To
The Students
Past And Present
Of
Maynooth College

Preface.

It is hoped that the present volume will supply a want
that is really felt by students of philosophy in our universities—the
want of an English text-book on General
Metaphysics from the Scholastic standpoint. It is the
author’s intention to supplement his Science of Logic1 and
the present treatise on Ontology, by a volume on the
Theory of Knowledge. Hence no disquisitions on the
latter subject will be found in these pages: the Moderate
Realism of Aristotle and the Schoolmen is assumed
throughout.

In the domain of Ontology there are many scholastic
theories and discussions which are commonly regarded
by non-scholastic writers as possessing nowadays for the
student of philosophy an interest that is merely historical.
This mistaken notion is probably due to the fact that few
if any serious attempts have yet been made to transpose
these questions from their medieval setting into the
language and context of contemporary philosophy. Perhaps
not a single one of these problems is really and in substance
alien to present-day speculations. The author has
endeavoured, by his treatment of such characteristically
“medieval” discussions as those on Potentia and Actus,
Essence and Existence, Individuation, the Theory of
Distinctions, Substance and Accident, Nature and Person,
Logical and Real Relations, Efficient and Final Causes,
to show that the issues involved are in every instance as
fully and keenly debated—in an altered setting and a new
terminology—by recent and living philosophers of every
[pg viii]
school of thought as they were by St. Thomas and his
contemporaries in the golden age of medieval scholasticism.
And, as the purposes of a text-book demanded,
attention has been devoted to stating the problems clearly,
to showing the significance and bearings of discussions
and solutions, rather than to detailed analyses of arguments.
At the same time it is hoped that the treatment
is sufficiently full to be helpful even to advanced students
and to all who are interested in the “Metaphysics of the
Schools”. For the convenience of the reader the more
advanced portions are printed in smaller type.

The teaching of St. Thomas and the other great
Schoolmen of the Middle Ages forms the groundwork
of the book. This corpus of doctrine is scarcely yet
accessible outside its Latin sources. As typical of the
fuller scholastic text-books the excellent treatise of the
Spanish author, Urraburu,2 has been most frequently
consulted. Much assistance has also been derived from
Kleutgen’s Philosophie der Vorzeit,3 a monumental work
which ought to have been long since translated into
English. And finally, the excellent treatise in the
Louvain Cours de Philosophie, by the present Cardinal
Archbishop of Mechlin,4 has been consulted with profit
and largely followed in many places. The writer freely
and gratefully acknowledges his indebtedness to these and
other authors quoted and referred to in the course of the
present volume.

General Introduction.

I. Reason of Introductory Chapter.—It is desirable that
at some stage in the course of his investigations the student of
philosophy should be invited to take a brief general survey of
the work in which he is engaged. This purpose will be served
by a chapter on the general aim and scope of philosophy, its distinctive
characteristics as compared with other lines of human
thought, and its relations to these latter. Such considerations
will at the same time help to define Ontology, thus introducing
the reader to the subject-matter of the present volume.

II. Philosophy: the Name and the Thing.—In the fifth
book of Cicero’s Tusculan Disputations we read that the terms
philosophus and philosophia were first employed by Pythagoras
who flourished in the sixth century before Christ, that this ancient
sage was modest enough to call himself not a “wise man” but a
“lover of wisdom” (φίλος, σοφία), and his calling not a profession
of wisdom but a search for wisdom. However, despite the
disclaimer, the term philosophy soon came to signify wisdom
simply, meaning by this the highest and most precious kind of
knowledge.

