Sentences with phrase «intelligible nature of matter»

Not exact matches

Form provides the intelligible principle which can be grasped in universal abstractions, while matter indicates the principle of individuality, what makes natures this or that particular instance of a species or genus.

Cudworth, more clearly than any of his contemporaries, realized that if nature was in some sense a coherent and intelligible system, then it could not be explained in terms either of the random movements of matter in space such as Hobbes supposed or of arbitrary and incalculable acts of God and other supernatural and demonic agents.

In terms of the physical as «matter,» the biological entities could, however, not be fundamentally different in nature from their material constituents; that is, biological entities are intelligible purely in terms of their chemical constituents, which in turn are reducible to their «physical» constituents, which is to say that biological entities are basically intelligible in purely mechanistic terms.