b. Action cannot be posited to be an Absolute Form contemporaneous with that in which it is

36. Action cannot be an absolute from, though a new form, or rather a form contemporaneous with that in which it is, for the two reasons given above [nn.28-29].The first is universal, that then it would be action and not action about anything that is acted on - which seems unacceptable and against the idea of ‘action’, for, according to the author of Six Principles ch.2 n.16, ‘action requires not what it may do but what it may act upon’.

37. The point seems also to be proved by reason, that action does not seem to be of the same single form when nothing is acted on and when something is acted on; for if, when nothing is acted on, the agent acts just as much as when it acts on nothing, then there is no greater reason why the action is done later rather than now; for something is not done unless an agent acts, and, according to you, it is acting now just as much as it is later when the thing is receiving being.

38. Hence, in brief, one does not seem to be understanding the idea of action when one posits it as thus absolute, because then it simply has no respect to a thing acted on or produced; indeed, there is not even action in divine reality without someone or something always receiving being through the action; nor does God always act by extrinsic action as much before the creation of the world as in the creation of the world.

39. Secondly, an argument is made by drawing a division as before [n.29], that if action is posited as being an absolute that is not contemporaneous with that in which it is, and therewith in the agent, it follows that no action ever begins to be or ceases to be save because the form that acts for the action begins to be or ceases to be; and then, as long as a hot thing is hot, the heating remains, and so, when a hot thing is impeded by a contrary, there is as much acting as when the hot thing is not impeded - and after the term of the action has been introduced into the thing acted upon, the action remains afterwards as much as before when it was introducing the term.

40. But to posit that action is an absolute form and contemporaneous with itself in the thing acted upon is altogether irrational, because the same action would still remain in the thing acted upon after the agent has been destroyed; also the same thing would undergo contrary actions if it can be acted on by contrary agents successively.