Nevertheless, our actions are not free in the sense of being autonomous if we choose to act only on material principles, because in that case we do not give the law to ourselves, but instead we choose to allow nature in us (our desires) to determine the law for our actions.
In contrast to material principles, formal principles describe how one acts without making reference to any desires.
Right from his first acquaintance with Descartes's philosophy, therefore, More believed that, like him, Descartes supposed that explanations of physical phenomena in terms of material principles could only take us so far, and beyond that point it was necessary to acknowledge the role of incorporeal active principles.
In addition to thus criticizing the theoretical viability of the monistic material principles of the early Milesian cosmologists, Parmenides also is supposed to have criticized the Milesian union of the material and moving cause in their principles by arguing that motion and change are impossible and inadmissible conceptions (Guthrie 1965, 5 6, 52).
(5) Matter can be considered as an individual in relation to the universal, the latter being founded in its individual as in a material principle.
It is distinguished as a principle of actuality in a being from the material principle which is a principle of potentiality and change in corporeal beings.
Prakrti in Samkhya-Yoga: Material Principle, Religious Experience, Ethical Implications.
Jacobsen Knut A. Prakrti in Samkhya-Yoga: Material Principle, Religious Experience, Ethical Implications.
Either More is talking loosely, and means to imply there is some active immaterial principle involved in the transfer of motions in collisions, or he has not yet properly grasped how best to use such signs of sottish life in inanimate bodies to show the limits of Cartesian mechanism, and the need for separate (non-material) principles of activity in the world.
In other words, quantity disposes matter so as to enable it to function as the material principle of individuation.
