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The customary distinction between dispositional and categorical properties is critically examined, and replaced by one between dispositional and occurrent predication. The ontological ground of the latter distinction is explained using the framework of the four-category ontology. An account is sketched of the ontological status of laws of nature, and its similarities to and differences from D. M. Armstrong’s account are discussed, particularly the key role in the new account of the categorial distinction between substantial and non-substantial universals. A theory of natural powers is advanced and contrasted with the recent theories of C. B. Martin and George Molnar.

On the book’s view, there is one entity with primitive, unexplained causal-modal attributes: God, who has natural powers. The books explains God’s non-natural powers, and in so doing explains all modal status other than God’s possibility, which it treats reductively. This chapter compares the book’s account of secular modal status to some ‘explanationist’ rivals. It emerges that its main competition comes from explanations of states of affairs’ modal status by their intrinsic content. It argues against several versions of this which involve analyticity or kindred notions. It also considers the extent to which the book’s view involves brute necessities.

This chapter provides detailed information on scientist, Franz Anton Mesmer (1734–1815), who had an extreme aversion to demons and spirits. He clearly denounced exorcism and looked for healing powers in nature. He forms a trinity with John Brown and Samuel Hahnemann. The three are united by a common attribute that they created the only ideas system in the two-thousand-year history of medicine that arose primarily out of the expressiveness of the organism. John Brown learned about the effects of alcohol and opium, cold baths, and spices through his own experience, and made up his own theory based on those observations. Franz Anton Mesmer worked on magnets. All he knew about them was that they contained, and seemed to emit, invisible natural powers. He concluded that there is an “animal magnetism” and an “animal gravity” and the magnet can influence the organism. Mesmer traveled extensively, appearing as a magician who created wonderful effects with his magnets.

This chapter focuses on the exchange of social energy which creates society as a structure and a system within consciousness. Society creates itself by transforming natural power into social power in a social exchange which involves the adding of social purpose to natural power. Social power includes the power contained in legal relations which seek to determine the interaction of the willing and acting of members of society in order that their interactive willing and acting should serve the self-creating and socializing purposes of society.

This chapter examines the ‘principle’ of a machine within the context of invention. It first considers the patent jurisprudence concerning the ‘principle’ of a machine before turning to William Robinson's claim that ‘principle’ was ‘a term of two meanings’: as ‘a natural power or energy’ or as ‘the spirit of the invention’. It then explores when or how nature is ‘transformed’ or ‘applied’ by an artificial arrangement as to become invention, how an idea becomes ‘embodied’ in a material form without losing its immaterial form, and how structure and function articulate so as to generate the ‘mode of operation’ of a machine. It also discusses the invention as an idea of means and the extent to which this theory is represented in practice.