D. To the Principal Positive Arguments while Maintaining the Fourth Way

87. He who wishes to maintain the fourth way [n.46] is able to reply to the principal reasons adduced for the first part [nn.6-14]:

To the first [n.6]: the power (or the one who has the power) uses the habit, because the habit is itself a certain inclination to action; not indeed as a power active for acting, but as a prior form inclines to a posterior form, as heaviness downwards.

88. To the four conditions [n.7]. One would say that pleasure [nn.7-8] is from the agreement of the operation with the power and with the object which the operation is about; this agreement is of the object with the power insofar as the power receives the action, not insofar as it elicits it, because mere making as making is never pleasure, and therefore one should, because of the pleasure, never posit the idea of active principle [n.49]. - Likewise, ease, absence of impediment, and promptitude [nn.7, 9-11] are set down under the idea of the passive, because the passive can receive with difficulty, and with impediment and slowly or not promptly, when it is not disposed, and by reason of the indisposition of the passive thing there is difficulty there and slowness. Therefore the agent can act without impediment and promptly and easily because of the disposition of the passive thing, and habit is such a disposition in the passive thing [nn.50-51]. When it is said, therefore, that ‘there is no easiness for undergoing because the passive is supremely disposed’ [n.9], I reply: by the abnegation of the contrary it is supremely disposed, but not through the positing of an agreeable disposition. An example about dry wood and neutral wood: wood that is neutral indeed is supremely disposed to heat by way of privation, through lack of any opposed disposition, - but it is not disposed positively by the positing of an agreeable disposition of the sort that dryness is; and if this agreement was accompanied by sense the dry wood would be heated with pleasure, but not so the neutral wood, because the received form does not similarly agree with it.

89. To the other, about inclination [n.12], one could say that it inclines as the prior form to the taking up of the later form, as heaviness inclines to be downwards (even according to those who say that heaviness with respect to downward descent is not an active principle [n.69]); nor need what thus passively inclines be the reason for receiving the form to which it inclines, just as neither is heaviness the receptive principle ‘where’ [nn.53, 46].

90. To the other, about science [n.13], I say that science, by which the soul is reduced from essential potency to accidental potency, is the intelligible species of the object itself, and about that I concede that it is the active principle with respect to consideration [nn.83, 75]. But the species is not the habit we are speaking of, which is a certain quality left behind from acts frequently elicited; for the species itself naturally precedes the first act elicited about the object which it concerns, and although this species could be rooted in the intellect and - once it has been rooted - could be called a habit, it is however not the habit which is generated from acts repeatedly elicited, as was said [n.90]. Therefore all the words that are spoken about the species as about a habit do not progress to the understanding of this question, nor either do those words that take science for this species (the distinction of these habits, namely of the habit which is the intelligible species and the habit of the intellective part properly speaking, will be plain in II d.3 p.2 q.3 n.15). Through the same point is clear the response to what is added about the being ‘by which’ [n.13]; I say that science, taking it strictly for the habit acquired from speculations, is not properly that by which we speculate but is a certain inclination for easily and pleasantly speculating; but that by which as by the active principle - on the part of the object - we speculate is the intelligible species.

91. To the other [n.14] one can say that the intellective habit - or the practical habit - can be called active or making because it is inclined to action; not that action belongs to it as to the active principle, but as terminating its inclination, - such that the action belongs either to the habituated power itself or to another power as to the active principle; just as choice ‘practically right’ is actively elicited by the will and not by prudence which, however, is the practical habit with respect to that choice (because it inclines to it), although it is not the active principle of it.