This objection, which we have often heard from men who should have known better, is wholly grounded on a false conception of the relation between the matter and the form of a primitive being. It is false, in fact, that the matter _supports_ the substantial form, and it is false that the substantial form exists in the matter as in a subject. The accidental act requires a _subject_ already existing; but the substantial act requires only a potential term to which it has to give the first existence. This is evident; because if the substantial act ought to be supported by a real subject, this real subject would be an actual substance before receiving the same substantial act; which is a contradiction in terms. And therefore the form is not _supported_ by the matter, but only _terminated_ to it; and the matter is not the _subject_ of the form, though it is so called by many, but is only the substantial _term_, to which the substantial form gives existence. “Properly speaking,” says S. Thomas, “that which is potential in regard to some accidental actuality is called _subject_. For the subject gives actuality to the accident, as the accident has no actuality except through its subject; and for this reason we say that accidents are in a subject, whereas _we do not say that the substantial form is in a subject_. ‘Matter,’ therefore, and ‘subject,’ differ in this: that ‘subject’ means something which does not receive its actuality by the accession of anything else, but exists by itself and possesses a complete actuality (as, for example, a white man does not receive his being from his whiteness). ‘Matter,’ on the contrary, means something which receives its actuality from that which is given to it; because matter has, of itself, only an incomplete being, or rather no being at all, as the Commentator says. Hence, to speak properly, the form gives existence to the matter; whereas the accident gives no existence to the subject, as it is the subject that gives existence to the accident. Yet ‘matter’ is sometimes confounded with ‘subject,’ and _vice versa_.”(6)