This objection, which, in spite of its apparent strength, contains only an appeal to imagination instead of intellect, might be answered from S. Thomas in two different ways. The first answer is suggested by the following passage: “The phrase, _A thing is everywhere and in all times_, can be understood in two manners: First, as meaning that the thing possesses in its entity the reason of its extending to every place and to every time; and in this manner it is proper of God to be everywhere and for ever. Secondly, as meaning that the thing has nothing in itself by which it be determined to a certain place or time.”(7) According to this doctrine, a thing can be conceived to be everywhere, either by a positive intrinsic determination to fill all space, or by the absence of any determination implying a special relation to place. We might therefore admit that the elementary power is everywhere in this second manner; for although the matter of an element marks out a point in space, we have seen that its power, as such, has no determination by which it can be confined to a limited space. And yet nothing would oblige us to concede that the active power of an element, by its manner of being everywhere, “shares in God’s immensity”; for it is evident that an absence of determination has nothing common with a positive determination, and is not a share of it. The second answer is suggested by a passage in which the holy doctor inquires “whether to be everywhere be an attribute of God alone,” and in which he proposes to himself the objection that “universals are everywhere; so also the first matter, as existing in all bodies, is everywhere; and therefore something is everywhere besides God.” To which he very briefly replies: “Universals and the first matter are indeed everywhere, but they have not everywhere the same being.”(8) This answer can be applied to the active power of primitive elements with as much reason, to say the least, as it is to the first matter. The active power may therefore be admitted to be everywhere, not indeed like God, who is everywhere _formally_, and “has everywhere the same being,” but in a quite different manner—that is, by extending everywhere _virtually_, and by possessing everywhere a different degree of virtual being. We know, in fact, that this is the case, as the exertions of such a power become weaker and weaker in proportion as the object acted on is more and more distant from the centre of activity.