This argument rests on very ultimate metaphysical conceptions. But not all scholastics will admit the assumptions it involves. How, for instance, does it appear that the created or finite substance as such cannot be _immediately_ operative? Even were it immediately operative its actions would still be accidents, and the distinction between Creator and creature would stand untouched. The operative power must be an accident because the action which actualizes it, the “_actus secundus_,” is an accident. But the _consequentia_ has not been proved, and it is not self-evident. On the theory of the real distinction, is not the operative power itself an _actual perfection_ of the substance, and therefore in some sort an actualization of the latter? And yet they are not in the same ultimate category, _in eodem genere supremo_. The nature which is the potential subject, perfected by the operative power, is a substance, while the operative power which perfects the substance by actualizing this potentiality is an accident. Of course there is not exactly the same correlation between substance and operative power as between the latter and action. But anyhow the action is in some true sense an actualization of the substance, at least through the medium of the power, unless we are prepared to break up the concrete unity of the agent by referring the action solely to the power of the agent, and isolating the substance of the latter as a sort of immutable core which merely “exists”: a mode of conceiving the matter, which looks very like the mistake of reifying abstract concepts. And if the action is in any true sense an actualization of the substance, we have, after all, a _potentia_ and _actus_ which are not in the same ultimate category.