Problems and Solutions Concerning First Principles, Volume 1

in their antecedents A note in the margin of a manuscript reads: "Why are there no exemplars (ideas) of individual things?". For distinction has produced them also from the first. This is a perfectly absurd opinion. For the causal agents of individual things escape coagregation when these things will no longer exist or when they do not yet exist; and either there will be in the eternal something that is not always, or it will be useless there, since the caused things are not always. That is why we do not posit paradigms of individual things, so that we do not have to posit for them antecedent coagregations original: "Προσυναίρεσις.".

But do these generations not then issue from the antecedents according to a necessary pre-comprehension of the generated in the generating? Yes, but the things that make their own generations exist and project them from their own substance, these are the ones that have anticipated the coagregations of their generated things; but all those at least that, by their external energies, fashion original: "Πλάττει" the species outwardly, as in things made by the art of men, those have not anticipated their products. It is thus that the individual species are produced by the energies, tending toward exteriorization, of the causal agents in movement.

From where then does this sort of specification proceed? It is from the outside that it receives its plastic form. But where does this plastic form come from, if the agent that fashions it did not anticipate it? This specifying agent disposes the proper energies for this plastic work, and the anticipation original: "Πρόληψις." of the species takes place, not in the substances, but in the energies which each behave in a different manner. But these energies themselves, from where does this specificity come to them? The individual energies constantly at work are specified by the universal species anticipated. By them, they...