The Human Question

What if at each level, form is contingent AND prime matter is not some pure underlying stuff, but rather the potency of any substance to become any other kind of substance? In such a case, wouldn't the third way avoid the fallacy of composition?  For one could apply it in a kind of orderly way to each m/f relation within any particular substance and arrive at a conclusion about the whole, doing so in a manner analogous to how the first way, rightly considered, has to do with per se movers, and the second way has to do with per se causes rather than per accidens...

Maybe the plant has a complex way of metabolizing (or is it a metabolic way of doing chemical changes?) Maybe the animal has a metabolic way of perceiving (or is it a perceptual way of metabolizing?) Maybe the human has a perceptive way of understanding (or is it an intelligent way of perceiving?) In other words, the formal achievement of the lower level becomes interwoved with the higher level achievement, so that one modality of action is the material of the higher mode of action.

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 la...