Nothing from nothing

Meaning

II.2.2 invokes the maxim that nothing is made from nothing in the discussion of returning effects to their beginnings. The immediate subject is Nature's working from an available receptive matter. The maxim prevents the search for a generative principle from becoming a demand that a finished body produce its cause without any prior subject. Because embodiment occurs through becoming earthly, the author infers a pre-existing subject immediately capable of that change, hidden within earth; this capacity does not say it is already an earthly body.

Its scope should not be inflated into an unqualified denial of divine creation. The surrounding argument distinguishes natural operations and their material conditions; it is not an independent treatise on what God can or cannot do. The phrase therefore supports continuity of subject and agency within Nature, while the author's objection to excessively long reversal supplies a further, practical limit on the inquiry.