Conatus: THIRD EDITION by Tom Wallace - HTML preview

C O N A T U S

understanding, is a kind of magic ingredient that gives real existence to the world. In fact, this view of form could be a stand-in for substrate, if only science could cope with the magic! It also kind of relates to the notion that substrate might be an abstract thing, which I’ll discuss a bit further below, as well as later in the book.

We can reach an initial understanding of essence by a kind of intermediate step. There was, for the ancient Greeks, the idea of a ‘quintessence’ — a fifth element — that sat along with air, fire, earth and water. The quintessence was again a kind of magic ingredient that delivered to things their crucial grounding in the real world. But quintessence was not necessarily from a heavenly realm or an abstract world of perfect forms, or from God. Quintessence could be earth-bound. It was form in its mundane sense that allowed air, fire, earth and water to take on the properties of the various substances we know in the world. Quintessence delivered something else. An essential character, we could say. And often this involved some kind of moral aspect. The fifth element is sometimes now referred to as love, and also sometimes as the primary substance of the universe. (Somewhat confusingly perhaps, it is also associated with the ether that was once thought to fill in the otherwise empty space between particles.)

Does this help in the scientific quest for a substrate? Probably we are forced to say – not yet! Too much magic in quintessence, even without Heaven or God.

Let’s move on to consider two further meanings

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