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An analogy between perception/intellection and matter/form

This thought is really a diamond in the rough... or perhaps zirconium in the trash.

One can think of matter as an inert, pure extension, as a kind of Ding an sich to be acted upon by either laws (a kind of materialism that is really a dualism, inasmuch as laws are not themselves material things) or by an immaterial principle (dualism, properly speaking, with matter as a reified prime matter)

Or one can think of matter as the proximate capacity of the concrete individual to exist and hence operate differently than it is now operating (i.e., proximate matter in hylomorphism)

Here comes the analogy with theories of intellection: to conceive of sensation as a purely inert substratum upon which intellection must work is either to invoke a psychological dualism in which the intellect is super active (as in innate ideas or forms of judgment or reminiscence) in ordering sensation or to suppose that intellection is really the sum of sensations, which sum can be understood to arise in a law-bound manner (think Hume and other theorists of perception)
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