. But then, to say that there's something going faster than light is to say more than I know." (41) Experiments, as we have seen, seem to indicate that Bell's theorem is correct, and local realism theories must be discarded. But local realism is composed of a number of different elements. Bernard d'Espagnat, in a very well-reasoned article, "The Quantum Theory and Reality," describes them like this: "One is realism, the doctrine that regularities in observed phenomena are caused by some physical reality whose existence is independent of human observers. The second premise holds that inductive inference is a valid mode of reasoning and can be applied freely, so that legitimate conclusions can be drawn from consistent observations. The third premise is called Einstein separability or Einstein locality, and it states that no influence of any kind can propagate faster than the speed of light." (42) If something has to go, what will it be? Scientists in their work and all of us in practice are implicitly realistic. There is a world out there, and it doesn't depend on my observations of it in order to exist. If we gave up realism for a shallow positivism we would have little left. If we gave up inductive reasoning, we would be in no better shape, for it, too, is founded on a realistic view of the world and the existence of universally valid scientific laws which in turn rest on stable natures. That leaves Einstein's locality. Bohm in his Wholeness and the Implicate Order tries to understand the kind of nonlocality that would replace Einstein's separability. We have already briefly seen his examples of revolving cylinders and the hologram with which he illustrated the relationship between the implicate and explicate orders, and he has another useful example, as well. Two television cameras are focused on adjacent sides of an aquarium that has fish swimming in it, and therefore, the two television pictures they produce of the swimming fish are correlated. Instead of saying there is a causal connection between these two images, it would be better to say that the two two-dimensional images are projections of a higher three-dimensional reality. If we transfer this imagery to the experiments that have demonstrated nonlocality, each particle can be thought of as a projection of a higher dimensional reality. There is a correlation between the particles, but of a "non-causal" sort, for they are not directly interacting with each other. Put in another way, we can say that there is no efficient causality operating between them, and no need to make some force travel faster than the speed of light from one to the other in order to effect the correlation observed. The correlation comes from somewhere else - a higher dimensional reality.

Bohm will spend considerable effort in this book trying to fathom what that higher dimensional reality could be, and in doing so he will travel a considerable distance from that zone of attraction where his philosophical instincts are directly engaged in physical problems and come up with the holomovement which contains any number of philosophical difficulties. The higher dimensional reality, for example, is a process: "Not only is everything changing, but all is flux. That is to say, what is is the process of becoming itself, while all objects, events, entities, conditions, structures, etc., are forms that can be abstracted from this process." (43) Particles are continually unfolding and enfolding from the holomovement so there is no need to maintain their continual motion, or even their existence. But there is no need to look at this attempt in detail. There is another way to approach an explanation of wholeness that is more compatible with a Thomist philosophy of nature, and Bohm gives us an important clue about it. He realized that for Aristotle causality meant more than just efficient or material causality. There was also formal and final causality, and Bohm picks out these kinds of causalities as akin to his implicate order. "It is of crucial significance in this context to understand what was meant by formal cause. Unfortunately, in its modern connotation, the word 'formal' tends to refer to an outward form that is not very significant (e.g. as in 'formal dress' or 'a mere formality'). However, in the Ancient Greek philosophy, the word form meant, in the first instance, an inner forming activity which is the cause of the growth of things, and of the development and differentiation of their various essential forms. For example, in the case of an oak tree, what is indicated by the term 'formal cause' is the whole inner movement of sap, cell growth, articulation of branches, leaves, etc., which is characteristic of that kind of tree and different from that taking place in other kinds of trees. In more modern language, it would be better to describe this as formative cause, to emphasize that what is involved is not a mere form imposed from without, but rather an ordered and structured inner movement that is essential to what things are. "Any such formative cause must evidently have an end or product, which is at least implicit. Thus, it is not possible to refer to the inner movement from the acorn giving rise to an oak tree, without simultaneously referring to the oak tree that is going to result from this movement. So formative cause always implies final cause." (44) If explanations of nonlocality in terms of material and efficient causality break down, what would happen if we looked at the problem from the point of view of a Thomistic understanding of formal and final causality? This is a point we will have to return to later. The Mystery of Matter Chapter 7: Formative Causation and Formal Causes We ought to be grateful to Rupert Sheldrake for the clarity with which he has demonstrated the limits of an overly mechanistic approach to biology, and for his robust rediscovery of formal causality. This gratitude mirrors the appreciation that Maritain had for the work of Hans Driesch in the early years of the century. Maritain had spent 1906-1907 in Heidelberg studying new developments in biology in Germany under Driesch's direction, and had introduced Driesch to the French public in his first published article in 1910. But Maritain was careful not to confuse Driesch as a biologist rediscovering a notion similar to Aristotle's entelechy with Driesch the philosopher subsequently trying to elaborate a philosophy of nature. This is a distinction that is well worth looking at in more detail because it will give us a framework in which to better appreciate Sheldrake's work.

Maritain had familiarized himself with the proponents of the new vitalism in Germany, for example, Gustav Wolff who had experimented with removing the lens of the eye of a newt without disturbing the surrounding tissue. A new lens grew, but one which did not follow the original embryonic path of development, but rather, emerged out of the surrounding tissue. This was a result at odds with a mechanistic view and a demonstration of another kind of principle at work (as well as an experiment that Sheldrake, himself, was to recall later.) But of all the practical experiments and theoretical discussions that passed for vitalism that Maritain reviewed, it was Driesch's work that most impressed him both because of the rigor and clarity of its scientific methodology and results, and because Driesh's properly biological work led him to rediscover, at a time when he did not know Aristotle, the basic idea of entelechy. Driesch had carried out a whole series of experiments on the embryos of sea urchins, dividing them in various ways and in various stages of their development with a variety of methods, and he had watched these fragments give rise to normal adults, although of reduced size. These results went against his own expectations, for he had been deeply embued with the mechanistic view of biology common at the time. Now he had to come up with a new explanation. He reasoned that normally a particular cell in the early embryo would give rise to a particular tissue. It had a certain perspective significance (prospective Bedeutung). But if normal development were disturbed, then it could give rise to something else, as his experiments had shown. It possessed a wider potential than its normal development indicated, a prospective potency (prospektive Potenz). It was here that mechanism broke down. There was a factor that guided the cell to its new destination. Driesch called it factor E, which can be considered the final end of the organism, or its morphic field in Sheldrake's terms. This factor had to transcend in some way the material parts of the organism, and so Driesch, without becoming an Aristotelian, called it entelechy. Maritain in his 1910 article, "Le no-vitalisme en Allemagne et le darwinisme" concludes: "The entelechy is neither material nor spatial. In itself it is simple, but since it manifests its action by a diversity of operations of the organism, Driesch calls it an intensive manifoldness. It is that which orders each part to the whole and gives to the organism its reality as a living being. It is the principle of life, the ordering "form" of the living body. Finally, it acts as the final cause." (1) In 1921 Maritain wrote the preface to the French edition of Driesch's The Science and Philosophy of the Organism. His admiration of Driesch's work was undiminished, but he had developed his own philosophical position significantly, and he took a critical view of Driesch's still Kantian philosophical development. In Maritain's mind Driesch's discoveries announced nothing less than the restoration of the philosophy of nature in the sense of Aristotle and the scholastics. Maritain saw in this not only the "inexhaustible fecundity" of this tradition, but also its power of assimilation, witnessed by the fact that it could enter into dialogue with these modern findings. Therefore, Driesch should not be considered part of the vitalist school that preceded him, but an animist in the Aristotelian sense. His vitalism is not one in which the vital principle intervenes in the phenomenon of the organism as an efficient cause would, but it is an "immanent principle of specific determination in itself simple and unextended" which determines the living body in its very being as a substantial form. (2) In short, Driesch's biological work rediscovered the Aristotelian idea of formal cause, but Driesch does not explore its meaning in that philosophical context. We find much the same situation when we turn to Sheldrake. His biological work led him to the notion of formal causality, and he recognized the similarities between his own conceptions and that of many of his predecessors, among them Driesch and Aristotle. But Sheldrake is not

a philosopher, and makes his philosophical remarks more or less in passing. We, however, have to scrutinize them, perhaps with excessive intensity, because they hold some clues that will help us rediscover the meaning of form in the Aristotelian-Thomist tradition. When Sheldrake looked at Aristotle, he saw that there was a close parallel between Aristotle's efficient and formal causes and the distinction that he, himself, was making between the energetic causality that physics was accustomed to and his own formative causation. But there was something that prevented him from identifying his formative causation with Aristotle's formal cause. Sheldrake felt that his notion differed "radically" from Aristotle's because Aristotle was talking about "eternally given forms." (3) Plato had placed these eternally given forms in the heaven of the forms from which they influenced the concrete things on earth. Aristotle had taken Plato's form and placed them in actual things, but they were still eternally given forms. Even science with its reductionistic and mechanistic tendencies spoke of the universal laws of nature. But in Sheldrake's mind they were all misguided because the whole context of our thought had changed. We were no longer in a static universe that could be thought of as being ruled by these eternal forms and laws, but in a dynamic evolving one, and this called for a new way of thinking. Sheldrake is going to update the idea of formal causality to fit this evolving universe by linking it with the idea of morphic resonance. Then the forms of things would no longer be determined by eternal archetypes or universal laws, but by the actual form of previous similar organisms which effect the present forms by morphic resonance, which is a "non-energetic transfer of information." (4) Let's look at Sheldrake's reasoning in more detail. There is order in the universe, and thus laws of nature. There are laws, for example, that govern the crystallization of sugar. These laws have an existence that transcends particular times and places and is independent of human behavior, "and even independent of the actual existence of the crystals themselves." (5) At least that is how science tends to conceive them. But isn't this a metaphysical assumption, Sheldrake asks? Isn't it a holdover from the old cosmology before we discovered we live in an evolving universe? Do these laws exist before the Big Bang, or did they come into existence with the creation of the universe? In the past universal laws were tied to God as the lawgiver, but even though many scientists ceased to believe in the lawgiver, they still believe in the laws. But what can these laws be if they are not material and lie beyond the realm of sense experience? Wouldn't it be better to say that they evolve with nature itself and should be looked at as habits? Sheldrake feels that it is morphic resonance that fits formal causality for an evolving universe and makes room for creativity and spontaneity in a way that was not possible with the old static view. Morphic fields have much in common with Driesch's entelechy, and before him with Aristotle's, but even here Sheldrake distinguishes his view from theirs. They are part of a vitalistic tradition, which means their conceptions are inherently dualistic. Entelechy in their theories is "essentially non-physical," but then how can it act on material systems? There are, then, two dimensions of Sheldrake's formal causality, and both of them are different from the old formal causality. The first is morphic fields in contrast to the old entelechy or form, which is dualistic, and the second is morphic resonance in contrast to the old static eternal essences. (It is interesting to note, however, that when F.D. Peat, who had examined both Bohm's work and Jung's synchronicity, looked at Sheldrake's morphic fields, it is dualism in their turn that he accused them of. (6) Perhaps a deeper view of formal causality will help clarify some of these issues. Sheldrake rightly insists that form is much more than the outer appearance of something. It is the inner structure and organization of the thing. He goes so far as to take over a classical style example

of causality in the old philosophy of nature. In building a house the boards and bricks are the material cause, and the carpenters the efficient cause. But the blueprint can be called a cause, as well, even though it does not have to be a physical object and might only exist in the mind of the architect. Morphic fields as plans of organization are in one sense non-material, but are in another an aspect of matter which is now taken in a wider sense. But is this really different than what Driesch or Aristotle were saying? Sheldrake, for example, describing Driesch's work, calls entelechy a natural causal factor, (7) and yet a non-material causal factor. (8) And when he comes to Aristotle he says, "in the Aristotelian understanding the sources of material forms are immanent in nature, rather than transcendent. The forms of all kinds of organisms arise from non-material organizing principles inherent in the organisms themselves." (9) So it is hard to say from Sheldrake's scattered remarks just how his views in this matter are to be distinguished from Driesch's and Aristotle's. Let's look more deeply at what Aristotle had to say. Certainly Aristotle could call a form nonmaterial, but his idea of matter has to be carefully distinguished from the notion of matter we have today. Matter as the physicists understand it would be described as both matter and form by Aristotle, and his matter and form would not be equivalent to their matter and energy. What was matter for Aristotle? This question will capture our attention in more detail later, but it is enough to say now that matter meant a potency for form. Potency in this context is in contrast to act, which in this case is form. The form of any inorganic or organic thing is its act. Form is not inserted in some already existing body, but constitutes the body to be what it is from within, so to speak. Form for Aristotle is the highest expression of being, and matter is never found without form. So if we say in an Aristotelian sense that a principle is nonmaterial, we don't mean it is non-material in opposition to being a material being, but it is non-material in the sense that it is form or act. In Aristotle's mind there was no dualism in this. He dismisses the question of how the human soul interacts with the body as meaningless once we are in this context of matter and form, and compares their union to that of a signet ring and the wax that it imprints. Neither do the eternal forms exist in things for Aristotle precisely as eternal. In things, forms exist in an individual singular fashion, and far from being eternal, they can undergo either slight modifications or substantial ones in which they are corrupted and new forms take their place. The only place that the forms manifest universal or eternal qualities is in the minds that know them by abstracting them from concretely existing things. What is slowly emerging here is another view of form which might have allowed Sheldrake to take a more positive view about the Aristotelian-Thomist tradition. We can almost say that form is the material object itself, or the form is the inmost reality of the thing itself. Or in a more refined language, it is in virtue of its form that something is and acts. The form is that which makes the thing to be what it is and is the source of its proper activity. If we return to the classical example that Sheldrake made uses of the building of a house, we will notice that he only mentions three kinds of causality rather than the traditional four. We could say that the very organization of the actually existing building itself can be called its form, just as in a living organism the form is the very life principle of that organism, and that which organizes its various parts. There is an ontological depth to form. Forms are the very things themselves, or as the quote from Maritain had it, the form or entelechy gives to the organism its reality as a living being. When put in this perspective the question that puzzles Sheldrake about the relationship between eternal forms and laws and the concrete objects of experience doesn't arise in the same way. We don't have to ask where these eternal laws reside, or how they can transmit their force to concrete existing things. Forms are written in the very fabric of things. They are the highest principles of the things themselves taken singularly and concretely.

