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Reply Obj. 2: Forms received into matter are to be referred, not to self-subsisting forms of the same type, as the Platonists held, but either to intelligible forms of the angelic intellect, from which they proceed by movement, or, still higher, to the types in the Divine intellect, by which the seeds of forms are implanted in created things, that they may be able to be brought by movement into act.
Reply Obj. 3: The heavenly bodies inform earthly ones by movement, not by emanation.
QUESTION 66
ON THE ORDER OF CREATION TOWARDS DISTINCTION (In Four Articles)
We must next consider the work of distinction; first, the ordering of creation towards distinction; secondly, the distinction itself. Under the first head there are four points of inquiry:
(1) Whether formlessness of created matter preceded in time its formation?
(2) Whether the matter of all corporeal things is the same?
(3) Whether the empyrean heaven was created contemporaneously with formless matter?
(4) Whether time was created simultaneously with it?
FIRST ARTICLE [I, Q. 66, Art. 1]
Objection 1: It would seem that formlessness of matter preceded in time its formation. For it is said (Gen. 1:2): "The earth was void and empty," or "invisible and shapeless," according to another version [*Septuagint]; by which is understood the formlessness of matter, as Augustine says (Confess. xii, 12). Therefore matter was formless until it received its form.
Obj. 2: Further, nature in its working imitates the working of God, as a secondary cause imitates a first cause. But in the working of nature