The Grey Man
τὸ φῶς ἐν τῇ σκοτίᾳ φαίνει
The formal aspect of the key (its specific shape, including the contours of its teeth) and the force that turns the key are necessary, but disjunctively insufficient conditions of the key opening the lock. Analogously, the momentum of the light rays impinging upon one's retina and the shape of the impressions are necessary, but disjunctively insufficient conditions of subsequent cognitive processes identifying, e.g., a triangular object as the origin of the light rays. I don't think that anyone here will deny that light rays or the muscular irritations of their own arms have causal efficacy, but given that formal conditions are necessary to yield the specified effect in both cases, do forms or ideas also have causal efficacy?
Civilization was made possible on the banks of the Nile, Euphrates, and Tigris rivers by both human artifice and naturally occurring canalizations of water, both of which are due no less to spatial forms (the shape of the terrain and the corporal structure of its inhabitants) than to the material properties of water; but there are yet no grounds for concluding that space influences events in the same way as matter. It seems more reasonable to conclude that space plays an individuating role, allowing cognitive subjects to distinguish between objects, whereas matter is a manifestation of a timeless will or divine power, the objectification of the latter as the action of the forces or natural laws that bind the objects together as members of the same global community. But why individuation? Why will? God only knows. Schopenhauer, I think, rightly identified the identity of the subject of volition and that of cognition (the union of masculine irascibility and feminine wit) as the "world-knot," the non ultra of scientific discovery. 20th century quantum mechanics acquaint us with the possibility of an invisible 'seamy side' of the world which does not obey laws and which researchers represent by such ethereal mathematical constructions as the 'superposition of eigenstates,' but this occult Kantian 'thing in itself' is, ex hypothesi, inaccessible to human experience/observation and, eo ipso, to the analysis and synopsis a posteriori of physics.
Civilization was made possible on the banks of the Nile, Euphrates, and Tigris rivers by both human artifice and naturally occurring canalizations of water, both of which are due no less to spatial forms (the shape of the terrain and the corporal structure of its inhabitants) than to the material properties of water; but there are yet no grounds for concluding that space influences events in the same way as matter. It seems more reasonable to conclude that space plays an individuating role, allowing cognitive subjects to distinguish between objects, whereas matter is a manifestation of a timeless will or divine power, the objectification of the latter as the action of the forces or natural laws that bind the objects together as members of the same global community. But why individuation? Why will? God only knows. Schopenhauer, I think, rightly identified the identity of the subject of volition and that of cognition (the union of masculine irascibility and feminine wit) as the "world-knot," the non ultra of scientific discovery. 20th century quantum mechanics acquaint us with the possibility of an invisible 'seamy side' of the world which does not obey laws and which researchers represent by such ethereal mathematical constructions as the 'superposition of eigenstates,' but this occult Kantian 'thing in itself' is, ex hypothesi, inaccessible to human experience/observation and, eo ipso, to the analysis and synopsis a posteriori of physics.