Things have ontological texture and grain. They act like they act because they are what they are. The whole notion of law is not ultimately separable from their being. Here we come to an intriguing possibility. Sheldrake's morphic resonance might be carrying out two distinct tasks. In the first, it is the biological equivalent to Bohm's nonlocality and Jung's synchronicity. There is some kind of non-energetic communication among things that is well worth exploring, and this possibility alone is enough to validate Sheldrake's exploration of morphic resonance. When A New Science of Life first appeared, one of the editors of Naturewrote a negative review under the heading "A Book for Burning?" But Alex Comfort of the UCLA Neuropsychiatric Institute, in a letter of support, replied: "Had Sheldrake said that the quantum interconnectedness might extend to macrosystems, including biological systems, I do not think that Nature would have felt that its virginity was in peril. A model of interconnectedness does in fact flow from Bohm's idea of explication." (10) It is to the possible philosophical foundations underlying things like nonlocality, morphic resonance and synchronicity that we are going to turn in the next part of this book. But morphic resonance is playing another role in Sheldrake's hypothesis, as well. We will remember that Jung first formulated the idea of synchronicity, and then saw it as a special instance of a much wider principle that he called acausal orderedness. But in Sheldrake's case morphic resonance, while it is coupled with morphic fields, has taken over much of their reality. In an Aristotelian-Thomist framework this would not have been necessary. The forms, themselves, are the principles by which the concrete things exist and act. They don't need to receive their morphic fields from past similar creatures by way of morphic resonance because they have already received them from these past forms by normal processes of generation. There is no longer any need to ask the very difficult question of how the morphic fields of the past could influence the present because they have already been transmitted to the present and dwell in things. Sheldrake's desire to avoid dualism, as well as the difficult problem of how eternal forms could influence concretely existing things, has led him to this conception of morphic resonance in which the morphic fields are first deprived of much of their ontological weight, and then given it back by the fields of the past. A more classical view of form and formal causality would have made this procedure unnecessary and still have left intact the morphic fields themselves and the intriguing question about their resonance. Instead, nature and substance are diminished and habits take their place, but perhaps the substances that Sheldrake is trying to avoid are the static ones that modern science has known since the time of Descartes and not the dynamic ones that exist in an authentic Thomism. In Sheldrake's view memory is inherent in things, and it builds up in them and solidifies and makes them act in certain ways. The regularities of nature are habitual. But this view of habits comes close to rediscovering the original idea of first nature or substance in the classical tradition in which substances underlay habits or second nature. Sheldrake raises important points about the origin of forms and the role they could play in an evolving universe, and these questions are a difficult challenge for a Greek universe in which the forms are the highest kind of being, and the world is static and eternal. But in the Thomist universe all this has been transformed. Once again we will look at this issue in more detail later on, but it is enough to say that for St. Thomas form is no longer the highest principle of being. Forms, indeed, can be said to be in the mind of God, but only virtually so as possible reflections and refractions of God as the fullness of being. Further, a Thomist view of evolution is, of course, not to be found in St. Thomas himself, but is still entirely possible, and good headway towards creating one has been carried out by Maritain. (11)

Sheldrake's biological work has naturally and organically led him to the frontier that biology shares with the philosophy of nature, and confronted him with a whole series of questions that, while they arise in biology, have a properly philosophical dimension, as well. It is hardly to be wondered at that some of the more profound aspects of the Aristotelian-Thomist school would have escaped him, for not only is he working as a biologist, but we have already seen any number of reasons why this tradition has not been able to put its best foot forward. Yet Sheldrake's remarks could stimulate a Thomist philosophy of nature to present its own ideas more clearly and enter into dialogue with modern biology. Biology and psychology have a greater and more direct affinity for a philosophy of nature than modern physics does, for physics is formally mathematical while they are not. This does not mean that there will not be an ever growing mathematical dimension in these disciplines. But if they are properly conceived, it will remain subordinate to higher principles that do not readily yield themselves to quantitative analysis, for example, notions like Driesch's factor E and Sheldrake's morphic fields themselves. (12) This affinity for a philosophy of nature does not mean that it would in any way intervene in the actual methods of the sciences themselves, but as I have said, they would be drawn to the frontiers they share with a philosophy of nature, and that process of attraction would create in them specialized vocabularies filled with ontological resonances. It is in this context that a genuine philosophy of nature could speak of its own more properly philosophical conceptions of these same realities, and if it were a genuine philosophy, it could create a climate in which fruitful dialogue would be possible. The Mystery of Matter Chapter 8: Synchronicity and Formal Causality

We have seen how both Bohm and Sheldrake were led to the idea of formal causality, and then recognized some of its historical antecedents. It is much the same in the case of Jung even though he doesn't use the word formal cause or link his ideas with those of Aristotle. Now that we are becoming more familiar with the idea of formal causality, if we take another look at many of the passages cited in Chapter 3 we can see how close they are to that idea. For Jung, imbued with the mentality of modern science, causality can only mean efficient causality. Causality, for example, is "the connection between cause and effect." (1) Acausality operates without the normal constraints of space and time so it "cannot be a phenomenon of force or energy," (2) nor be based on "bodies in motion." (3) When we look at acausality itself we see that it manifests many of the aspects that have been traditionally connected with formal causality. It is connected to finality, and a knowledge that is prior to consciousness, and so Jung likened it to similar ideas that Driesch had proposed. (4) It is meaning or even transcendental meaning, or we could say, information. It is similar to the Taoist idea of nothing that does not appear in the world of the senses, but is its "organizer." (5) It is like the medieval idea of correspondentia or the classical idea of the sympathy of all things which allows them to interrelate regardless of the distance between them. It is connected to Agrippa von Nettesheim's inborn knowledge and perception in living organisms, which again Jung relates to similar ideas in Driesch, and to the notion of final cause, which is intimately related to formal cause. Further, this is an unconscious or absolute knowledge that Jung links to his archetypes considered as formal factors (6) and synchronicity as an

unconscious knowledge can be related to Plato's forms. And Jung goes so far as to call synchronicity itself "a formal factor." (7) In Jung's mind synchronicity can be further connected to the instinct of bees and biological morphogenesis. (8) "Professor A.M. Dalcq (of Brussels) understands form, despite its tie with matter, as a 'continuity that is supraordinate to the living organism."' (9) Synchronicity might not even be confined to the human psyche, but be found in an analogous way in animals and even minerals. (10) Thus there would be "formal factors in nature," and synchronicity would become a specific manifestation of a more universal acausal orderedness. There is a close bond between synchronicity and the archetypes which, as we have seen, are formal factors in the psyche. Therefore, synchronicity as a meaningful coincidence in which we observe a meaningful connection between an inner psychic state and an outer event might conceivably be related to the formal factors that exist both in the inner and outer world. Jung speculates that both these worlds share the same ultimate background, and are parts of an unus mundus which embraces both matter and spirit. Jung was also struck by the luminosity or what he called a cloud of cognition that is to be found in the unconscious that hinted at what Thomists, in turn, might call its spiritual or intellectual nature. This is similar to the idea that Maritain developed in terms of the spiritual unconscious using similar imagery. Von Franz, in her turn, when examining various antecedents to synchronicity, points to Aristotle's nous poietikos, or agent intellect, or what we might call with Maritain the illuminating intellect, which is the natural spiritual life of the human soul by which it illuminates the images in the psyche, unleashing from them their intelligible treasure or immaterial forms. Both the human soul, itself, is a form in the classical tradition, and the intellect knows by immaterial forms. (11) Further, Jung will call the psyche an unextended intensity. "In the light of this view the brain might be a transformer station, in which the relatively infinite tension or Intensity of the psyche proper is transformed into perceptible frequencies or "extensions." Conversely, the fading of introspective perception of the body explains itself as due to a gradual "psychification," i.e., intensification at the expense of extension. Psyche = highest intensity in the smallest space." (12) Jung realizes that here he is pushing his usual language to the limit, but interestingly enough, what he arrives at is his own view of what the Thomist would call spirit. Finally Jung will apply synchronicity to the relationship of the body to the soul as a way to avoid the difficulties that arise from any kind of psychophysical parallelism that would try to coordinate them by means of efficient causality. This, too, is very close to the Aristotelian idea of the soul as the form of the body, and once Aristotle proposes such a relationship he can say, "That is why we can wholely dismiss as unnecessary the question of whether the soul and the body are one: it is as meaningless as to ask whether the wax and the shape given to it by the stamp are one..." (13) Number, itself, which so fascinated Jung and von Franz, is an archetype of order, and can function in this context of the relationship between the body and the soul in the same way as Aristotle's form does. "As the active ordering factor, it represents, the essence of what we generally term 'mind'." (14) Jung, as we saw in Chapter 3, relates the nature of spirit to "a spontaneous principle of movement in the unconscious psyche which engenders, autonomously manipulates, and orders inner images," and von Franz comments: "Number is, as it were, the most accessible primitive manifestation of this transcendental spontaneous principle of movement in the psyche." (15) The very word archetype means form in this classical tradition, and number was habitually related to form.

What we are faced with, then, is another remarkable example of how a scientist, working within his own discipline, has been led to rediscover the idea of formal causality, and the more he approached the frontier that psychology shares with the philosophy of nature, the more powerful the ontological resonances of his specialized and freshly minted vocabulary became. But much like the situation with Bohm and Sheldrake, Jung's formulations can present a problem for the philosophy of nature. There is certainly no problem simply calling formal causality acausal orderedness. Jung is entitled to his own vocabulary. But a problem does arise if acausality, reinforced by a perception of the invincibility of the Copenhagen interpretation, distinguishes itself not only from efficient causality, but cuts itself off from causality altogether. If this were to happen, no explanation of synchronicity would be possible, for explanation in its deepest sense means understanding something through its causes. Without causality in this wider sense we are left simply with stating that synchronistic events exist. There seems no need to go to this extreme. Jung wrote, "Causality is only one principle and psychology cannot be exhausted by causal methods only, because the mind (=psyche) lives by aims as well." (16) There is plenty of room to discover in Jung's formulation of synchronicity both the final causality that Jung mentions here, and formal causality. We have already seen two stories which Jung used to illustrate the meaning of synchronicity. In the first, a scarbaeid beetle taps at the window of his consulting room, and in the second, birds gather at the death of a woman's husband. Let's look at two others. The first comes from a 1945 letter from Jung to J.B. Rhine: "I walked with a woman patient in the wood. She tells me about the first dream in her life that had made an everlasting impression on her. She had seen a spectral fox coming downstairs in her parental home. At this moment, a real fox comes out of the trees not forty yards away and walks quietly on the path ahead of us for several minutes. The animal behaves as if it were a partner in the situation." (17) Jung had prefaced this story with the remarks that the collective unconscious acted "as if it were one and not as if it were split into many individuals." And it showed itself not only among human beings, but animals and physical conditions. The second story is recounted by Marie-Louise von Franz, and was told to her by a young Jewish intern stationed in Hawaii. His nephew's bar mitzvah was coming, and he was unfamiliar with the ceremony. So he was reading some of the texts, but in a bored and restless way. He soon put them down and reached for von Franz's book on fairy tales. There he found one about a white parrot which guarded the source of life, and anyone who reached for it in the wrong way was turned to stone. Her interpretation of the fairy tale hinged on the lifeless way in which religious truths can be handled and parroted. This story struck a deep chord in the doctor, for it was precisely what he had been doing with the bar mitzvah texts. At that moment he heard a cawing outside, and looked up to see a white parrot in a bush outside his window. (18) Jung felt it was unfair to write off those kinds of events as pure chance, but at the same time, he knew that they fell outside of causality as modern science understood the term. This left him with either simply stating that they happened - which most people accepted already - or trying to give some sort of explanation of them. But giving an explanation is perilously close, even identical, to talking about causality, and we saw how Jung began to rediscover the idea of formal causality.

This rediscovery, however, was never formally made, and Jung never developed a fullfledged explanation. Two of his basic premises prevented him from coming to terms with formal causality. The first was his insistence that causality, itself, had been superseded by the discoveries of modern science. Therefore synchronicity must be acausal. The second was an even more general premise in which he held that as a psychologist his goal was a deeper and deeper knowledge of psychic images, but not the things in themselves, i.e., the archetypes that gave rise to them. This was a valid way of proceeding for an empirical psychology, but Jung, under the influence of Kant, extended it to become a general epistemological principle in which we only know psychic images, not things in themselves, no matter what methods we use. These presuppositions of Jung allow us to understand his ideas on synchronicity more clearly. He was struck by the fact that in Rhine's experiments distance and time seemed no obstacles to extrasensory perception. This, he felt, ruled out any understanding of it based on a normal transmission of energy. But since he identified all causality with efficient causality, then he came to the conclusion there could be no causal explanation whatsoever. Therefore, in order to understand paranormal or synchronistic events, he considered the possibility that a psychic factor could have made space and time elastic, and have reduced them to the vanishing point. This type of explanation was congenial to him, for it fit in with his Kantian-style presuppositions. "In themselves, space and time consist of nothing. They are hypostatized concepts born of the discriminating activity of the conscious mind, and they form the indispensable co-ordinates for describing the behaviour of bodies in motion. They are, therefore, essentially psychic in origin, which is probably the reason that impelled Kant to regard them as a priori categories." (19) The psychic condition that brings about this relativization is the activation of an archetype in the collective unconscious. In the case of the scarab beetle, for example, the woman has become dead-ended because of her rationalistic cast of mind. The psychic energy that previously animated her consciousness has flowed into the unconscious with which it forms one energetic system, and has activated an archetype which holds the promise of a solution to the dilemma and which gives rise to her dream. But when Jung considers the relationship between the dream and the arrival of the beetle at his window, he is struck by the strange knowledge that the psyche seems to have of the event to come, and he is going to try to explain this knowledge by a shrinking of space and time in which the unconscious already knows of the event before it happens. "The scarab dream is a conscious representation arising from an unconscious, already existing image of the situation that will occur on the following day..." (20) But Jung is aware that there is another possibility in which the archetype which gives rise to the dream in some mysterious way brings about the outer event of the arrival of the beetle at his window. But for Jung that smacked of "magical causality" and his presuppositions prevented him from looking in that direction. He is left, then, with positing a transcendental or absolute knowledge in the psyche either without explaining it or linking it with the shrinking of space and time which, itself, demands a great deal of explanation. This was unfortunate for he had collected some fascinating texts that spoke about this other possibility, but he could not fully exploit them. He cites, for example, Albertus Magnus to the effect: "I discovered an instructive account (of magic) in Avicenna's Liber sextus naturalium, which says that a certain power (virtus) to alter things indwells in the human soul and subordinates the other things to her, particularly when she is swept into a great excess of love or hate or the like. When therefore the soul of a man falls into a great excess of any passion, it can be

proved by experiment that it (the excess) binds things (magically) and alters them in the way it wants, and for a long time I did not believe it, but after I had read the nigromantic books and others of the kind on signs and magic, I found that the emotionality of the human soul is the chief cause of all these things, whether because, on account of her great emotion, she alters her bodily substance and the other things towards which she strives, or because, on account of her dignity, the other, lower things are subject to her, or because the appropriate hour or astrological situation or another power coincides with so inordinate an emotion, and we (in consequence) believe that what this power does is then done by the soul." (21) This is a fascinating passage. Albertus Magnus, who was the teacher of St. Thomas, gives us three reasons for the power of the soul over other things. The first is because of her great emotion, and this is similar to how Jung describes the role of the activated archetype in synchronistic events. The second is on account of her dignity, and we can take this as an expression of the interconnectedness of the soul with the universe. The third reason in which the appropriate hour coincides with the emotion in the soul, and so we believe that the soul brings it about, is more like a simple statement of the existence of synchronistic events. This leaves us with the first two reasons as the raw material from which a philosophical explanation could begin to emerge. Jung goes on to quote Goethe: "We all have certain electric and magnetic powers within us and our cells exercise an attractive and repelling force, according as we come into touch with something like or unlike." (22) Later he will quote Pico della Mirandola: "Firstly there is the unity in things whereby each thing is at one with itself, consists of itself, and coheres with itself. Secondly there is the unity whereby one creature is united with the others and all parts of the world constitutes one world. The third and most important (unity) is that whereby the whole universe is one with its Creator, as an army with its commander." (23) It would take us too far afield to discuss other problems that arise from Jung's Kantian presuppositions, and to explore other interesting -ways in which Jungian psychology could enter into dialogue with a Thomist philosophy of nature. I have looked at both of those issues in detail elsewhere. (24) We have seen, however, enough over the last three chapters to convince us, I hope, that it is worth trying to explore in depth a philosophical view of matter and form, and the sympathy of the forms. The Mystery of Matter Part DEEPENING THE FOUNDATIONS THOMIST PHILOSOPHY OF NATURE Chapter 9: The Matter of Matter CHAPTER THE MATTER OF MATTER 9: OF IV: A

Parts I, II and III have yielded some interesting results. Whether we look at physics, biology or psychology, there is a movement away from a mechanistic point of view towards one of wholeness that embodies in various ways the idea of formal causality. In addition, we have seen how these wholistic perspectives have rediscovered something of the classical tradition

on formal causality that stretches from Aristotle through the Middle Ages to today. And along the way we have also learned something about a Thomist philosophy of nature. But the task we face now is particularly challenging. We need to penetrate more deeply into the notion of form, and if we succeed, we can tackle the question about the possible philosophical foundations to nonlocality, morphic resonance and synchronicity. But let it be clear from the beginning we are not trying to create a physical, biological or psychological theory, but to interrogate a Thomist philosophy of nature about them. Hopefully in the course of the previous chapters we have cleared away some of the obstacles that could prevent us from probing the classical tradition on form. Perhaps now it is not unthinkable that there could be a Thomist philosophy of nature whose view of form is worth exploring. But the real difficulty in this exploration doesn't reside there, or even in the poor pedagogy that has succeeded in pushing the Thomist philosophy of nature into oblivion, or even in the host of misunderstandings that surround the notion of a philosophy of nature when viewed from the mentalities of modern science and philosophy. It goes deeper than that. Formal causality cannot be deeply understood unless it is seen in relationship to matter on one hand and existence on the other, and both matter and existence are extremely difficult topics. Thomism as a Living Tradition Before we begin, a short digression is in order. We have had some hard words to say about the Aristotelian-Thomist philosophy of nature. For long periods it gave way to unreflective repetition; it buried itself under poor pedagogy. Nonetheless, it is part of a living tradition of philosophical wisdom. This certainly doesn't mean that all Thomists are wise or, as I just mentioned, the tradition hasn't been passed down on many occasions in a dead and mechanical fashion, or even that its individual members are historical experts on Aristotle or St. Thomas. It is a living tradition because its fundamental principles, or insights, conform well enough with reality that they can be increasingly clarified and applied to new challenges. Thomism, then, can continue to grow if it has the imagination and energy to apply itself. It is a living tradition in the sense that its history, however rich and important, does not rule it. It is a philosophy, not a history of ideas. We only need to find some point of entry, whether it be through St. Thomas, or someone like Maritain, to be in contact not just with words about it, but an intelligible universe of philosophical wisdom. With these qualifications, it is inspiring to contemplate a philosophical tradition that stretches over 2,300 years, especially when we live in a climate of almost frantic change in which 30 years can easily cover a philosopher's popularity. It would be a mistake, then, to think that Thomism has seen its day and will slowly fade from the scene. It has immense reservoirs of vitality, and has shown itself in the past capable of prodigious displays of energy, and hopefully when it rediscovers itself, the whole question of a philosophy of nature will receive the attention it deserves. Back to our task. We need to understand the nature of form in relationship to matter and existence, and the structure of our argument will run like this. Aristotle had a particular view of being, and this view vitally effected his idea of matter. St. Thomas transformed Aristotle's understanding of being, and in doing so, he transformed his view of matter, as well. But Thomas kept a great deal of Aristotle's language and perspective on matter and didn't focus on the implications that his new view of being would have for it, and the Thomist school, for the most part, neglected to develop a distinctively Thomist view of matter.

