PROPOSITION CXIII.

Evil, as such, has no proper and intrinsic formal cause.

THIS PROPOSITION is declared as follows. Since Evil is a privation in Being, it assumes the nature of a form; while it is quite plain that a privation is not constituted by any other intrinsic form. Nor is it even conceivable how it could be. But it sometimes happens that it is constituted by some remote and extrinsic form; which is the reason why the words proper and intrinsic have been inserted in the Enunciation of the Thesis. For the privation of one form not unfrequently follows upon the presence of another form in the Subject; not by virtue of any efficient causality, but simply by the formal causality of the latter. Thus, water is deprived of its form of coldness by the mere formal presence of heat. Hence, this natural Evil accrues to the water from the simple introduction of a new and opposite form.