This treatise attempts both to explain how the soul, as an incorporeal reality, is unaffected by the physical while at the same time not excluding the notion that it can undergo change in the moral and spiritual sense. The second part of the treatise introduces a completely different kind of impassibility, that of matter which is also incorporeal but in a way quite different from soul.
§1. How can we explain vice if the higher part of the soul is unchangeable?
§2. The theory of harmony does not provide an explanation. Virtue and vice are due to the exercise or failure to exercise reason.
§3. The physical manifestations of emotions are caused by the soul which remains unmoved.
§4. The case of the lower soul is similar. Emotions, etc. are not in the lower soul. The ‘affective’ faculty of soul is a kind of form but it is the matter in which the soul is present which is subject to affection, e.g. the faculty of growth does not itself grow. It is an activity rather than a movement.
§5. ‘Purification’ is turning away from images to what is above.
§6. Is matter subject to affections? The nature of true being. The more something becomes body the more it is subject to affections.
§7. Matter is incorporeal but unlike Intellect and Soul is unlimitedness and is true non-being. It remains unaffected.
§8. Affections destroy and replace each other, but matter is not destroyed.
§9. Different meanings of being present to or in, or being affected by something. Affection occurs to opposites by their opposites. The simple cannot be subject to affections.
§10. Matter is in itself unalterable.
§11. Matter remains unaffected, evil, and ugly even when form, goodness, and beauty are present to it.
§12. Plato teaches that matter is unaffected.
§13. Interpretation of various Platonic phrases including ‘matter flees’ and matter is ‘receptacle and nurse’. Forms in matter are like the images in an invisible mirror.
§14. Matter is a prerequisite for a visible universe. In reflecting form and being it ‘shares’ in it in a way, but without being in any way united with it, like reflections fleeting over a surface.
§15. Matter does not mix with what appears ‘in’ it, nor do they mix with it, like the things which are illuminated by the sun or the soul when entertaining mental images.
§16. Even size is projected onto it from outside and does not really belong to it.
§17. Matter is not magnitude, which is a form, but takes on only the appearance of size.
§18. Matter just because it is not in itself affected by form can receive and reflect all forms.
§19. Matter, like a mother, is only a passive receptacle of form. It is like the eunuchs of Cybele in its impotence, whereas the forms are generative like Hermes.