But is the matter an element even in the
formula? We certainly describe in both ways what brazen circles are;
we describe both the matter by saying it is brass, and the form by
saying that it is such and such a figure; and figure is the
proximate genus in which it is placed. The brazen circle, then, has
its matter in its formula.
As for that out of which as matter they are produced, some
things are said, when they have been produced, to be not that but
'thaten'; e.g. the statue is not gold but golden. And a healthy man is
not said to be that from which he has come. The reason is that
though a thing comes both from its privation and from its
substratum, which we call its matter (e.g. what becomes healthy is
both a man and an invalid), it is said to come rather from its
privation (e.g. it is from an invalid rather than from a man that a
healthy subject is produced). And so the healthy subject is not said
to he an invalid, but to be a man, and the man is said to be
healthy. But as for the things whose privation is obscure and
nameless, e.g. in brass the privation of a particular shape or in
bricks and timber the privation of arrangement as a house, the thing
is thought to be produced from these materials, as in the former
case the healthy man is produced from an invalid. And so, as there
also a thing is not said to be that from which it comes, here the
statue is not said to be wood but is said by a verbal change to be
wooden, not brass but brazen, not gold but golden, and the house is
said to be not bricks but bricken (though we should not say without
qualification, if we looked at the matter carefully, even that a
statue is produced from wood or a house from bricks, because coming to
be implies change in that from which a thing comes to be, and not
permanence).
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