  Thomas Aquinas agrees with Albert on these matters. In his literal commentary on the Posterior Analytics (1269-72) he notes that mathematics bears on matter because of the nature of matter, which leads it to have mathematical accidents, dimensions, that is, accidents which can be abstracted from matter and considered on their own in the mathematical disciplines without relation to matter. It is only in the intellect, through abstraction, that they become separated from matter, and their presence in matter is due to the nature of matter, not to any sort of prior mathematical reality. But there is something here that is not in Albert, for Albert does not allow the possibility that the nature of a thing can cause it to have properties that are not part of its essence. He thinks that every accident in a thing is to be traced to another accident in the thing, or some accident of something outside which brings it about that the accident inheres, but that no accident, not even an attribute, that is, a proper accident necessarily belonging to that sort of thing, is caused in it by its essence. To Albert's mind, this would mean that the nature of a thing, considered in itself and not insofar as it is a particular in particular circumstances, would efficiently cause its attribute to inhere in it, and that smacks of Platonism, of the view that separated universals somehow play a causal role in the world. Thomas argues that a thing's nature efficiently causes its primary attribute, and that it does so necessarily and without exception. This means that the primary attribute is always a propensity or capacity, not an actual inherence of an occurrent quality, since, of course, the actual inherence of an occurrent quality depends on the right conditions being in place for the operation of the capacity to have that quality. Albert allows that such propensities are necessary in their subjects, and he agrees that they are not part of the subject's essence, so that they follow deductively from its nature, but he allows no sort of efficient causation any role in this process. Efficient causation of this sort is referred to in later Thomistic writers as “emanation”—so Cajetan in his commentary on the Summa Theologiae I, questions 54 and 77, and Suarez in his discussion of efficient causation in Metaphysical Disputation 18.3. But such efficient causation is an impossibility for Albert, for Albert takes it that all efficient causation connects actualities (an assumption he perhaps got from Averroes), and seems to take propensities and capacities as nothing more than descriptions how efficient causality works for one or another kind of thing.