212 THE WORLD-ENERGY 



it to be already its own substance, and hence its own 

 material cause. So, also, allowing the material cause to 

 have reality apart from efficient cause, it must then be an 

 independent, self -realizing potency and therefore its own 

 efficient cause. 



Clearly, also, efficient cause could really be such only 

 by being completely consistent with itself, only by 

 embodying a perfect method. But the self-consistency of 

 its activity is the development into reality of cause in its 

 character of formal cause. Hence, while matter and form 

 mutually presuppose one another, their realized unity is 

 found in efficient cause, which is at once its own matter 

 or substance and its own form or method, as well as the 

 concrete potency which fuses these phases into a vital 

 unity at the same time that it brings them into perfect 

 realization. 



Evidently, then, these three "causes" are the abso- 

 lutely necessary, because complementary, phases of the 

 one true, vital cause. Each phase necessarily presupposes 

 or implies the others; and that not as external the one to 

 the other. On the contrary each is found to necessarily 

 involve the others within itself. Matter cannot be matter 

 without being also both form and efficient formative prin- 

 ciple. Form cannot even be form without being also the 

 vital energy constituting the matter which thus spontane- 

 ously unfolds into form, while the potency of efficient 

 cause, as just seen, cannot prove itself to be potency save 

 by unfolding as vital, self -forming (that is, self-differen- 

 tiating) matter. 



Thus we reach the conception of cause as absolutely 

 self -complete. As efficient, self -forming matter, it is an 

 absolutely self-dependent unit. Nothing beyond it is 



