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of impression of the Agent on the Patient. Of these the first two are not worthy of consideration.[1] The last might be accepted if taken in the broad sense of transmutation of the Patient through the action of the Agent; it is in this sense that Aristotle uses it as an analogy to explain sense-perception, but the analogy is not an entirely adequate one.[2] As for emission from the Agent, Bacon considers this with some care,[3] but he finds it an impossible explanation. It is impossible, because such an emission from the Agent would involve the total destruction of the Agent. And it is no explanation, because it is the fiction of a third element to explain the production of the Effect—instead of retaining, as it should, the role of effect itself. Proceeding from what is universally granted, namely, that the Agent in contact with the Patient can alter the Patient, the question which this emission theory seeks to answer is this: How can the Agent be in contact with the depths of the Patient? And the common reply is: That there are two senses of “contact”; the one is contact by substance, the other is contact by virtue. There is of course no contact by substance, where the depths of the Patient are concerned. But the virtue-contact may serve as an explanation. For, they say, the virtue is given off from the Agent and infused into the depths of the Patient; and in this way the Agent is in real contact with the Patient, through its intermediary, the Species, which is thus instrumental in producing the Effect.

But, says Bacon,[4] while this might seem to explain the production of the Effect, it leaves the production of the Species itself unaccounted for.[5] In other words, it is open to the very objection which it seeks to explain, namely, action at a distance. In point of fact there is no such action. For it would require that the Agent affect the depths of the Patient through a third factor, its “virtue”; but the generation of this “virtutem-in-profundo” requires still a third factor, and that another, and so on ad infinitum.[6] The truth is, that the action is an immediate one throughout.[7]

Other than the above there is no conceivable way for the genesis

  1. ↑ See II—432, "Hoc enim ridiculum esset."
  2. ↑ See II—433, cf. 410, 510, 31, cf. Arst. De An. II, 12, 424a 19, de memor. I, 450a, 30. Arist. holds that in sense-perception the Form without the Matter is taken by the senses; cf. Baeumker: d. Arist. Lehre v. d. aeuss. u. inner Sinnesvermoeg. pp. 13ff. Bacon differs from Aristotle in this.
  3. ↑ See II—432, cf. 434, 435.
  4. ↑ Ibid. But Bacon himself employs the distinction between "per substantiam" and "per virtutem" (see II—446); but his "influentia per virtutem" differs from the crass emission theory, as we shall see.
  5. ↑ See II—435.
  6. ↑ An application of Aristotle's "third man argument."
  7. ↑ And in the sense that there is nothing between Agent and Patient. Thus, even in the case of the sun's action on things here below, while there is no immediate contact between substance of the sun and the earth, the Species makes immediate contact possible. For, the sun alters that part of its orbit in immediate contact with it, and that so altered alters the next, and that the next, until the change is thus "immediately" worked here below. Cf. II—436, 446 with C. N. 20, 24.
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