scorned, and that, being permanent, it carries with it not only a mere faculty for action, but also that which is called ‘force’, ‘effort’, ‘conatus’, from which action itself must follow if nothing prevents it.  Faculty is only an attribute, or rather sometimes a mode; but force, when it is not an ingredient of substance itself (that is, force which is not primitive but derivative), is a quality, which is distinct and separable from substance.  I have shown also how one may suppose that the soul is a primitive force which is modified and varied by derivative forces or qualities, and exercised in actions.

88.  Now philosophers have troubled themselves exceedingly on the question of the origin of substantial forms.  For to say that the compound of form and matter is produced and that the form is only comproduced means nothing.  The common opinion was that forms were derived from the potency of matter, this being called Eduction.  That also meant in fact nothing, but it was explained in a sense by a comparison with shapes:  for that of a statue is produced only by removal of the superfluous marble.  This comparison might be valid if form consisted in a mere limitation, as in the case of shape.  Some have thought that forms were sent from heaven, and even created expressly, when bodies were produced.  Julius Scaliger hinted that it was possible that forms were rather derived from the active potency of the efficient cause (that is to say, either from that of God in the [171] case of Creation or from that of other forms in the case of generation), than from the passive potency of matter.  And that, in the case of generation, meant a return to traduction.  Daniel Sennert, a famous doctor and physicist at Wittenberg, cherished this opinion, particularly in relation to animate bodies which are multiplied through seed.  A certain Julius Caesar della Galla, an Italian living in the Low Countries, and a doctor of Groningen named Johan Freitag wrote with much vehemence in opposition to Sennert.  Johann Sperling, a professor at Wittenberg, made a defence of his master, and finally came into conflict with Johann Zeisold, a professor at Jena, who upheld the belief that the human soul is created.

89.  But traduction and eduction are equally inexplicable when it is a question of finding the origin of the soul.  It is not the same with accidental forms, since they are only modifications of the substance, and their origin may be explained by eduction, that is, by variation of limitations, in the same way as the origin of shapes.  But it is quite another matter when we are concerned with the origin of a substance, whose beginning and destruction are equally difficult to explain.  Sennert and Sperling did not venture to admit the subsistence and the indestructibility of the souls of beasts or of other primitive forms, although they allowed that they were indivisible and immaterial.  But the fact is that they confused