1. To the First Doubt

233. As to the first doubt [n.231]: what an action is, and by what it is, will be stated in question one of the following distinction [d.13 nn.18, 27-71]. But positing here briefly what I believe to be true, that action states a certain respect arriving from outside (whether in the agent or in the passive thing), and a respect that corresponds mutually to the respect of passive undergoing, then, since passive undergoings in diverse passive things are of different and diverse idea (just as are the forms received in them), the result is that the actions of them will accordingly be different.

234. This is confirmed specifically in the issue at hand, because a passive thing receptive of a form as to real being is not receptive of the same form as to intentional being, On the Soul 2.7.418b26-27 [12.424a17-b3]: “For what is receptive of sound must be without sound” - at any rate, what is regularly receptive of the form in the latter way is not receptive of the form in the other way, especially in the case of receptive or susceptive material things. Therefore, an organ [sc. object of intentional action] and a contrary subject [sc. object of real action] are not receptive of the form according to the same being, because the one receives it intentionally, the other really; and consequently, since an agent acts on a passive thing according to that thing’s receptive potency (according to On the Soul 2.414a11-12: “It seems that the acts of active things are in the passive and disposed thing”), it follows that an agent does not act on this passive thing and on that passive thing with an action of the same idea.

235. And then, as to the objection about an agent acting by choice [n.231a], I reply that an agent acting by choice can act in diverse ways, with a diversity not only of unlikeness but of contradiction - as it is able not only to do this and that but to do this and not to do that. Now a natural agent, which is unlimited simply or in some way according to active perfection, is able to act for disparate results but not for contradictory results, because each natural agent acts on matter disposed to it, and does so necessarily. Therefore, the inference ‘it does not act according to choice, therefore it does not effect diverse forms in diverse passive objects’ does not hold, but what follows is that ‘therefore it does not act indifferently, or it does not of itself effect the form that it is able to effect or not to effect in such a passive object’. An example from the sun (and it was touched on in Ord. I d.2 nn.349-350), which although it have a certain indeterminateness as to causing diverse effects in diverse passive objects, is yet not indeterminate as to the contradictories of acting or not acting, but it necessarily does in any passive object whatever it can do in it.

236. As to the second objection [n.231b], one must say that there can be many formally distinct actions of the same active principle, provided however that the active principle not be single one limited in active virtue, as a single form is. And thus, all the authorities of the Commentator [n.231], and of anyone else, must be expounded of a form single in virtue as it is single in being of nature.