It is for this reason, then, that we use this way of
speaking.
8
Since anything which is produced is produced by something (and
this I call the starting-point of the production), and from
something (and let this be taken to be not the privation but the
matter; for the meaning we attach to this has already been explained),
and since something is produced (and this is either a sphere or a
circle or whatever else it may chance to be), just as we do not make
the substratum (the brass), so we do not make the sphere, except
incidentally, because the brazen sphere is a sphere and we make the
forme. For to make a 'this' is to make a 'this' out of the
substratum in the full sense of the word. (I mean that to make the
brass round is not to make the round or the sphere, but something
else, i.e. to produce this form in something different from itself.
For if we make the form, we must make it out of something else; for
this was assumed. E.g. we make a brazen sphere; and that in the
sense that out of this, which is brass, we make this other, which is a
sphere.) If, then, we also make the substratum itself, clearly we
shall make it in the same way, and the processes of making will
regress to infinity. Obviously then the form also, or whatever we
ought to call the shape present in the sensible thing, is not
produced, nor is there any production of it, nor is the essence
produced; for this is that which is made to be in something else
either by art or by nature or by some faculty.
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