Now human knowledge has for its object everything that
falls in any way within human experience. It has extensively a
great variety in its subject-matter, and intensively a great variety
in its degrees of depth and clearness and perfection. Individual
facts of the past, communicated by human testimony, form the
raw materials of historical knowledge. Then there are all the
individual things and events that fall within one’s own personal
experience. Moreover, by the study of human language (or
languages), of works of the human mind and products of human
genius and skill, we gain a knowledge of literature, and of the
arts—the fine arts and the mechanical arts. But not merely do
we use our senses and memory thus to accumulate an unassorted
stock of informations about isolated facts: a miscellaneous mass
of mental furniture which constitutes the bulk of human knowledge
[pg 002]
in its least developed form—cognitio vulgaris, the knowledge
of the comparatively uneducated and unreflecting classes of mankind.
We also use our reasoning faculty to reflect, compare,
classify these informations, to interpret them, to reason about
them, to infer from them general truths that embrace individual
things and events beyond our personal experience; we try to
explain them by seeking out their reasons and causes. This
mental activity gradually converts our knowledge into scientific
knowledge, and thus gives rise to those great groups of systematized
truths called the sciences: as, for example, the physical
and mathematical sciences, the elements of which usually form
part of our early education. These sciences teach us a great
deal about ourselves and the universe in which we live. There is
no need to dwell on the precious services conferred upon mankind
by discoveries due to the progress of the various special
sciences: mathematics as applied to engineering of all sorts;
astronomy; the physical sciences of light, heat, sound, electricity,
magnetism, etc.; chemistry in all its branches; physiology and
anatomy as applied in medicine and surgery. All these undoubtedly
contribute much to man’s bodily well-being. But
man has a mind as well as a body, and he is moreover a social
being: there are, therefore, other special sciences—“human” as
distinct from “physical” sciences—in which man himself is
studied in his mental activities and social relations with his
fellow-men: the sciences of social and political economy, constitutional
and civil law, government, statesmanship, etc. Furthermore,
man is a moral being, recognizing distinctions of good and
bad, right and wrong, pleasure and happiness, duty and responsibility,
in his own conduct; and finally he is a religious being,
face to face with the fact that men universally entertain views,
beliefs, convictions of some sort or other, regarding man’s subjection
to, and dependence on, some higher power or powers
dwelling somehow or somewhere within or above the whole
universe of his direct and immediate experience: there are therefore
also sciences which deal with these domains, morality and
religion. Here, however, the domains are so extensive, and the
problems raised by their phenomena are of such far-reaching
importance, that the sciences which deal with them can hardly be
called special sciences, but rather constituent portions of the one
wider and deeper general science which is what men commonly
understand nowadays by philosophy.

[pg 003]

The distinction between the special sciences on the one hand
and philosophy, the general science, on the other, will help us to
realize more clearly the nature and scope of the latter. The
special sciences are concerned with discovering the proximate
reasons and causes of this, that, and the other definite department
in the whole universe of our experience. The subject-matter of
some of them is totally different from that of others: physiology
studies the functions of living organisms; geology studies the
formation of the earth’s crust. Or if two or more of them investigate
the same subject-matter they do so from different standpoints,
as when the zoologist and the physiologist study the
same type or specimen in the animal kingdom. But the common
feature of all is this, that each seeks only the reasons, causes, and
laws which give a proximate and partial explanation of the facts
which it investigates, leaving untouched and unsolved a number
of deeper and wider questions which may be raised about the
whence and whither and why, not only of the facts themselves,
but of the reasons, causes and laws assigned by the particular
science in explanation of these facts.

Now it is those deeper and wider questions, which can be
answered only by the discovery of the more remote and ultimate
reasons and causes of things, that philosophy undertakes to investigate,
and—as far as lies within man’s power—to answer.
No one has ever disputed the supreme importance of such inquiries
into the ultimate reasons and causes of things—into such
questions as these, for instance: What is the nature of man himself?
Has he in him a principle of life which is spiritual and
immortal? What was his first origin on the earth? Whence
did he come? Has his existence any purpose, and if so, what?
Whither does he tend? What is his destiny? Why does he
distinguish between a right and a wrong in human conduct?
What is the ultimate reason or ground of this distinction? Why
have men generally some form or other of religion? Why do
men generally believe in God? Is there really a God? What
is the origin of the whole universe of man’s experience? Of life
in all its manifestations? Has the universe any intelligible or
intelligent purpose, and if so, what? Can the human mind give
a certain answer to any of these or similar questions? What
about the nature and value of human knowledge itself? What is
its scope and what are its limitations? And since vast multitudes
of men believe that the human race has been specially
[pg 004]
enlightened by God Himself, by Divine Revelation, to know for
certain what man’s destiny is, and is specially aided by God
Himself, by Divine Grace, to work out this destiny—the question
immediately arises: What are the real relations between reason
alone on the one hand and reason enlightened by such Revelation
on the other, in other words between natural knowledge and
supernatural faith?

