The
causes from which lucky results might happen are indeterminate; and so
luck is obscure to human calculation and is a cause by accident, but
in the unqualified sense a cause of nothing. It is good or bad luck
when the result is good or evil; and prosperity or misfortune when the
scale of the results is large.
Since nothing accidental is prior to the essential, neither are
accidental causes prior. If, then, luck or spontaneity is a cause of
the material universe, reason and nature are causes before it.
9
Some things are only actually, some potentially, some
potentially and actually, what they are, viz. in one case a particular
reality, in another, characterized by a particular quantity, or the
like. There is no movement apart from things; for change is always
according to the categories of being, and there is nothing common to
these and in no one category. But each of the categories belongs to
all its subjects in either of two ways (e.g. 'this-ness'-for one
kind of it is 'positive form', and the other is 'privation'; and as
regards quality one kind is 'white' and the other 'black', and as
regards quantity one kind is 'complete' and the other 'incomplete',
and as regards spatial movement one is 'upwards' and the other
'downwards', or one thing is 'light' and another 'heavy'); so that
there are as many kinds of movement and change as of being. There
being a distinction in each class of things between the potential
and the completely real, I call the actuality of the potential as
such, movement.
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