Aristotle on Being For Aristotle, being first and foremost meant substance, or essence, or form, and for our purpose we can consider these terms roughly equivalent. Aristotle wrote, for example, in his Metaphysics that being means "what a thing is..." (1) And though being has many senses, its most fundamental one is as a "what, which means the substance of a thing." (2) "The thing seems really to exist because of something definite that underlies it, which is substance..." (3) Therefore, "what is being is actually the question what is substance." (4) Substance also means essence. "Your essence is what you are..." (5) Or as one modern Aristotelian scholar put it, substance "primarily means beingness, the density or fullness of being..." (6) "It primarily refers to the immanent form," (7) and "the beingness of all beings." (8) But what about matter? Aristotle conceived the need for a material principle or cause because of his observation of radical change in which it appeared that one thing became another, for example, the bread we ate was transformed into flesh, or the tree, consumed by the flames, became ashes. His reasoning was quite straightforward. If one substance disappears, and another appears, how can we explain this transformation? Do we say that the change we are seeing is simply on the surface and things are fundamentally the same underneath? That would deny the reality of one thing truly becoming another thing. Or do we conceive it as the total destruction of one thing followed by the creation of another? That would deny that one thing becomes another. Neither of these alternatives pleased Aristotle. Somehow there was an underlying continuity, and yet there was radical substantial change. So Aristotle set out to try to understand what that principle of continuity could be. He reasoned that it could not be a formal principle because the old form had suffered corruption and disappeared, and the new form had been generated, and yet some kind of fundamental continuity remained. There must be a principle, then, between nothing and substance, and this is what Aristotle called matter. Since being meant form or substance, and it was clear that in this radical change the old form disappeared and a new one took its place, then the underlying principle of continuity, Aristotle concluded, could be "neither a particular thing, nor of a particular quantity, nor otherwise positively characterized." (9) Aristotle, working within the limitations of his own view of being, has set up the parameters of the problem, and these parameters will influence the whole tradition to come. Being equals whatness equals form, and thus, substantial change points to a principle that has no what or form, is pure potency or prime matter. The notion of prime matter is let loose to bewitch and bedevil the Aristotelian-Thomist tradition that is to come. The Thomists will try to understand what prime matter is despite Aristotle having said that it really has no what. But back to our story. St. Thomas and His Metaphysical Revolution St. Thomas was an Aristotelian at a time when Aristotle in his full stature was just being discovered by the West, and being an Aristotelian was a rather daring thing to be. But that's not all he was. He took Aristotle's being and transformed it in a very Aristotelian way, but one in which Aristotle had never thought of. For Aristotle, as we have just seen, being was substance, or form, or the whatness of things. This is what was real in the full sense of the term. This was act in relationship to matter, which was potency. But Thomas, probably early in his career, had a revolutionary metaphysical insight in which he saw that form, itself, was not the ultimate principle of being, but stood in a relationship of potency to the ultimate principle of being, which was existence, or the very act to be. It is as if he had asked himself, "What makes a what to be a what?" - a question that could have had no meaning for Aristotle - and found the answer in existence.

This transformation of metaphysics is easy to state, but very difficult to grasp. It is as if we suddenly saw that the very what of things, the principle that makes something to be what it is, a stone, a tree, or a bird, is not the deepest manifestation of being, but a higher principle is to be found in the fact at once banal and mysterious that things are, they exist. Form, or essence, or the what of things, is then seen as a certain capacity to exist. If forms were to be compared to different colors, then existence would be the sunlight that contained them in a higher way. This is a completion of Aristotle that leaves the best of Aristotle in place, but encompasses it in a wider and deeper synthesis. With this insight St. Thomas went about remaking both philosophy and theology. But we certainly couldn't have expected him to apply it with equal rigor in every area. When it came to Aristotle's ideas on matter, it appears that he did not fully focus on this new perspective on matter that he had made possible. Sometimes he would simply stay within the parameters Aristotle had set up, while at others, he would relate matter to his ultimate principle of being, which was existence. The Thomist school had trouble enough keeping in sight the metaphysical revolution that Thomas had wrought in relationship to essence. Often it settled for a more or less Aristotelian view of being, and it could have hardly be said to have spent any energy working out a truly Thomistic view of matter. The Thomistic renaissance that had started in the 19th century and had lasted until the beginning of the Second Vatican Council had had one of its finest moments when it rediscovered around World War 11 the central role that existence played in the metaphysics of St. Thomas. Men like Maritain and Gilson, de Finance and Fabro, uncovered what could be called Thomas' existential metaphysics. This remarkable feat is a concrete example of the ability of Thomism to recover itself that I mentioned before. But wouldn't it have been logical for this rediscovery of the primacy of the act of existence to be applied to the question of matter? This, in fact, is what happened, but it happened in such a way that it went virtually unnoticed. William E. Carlo William Carlo was one of the most incisive and daring metaphysicians that American Thomism ever produced. He taught at St. John's University, Boston College, and the University of Ottawa, and he was fascinated with the relationship between essence and existence. Thomists, themselves, disagreed about how to characterize this relationship, and their disagreement hinged on whether essence, itself, should be accorded any positive reality. Carlo pursued this issue with vigor, first in 1957 in a short commentary on a presentation by Gerald Phelan on "The Being of Creatures," then in a 1964 article that appeared in the International Philosophical Quarterly called, "The Role of Essence in Existential Metaphysics: A Reappraisal," and finally in 1966 in a book titled, The Ultimate Reducibility of Essence to Existence in Existential Metaphysics. As the title suggests, Carlo's program was a radical denial of any separate or positive reality to essence, and in his mind it was the logical and ultimate conclusion to St. Thomas' insight of the primacy of the act of existence. For Carlo, essences "are intrinsic modifications" of esse or the act of existence. "Forms are coexistents rather than beings. They are concreated rather than created. Essence is the intrinsic modification of the dynamism of actual exercise of the act of being. Why not describe essence then as the place where esse stops, bordered by nothingness?" (10) And Carlo tries to provoke our imaginations so that we can leave behind us our instinctive tendency to turn essences into separate beings. "Let us consider existence as if it were a liquid poured from this same pitcher simultaneously with a sudden drop in temperature. Under freezing conditions it becomes a solid before it strikes the ground. The liquid existence is possessed of its dimensions, its own limitations. The shape it assumes is the determination of its own substance. Essence is not

something extrinsic to existence which limits and determines it in the way that a pitcher shapes its recipient liquid, but essence is rather the place where existence stops. There is nothing in water which is not water. There is nothing in an existent which is not existence. Essence is the intrinsic limitation of esse, the crystallization of existence, bordered by nothingness." (11) When Carlo looks at the passages on essence and existence in St. Thomas, he finds some that support this radical view, and others that seem to speak of essence having some kind of positive reality of its own, and he will explain this divergence by the hypothesis that Thomas only gradually applied his revolutionary insight of the primacy of existence over essence. Carlo feels that the revolution should be brought to its final conclusion: "Let us imagine, then, existence as a stream rushing down the mountain side. Again, for our purposes it is frozen by a sudden drop in temperature. An axe at this point can help us explain what we mean by essence as the intrinsic limitation of existence. If we cut the stream into several pieces or blocks they will differ only by the pattern left by the blade of the axe. There is nothing in the blocks but frozen water or ice. But one is distinguishable from another by the place where they stop, the myriad grooves and raised surfaces left by the blade of the axe. This is what we mean when we say that essence is the intrinsic limitation of existence. It is not that which limits esse, it is the limitation of esse; it is not that which receives, determines and specifies esse, it is the specification itself of existence." (12) Carlo's radical interpretation didn't go unchallenged. It was questioned whether his interpretation of Aquinas was correct, and more importantly, whether he had reduced essence to the vanishing point. (13) He replied, "Essence is not a positive being apart from the existence of which it is the limitation, but it is definitely a positive principle of philosophy when understood as the intrinsic limitation of esse. Its function can be designated by affirmative terms, contraction, refraction, channeling of perfection, specification, determination." (14) 1 confess that I find Carlo's fundamental insight very appealing. Ultimately everything must be seen in the light of existence, and if the reduction of essence to existence at first appears negative, it becomes eminently positive if it gives us a better sense of the richness of existence itself. Once Carlo had completed St. Thomas' program by reducing essence to existence, he was in a position to carry out a fascinating metaphysical experiment. Why not take the AristotelianThomist view of matter and see if that could be reduced to existence, as well? Before we look at Carlo's solution, it is worthwhile getting a better sense of the problem by looking at how prime matter has been presented by various notable Thomist philosophers of nature in the 20th century. The Riddle of Prime Matter St. Thomas and the Thomists after him have always insisted that prime matter can never be found existing on its own, but rather, in composition with form in actually existing material things. (15) But when we read various descriptions of prime matter, scattered the length of the 20th century, it has an uncanny tendency to take on a life of its own. Henry Koren will write, for example: "Prime matter is the substratum which remains throughout all successive changes and serves as their common bond. It itself is not subject to substantial changes, i.e., generation or corruption, for it is not a substance but only a substantial principle. It is the composite of prime matter and form that can change substantially.

"Despite its own incorruptibility, prime matter is the principle of corruption in material beings. The reason ties in the potential character of prime matter. Being in potency to any substantial form that can come to actuate it, matter is never actuated to the fullness of its capacity." (16) Leo Elders will put it this way: "Matter is an entirely indeterminate substrate. Under the influence of the required efficient causality it can become the various material substances. Hence St. Thomas describes matter as that which, considered for what it is, can take on a form. However, the form is not added to it from the outside. If it were, there would be no real becoming nor would the new being be a strict unity. For this reason the form can only come from matter. Apparently it is present in it; all forms which matter can take on must be present in matter, but this is not a presence as the effect is present in its active principle. The form is only present as a possibility, which coincides confusedly with all other possibilities which lie in matter." (17) D. Nys states: "We can define prime matter as "the permanent substratum of substantial forms," only if we mentally strip the notion not only of all the essential forms which actually determine it in the world of existences, but also of the special aptitudes or exigencies which it holds from the body in which it is realized. Thus, the prime matter of hydrogen and oxygen exhibits a special kind of receptivity in regard to the specific form of water, because these two simple bodies possess a mutual affinity and a common inclination to be changed into water. Such an aptitude is not essential to prime matter conceived as the universal substratum of substantial forms. Subjected to these adventitious and passing relations, prime matter is usually termed materia prima transiens, to distinguish it from matter totally indetermined or materia permanens, whose intimate being passes from one body into another without undergoing the slightest transformation or change." (18) Finally, Peter Hoenen asserts: "Prime matter is potential being without qualification, and it must be further determined to unqualified or substantial or first existence. Therefore, prime matter is not something possessing potency, but it is the very potency itself for unqualified existence... This seems to be the best interpretation of Aristotle's famous negative description of it: N call matter that which in itself is not a quiddity, nor a quantified thing, nor any of those things by which being is determined"... Prime Matter Is Ingenerate and Incorruptible. Because matter, in contrast to privation and to form, remains in all changes, therefore, it is ingenerate and incorruptible although it is the cause of the generation and corruption of bodies which are composed of it. In addition, therefore, the number of possible generations and corruptions is indefinite, with new matter never being supplied and old matter never disappearing." (19) It is enough to read these passages to see why Thomists, while accepting the notion of prime matter, have always been bemused by it. Prime matter is somehow incorruptible, yet the principle of corruption; forms are somehow present in matter, but only as possibilities; the intimate being of prime matter passes from one thing to another without undergoing any change; prime matter is the very potency itself for unqualified existence, and so forth. We begin to see what Carlo was up against. On the one hand, prime matter had a venerable history, and seemed to be rooted in a careful rational analysis of substantial change. Yet, on the other hand, it just doesn't come into focus. But if we dare to change the notion of prime matter, aren't we altering one of the foundations of a Thomist philosophy of nature, and sending out a shock wave that will dislocate other parts of the edifice? Let's try to focus more clearly on the traditional position by looking at an article by Norbert Luyten called, "Matter As Potency." Luyten was a Dominican philosopher of nature, and one

of its more enlightened defenders, and his article appeared as part of a conference on matter held at the University of Notre Dame published in 1963. (20) Luyten first sums up two basic trends in Greek natural philosophy before the time of Aristotle. In one, matter takes on the meaning of potency. The word matter originally meant wood found in the forest, and then became wood in the sense of the material out of which things were made, and finally, by a further permutation, it took on the meaning of that out of which something is made, and thus, matter as potency. But the early Greeks also questioned themselves about the nature of the things they observed around them, and about change, itself. Was there some primordial stuff or matter out of which everything was made, whether it be water, or fire, or whatever? In this way matter became connected with the idea of nature, or form. Aristotle combined these ideas. His analysis of substantial change led him to conclude that material things were made up of both form, and matter in the sense of pure potency, and it is this latter idea that Luyten is going to defend. Matter is "potentiality in the line of substance"; it is "pure potency," "mere determinability" and even "pure indetermination." (21) But can there be any sense to pure indetermination? Isn't determinability always intimately connected with determination? Luyten will insist, like all Thomists, that pure indetermination cannot exist on its own, but must always be seen in connection with determination. It is the "constitutive or fundamental inadequacy of substantial determination. Expressed in a more concrete way: a material reality is what it is in such a way that it bears in itself the possibility of simply not being what it is." (22) Determination itself implies inadequacy, and while this inadequacy is intrinsically linked to it, it is still real, and Luyten concludes: "There is no absurdity in admitting a real pure indetermination, provided one does not posit it as a reality existing in itself, but rather as a constitutive deficiency of the given material thing." This fundamental kind of deficiency is "a sort of hallmark of the thing's former - and future - non-being." (23) But he realizes that for many people this kind of deficiency or view of prime matter appears much more as an abstract logical concept than a real principle. Luyten denies that this is so. "The ontological reason why a thing is what it is, cannot be really identical with the reason why it is not what it is. It does not make sense to derive the "being determined" of a thing, as well as its "being undetermined" (and thus determinable) from the same ontological source." (24) But Luyten carries his imaginary argument further. Can't it be objected that this reasoning would only hold if we looked at determination and indetermination under the same aspect? Can't a thing determined in one way be able to be determined in another? Luyten counters, "it would be absurd to say that its own determination, that which makes the thing what it is, is at the same time the reason why it ceases to be what it is. So we see that the possibility of becoming something else (i.e., determinability or potency) implies an indetermination with regard to a thing's own "suchness" or determination. It implies, indeed, the possibility of its own non-existence; thus the thing bears within itself an indetermination relative to its own existence and relative, therefore, to its own "being determined." What is more, this indetermination is so radical that it contradicts the very fundamental, constitutive (substantial) determination of the thing." (25) It is important to note here that Luyten is staying within the parameters of the question as Aristotle established them. What makes the thing to be what it is cannot be the reason why it