Now it will be admitted that the special sciences take us
some distance along the road towards an answer to such questions,
inasmuch as the truths established by these sciences, and even
the wider hypotheses conceived though not strictly verified in
them, furnish us with most valuable data in our investigation of
those questions. Similarly the alleged fact of a Divine Revelation
cannot be ignored by any man desirous of using all the data
available as helps towards their solution. The Revelation embodied
in Christianity claims not merely to enlighten us in regard
to many ultimate questions which mankind would be able to
answer without its assistance, but also to tell us about our destiny
some truths of supreme import, which of ourselves we should
never have been able to discover. It is obvious, then, that
whether a man has been brought up from his infancy to believe
in the Christian Revelation or not, his whole outlook on life will
be determined very largely by his belief or disbelief in its authenticity
and its contents. Similarly, if he be a Confucian, or a
Buddhist, or a Mohammedan, his outlook will be in part determined
by what he believes of their teachings. Man’s conduct
in life has undoubtedly many determining influences, but it will
hardly be denied that among them the predominant influence is
exerted by the views that he holds, the things he believes to be
true, concerning his own origin, nature and destiny, as well as the
origin, nature and destiny of the universe in which he finds himself.
The Germans have an expressive term for that which, in
the absence of a more appropriate term, we may translate as a
man’s world-outlook; they call it his Weltanschauung. Now this
world-outlook is formed by each individual for himself from his
interpretation of his experience as a whole. It is not unusual to
call this world-outlook a man’s philosophy of life. If we use the
term philosophy in this wide sense it obviously includes whatever
light a man may gather from the special sciences, and whatever
light he may gather from a divinely revealed religion if he believes
in such, as well as the light his own reason may shed upon a
[pg 005]
special and direct study of those ultimate questions themselves,
to which we have just referred. But we mention this wide sense
of the term philosophy merely to put it aside; and to state that
we use the term in the sense more commonly accepted nowadays,
the sense in which it is understood to be distinct from the special
sciences on the one side and from supernatural theology or the
systematic study of divinely revealed religion on the other.
Philosophy is distinct from the special sciences because while the
latter seek the proximate, the former seeks the ultimate grounds,
reasons and causes of all the facts of human experience. Philosophy
is distinct from supernatural theology because while the
former uses the unaided power of human reason to study the ultimate
questions raised by human experience, the latter uses reason
enlightened by Divine Revelation to study the contents of this
Revelation in all their bearings on man’s life and destiny.

Hence we arrive at this simple and widely accepted definition
of philosophy: the science of all things through their ultimate
reasons and causes as discovered by the unaided light of human
reason.5 The first part of this definition marks off philosophy
from the special sciences, the second part marks it off from supernatural
theology.

The history of philosophical investigation yields no one
universally received conception of what philosophy is, nor
would the definition given above be unreservedly accepted.
Windelband, in his History of Philosophy8 instances the following
predominant conceptions of philosophy according to the chronological
order in which they prevailed: (a) the systematic investigation
of the problems raised by man and the universe (early
Grecian philosophy: absence of differentiation of philosophy
from the special sciences); (b) the practical art of human conduct,
based on rational speculation (later Grecian philosophy: distrust
in the value of knowledge, and emphasis on practical guidance
of conduct); (c) the helper and handmaid of the Science of Revealed
Truth, i.e. supernatural theology, in the solution of
ultimate problems (the Christian philosophy of the Fathers of the
Church and of the Medieval Schools down to the sixteenth century:
universal recognition of the value of the Christian Revelation
as an aid to rational investigation); (d) a purely rational
investigation of those problems, going beyond the investigations
of the special sciences, and either abstracting from, or denying
the value of, any light or aid from Revelation (differentiation of
the domains of science, philosophy and theology; modern philosophies
from the sixteenth to the nineteenth century; excessive
individualism and rationalism of these as unnaturally divorced
from recognition of, and belief in, Divine Revelation, and unduly
isolated from the progressing positive sciences); (e) a critical
analysis of the significance and scope and limitations of human
knowledge itself (recent philosophies, mainly concerned with
theories of knowledge and speculations on the nature of the
cognitive process and the reliability of its products).

