Grammar of motives, by Burke Kenneth 1897-1993

Author:Burke, Kenneth, 1897-1993. [Burke, Kenneth, 1897-1993.]
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Publisher: New York, Prentice-Hall, inc., 1945.
Published: 1945-03-03T04:00:00+00:00

less" would be all that was left to serve as the dialectical counterpart, or "ground," of a concept so comprehensive. No, that is not the only recourse here. Another was to use the macrocosm-microcosm pattern, considering universal motion as the ground of particular motions. The whole would thus be the ground of the parts; and the parts would synecdochically (by the omnia ubique formula) share the nature of the whole.

Another opportunity here has already been touched upon: the kind of ground one gets when considering "matter" as a "substrate" (hy-pokeimenon, the placed-beneath, or "subject"), possessing potentialities that may be variously actualized. Both members of the potentiality-actuality pair, it will be recalled, are tinged by the paradox of substance. Not only does God as pure act take the grammatical form of a passive (in being the object of desire). There is a similar reversal of voice implicit in the fact that matter (possessing, in Windel-band's phrase, "an impulse to be formed") is characterized as potency.

What passivity ever possessed more "active" a name ? In its passive role, matter undergoes the shaping activity of form. Yet it partially resists the efforts to shape it. A seed may either grow or rot; in this sense its potentialities are of an either-or sort. But a radish seed possesses solely the potentialities of a radish; and in this sense, its potentialities are foreordained, being related to its actualities as the implicit to the explicit.

The earlier notions of rationes seminales were constructed in accordance with the same proportion (implicit is to explicit as potential is to actual). Some mystics similarly viewed the world pantheistically as a development from a Deus implicitus to a Deus explicitus (nature being God explicit, or God made manifest).

Similarly Leibniz's monads were "possibilities" conceived after the analogy of seeds (and in accordance with a theory of "pre-formation" that thought of seeds as containing, in miniature involution, all the traits that would later evolve into the full-sized plant). Thus "the present is big with the future, the future might be read in the past." And before the soul has clear and distinct ideas, it possesses them "innately" and "virtually." Looking at this pattern in the light of modern psychology, we could rephrase it: "The unconscious is virtually (potentially) the conscious."

The pattern underlies the thinking of the early criminologist, Lorn-

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