ceases to be what it is. This is the very kind of reasoning that led Aristotle to posit a material principle that had no what connected with it, or was pure potency. In short, a what is a what and can't be its own reason for ceasing to be what it is. And in Aristotle' framework, if you are not a what, you are somehow non-being, or pure potency. Ernan McMullin, a noted philosopher of nature from the University of Notre Dame, responded to Luyten's paper. He asked whether a principle could be an act in one regard, and in potency in another, and in a second question, whether Luyten was implying that any given object can in principle become any other object? To the first question Luyten responded that it is of the very nature of being a substantial form "to be substantial, i.e., fundamental, i.e., first constitutive determination." (26) The substantial form makes the thing to be what it is in the most fundamental and primary sense. Something can't have two substantial forms; "It is contradictory to say that a substantial form is a further determination of an already determined substance." (27) But what of the second objection? Does everything have the possibility of becoming everything else? Luyten denies it. The oneness of the substantial form does not exclude the contribution of other forms. Prime matter becomes available for a new form through a previous form so the new material being is conditioned by the particular availability established by the previous form. But isn't this what the first objection was driving at? Luyten insists that the oneness of form is maintained because it "absorbs within itself everything contributed by the preceding form... The doctrine of the oneness of the form is the technical expression of this ontological severing of beings which follow each other." (28) But at the same time, "a material being is not only a thing which could be something else, it is also something which wassomething else... This is to say that the pure potentiality of primary matter enters the constitution of a material being only as conditioned by the previous form. This conditioning does not cease purely and simply by the advent of the new form. Of course, formally speaking, every determination within the new being is ontologically reassumed under the new form." (29) Luyten concludes: "What we maintain is, that in every concrete material reality there is, besides its substantial determination, a real intrinsic reason opposing this very same substantial determination, so that this opposition may result - and actually results - in a simpliciter non-being of the given substance. And it is this absolutely fundamental possibility of non-being that we call the absolute, radical, fundamental, pure potency in every concrete material reality." (30) We are not going to get a clearer presentation of the classical position than this, but as long as we remain within the Aristotelian framework, we are at a dead-end. We are not going to gain a better understanding of what prime matter is because it has no what, and so can't be placed on Aristotle's map of being. When Carlo read Luyten's article, his reflections on the reduction of essence to existence and the primary role that existence played in the metaphysics of St. Thomas, allowed him to see how to escape from this dilemma. "Fr. Luyten, by suggesting a deficiency of substantial determination locates matter in form, but St. Thomas says precisely and specifically that matter is not form nor is it the lack of form, that is to say, privation. It is only if we locate the inadequacy within being, and more accurately esse that we can have an explanation of matter on the correct metaphysical level." (31) The key, of course, is to relate the notion of matter to existence, but this is easier said than done because it means seeing St. Thomas' doctrine on matter with a new clarity, a clarity that Thomas, himself, had not insisted upon.

Matter, St. Thomas and Carlo Sometimes for St. Thomas matter is described as non-being. It has neither existence, nor is it knowable. At other times, however, he describes matter as having a kind of weak existence, an incomplete existence, indeed, the most incomplete being of all. (32) He will say, "matter... is not created without form." (33) "Prime matter does not exist by itself in nature, since it is not being in act, but in potency only; hence it is something concreated rather than created..." (34) And so prime matter was created "under distinct form." (35) But other times Thomas will say, "matter, indeed, is made finite by form, because matter before it receives its form, is in potency to many forms, but on receiving a form, it is terminated by that one." (36) And "form is not made perfect by matter, but rather its fullness is contracted by matter." (37) "...insofar as it (matter) is a certain being in potency, it is ungenerated and incorruptible." (38) Thomas describes prime matter as indifferent to all forms and thus, in a certain way, infinite and made finite through form. It is not generated but created. It is entirely unformed and is therefore a kind of abyss, and it is at a maximum distance from the creative power of God, and can in no way act, itself, and these kinds of statements give the impression that matter has some kind of life of its own outside of form. The solution to these apparent contradictions can be found in St. Thomas relating matter to existence. "Matter is essentially being in potency." (39) It is "that which is in potency to substantial existence." (40) "...potency to substantial existence is not something outside the genus of substance. Therefore the potency of matter is not some property added to its essence, rather matter is substantially a potency to substantial existence." (41) "Matter is nearly a thing, and is in some way because it is in potency to be a thing and is in a way the substance of a thing because it enters into the constitution of the substance." (42) Carlo wants to reduce all these different points of view to a single-pointed vision of matter: "In a metaphysics of essence such as that of Aristotle, a subject which is neither a substance nor a form cannot be located within being. It has no ontological status. This is why some look on Aristotle's argument as a vicious circle. In an essentialistic metaphysics in which to be is to be an essence, matter without qualification or character is precisely a monster. But in a metaphysics of esse there is a reality below and beneath essence which is not of itself determined or limited but is still the very foundation of the real and the source of essence and all that lies within it. Within esseprecisely we find a reality which is both transcendent and inclusive because it embraces all the determinants of the categories since it is perfection as unlimited. Esse thus provides an ontological status for matter outside of form but still within being as the phenomenon of the "elasticity of esse"." (43) "To explain matter and to locate it ontologically is to see it metaphysically as a "deficient esse," a debile esse, a weakness at the heart of being but one for which there is a remedy just as there is for the limited nature of the human intellect. Motion and change are the attainment of perfection of further esse, and thus represent the achievement of higher or lower, superior or inferior essences. Essence is determined by "existential quanta," not higher as best absolutely, for even the lower may articulate more perfectly in the return of the total universe of being to Ipsum Esse Subsistens." (44) "...just as essence and existence are not reciprocal causes but essence is reducible to existence, so matter is the limitation of form, the place where form stops, in what is basically an immaterial universe." (45)

"Matter in its ultimate signification revolves around a "lack of being." Since the material being is not being itself but only by participation, it lacks some being and so has matter. "If matter is neither form, nor privation, nor evil, but is still in some basic way reducible to esse then perhaps it is esse as limited, as, to put it crudely, existential quanta approaching but not completely, one of the Primal Modes or Stages ofesse as unfolding, i.e. essence." (46) "It (matter) is in a way rooted in something positive. Because the being lacks esse, it can gain esse. This is what is meant by matter, ens in potentia, a deficient esse, a debile esse but one which has a remedy for its imperfection. Essence is the primary limitation, a mode of esse, essence as imperfect esse. Matter signifies a secondary limitation, this imperfect being as deficient when a point is reached in the descent of creatures from God at which the esse does not correspond to, is more or less than, one of the Primal Stages of being expressed by the doctrine of the Divine Ideas." (47) "Essences are the primal stages of esse, and make things to be the kind of things they are. But within this primal stage there is a secondary stage which enables a thing to be more or less what it is, to increase in being without becoming other than what it is." (48) Admittedly, none of this is easy to follow. It is strange even to Thomist ears, and we will have to decipher what Carlo is saying. But I believe that we are in the presence of a breakthrough in Thomist thought that can lead us to a deeper metaphysical knowledge of matter which, in turn, could revitalize a Thomist philosophy of nature and its dialogue with modern science. Unfortunately, following this path that Carlo opened up is not going to be easy. Carlo, himself, is not there to help us. He died prematurely around the age of 50 not long after his book on essence and existence appeared. Ironically, just as Thomism was finally in a position to apply its renewed appreciation of a central role of existence in a metaphysics of St. Thomas to the question of matter, it went into eclipse, and Carlo's work went virtually unnoticed. But luckily there was one person who saw what Carlo was driving at. This was one of America's keenest metaphysicians, W. Norris Clarke, S.J. The Mystery of Matter Chapter 10: Being and Action CHAPTER BEING AND ACTION Norris Clarke on Carlo In 1957, when Carlo gave his brief response to the paper by Gerald Phelan - and drew inspiration from Phelan's ideas on the relationship between essence and existence - Norris Clarke was the other respondent. Later in 1964, Carlo's article on essence and existence appeared in the International Philosophical Quarterly, co-founded and edited by Fr. Clarke who, in 1966, wrote the preface to Carlo's The Ultimate Reducibility of Essence to Existence. But this wasn't just a case of proximity. Only someone steeped in the existential Thomism that had appeared around World War II would understand what Carlo was driving at, and Norris Clarke in those days was a philosophy student at the French house of philosophical studies on the Isle of Jersey under Andr Marc, a noted Thomist metaphysician. 10:

Clarke found Carlo's book exciting. Though Thomists agree about the real distinction between essence and existence in all creatures, in actual fact they understood it in different ways. In the more traditional one, common among the great commentators on St. Thomas with the exception of Baez, essence still kept "a certain ontological positivity" as if existence were added to it from without "as actualizing the perfections conceived to be somehow the contribution of the essence in itself." (1) This could be called the "heavy" or "solid" view of essence. In the other view, which Carlo is radically presenting, essence is an intrinsic limitation of esse itself, and this is the view that Norris Clarke follows, for it seems most in line with a full understanding of the primary role existence plays in the metaphysics of St. Thomas. "But the special metaphysical daring of the author comes out in the new chapter he has added on the nature of primary matter, interpreted as nothing but a limiting or negating mode of esse itself, instead of as some positive ultimate subject really distinct from both form and esse." (2) This position flows out of Carlo's view of the relationship between essence and existence, and addresses "one of the most tenacious holdouts of pure Aristotelianism in Thomism," and one which Thomists have paid little attention to and would, no doubt, feel uncomfortable with. (3) Fr. Clarke goes on to give us a fine but densely packed commentary on Carlo's view of matter: "Yet, despite my reluctance to abandon my own long-established and convenient categories, the more I reflect, the more advantages I see in interpreting substantial change as simply a shift from one essential mode of esse to another, within the continuity of esse itself, seen not just as accidentally but as essentially plastic, elastic, transformable, without importing any new positive metaphysical principle over and above esse plus a graded series of negations. It seems to me - and here I am going beyond the explicit analyses of the author to embark upon my own reflections - that the permanently valid essential of the argument put forward by Aristotle for prime matter is the necessity of some essentially indeterminate and determinable principle to explain substantial change. But the two other requirements added on by Aristotle himself, those of radical passivity and radical imperfection of this principle of continuity, seem to me to have been introduced not from the pure logical and metaphysical exigencies of the argument but from two further premisses proper to his own philosophical and cultural outlook: namely, that all perfection, including activity, is rooted in form, the principle of determination and intelligibility, and that the infinite, or the indeterminate in general, can only be a principle of imperfection. Once one eliminates these two extra premisses, the indeterminacy required for substantial change could just as well be that of the one principle of perfection, which does not necessarily have to remain fixed at one essential mode of perfection but can slip, so to speak, under the action of causal influences, from one essential level of limitation to another, as though it were a fundamental energy capable of being molded or channelled in infinitely diverse ways." (4) For Aristotle, as we have been seeing, being equals form. Therefore, in substantial change if one form disappears and another comes to be, there must be some non-formal principle to account for the continuity that is observed. But to be non-formal in Aristotle's universe is to be pure potency or prime matter with all the difficulties that such a conception brings in its wake. But with St. Thomas being equals existence, and form, itself, can be reduced to existence, and is utterly transparent to it, as it were, as a certain capacity for existence. This capacity is

positive inasmuch as it is a real limitation of existence taken in itself, and thus makes the thing to be this or that particular being, but it is wholely negative in terms of its own reality outside of existence. This allows substantial change for St. Thomas to be rooted in existence. One form can give way to another because there is a non-formal principle that they are both rooted in, but now this non-formal principle does not have to be below form, but it can be above form. Instead of substantial change demanding prime matter, it can be understood in terms of existence. Then substantial change becomes simply "a shift from one essential mode of esse to another, within the continuity of esse itself..." Matter expresses the elasticity of a substantial being towards existence. Essences are the primal stages of how esse expresses itself, but within those primal stages there are secondary stages rooted in what we call material beings as an expression of the imperfection, or lack of intensity, of their being. This lack of intensity, or this plasticity in relationship to existence, is what we call matter. In this regard they stand in contrast to spiritual creatures which possess existence through their forms in such a way that they can never lose it. Material things simply don't have that intensity of form. They contain a substantial potency to substantial existence. They can lose their very being and be transformed into something else. This potency to substantial existence is matter. It is not something separate from substantial form, but an aspect or limitation or negation of it rooted in its limited capacity for existence. Fr. Clarke will continue: "And it seems to me profoundly stimulating and fruitful to the metaphysician to make the effort to try and think spatial distance as really only the defective presence of what we call material beings or bodies to each other, and to rethink the multiplicity of parts of an extended material body as nothing more than a deficiency or limitation in the concentration, unity, and power of a form (itself already only a limited mode of esse), as a further relaxing or partial disintegration (as Plotinus would put it) of the pure concentrated unity-presence of esse in its plenitude. Hence I think Thomists and all serious metaphysicians have only to gain by taking up the challenge of Professor Carlo to think through reality in terms of the powerful unified vision he proposes in this book." (5) We could call matter, itself, "a deficiency or limitation in the concentration, unity, and power of a form," and this deficiency is the root of multiplicity, quantity, space and time. Not all potency is matter in this sense. Purely spiritual creatures which realize their natures upon their creation still retain a certain potency in regard to new perfection. Matter exists only below the threshold of a certain intensity of form. It is a deeper root of potency among creatures who must step-by-step become what they are meant to be, and can even lose their very being. St. Thomas will say, "...prime matter is actuated by means of change and motion, and since every change and motion may be reduced to local motion, as the primary and most universal type of motion, as proved in the Physics, it follows that matter is present only in those things in which there is potency to place." (6) What is beginning to emerge is a metaphysical view of the universe. It is a fundamental "weakness" of the form, which is matter, and from this lack of intensity comes the existence of part outside of part, and space and time, in short, our universe in which material creatures intimately interact to become what they were meant to be, and to realize a grand design. A Historical Aside In 1952, Norris Clarke wrote a masterful article called, "The Limitation of Act by Potency: Aristotelianism or Neo-Platonism?" (7) which had as its principal purpose the illustration of the important role that neo-Platonism had played in St. Thomas' metaphysics, and the article