These various conceptions are interesting and suggestive;
much might be said about them, but not to any useful purpose
in a brief introductory chapter. Let us rather, adopting the
definition already set forth, try next to map out into its leading
departments the whole philosophical domain.

III. Divisions of Philosophy: Speculative and Practical
[pg 008]
Philosophy.—The general problem of classifying all the
sciences built up by human thought is a logical problem of no
little complexity when one tries to work it out in detail. We
refer to this general problem only to mention a widely accepted
principle on which it is usually approached, and because the
division of philosophy itself is a section of the general problem.
The principle in question is that sciences may be distinguished
indeed by partial or total diversity of subject-matter, but that
such diversity is not essential, that diversity of standpoint is
necessary and sufficient to constitute distinct sciences even when
these deal with one and the same subject-matter. Now applying
this principle to philosophy we see firstly that it has the same
subject-matter as all the special sciences taken collectively, but
that it is distinct from all of them inasmuch as it studies their
data not from the standpoint of the proximate causes, but from
the higher standpoint of the ultimate causes of these data. And
we see secondly that philosophy, having this one higher standpoint
throughout all its departments, is one science; that its
divisions are only material divisions; that there is not a plurality
of philosophies as there is a plurality of sciences, though there is
a plurality of departments in philosophy.9 Let us now see what
these departments are.

If we ask why people seek knowledge at all, in any department,
we shall detect two main impelling motives. The first of
these is simply the desire to know: trahimur omnes cupiditate
sciendi. The natural feeling of wonder, astonishment, “admiratio,”
which accompanies our perception of things and events, prompts
us to seek their causes, to discover the reasons which will make
them intelligible to us and enable us to understand them. But
while the possession of knowledge for its own sake is thus a
motive of research it is not the only motive. We seek knowledge
in order to use it for the guidance of our conduct in life,
for the orientation of our activities, for the improvement of our
condition; knowing that knowledge is power, we seek it in order
to make it minister to our needs. Now in the degree in which
it fulfils such ulterior purposes, or is sought for these purposes,
[pg 009]
knowledge may be described as practical; in the degree in which
it serves no ulterior end, or is sought for no ulterior end, other
than that of perfecting our minds, it may be described as speculative.
Of course this latter purpose is in itself a highly practical
purpose; nor indeed is there any knowledge, however speculative,
but has, or at least is capable of having, some influence or bearing
on the actual tenor and conduct of our lives; and in this
sense all knowledge is practical. Still we can distinguish broadly
between knowledge which has no direct, immediate bearing on
our acts, and knowledge that has.10 Hence the possibility of
distinguishing between two great domains of philosophical knowledge—Theoretical
or Speculative Philosophy, and Practical
Philosophy. There are, in fact, two great domains into which
the data of all human experience may be divided; and for each
distinct domain submitted to philosophical investigation there
will be a distinct department of philosophy. A first domain is
the order realized in the universe independently of man; a second
is the order which man himself realizes: things, therefore, and
acts. The order of the external universe, the order of nature as
it is called, exists independently of us: we merely study it
(speculari, θεωρέω), we do not create it. The other or practical
order is established by our acts of intelligence and will, and by
our bodily action on external things under the direction of those
faculties in the arts. Hence we have a speculative or theoretical
philosophy and a practical philosophy.11

[pg 010]

IV. Departments of Practical Philosophy: Logic,
Ethics and Esthetics.—In the domain of human activities, to
the right regulation of which practical philosophy is directed, we
may distinguish two departments of mental activity, namely intellectual
and volitional, and besides these the whole department
of external, executive or bodily activity. In general the right
regulation of acts may be said to consist in directing them to the
realization of some ideal; for all cognitive acts this ideal is the
true, for all appetitive or volitional acts it is the good, while for
all external operations it may be either the beautiful or the useful—the
respective objects of the fine arts and the mechanical arts
or crafts.

