Thomism

Time is treated as Substantival and One-dimensional — a measure of motion according to before and after that has its own reality once creation is given. Its Extent is Both: the created world had a beginning (Aquinas defends this on faith, not philosophical demonstration) and will have an eschatological consummation, while God's own eternity is neither inside nor outside time in the spatial sense but is the simultaneous whole possession of unlimited life (Boethius's 'totum simul'). Traversability is Linear and Direction Uni-directional, ordered from creation through Incarnation to Last Judgment. Freedom is Non-Deterministic: divine foreknowledge does not impose necessity on contingent creaturely acts, because God knows future contingents in the eternal present rather than as future to himself.

Space is Substantival, three-dimensional, Flat in its everyday Euclidean ordering, and Local in its causal structure — material substances occupy determinate places and act on what they touch. Its Extent is Both: the cosmos is finite as a created thing but the category of place is itself one of God's good creatures and not arbitrarily bounded. Aquinas distinguishes the natural place of bodies (in Aristotelian fashion) from the omnipresence of God, who is present to every place by essence, presence and power without being spatially extended. The angels, lacking bodies, are present 'definitively' to where they operate rather than circumscriptively, which preserves Locality for material creatures while allowing other modes of presence.

Matter is Substantival in the strict hylomorphic sense: prime matter (materia prima) is the pure potency for substantial form, and matter-form composites are the paradigm substances of the physical world. It is Finite, Three-dimensional and Local, conserved within the order of secondary causes that God sustains in being. Individuation of material substances is by matter signed by quantity (materia signata quantitate), which is why two angels of the same species are impossible but two human beings of the same species are not. This commitment blocks any reduction of matter to pure relation or to mere bundles of properties: bodies are irreducibly substantial unities, even when modern physics redescribes their internal structure.

For the Thomist the human observer is a hylomorphic composite — a rational soul that is the substantial form of a particular body — and knowing is therefore an embodied, active, but essentially mediated affair. There is nothing in the intellect that was not first in the senses (nihil in intellectu nisi prius in sensu); the active intellect abstracts intelligible species from phantasms drawn out of sensation, and the possible intellect is informed by them. Knowledge extent is therefore Mediated rather than Immediate: we know things through their forms, not by inspecting them directly as the angels do, and our knowledge of God in this life is analogical and indirect. Knowledge retainment is Total because the rational soul is naturally immortal, carrying its habits and acquired science into the separated state and the resurrection. Observers are Plural and share a common specific nature, which is what makes objective knowledge of a common world possible at all.

Thomism does not theorise modern physical energy as such, but reads physical activity through act and potency: every change is the actualisation of a potency by something already in act, and the divine 'actus purus' is the ultimate ground of all created acting. Energy is treated as a Finite and Substantival feature of the created order — real, creaturely, and limited — with Conservation Conserved because the natural laws expressing secondary causality reflect the rational stability of God's creative wisdom. Dispersibility is Irreversible: the order of nature exhibits genuine directional tendencies (generation, corruption, the running-down of motion) that are not merely apparent. Even miracle does not violate this order so much as add a further cause within it.

Information has Substantival ontological status because it is carried by the forms of things: a form is the intelligibility that makes a substance the kind of being it is, and the divine ideas in God's intellect are the eternal exemplars of every possible form. Conservation at the cosmic scale is straightforward: God knows all things in a single eternal act, so no truth is ever lost from the divine mind. Personal-identity information is likewise Conserved because the rational soul, being subsistent, survives bodily death with its acquired intellectual and moral habits intact. Granularity is Continuous because intelligible form is not built up from atomic bits but presented as a unified ratio that the intellect grasps as a whole.