was part of his own process of assimilating the existential Thomism that he had been studying. But this article can provide us with some valuable insights into the differences between an Aristotelian and a Thomist understanding of matter. just as Thomists have fought over the relationship between essence and existence, they have argued over the interpretation of the Thomist axiom: act is not limited except through potency, "i.e., no act or perfection can be found in a limited degree in any being unless it is conjoined with a really distinct limiting principle whose nature is to be a potency for that act." (8) And Thomists assumed that this principle was part and parcel of Thomas' Aristotelian heritage. But Fr. Clarke, by some careful historical detective work, discovered that this principle does not exist in Aristotle. For Aristotle, as for the Greeks before him, the perfect is complete and thus, the imperfect infinite. 11(T)he role of form or act is to impose a limit on the formless infinity of matter in itself, and thus confer upon it determination and intelligibility." (9) For Aristotle forms are multiplied by being received in matter. The form is "a stamp or die, fully determined in itself, which is stamped successively on various portions of an amorphous raw material such as wax or clay." (10) The notions of potency and act are limited to explaining substantial change. In contrast, for St. Thomas forms are not limited in themselves. They possess a certain infinity in their own order, and they are not only received by matter, but also limited by it. But then, where did the axiom, act is not limited unless by potency, come from? Fr. Clarke traces it, in part, to Plotinus and neo-Platonic sources like the Liber de Causis from which Thomas took the motif of participation-limitation, and in part, to the Aristotelian concept of potency and act. But Thomas combined these ideas in a highly original synthesis, and then applied them to the relationship between essence and existence, as well as to that between matter and form. But this elaborate process of synthesis, which can be traced in St. Thomas' writings, can help explain why his doctrine of matter was not completely in focus. It also allows us to see something more important. Form, and therefore, formal cause, exists in a much more dynamic way in St. Thomas than it could in Aristotle, for it is related to the highest metaphysical principle. This dynamism only increases if we accept Carlo's view of matter, for the whole reality of matter, if matter is an intrinsic limitation of form, is thus taken up into form, and enriches It, just as form, itself, is taken up into existence. But back to our deciphering of a Thomist view of matter. Substantial Change We have already seen how Fr. Clarke had teased apart the Aristotelian view of substantial change. It demands some "essentially indeterminate and determinable principle" which can now be identified with existence, and the Aristotelian requirements of radical passivity and radical imperfection can be dropped. But how well does this view of substantial change hold up under scrutiny? For an answer we can turn to an article that he wrote in 1974 on the 700th anniversary of the death of St. Thomas called, "What Is Most and Least Relevant in the Metaphysics of St. Thomas Today?" (11) The idea of substantial change is basically a sound one. We see that one thing actually is transformed into another, and yet there is a continuity between them. The idea of substantial form, or formal causality, is equally valid. Without it there would be nothing to hold something together and give it its distinctive character, and we would be left with a reductive mechanism that even science is beginning to repudiate. The whole is, indeed, more than the sum of its parts. A tree is not simply a collection of atoms, but it is a living organism. We

have been seeing how Aristotle tried to reconcile these two genuine insights, and arrived at the notion of prime matter, or pure potency. There can only be one fully actual substantial form if the unity and the existential reality of the being is to be safeguarded, but does this demand, as its counterpart, prime matter? Does the substantial form have to actualize matter down to its bedrock in the sense that matter must be conceived of as pure potency? And we have already seen in the exchange between Ernan McMullin and Norbert Luyten that the traditional Thomist doctrine on substantial change includes the notion of what St. Thomas called virtual presence. Here is how Fr. Clarke puts it: "...it is clear enough that in all the organic wholes we know which emerge out of transformation processes, the component elements which are integrated into the new higher unity do not have their characteristic structures and activities entirely wiped out down to pure indetermination, but abide somehow in a latent subordinate way, which St. Thomas himself describes as a "virtual presence," such that they can reappear again if the higher complex breaks down... If "pure potency" means that what passes over is totally denuded of any determination whatever, then it seems to me it goes beyond what is required to handle the problem. But if "pure potency" does not mean the latter, then the term is dangerously misleading. That is why I prefer the terms "substantial potency," or "determinability at the substantial level."" (12) The phrases "substantial potency" or "deteminability at the substantial level" are, in fact, the same as Thomas' characterization of matter as potency to substantial existence, and as Carlo has made clear, these descriptions are best conceived as intrinsic limitations of substantial forms in regard to their existence. Fr. Clarke continues: "Complex unities are so strong that the lower elements integrated within them are not merely accidentally united; the unifying substantial form penetrates deep into the very substances of the components, so that they lose their autonomy of being and action. Yet these components can still retain some latent plural presence, not totally dominated and integrated, which is precisely "in between" pure indetermination (or pure determinability) and merely accidental determinability. There seems to be no adequate term for this somewhat messy, but I believe more realistic, "in-between" state in the Thomistic system." (13) This mysterious "in-between" state cloaks a very important aspect of material things. They are meant to interpenetrate and form a whole, which we call the universe. The Dynamic Nature of Form and Formal Cause Norris Clarke is not done helping us understand some of the metaphysical principles which can clarify the nature of matter and form. In recent years one of his principal fields of interest has been the dynamic nature of being. This is a theme he has explored in Person and Being, and in various articles such as "Person, Being and St. Thomas," "To Be Is To Be SelfCommunicative," and "Action As The Self-Revelation of Being." (14) Just as Carlo attempted to complete St. Thomas new view of matter, Fr. Clarke is trying to bring out explicitly the dynamic character of being according to St. Thomas. Action flows naturally from being, and is characterized by the nature of the being from which it comes. Without action the universe would go dark and silent, for things would be closed in upon themselves, and there would be no universe at all. "A being that did not manifest its existence and essence to others by some form of self-revealing action would make no difference at all to

the other beings in the universe, and hence might just as well not be at all." (15) "Not only does every being tend, by the inner dynamism of its act of existence, to overflow into action, but this action is both a self-manifestation and a self-communication, a self-sharing, of the being's own ontological perfection, with others. This natural tendency to self-giving is a revelation of the natural fecundity or "generosity" rooted in the very nature of being itself." (16) But this self-expression of beings has its counterpart in their receptivity to each other. " ... (A)ny being capable of receiving these influences immediately become a receiving center for the surrounding world, a kind of crossroads information-receiving center for the universe as it impinges on that particular location." (17) Beings, therefore, are the receiving sets for the "information, contained within this incoming action," (18) which information is literally an impressing of the form of one being upon another. Immediately these kinds of phrases begin to evoke associations with the notions of information we have seen in people like Bohm, but now the concept of information is being presented from a metaphysical point of view rooted in the very nature of being itself. Nowhere is this process more evident than in our intellectual knowledge: "There is first the incoming ontological intentionality of action itself into the knower, which tends naturally to produce a self-expression, a similitude, of itself in an apt receiver. This similitude, which is a self-expression of the agent projected through its form, leaving the being's matter and actual existence behind, is not the physical or natural being (esse naturale) of the agent, which remains within itself, but a projected similitude, (an esse intentionale) received in the knower according to the mode of the knower, and, when recognized as a natural similitude, image, or sign of its source, points back by the whole dynamism of its relational being to the source from which it came and of which it is the projected self-image. The second, complementary movement of cognitive intentionality now occurs when the consciousness of the knower, fecundated or informed by the image brought into it by the incoming intentionality of action, recognizes it explicitly as a sign or message from another and reaches out dynamically in the cognitive order, through the mediation of the sign, to refer it by an intending relation back to the thing itself from which it came." (19) This is pure Thomism, and it is much closer to the kind of interconnectedness that Bohm, Sheldrake and Jung are trying to articulate than the static and inert substances of Descartes and his successors. It is that modern view of substance that scientists have reacted against and has tempted them to turn to process-type philosophical solutions to account for the dynamism and interconnectivity of what they are discovering. But as Fr. Clarke is insisting, being, itself, is dynamic. Or put in another way, form and formal cause are dynamic, and action is the selfrevelation of being. God and the Metaphysics of St. Thomas The God of the metaphysics of St. Thomas is no God of the gaps driven from one unexplored corner of the universe to another by the inexorable march of science. That kind of God is a God made over in the image and likeness of science. Nor is the God of St. Thomas' metaphysics the Christian God of Revelation appended to it out of faith. God is the very center of Thomas' metaphysics, its irreplaceable heart woven into his understanding of essence and existence, a God we can gain some knowledge of by the highest exercise of human reason.

Fr. Clarke in "Is Natural Theology Still Possible Today?" in 1988 explored this metaphysical knowledge of God. (20) First he cleared away the philosophical obstacles to even believing that such a knowledge was possible that had been heaped up by the deconstructionists, empiricists, and neo-Kantians. Then he presented the classical arguments of St. Thomas, but in fresh language, and reinvigorated with metaphysical insight. The most radical metaphysical question addresses the very existence of things. "Why do they exist at all in this way that they do exist?" (21) The answer unfolds in three steps: 1. Something must have always existed, for if there were a time at which there was absolutely nothing, something could never have come to be, for something cannot come out of nothing. Among existing things there must be one that is self-sufficient for its own existence. Something that is not self-sufficient depends on another for its existence, and a whole series of this kind of dependency still leaves us with a need for a self-explanatory being. "It follows, therefore, that somewhere along the line, either at the head of the series or outside of it, supporting the whole, there must be at least one self-sufficient being, which is the initiator (not necessarily in time) of the causal flow of existence into all the others in the series." (22) 2. "No self-sufficient being can be finite." (23) If a being has a limited mode of being, then there must be a reason why it is this and not that. "Why this being, or this whole finite worldsystem, in fact, and not some other? A principle of selection is needed to select this mode of being from the range of possibilities and give actual existence (energy-filled existence) to it according to this limited mode (or "essence," as the metaphysician would say). But no finite being can select its own essence and confer existence on itself. For then it would have to preexist its own determinate actual existence (in some indeterminate state), pick out what it wills to be, and confer this upon itself. All of this is obviously absurd, unintelligible. It follows that no determinate finite being can be the self-sufficient reason for its existence as this determinate being. Therefore it requires an efficient cause for its actual existence as this being. But, since we cannot go on to infinity in finite caused causes, we must eventually come to some Infinite Cause of these finite beings." (24) 3. "There can be only one such being infinite in all perfections." (25) If there were two, what would differentiate them? One would have to lack something that the other has, and thus, be in some way less than it and not infinite. This kind of reasoning can be applied to the universe as a whole as a particular kind of limited system. Then we can ask, "Why, then, this determinate one rather than some other?" "There is no way for the system itself to fill the gap in its own intelligibility, to illuminate the sheer brute fact of its own limited existing thisness." (26) Fr. Clarke, after conversations with scientists at a colloquium held at the Center for Theology and the Natural Sciences, was inspired to come up with a more radically existential version of this classical reasoning. But even here he realized that all these kinds of arguments for the existence of God demand a special kind of metaphysical seeing and insight. This is what Maritain called the intuition of being, and Fr. Clarke elsewhere called "a taste of existence." (27) This kind of insight allows us "to bring clearly into focus the actual existence of this universe in all its fresh wonder and originality. This means getting beyond the mere epistemological recognition of the fact that this universe exists. We must look deeper into the very intrinsic actuality, the active presence within the existing beings themselves, which is the ground for our epistemologically true judgment about them. This is what St. Thomas calls by his own original term, "the act of existing" (the actus essendi or the esse, the to-be, of things). And this actual existence within real beings is not to be looked upon as some minimal, static

factual state, but as an active presence, presence-with-power, as power-filled, energy-filled presence." (28) His new argument runs like this: Does any determinate essence or system of essences contain within itself its reason for existence? "(N)o determinate essence (or system of essences), no model of reality, can specify or prescribe its own actual existence.. As St. Thomas puts it, all such determinate essences are radically "contingent," i.e., neutral or "indifferent" (not the happiest term) to existence or non-existence - they can either be or not be. Hence it is that they need a cause of a totally different order from that of essence or model, a cause in the existential order that is a source of energy-filled existence and can communicate it to others, a cause that can bring them out of their contingent neutrality to exist - which really means out of their pure intelligible possibility - and "real-ize" them into the real order of energy-filled existence. Of themselves they have no necessary link with their existence; it is a sheer brute fact that they are. But they have no resources anywhere inside them to explain why in fact they do exist. They need an actualizing-energizing cause outside of themselves to lift their essence-models to real existence." There must be one being "that contains actual existence as constitutive of its very essence, whose essence is energy-filled existence itself in all its unrestricted fullness, unreceived from any other, in a word, existence itself in its very source." (28) Fr. Clarke is exposing the bedrock on which St. Thomas' various arguments for the existence of God stand. But it is possible to sharpen even more the language used here. The words "neutral" or "indifferent" belong, as he well realized, to the "thick" or "heavy" school of how Thomists conceive the relationship between essence and existence. It is possible to replace that language with Carlo's more radical one. Then essences are no longer neutral or indifferent to existence. The whole thrust of the reality they have is to be potencies or capacities for existence. In this way they are intrinsic limitations of existence contracting it to be this or that existing thing. The fundamental structure of the relationship between essence and existence as St. Thomas conceived it is the argument for the existence of God. If our metaphysical sight is keen enough, the very "limited existing thisness" of the universe as a whole and its creatures, its birds and stones and stars, allows us to see that we are surrounded by and are, ourselves, existence as limited. Then all things point with the very weight of their being, by their deepest ontological structure, by the fact that they exist in this or that limited mode, to existence as unlimited, which is the metaphysical name of God. The Mystery of Matter Chapter 11: The Human Universe CHAPTER THE HUMAN UNIVERSE Emile Mersch In May of 1940, Emile Mersch, S.J., one of the 20th century's finest theologians, was fleeing through Belgium and France before the Nazi armies. He was on his way to the Isle of Jersey guiding two old fathers, and carrying the final draft of the manuscript of his masterpiece, The Theology of the Mystical Body. But he never arrived. Instead, he died on a roadside in France and part of his manuscript disappeared. (1) 11:

Mersch's great book was finally published using parts of earlier drafts, and it contains a section on his philosophical views about the unity of the human race and its relationship with the universe, both themes that shed light on the dynamic nature of the human form. Mersch realized that the human soul could be looked at from two perspectives. If it were a purely spiritual form akin to those attributed to the angels, there would have been only one human being that would have contained in itself all the riches of humanity. But in actual fact the human form is "too imperfect to exist in itself," (2) or using Carlo's terminology we can say it lacks the intensity of being to be itself once and for all. Mersch in a brilliant stroke of intuition combines these two perspectives. The human form, if it could actually exist like the other spiritual forms, "would be equivalent and more in its perfect unity" to all the material forms that make up the universe. (3) The fact that the human soul cannot exist in this way leads directly to its need for all the material forms of the universe so that it can express itself in and through them. In short, the universe is intrinsically human, and we are intrinsically cosmic. (Mersch's viewpoint also allows us to look at in a new way the anthropic principle expressed by some scientists who feel that the universe must somehow culminate in intelligent life.) The human soul as a spiritual being is so dynamic that it demands the entire universe in order to adequately express itself. It is as if in some mysterious way the material creatures of the universe are contained in the human soul. If we take the entire universe and the human soul, we glimpse something of the riches of what it means to be human. Put in another way, we can say that the entire universe must be created in order that human beings can be what they are meant to be. This brings us back in a more properly philosophical way to our tongue-in-cheek Thomist story of creation. We could say that the lack of intensity of the human spirit is the reason for the existence of the material universe. Then the human soul becomes the ultimate foundation for the existence of matter, for it is the final cause of existence of material things, and by giving rise to matter, it in some way gives rise to space and time. But Mersch is not finished. "We begin with a principle that may seem banal; but it has enormous consequences. All men have the same form in the abstract. In itself, this form is transcendent with regard to its concrete realizations. Therefore the latter must be endlessly multiplied in order to convey as well as possible, although always inadequately, the fullness of humanity that is in the form. The conclusion necessarily flowing from this is that the multiplicity of men is at bottom a unity, and that all men are one through their form." (4) The dynamism of the human soul is not exhausted by the creation of the universe, but expresses itself in the creation of the human race, as well. What cannot be expressed once and for all is expressed in a myriad of different ways, so we have many human beings all possessing the same fundamental form, but each embodying a certain realization of it. It Is only in the human race as a whole seen as the culmination of the universe that we can fathom what humanity Is. Despite being the last and least of the spiritual forms, the human soul, taken in itself, has an almost infinite fecundity in its own order. It becomes the very principle that inexorably draws us to realize our union with the universe and with each other. It Is as if all human beings, in virtue of possessing the same form, undergo a deep magnetic attraction to become one with each other, and that attraction extends to the whole universe because it is contained in some way in the human soul.

