It’s definitions like that that make scholasticism a fit object of satire!
Try this: Question: WHY is that a ‘bat’? (as in baseball).
Efficient cause : the bat factory
Material cause: Aluminum or ash wood
Final cause: That we may play baseball
Formal cause: “By virtue of ‘batness’.” (which might include maximum and minimum lengths, widths, weight etc but would be more a matter of suitability for hitting one out of the park.)
The “batness” would be the ‘specific element’, while the aluminum or ash-wood would be the less determinate element.
You could have the exact same ‘stuff’ as is currently sitting at my confuser typing this dreck, but unless it is organized a certain way and animated by a certain sort of ‘soul’ it ain’t human. So the humanness of moi (albeit much debated by, say, my wife, sometimes) is ‘communicated’ to all the ‘stuff’, and here I am!
OK, that’s somewhat clearer! Thanks! (I have a feeling it’s not going to stick unless I come back to it again . . . and again and again . . . but that’s not your fault!)
So maybe my professor with the electric light example maybe should have said the "nature of electricity" instead of the "laws of electricity" (a kind of fine distinction, but a distinction, I think)?
Because a Yankee is swinging it.
Other than this suggested correction, that post was very helpful.