Where did Mersch get all this? In his mind he was making explicit what was already to be found in St. Thomas. Let's turn, then, to St. Thomas and his Summa Contra Gentiles to begin to grasp how he saw the universe: "Prime matter tends to its perfection by acquiring in act a form that it previously had in potency, although it may cease to have the other form that it previously possessed in act. For it is in this way that matter successively receives all the forms to which it is in potency, in order that all of it may be successively reduced to act, which is something that could not be done all at once." With our new understanding of prime matter we can translate this passage. Something that has the potency for substantial existence which we call matter, will try to realize and actualize itself. But it is not only in potency to its own completed being, but the potency of matter puts it in potency to other forms of being. It is moved by a dynamism that can carry it to the loss of its own form. Material creatures are subsumed by each other in order to achieve a higher degree of being or act than they could achieve on their own. It is almost as if they sacrifice themselves for a higher purpose. St. Thomas continues: "Whatever is moved, to the extent that it is moved, tends to the divine likeness so that it may be perfected in itself. But a thing is perfect to the extent that it is in act. The intention of everything that exists in potency must be to tend to act through movement. The more an act is posterior and perfect, therefore, the more principally is the appetite of matter directed towards it. Hence, regarding the last and most perfect act that matter can attain, the appetite of matter by which it seeks form must tend as to the ultimate end of generation. But in the acts of the forms there are various gradations. For prime matter is first in potency to the form of an element. When it has the form of an element, it is in potency to the form of a mixed body, because elements are the matter of a mixed body. Considered as having the form of a mixed body, it is in potency to a vegetative soul, for this is the soul that is the act of such a body. Likewise, the vegetative soul is in potency to a sensitive soul, and the sensitive soul to the intellectual soul. The process of generation makes this clear, for first in generation there is the living foetus possessing the kind of life proper to a plant, later that of animal life, and finally the life of a man. No later or more noble form is found in generable and corruptible things after the last form, i.e., the soul of a man. The ultimate end of all generation is, therefore, the human soul and matter tends to this as its ultimate form. Elements, therefore, are for the sake of mixed bodies, but these latter are for the sake of living bodies. In these latter, plants are for the sake of animals; but animals are for the sake of man. Man, therefore, is the end of all generation." (5) Potency to substantial existence is not limited to the realization of the capacity of this or that substantial form. It extends beyond to a potency for a higher form that can exercise existence more fully, and ultimately it is a potency for the human form. In a mysterious way all material creatures are bound together. This is not because there is some primordial matter out of which they are made, or educed. That would make prime matter have a certain primacy that is not fitting in something that is described as a pure potentiality. No. Material beings have a potency to substantial existence precisely because they form one interconnected whole, and literally give their own being to another to serve the purpose of the whole, and that purpose is to reach in some way the human form. In other words, as Mersch indicated, the universe is meant to find its end in helping the human soul realize itself. It is this human soul that culminates the whole hierarchy of material beings by possessing substantial existence in a way that it can never lose it.

Maritain and a Thomist View of Evolution In 1966, at the age of 84, Maritain gave a seminar that would later appear as an article called, "Towards a Thomist View of Evolution." (6) It stretched more than 50 pages, but it was still just a sketch of a book he would have liked to write on the subject had he had the time and energy. His inspiration for such a theory of evolution is the passage in St. Thomas we have just been reading. He finds in it, as we have, not only a description of the hierarchy of material forms, but also the tendency among them to be transformed into higher forms until they reach their final goal in the human form. Thus, a material form has not only a natural goal of realizing itself, but a "transnatural" one in relationship to a higher form. And if this transnatural tendency were to be extended to the dimension of time - something that is not found in St. Thomas, himself - then we would have the philosophical foundations for a Thomist view of evolution. Maritain begins to develop these foundations by scrutinizing the phrase in this passage from the Summa Contra Gentileswhere St. Thomas compares this ascent of the form to human generation. The foetus first has a vegetative soul, then a sensitive or animal soul, and finally, a human soul, and at each of these transitions there is, according to St. Thomas, a substantial change or transformation involved. A genuine substantial change means the vegetative soul disappears and a sensitive soul takes its place, and then the sensitive soul, in its turn, disappears, and is replaced by the human or spiritual soul. But the advent of these new forms requires the proper disposition of the body, which must be duly proportioned and disposed to receive them. The human soul, for example, demands a certain level of development of the brain and the nervous system. Therefore it cannot be formally present, that is, present as the substantial form of the organism from conception. When the human soul finally appears, the vegetative and sensitive soul are no longer formally present, but virtually. The whole thrust of their being is taken up and now rooted in this new formal principle. The embryo is destined from the moment of conception to become a human being, and though it receives in passing a vegetative soul, and then an animal soul, in a certain way the human soul is virtually present from the beginning. We have already encountered the word virtual in the first context where it explains how prior forms remain present in higher subsequent forms, but what about virtual presence in the second context? What does it mean to say the human soul is virtually present in the embryo? The human soul is present in virtue of the act of generation. The phrase "in virtue of" does not connote the physical transmission of an object, but a reality of the instrumental order. The art of Michelangelo, for example, passes as a certain kind of virtue or force or regulating power through his hand and through his chisel to his sculpture. In a similar way, the artistic vision of a conductor passes through his orchestra and becomes visible in the music created. "I will say that the virtue is a certain form transmitted or communicated, but, here is the capital point, this is not an entitative form informing a thing, (chose), a thing (res), to which it would give its constitution in being. It is a transitive form, it is the formof a movement, not of a being, it is the form of a movement by which the latter is regulated in the impermanence itself of its passage in time." (7) It is a reality that is bound up with formal causality, not efficient causality. This virtue or regulative force is "the form of a caused movement, by which the action of the efficient cause, when it is not instantaneous, regulates for as long as the process of causation endures, all the instrumentality which leads to the final effect." (8)

What does this mean? Let's put it in Norris Clarke's language of action. The action of a being is a self-revelation of its formal nature. It transmits, as it were, according to the wavelength of its own being even when it is not a case of entitative action. In the human act of generation the goal is a new human being, but it is a goal that cannot be realized all at once. Something must guide this process or evolution of motion, and inform it to be the kind of motion to produce the specific goal. Or in the language of action, the parents' action of generation has a specifically human character, a force or energy, that directs the growth of the embryo so that it can evolve through the vegetative and sensitive stages and become disposed for the reception of a human soul. This force or energy is not an efficient cause or a thing, but an information or virtue that directs the developmentof the fertilized egg. The fertilized human egg has a vegetative soul, but human nature is virtually present in it because of the virtue of the human act of generation that passes in and through it. This virtue is the form, as it were, of the evolutionary movement. It is the energy that directs the evolution of the new organism and it directs it until this organism has properties that are such that it can no longer remain directed by its present substantial form, but needs to be informed by another and higher form. Thus, the vegetative soul gives way to a sensitive one, and the sensitive one to the ultimate disposition for a human or spiritual soul. But because this spiritual soul is not a material being - it lacks that substantial potency to substantial existence we call matter - the soul must be immediately created and infused by God. In this infusion the generative force of the parents reaches its final conclusion, and the human soul is no longer virtually present, but formally. Maritain develops this theme at length because he is going to apply it to the evolution of the human species. The natural world presents us with a remarkable spectacle in which we find both the fixity of certain species over long periods of time, as well as an evolutionary movement, 11which traverses or (rather) has traversed the world of living creatures..." (9) in normal animal generation the offspring are of the same species as their parents. But in animal evolution there is the generation of offspring which have sensitive souls more elevated than those of their parents, and thus are a new species. In the first case, God as the cause of all being exercises a simple directive motion, but in the second, God exercises "an elevating and transforming motion (surlvatrice et surformatrice)." (10) The first motion moves the animal to act to produce an animal soul like its own. The second moves the animal to become in its descendants greater than it is in itself. To sum up: St. Thomas has described the tendency for one material form to become another. If this tendency is put in the context of time we begin to have a philosophical view of evolution. A living being strives not only to perfect itself, and perpetuate itself according to its own species, but at certain times under the influence of this elevating and transforming causality of God, it becomes more than itself in its descendants. This is a special case of the transnatural ontological aspiration that material creatures possess that urges them to become other than what they are. In normal animal embryological development the dynamism of nature suffices under the general directing motion of God - here we can recall the text of St. Thomas cited in Chapter 4 where he insists that the causality of God does not do away with the causality of creatures, but empowers it. In contrast, animal evolution presupposes a special elevating and transforming motion on the part of God which awakens in the creature the ontological possibility of transforming itself. But when we arrive at the appearance of the first human being even this general philosophical theory of evolution is not adequate. For paleontologists the hominids seem to exhibit qualities

like tool-making that exceed the abilities of animals as we know them. Must we conclude that they were human beings? If we say they were not, we seem to deny the scientific evidence. Yet, if we say that they were, we run into philosophical problems because either they do possess spiritual souls and are true humans, or they do not and are not human. For Maritain the hominids, or prehumans, were the final preparation, or we could even say the final disposition of matter, for the appearance of true human beings. These hominids, caught up in the process of evolution, had a plasticity and animal refinement that animals as we know them today do not exhibit, and they finally arrived close enough to the fundamental divide between material and spiritual creatures that human beings could be born of them. But they were superdeveloped animals, not humans, who were the ancestors of the human race in potency. When these immediate ancestors of the human race had reached their highest degree of development, God, by means of an "exceptional and absolutely unique" (11) elevating and transforming motion, infused spiritual souls into their offspring in the course of their prenatal development. This is a rather crude sketch of what Maritain felt was a sketch, but it is enough to indicate that a Thomist view of evolution is possible. It gives us a picture of a wave or waves of evolutionary energy passing through fixed species which under this elevating and transforming motion coming from God, become more than themselves and their descendants. When the wave has served its purpose, the fixity of the species reasserts itself. The hominids rise like a special tide in order to prepare the way for the human race, and once human beings appear, that tide recedes. Not only is a Thomist view of evolution possible, it is rooted in the very notion of matter. It is of the essence of material creatures to be in substantial potency to their substantial existence because of the lack of intensity or density of their being. But this is the very quality that binds them together in a universe. They intereact with each other. They grow and develop out of each other. They give being and take it away from each other, but not randomly like the blind collision of independent units, but according to an overall design. The universe grows in complexity and consciousness, as Teilhard de Chardin saw so well, and it undergoes that evolutionary development in order to finally arrive at the human race. It can undergo that development only because it is material, and one thing can be in potency to another, can be transformed into another. Material beings have a fundamental plasticity in relationship to each other, for they are parts of the same whole, which is the human universe. The Mystery of Matter Chapter 12: Body, Soul and the Spiritual Unconscious

CHAPTER BODY, SOUL AND THE SPIRITUAL UNCONSCIOUS Body and Soul

12:

The ultimate test case for any conception of matter is how it explains the relationship between the body and the spiritual soul. We have already met some of the principles that St. Thomas employed to explain this relationship. One of them, the unicity of the human substantial form, embroiled him in a great deal of conflict before and after his death. (1) Unlike some of his contemporaries, he insisted there were no distinct vegetative or animal souls that remained

after the infusion by God of the spiritual soul. If vegetative and animal souls remained formally present, he argued, then the unity of the human being would be destroyed, for the substantial form is the principle by which something exists and acts, and if something had two such principles, it would be two beings. But this does not mean that we have to conceive of the human soul as directly informing prime matter in order to safeguard the unity of the human being. Norbert Luyten and Norris Clarke have already pointed out the role that the Thomist idea of virtual presence plays in such a case, and we have seen a concrete example of it in Maritain's description of the development of the embryo. The vegetative and sensitive souls are retained in a very real way, but virtually, not formally. We will have to look more closely at this in a moment. But first we need to examine a radical Carlo-like view of the relationship of the body and the spiritual soul. If matter is but a potency to substantial existence, why can't we say that the human spirit itself, since we are calling it a spiritual being in potency, possesses matter as a dimension of its own being? Then matter would spring forth as an expression of the lack of intensity of the being of the human spirit. Then there would be no body as an independent principle, but only the human spirit as manifesting itself as a body. Then the body would be the human spirit in its low intensity of being as a spiritual form expressing itself in matter, space and time. Wouldn't this be an explanation for St. Thomas saying that the body doesn't contain the soul, but the soul contains the body? Then our souls exist with a capacity to exist, which is matter, itself, and the whole of material creation is like a rainbow manifesting this potentiality of the human spirit in matter, space and time. There is a certain seductiveness to this view. But if we embraced it, we would be open to the objections of those who felt - mistakenly, I think - that Carlo had eliminated any positive reality to essence and to matter, and we had just done the same to the human body and, indeed, to all material creation. There are significant flaws in such a radical reduction of body to soul. The human spirit does possess a very basic kind of potency, for it is the only spiritual form which does not immediately activate itself. But this is not the potency of matter which St. Thomas described as a potency to place, or a potency to substantial existence. The human soul as a spirit does not possess that kind of potency, and thus, does not have matter as part of its intrinsic makeup. It has existence above the critical threshold that divides matter and spirit so it can never lose it. It does possess a passivity of its faculties, and thus, in a very real way, of its being as a spirit. And so, pushing our language a bit, we can say it is a spiritual being in potency, but this potency is not the potency of matter, but more precisely, the potency of the human faculties like the intellect and will. Matter, therefore, cannot be directly reduced to the human spirit as a negation or lack of intensity of the spirit, itself. Matter in the sense of material creation has a wonderful richness and beauty to which we must give a positive meaning. It is a certain expression of what it means to exist. Thus, it cannot be reduced to the potency of the human spirit so that we can say the human spirit, as spirit, manifests itself as body. Material creatures have substantial forms, and thus, substantial existences. The soul does, indeed, contain the body, but not in the sense that the body is only an expression of the soul's capacity to activate itself. In the example of human embryological development the embryo existed with a substantial vegetative soul, and then, with a substantial sensitive soul before it existed with a spiritual soul. While these lesser souls could be subsumed in the spiritual soul, they had their own positive reality.

These clarifications still leave us very far from the kind of dualism that has dominated so much of modern thought, and is now passing from the scene. Joseph Donceel in an article, "Immediate Animation and Delayed Hominization," gives several examples of this antidualistic trend in modern Catholic thought. Edward Schillebeeckz, for example, writes: "Man is not a closed interiority which afterwards, as in a second stage, would incarnate itself in the world through bodyliness. The human body as such belongs indissolubly to man's subjectivity. The human I is essentially in and with the things of the world. He is with himself, he is a person only when he is with other things, especially with other persons... The body does not refer to a soul which lies behind it, it is not asign of the spirit, but this interiority itself made visible." (2) And Karl Rahner asserts: " ... that which I experience as the bodyliness of a man is already the reality of the soul, extraposed in that mysterious something, which we know only from metaphysics, which the Scholastic, Thomistic philosopher calls prime matter. The body is already spirit, considered in that aspect of its self-realization in which the personal spirit gives itself away in order to encounter directly and tangibly that which is distinct from it. Hence corporeity is not something which is added to spirituality, but it is the concrete existence of the spirit itself in space and time." (3) These passages stand in rather strong contrast to some of the ways in which the body-soul relationship was expressed by earlier Catholic thought. Even the great 19th century dogmatic theologian, Matthias Scheeben, could write: "The material body, which in itself is a mass without unity, life, or movement, is held together in coherence, endowed with life, and moved by the spirit as the principle that unifies, animates, and moves. But by its union with matter the spirit forfeits Its purely spiritual independence to a certain extent, and even incurs a sort of slavery to matter. Matter prevents the spirit from beholding itself in its spiritual essence, and in general from enjoying the intuition of purely spiritual things. It forces the spirit to direct its spiritual activity to objects on hand within the realm of matter, to things of sense, yet does not thereby upset the independence and spirituality of this activity." (4) Just how, then, should we conceive the relationship between the body and the soul? The soul does not immediately grasp its own nature in knowledge and love. But this is not because its union with the body prevents it. Quite the contrary. The human soul is united to the body precisely so it can activate and develop itself. We could say that its passivity and potency allow and demand that it be united to the body. Virtual Presence Let's return to the question of virtual presence. When in the process of the development of the human embryo the vegetative soul is replaced with a sensitive one, and it, in turn, is replaced by a spiritual soul, the previous soul cannot remain as a substantial form, i.e., as the very principle by which the being exists and acts. But it can and does remain virtually. Its whole being remains though being is not a good word - but stripped of its former autonomy. It is taken up into a larger and deeper being, and it exists within that new being with the existence of that being. If substantial change in general can be looked at as a movement from one mode of being to another within the context of existence, then virtual presence means the subordination of existence and action of one being to another. Material natures, because of their fundamental potency to substantial existence, can be subsumed by other material beings and live a higher and deeper life in virtue of that subordination. Lower forms become

animated from within by higher forms because not only are both principles of existence, and driven to achieve their own natures, but they are also driven to surpass their own natures by subordinating themselves to other beings so that existence, itself, as it were, can be served in a higher way. Ultimately the existence that is to be served is that of the human soul. The universe exists in the simplest forms in the very beginning of time. This is not an accident, but an expression of the intrinsic nature of matter. Elementary particles serve atoms which, in turn, serve molecules, which serve living bodies, and so forth. But it is only in this way that the higher beings can exist, and thus we can say that the lower material beings exist for the higher ones, and the whole universe exists for the human soul, as St. Thomas indicated. Maritain's Diagram In 1952, Maritain gave the A.W. Mellon lectures in the fine arts at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., and strange as it may seem, he provided there a way for us to draw together many of the metaphysical themes we have been seeing in these last chapters. (5) His help comes in the form of reflections on the emanation from the human soul of its various powers. "As soon as the human soul exists, the powers with which it is naturally endowed also exist, of course, though with regard to their exercise, the nutritive powers come first... and then the sensitive powers, and then the intellective powers. But at the very instant of the creation of the soul, there is an order - with respect not to time but to nature -in the way in which they flow or emanate from the essence of the soul. At this point St. Thomas states that with respect to this order of natural priorities, the more perfect powers emanate before the others, and he goes on to say (here is the point in which I am interested) that in this ontological procession one power of faculty proceeds from the essence of the soulthrough the medium or instrumentality of another - which emanates beforehand. For the more perfect powers are the principle or raison dtre of others, both as being their end and as being their "active principle," or the efficacious source of their existence. Intelligence does not exist for the senses, but the senses, which are, as he put it, "a certain defective participation in intelligence," exist for intelligence. Hence it is that in the order of natural origin the senses exist, as it were, from the Intellect, in other words, proceed from the essence of the soul through the intellect. "Consequently, we must say that imagination proceeds or flows from the essence of the soul through the Intellect, and that the external senses proceed from the essence of the soul through imagination. For they exist in man to serve imagination, and through imagination, intelligence." (6) And he draws a diagram to illustrate this process of emanation.

We will return to this diagram in a moment. For now it suffices to see that the intellect gives birth to the imagination which, in turn, gives birth to the senses, and all this is quite the opposite of how we tend to imagine it, for we suppose that the imagination builds on the senses and, in turn, is the foundation for the intellect. This diagram actually illustrates the idea of virtual presence very well, and how the soul contains the body. When the vegetative soul is replaced by the sensitive soul which, in turn, is replaced by the spiritual soul, each succeeding soul is wider and deeper than what preceded. Each soul lives, as it were, within the next, not formally but virtually. We can, therefore, reformulate Maritain's diagram as follows:

We can see that the substantial unity of the human soul is preserved. Maritain indicated this when he said: "For the more perfect powers are the principle or raison d'tre of others, both as being their end and as being their "active principle," or the efficacious source of their existence." Some supplementary clarifications are necessary, as well. The lower powers as in Diagram 1, or the lower forms or souls, as indicated in Diagram 2 are, indeed, subordinated to the higher ones, but this deprivation of autonomy is compensated for by their existing in a higher way in virtue of their virtual presence in the higher form. The human imagination, for example, because of its animation from within by the intellect, has a different and more refined character than a purely animal imagination that is not animated in that way. The transformation of the lower power, or soul, is a transformation in root, or principle, but it is not yet an actually achieved transformation. This animation of the lower by the higher has as its ultimate purpose the activation and realization of the higher, which is precisely why it has subsumed the lower as the seed of its own realization. The human intellect, for example, is in potency, and needs the senses and imagination in order to actually know. There is, then, a certain symbiosis in the universe. The higher beings subsume the lower, and in the process transform them and lift them to a higher level of being while transforming themselves. The Spiritual Unconscious The phrase spiritual unconscious was coined by Maritain to express one of his major insights, an insight that grew out of the impact of the psychological discovery of the unconscious, and Maritain's own explorations of the nature of the creative process in art and poetry, as well as the subjective requirements of metaphysical insight. (I have explored in detail the genesis of this idea in Maritain's thought, and the primordial role it plays in it in Mysticism, Metaphysics and Maritain.) Just what this spiritual unconscious means is best expressed in Maritain's diagram that we have just been looking at. The original diagram was more complicated than our version of it and looked like this:

The bases of the cones represent where those cones enter into consciousness. We see a conscious world of concepts and reasoning, another of images, and a third of sensation. The vast volumes of the cones represent the unconscious. There is not only a Freudian unconscious of repressed material, but a spiritual unconscious - a modern equivalent to the center of the soul known by the medieval mystics and philosophers, but not formally reflected upon. If we redraw our adaptation of Maritain's diagram it will now took like this:

The volume of the largest outer cone, which represents the human soul, can be called the spiritual unconscious in a special way. The base of the cone is the conscious world of intellect and will, which is now seen to rest on a whole inner universe. But what has this to do with our search for the philosophical foundations to nonlocality, morphic resonance and synchronicity? That goal seems to have been lost under a relentless flow, however necessary, of Thomist philosophy. Yet, in actual fact, with this diagram we have begun to arrive at our goal. In virtue of our spiritual souls informing our bodies, in virtue of the spiritual unconscious which in some mysterious way informs our bodies and thus in some way the universe, we can be said to be united with the whole universe. It has given birth to us, and we have taken it into ourselves. The universe, in virtue of matter, is a communion of beings, and the human soul is the sea in which they swim. The Sympathy and Symphony of the Forms This last diagram illustrates the hierarchy of material beings and their interconnectedness. But action follows being. Therefore, there must be a hierarchy of action, and even, we could say, a hierarchy of the actions that lead to interconnectedness. Material beings have that special potency we are calling matter that is the root that allows their interconnectedness. They are, in a certain way, in potency to each other in their very being. Their characteristic action is on one hand their own perfection, and on the other,

substantial change, which is brought about by efficient causality. Substantial change can be looked at as how material beings communicate with each other. It is a communion of entitative beings. One thing literally becomes another and ceases to be what it was. One thing causes, or gives, being, or takes away being from another. In short, material beings physically interact with each other. They transmit and receive their very forms to and from each other by a literal information that we have come to know under the heading of virtual presence and substantial change. The human form shares in this kind of action and communion to a certain degree because it informs the body and literally takes possession of the previous forms, i.e., becomes the substantial form of that living organism. But the human form is also a spiritual being. It has that fundamental relationship and openness and receptivity to its own substantial existence that will never allow it to lose that existence. The literal information that is the way of communion among material forms is not suited to a spiritual being. The human soul, to the degree that it rises above matter, shares in another kind of information. Literal entitative information means that one material creature becomes another at the price of its own substantial form and existence. In this new way of information one being becomes another precisely as other without losing its own being. Therefore, this becoming, this new kind of existence, cannot be a question of entitative existence. Here we return to the esse intentionale, or intentional existence, that we saw Norris Clarke talking about in Chapter 10. This is the kind of existence that must be posited if genuine knowledge exists. The word knowledge has become so shopworn that it hides from us the fact that it is a kind of superexistence in which the knower becomes the thing known. When we know a stone or a tree, they are not entitatively present in our minds, yet if they were not somehow truly present in their very being, we would have no genuine knowledge of them whatsoever. "Another kind of existence must, then, be admitted; an existence according to which the known will be in the knower and the knower will be the known, an entirely tendential and immaterial existence, whose office is not to posit a thing outside nothingness for itself and as a subject, but, on the contrary, for another thing and as a relation. It is an existence that does not seal up the thing within the bounds of its nature, but sets it free from them." (7) We met another kind of intentional existence when Maritain described how the chisel of Michelangelo was directed by the virtue of his art which passed through it - not entitatively and directed its motion that led to the creation of the statue. There is nothing in the chisel as a physical object that can account for the beauty of the statue. A higher causality, "a causality superordered to it," moves through it, which is a certain intentional existence which, while it is not the esseintentionale of intellectual knowledge, is akin to it. Maritain writes: "We think it would be of great interest to philosophers to study the role that esse intentionale plays in the physical world itself, wherein there undoubtedly arises from such existing, that sort of universal animation whereby motion puts into bodies more than they are, and colours the whole of nature with a semblance of life and feeling undoubtedly derived from it." (8) In virtue of its informing power the human soul literally and entitatively informs the body, which is the finest and final fruit of the process of evolution. Thus, it informs and animates from within the elements, the molecules, and the vegetative and animal dimensions of the body. But the human form, precisely as a spiritual form, has an even more intimate way of

communing with material forms. It can know them. In virtue of its spiritual nature expressed in its agent or illuminating intellect, which is the very spiritual power of the soul, itself, the human spirit bathes material beings in a spiritual light and allows them to exist for it as objects to be known, to exist with an intentional and relational existence which allows it to know them as they are. There is, therefore, an information or communion, or sympathy of the forms in virtue of which the human soul literally informs material form. But there is a more powerful information in which the material forms become present to the soul in their intentional existence so that they can become truly one with it by being known by it. Both of these informations are driven by the same goal, which is the creation and activation of the human universe. These long metaphysical excursions that have occupied us in Part IV have brought us to the foundations of a Thomist view of the interconnectedness of the universe, and now we are faced with the challenge of returning to our three scientific themes to see if these tools which we have fashioned can help us penetrate into them more deeply, and whether these explorations, in turn, can help us refine our philosophical tools.

A final diagram will prepare us for an attempt to create a philosophical explanation of nonlocality, morphic resonance and synchronicity. The center of the circle represents the first moment of creation. Each circle of cones of the same size represents a distinct stage in the evolution of the universe. First comes the basic elements, then vegetative life, animal life, and finally, human beings.

If we limit our explanation of the universe to material and efficient causes, our explanation will be deficient. We will be compelled to try to explain the more complex and conscious stages of the universe by its more elementary ones. The end result will be a reductionism that cannot take account of all that is most distinctive about it. The stone is made the explanation of the cathedral. Biology and psychology are nothing but physics in disguise. The intricate order the universe manifests is caused by random mutations and the survival of the fittest. This kind of universe, far from being scientific, is a distortion of what is actually in front of our eyes. Posit formal and final causes and the whole picture changes. The universe from its very beginning is precisely a universe, and a human universe. It is of the nature of all material beings to be related to each other and to come together to create a whole. The higher beings emerge from the lower, who then become virtually present within them, but this emergence is of a more complex and conscious whole that cannot be fully explained in terms of the elements that make it up. The Mystery of Matter Part THE BEGINNING OF DIALOGUE Chapter 13: Nonlocality, Synchronicity and Formal Causality Morphic Resonance, V:

CHAPTER 13: NONLOCALITY, MORPHIC RESONANCE, SYNCHRONICITY AND FORMAL CAUSALITY

I am not going to try to frame scientific explanations about how nonlocality, morphic resonance and synchronicity might work. That is for the sciences to do. What I would like to do is to give some indication of how the philosophical notion of formal causality could shed light on the foundations of these ideas. First, though, it would be useful to look at where we have been. On a scientific side we saw how Bohm, Sheldrake and Jung, by pursuing their own disciplines, arrived at important philosophical questions and rediscovered the idea of formal causality. Indeed, we could say that they arrived at very similar scientific theories to account for the strange facts that confronted them. Bohm's quantum potential, Sheldrake's morphic resonance, and Jung's synchronicity all share a similar structure. They are not restricted by the normal laws of space, time and efficient causality, but act to bind things together in some more immediate or instantaneous fashion that is based on formal causality. On the philosophical side, we have tried to recover the notion of formal causality under its various aspects even though that meant tackling the difficult concept of matter. This whole process has been made much more difficult because of the historical situation that a Thomist philosophy of nature finds itself in. Up until the 1960s it was possible for Thomists to discuss their philosophy of nature as part of a living tradition, however inadequate these discussions may have sometimes been. A good example of this kind of discussion can be found in the 1963 conference at Notre Dame at which Norbert Luyten's paper, which we looked at in Chapter 9, was presented. Then for a variety of reasons many Thomists lost living contact

with their philosophy, and either abandoned it, or replaced it with history about it. It was as if the creative energy, that had animated someone like Maritain until the end of his life so that he was always applying Thomism in a living way to new fields, dried up. When Notre Dame, for example, held a conference called the "Philosophical Consequences of Quantum Theory: Reflections on Bell's Theorem" which was published in 1989, Thomism as a viable philosophical option or light in which to examine quantum theory was virtually absent. (1) If William Carlo had lived longer, perhaps this picture would have been less bleak. Carlo had a deep interest in science and his 1969 "Epistemological and Metaphysical Foundation of Albert Einstein" foreshadows many of the themes we have been developing by touching on physical reductionism versus biological emergence with a special look at embryology, and Bohm and microphysics. Perhaps had he lived he would have brought them together with his views on matter and helped breathe some life into a Thomist philosophy of nature. But a Thomist philosophy of nature has the resources to revive. The idea of formal causality, itself, is making a comeback. The theme of the 1995 meeting of the American Catholic Philosophical Association was "The Recovery of Form" and a recent paper by Terence Nichols, "Aquinas' Concept of Substantial Form and Modern Science" touches on many of the themes explored here, especially the idea of virtual presence which he calls subsidiarity. (2) But enough of this digression. Let's try to summarize our philosophical view of formal causality before going on to apply it to the work of Bohm, Sheldrake and Jung. Perhaps the easiest way to do this is to model the relationship between matter and form on that of essence to existence. What are the most fundamental things that can be said about the relationship of essence to existence? Essence cannot be a principle separate from existence. In this sense it does not exist of itself, or put in another way, it is nothing positive in terms of existence. Essence is a certain capacity or potency for existence. It contracts existence, as it were, so that this or that thing can exist. In this sense it can be said to have a positive reality inasmuch as it is the principle by which existence is contracted in this or that particular way, and without which there could not be this or that existent. Now what would happen if we took this model of the relationship between essence and existence and followed it in talking about the relationship between matter and form? Then we could say matter is not a principle separate from form. In this sense it does not exist of itself, but receives its existence through form. There is nothing positive in matter in terms of form. Matter is a certain capacity or potency for the substantial existence due a form in view of its perfectibility as a substance. It is this or that substantial potency for existence which is an intrinsic aspect of an existing form, a form that can be further perfected in the line of its substantial existence. In this sense we can say that matter is the capacity for existence of the already existing substance. It is this substantial potency for substantial existence of the existing substance that allows and demands that this substance express itself in multiplicity, quantitative dimensions, space, time and efficient causality. It is not matter as a separate principle that allows and demands this, but matter as an intrinsic aspect of the existing substance. Or put in another way, an existing substance which has in the heart of itself a potency to substantial existence must act in this way. In this sense matter is a very positive principle, just like essence is in the preceding model, but only as a potency or capacity to substantial form. But why is matter like that? Why multiplicity, quantitative dimensions, and all the rest? Why does a material being act in this fashion? It is because only by expressing itself in this way that it can receive existence, or better, receive more existence and be what it is meant to be, and overcome its limitations as far as existence is concerned. The mystery of matter is at once

a mystery of weakness and a magnificent overcoming of that weakness by the means of stunning strategies. The first strategy is what I have been calling literal information, the actual form of a material substance, and the interaction between material substances by means of efficient causality by which they alter each other's existence. Another aspect of this literal information is a virtual presence by which lower forms are taken up into a higher one. But there is another major strategy, as well, that of intentional information, or the communion of form with form by intentional presence or knowledge. And a third that forms a bridge between the first two. This is an intentional action, or Maritain's instrumental causality by which a form becomes intentionally present to a physical motion and guides it to its proper conclusion. Nonlocality If nonlocality turns out to be a scientific fact, how can we try to understand it from a philosophical point of view? When Bell hesitated to say nonlocality meant speeds higher than the speed of light, his instincts seemed sound. If we look for a solution in that direction, it is as if we are trying to uphold the old supremacy of efficient causality. Bohm's approach is more promising. Let's recall his example of the fish tank which has cameras mounted on two of its sides. If we make the issue how to coordinate the two-dimensional images that appear on our monitors, we are not looking deep enough. The fish that is swimming around is one substantial being; Bohm would say that in relationship to its images it inhabits a higher dimensional space. There is no need to create some elaborate mechanism in order that we can understand the relationship between the two images in terms of efficient causality. That would be like misconstruing the relationship between the body and the soul in the form of some kind of psycho-physical parallelism and then trying to figure out how to coordinate them. But then how does nonlocality manifest itself? Let's take the case of a particle that seems to know instantly what is happening to its distant partner. Bohm invokes the implicate order, that is, some higher dimensional connection between the two particles, and even though the notion of the implicate order as a philosophical idea leads to many difficulties, it points us in the right direction. There is a connection between the two particles not mediated by space, time and efficient causality. There is a more direct and immediate bond between them, a common background that connects them. As Bohm, himself, suggested, this has something to do with formal causality. Let's say that this common background is a higher dimensional formal order in relationship to the threedimensional world of efficient causality. A material being is manifest in space and time in virtue of its matter, that is, its potency to substantial existence, not in virtue of the fact that it is a substantial form. As a form we can say it has a higher dimension of being, as well. The form of a material being is the principle by which it exists. It thus partakes of existence's dynamic character, and shares in the inclination found in all created beings to complete themselves by means of intentional presence. Thus there is a certain immanent dimension to even a material form by which it has a relationship to the source of its existence and t other substantial forms, especially those that possess the same specific nature. Let's apply this to the nonlocal connection between the two particles and imagine that they both share the same substantial form. This is not particularly farfetched from a scientific perspective because in most of the experiments the particles have been intimately connected before they went off on their separate ways. But does it make any sense philosophically? Can two particles in different locations share the same substantial form? (We could, I think, work out an explanation based on the particles being two different substantial forms but sharing the

same nature, but this more radical case illustrates the nature of this higher dimensional formal order better.) At first glance a philosopher of nature would be inclined to deny that the same substantial form can manifest itself in two distinct locations and, indeed, this was the classical position. But Maritain held the opposite opinion which he expressed in a footnote in The Degrees of Knowledge: "The problem arises whether the substantial unity of a corporeal individual (for example, like a molecule of a gas, or a living organism) necessarily requires continuity in extension, as the ancients believed. In other words, cannot a substantial form inform a whole of discontinuous parts, whether contiguous (as blood plasma is contiguous to the walls of the blood vessels) or, on the atomic scale, separated by inter-atomic or intermolecular interstices (in the case that, contrary to the hypothesis of Gredt, these interstices would not themselves be informed by the substantial form of the individual whole). In my opinion, such a structural discontinuity is compatible with the substantial unity of the individual whole, and I think that, in that case, the Thomistic theory of individuation by materia signata quantitate is verified without special difficulty. The transcendental relation of matter to quantity would then mean, a transcendental relation to a constellation of positions." (3) Let's try to decipher what he is saying. In the case of the two particles, the substantial form would not inform the space between them, but just the particles in their separate locations. But if this is so, then this literal information is not propagated through space and time, but in some other fashion - our higher formal dimension, if you will. But to understand materia signata quantitate, or matter signed by quantity, as a way to shed light on a higher dimensional formal order is a much more difficult challenge. Far from a material substance being identified with its extension in three dimensions as a Cartesian world would have it, St. Thomas felt it was possible to distinguish between matter and the quantity by which it appeared in space and time. John of St. Thomas, a contemporary of Descartes, and one of the last great Thomists of that age, graphically expresses that distinction: "Substance has parts radically, in other words, it has the ability to receive such an arrangement and distinction of parts... substance without quantity does not have parts outside parts... As St. Thomas remarks (Com. on the Sent. ii. dist 3. q. 1. a. 1), to say that substance without quantity is indivisible does not mean that its parts are reduced to a point - point is the principle of quantity it means that substance without quantity totally lacks divisibility. Substance would no longer be capable of motion and it would not exist in a physical place, it would be in the universe as a part of it, not as a thing located in a place." (4) Using Bohm's language we could say that even a material substance that we encounter in the explicate order has an implicate dimension. A substantial unity could be said to exist in this implicate order, and yet express itself in two distinct physical locations. The two particles share a wholeness derived from this formal order. From an ontological point of view they are one thing. Therefore, what is done to one is immediately known or felt by the other. There is no communication between the two transmitted through space and time, and there is no need for it, for as I have just said, the two explicate particles share an implicate higher dimensional formal unity. The first foundation, then, of their union is their identical literal information. If we were to hold that the two particles are, in fact, two separate substantial beings of the same nature, then we could turn to intentional information to explain the knowledge they have of each other and to intentional action for a way in which they could influence each other's behavior. It might very well be some combination of these three kinds of formal causality that explains the

wholeness that is observed. Let's take the example of radioactive decay. I argued before that each atom that decayed had a cause for that decay. But how does the radioactive material know to decay at a certain rate, or put in another way, how do the individual atoms know when it is their turn to decay? Perhaps they all share a common morphic field or substantial form, or they share in a common field of intentional information which guides each atom by way of instrumental causality. The kind of picture that begins to emerge of the physical universe is that there is a deeper and richer background to the world of visible bodies. Bohm and Hiley have described it in their The Undivided Universe, and the notion of formal causality allows us to look at it from a philosophical point of view. Morphic Resonance As we move into the world of living beings the substantial forms we encounter are richer in being. Let's recall the diagram of the cones nested inside each other. As evolution advances virtual presence increases. Higher substantial forms grow stronger by building on lower forms. As they grow stronger they are more themselves, and the intensity of their literal information increases. At the level of literal information, the more they become themselves the less they become others. We could almost say that they have less potency or matter than elementary particles do. They have less malleability to be taken up into virtual presence complexes. But this reduction in potency at the level of literal information is more than offset by an increase in intentional information. The richer the substantial form the more it manifests itself to other beings by way of intentional presence. Let's take the example of a bee. Each individual bee has a certain entitative form which we initially confront in terms of its outer structure, but which is much richer than that, for it embraces the inner structure which is the principle by which a bee is a bee. The outer form can be represented by the base of the cone while the whole inner volume of the cone is this inner form. There is a within to the bee, an inner world or unconscious, that is much richer and more mysterious than we first realize. The world of the bee has an elaborate social structure, means of communication, and so forth, and to do justice to it we need to draw on the other aspects of formal causality. The question becomes whether the inner volume of the cone, the unconscious of the bee, is limited to that one bee or does it somehow embrace the whole hive? Is the inner form exclusively an entitative form or does it have a social dimension? In Sheldrake's language we could answer that morphic resonance is a direct expression of morphic fields and binds those fields together in wholes or communities. The being of the bee naturally gives rise to its characteristic kinds of action. The unconscious of the bee must in some way be a literal form, but it is a form that radiates or transmits on its own frequency and is present to other similar bee forms. The unconscious of the individual bee is at the same time the collective unconscious of the hive. It is this collective form or active field of information that allows the bees to coordinate their activities and act as a community. In the case of the two particles, they were bound together by a quantum potential, or formal unity, which did not have to inform the intervening space. Here the notion of a collective unconscious does not demand that each bee share the same physical structure or literal information. The inner structure of one bee is permeable to the inner structure of another by way of intentional information. It receives the form of the other and transmits its own. There is a nonphysical communion of form taking place that gives rise to the collective unconscious. The richer the inner structure of the individual, the richer its collective unconscious or communion with others. We need not restrict this intentional existence to the realm of knowledge, either. Forms received in this intentional way can influence the behavior of the

recipient by guiding its behavior. In this way intentional presence spills over into the world of efficient causality by means of intentional action or instrumental causality. Synchronicity Let's try to explore more thoroughly this mysterious world of formal causality by looking at Jung's synchronicity as expressed in the case of the woman and the scarab-like beetle. The woman, because of her rationalistic cast of mind, had reached a dead-end in her life. The psychic energy that animated her consciousness had drained away, leaving her no way to go forward. But where had this energy gone? Jung felt that the conscious and unconscious form one energetic system, and that psychic energy, in a way analogous to the energy that physics knows, could not be destroyed, and therefore must have fallen into the unconscious. This he could verify by observing the contents of the unconscious. Some of them had become activated. In this particular case the activation of the unconscious is what produced the dream of the scarab beetle. We need to look at how this process works in more detail. When the energy falls into the unconscious Jung says that it activates an archetype. Just what does that mean? An archetype is a certain aspect or dimension of the psyche. We could say, as its name implies, that an archetype is a form that exists in the unconscious, but we shouldn't imagine these forms to be floating about in the unconscious as if in some platonic heaven. It would be better to describe the archetypes as formal factors, or formal structural characteristics of the psyche. The psyche or soul is itself a form, or formal principle, with a definite structure, and it is this structure that is expressed in the various archetypes. Despite some of Jung's earlier statements, he felt that the archetypes as they exist in the unconscious, are not images, but the principles that give rise to images. Jung likens them to the axes or structural principles of crystals that gave rise to a myriad of concrete crystals, each with an analogous structure. The same archetype can give rise to countless images which vary due to the cultural conditioning of a person's imagination but which all express the same fundamental structure. Furthermore, these archetypes from an empirical point of view are not randomly scattered in the psyche, but are interconnected with each other and form one articulated whole. In any event, in the case we are examining, a particular archetype becomes activated and gives rise to the image of the scarab beetle. This is the same archetype which in ancient times gave rise to the rich symbolism of the Egyptian scarab beetle and the role it played in symbolizing rebirth. It is no accident that it would become activated now in the unconscious of this woman who desperately needs a new beginning. But what does it mean to say that the archetype has become activated? It means that it has increased its energy and power to capture and radiate images that express its core structure, and to create an appropriate emotional mood to go with those images. Or put in the language of formal causality, when the archetype receives psychic energy, its formal nature becomes intensified, and it begins to manifest itself by formal resonance. We can imagine this resonance radiating out from the archetype, and traveling through the woman's imagination, or deep repository of actual images drawn from her experiences, and as it travels it attracts those images that fit its frequency, or in other words, are expressive of its formal structure. These are the images, together with their attendant moods, that go to make up the dream that is propelled by that same energy into consciousness. Thus, the woman dreams of the scarab beetle, and is apparently moved by this dream, and goes and tells Jung

about it. It is Jung's task to help her understand that there is more to her than the ego alone. She is part of a greater self that embraces both ego and unconscious, and the dream provides him with a wonderful opportunity to try to get that message across because it is literally a message originating from that wider and deeper self. All this is easy enough to understand, but what about the scarab-like beetle that comes tapping at Jung's window as the woman is telling him the dream? Jung, as we saw, shied away from anything that smacked of magical causality, or even any kind of causality at all because he equated causality with efficient causality. We can certainly understand his feelings, especially since he was concerned about the scientific respectability of his psychology. Yet he realized that synchronicity came about from an activation of an archetype, and we saw how he instinctively went about rediscovering the notion of formal causality. Let's go out on a limb and try to complete that process by trying to come up with some kind of explanation of how the beetle arrives at Jung's window. What is Jung's collective unconscious? Taken as it exists in each of us it is the inner world of the archetypes. Each of us because we have a human psyche or soul or form has the same inner world with its various formal structures or archetypes. We are dealing here with a literal or entitative information by which each of us is constituted in existence by means of the human form. But this human form cannot be reduced to the ego, but is a much deeper and richer reality which Jung describes in terms of the collective unconscious, and Maritain in terms of the spiritual unconscious. Here we should recall again the diagram of the cones nested inside each other. The collective or spiritual unconscious in a very real way contains and permeates an animal or sensitive unconscious, as well as a vegetative and even an elemental or physical unconscious. The human unconscious can never be understood in isolation from these other dimensions. They gave birth to it and sustain it. Here we are close to Jung's ideas on the unus mundus. In a certain way I am an animal, as the old classical definition of man as a rational animal indicates, but in some way I am also a plant, and the elements, and the subnuclear particles, and a microcosm of the whole universe. The archetypes or formal structures that exist in my unconscious are not mere representations of realities that only exist outside of me, but they are in some very real way formal structures equivalent to the formal structures that constitute those beings independently existing outside the psyche. But there Is more to the collective unconscious than literal information. What of the intentional information we saw in the example of the bee? The human collective unconscious is collective because literal information gives rise to intentional information, especially at this high level of being. In Jung's language the psyche equals the highest intensity. Therefore, the activation of an archetype in an individual unconscious can also be seen as the transmission or resonance of this formal structure in the intentional order - what Maritain calls a "tendencyexistence whereby forms, other than their own, come upon things." (5) Using some poetic license we can imagine a formal structure or archetype sending out a wave on the frequency of its own nature. This formal wave, much like Bohm's quantum potential, or Sheldrake's morphic resonance, does not propagate through space and time by means of efficient causality. It moves through an implicate or formal order. Let's go back to our example. The archetype is activated in the woman and gives rise to this formal wave that transverses the imagination, clothing itself in images and affects, and then enters consciousness by way of the dream thus created. But if the wave moves in an implicate or formal order, then what is to prevent it from leaving the individual psyche and radiating out into the world at large and penetrating into other human psyches, or even non-human ones? If

the human unconscious permeates an animal unconscious, then an activation of an archetype in a human psyche could be the activation of the animal dimension of that psyche. Therefore, the wave that originates from the archetype and which gives rise to the scarab image could resonate with the unconscious of an actual beetle, a beetle, for example, that is flying in the vicinity of Jung's consulting room. This actual resonance, given off by the archetype, might have even more of a content than the scarab image alone. The activation of the archetype has the purpose of revivifying the life of the woman. It wants to bring her in contact with the psychic reality represented by the scarab beetle. What if this relational intention is somehow embodied in the resonance of the archetype? Then the message the beetle would receive would be one of the importance that it and the woman come together. This intentional presence of the form of the archetype to the beetle could overflow into action in which the form guides the motion of the beetle to the woman so that soon the beetle is tapping at Jung's window.

EPILOGUE: The Mystery of Matter

This has been a long and difficult journey. First we had to grasp something of the daring theories of Bohm, Sheldrake and Jung. And in doing so we found that each of them had rediscovered the fundamental idea of formal causality. Then we faced the even more difficult task of trying to understand matter and form in the philosophy of nature of Thomas Aquinas. And finally, we made some small faltering steps in applying these ideas to nonlocality, morphic resonance, and synchronicity. But the end of this journey is the beginning of another. Both science and a Thomist philosophy of nature are converging to give us another view of the universe. The old mechanistic view of a world in which innumerable separate objects occasionally interact is giving way to an ever deepening sense of the unity of the universe that has often been hidden from our view. The ultimate mystery of matter is the mystery of that unity. Whether it is Bohm talking about the quantum potential, or Sheldrake speaking of morphic fields and their resonance, or Jung pondering meaningful coincidences and acausal orderedness, or Thomas Aquinas on matter and form, we are faced with a much more cohesive and dynamic view of matter. The objects that fall under our senses are but the visible presences of much wider and deeper formal fields. To return to Maritain's diagram, we tend to see the universe as a series of independent and separate circles represented by the bottom of the cones, but what we do not see are the formal fields represented by the interior volume of those cones. Nor do we see the cones nestled inside each other, or radiating energy and becoming present to each other, or the place where those cones emerge from a common source. It is these interior spaces that we need to explore.