Logic, as a practical science, studies the mental acts and processes
involved in discovering and proving truths and systematizing
these into sciences, with a view to directing these acts and
processes aright in the accomplishment of this complex task.
Hence it has for its subject-matter, in a certain sense, all the
data of human experience, or whatever can be an object of human
thought. But it studies these data not directly or in themselves
or for their own sake, but only in so far as our acts of reason, which
form its direct object, are brought to bear upon them. In all the
other sciences we employ thought to study the various objects of
thought as things, events, realities; and hence these may be
called “real” sciences, scientiae reales; while in Logic we study
thought itself, and even here not speculatively for its own sake
or as a reality (as we study it for instance in Psychology), but
practically, as a process capable of being directed towards the
discovery and proof of truth; and hence in contradistinction
to the other sciences as “real,” we call Logic the “rational”
science, scientia rationalis. Scholastic philosophers express this
distinction by saying that while Speculative Philosophy studies
real being (Ens Reale), or the objects of direct thought (objecta
primae intentionis mentis), Logic studies the being which is the
product of thought (Ens Rationis), or objects of reflex thought
(objecta secundae intentionis mentis).12 The mental processes involved
in the attainment of scientific truth are conception, judgment
and inference; moreover these processes have to be exercised
methodically by the combined application of analysis and synthesis,
[pg 011]
or induction and deduction, to the various domains of
human experience. All these processes, therefore, and the methods
of their application, constitute the proper subject-matter of Logic.
It has been more or less a matter of debate since the days of
Aristotle whether Logic should be regarded as a department of
philosophical science proper, or rather as a preparatory discipline,
an instrument or organon of reasoning—as the collection of Aristotle’s
own logical treatises was called,—and so as a vestibule or
introduction to philosophy. And there is a similar difference of
opinion as to whether or not it is advisable to set down Logic
as the first department to be studied in the philosophical curriculum.
Such doubts arise from differences of view as to the
questions to be investigated in Logic, and the point to which such
investigations should be carried therein. It is possible to distinguish
between a more elementary treatment of thought-processes
with the avowedly practical aim of setting forth canons of inference
and method which would help and train the mind to reason
and investigate correctly; and a more philosophical treatment
of those processes with the speculative aim of determining their
ultimate significance and validity as factors of knowledge, as
attaining to truth, as productive of science and certitude. It is
only the former field of investigation that is usually accorded to
Logic nowadays; and thus understood Logic ought to come first
in the curriculum as a preparatory training for philosophical
studies, accompanied, however, by certain elementary truths from
Psychology regarding the nature and functions of the human
mind. The other domain of deeper and more speculative investigation
was formerly explored in what was regarded as a
second portion of logical science, under the title of “Critical”
Logic—Logica Critica. In modern times this is regarded as a
distinct department of Speculative Philosophy, under the various
titles of Epistemology, Criteriology, or the Theory of Knowledge.

Ethics or Moral Philosophy (ἤθος, mos, mores, morals, conduct)
is that department of practical philosophy which has for its
subject-matter all human acts, i.e. all acts elicited or commanded
by the will of man considered as a free, rational and responsible
agent. And it studies human conduct with the practical purpose
of discovering the ultimate end or object of this conduct, and the
principles whereby it must be regulated in order to attain to this
end. Ethics must therefore analyse and account for the distinction
of right and wrong or good and bad in human conduct, for
[pg 012]
its feature of morality. It must examine the motives that
influence conduct: pleasure, well-being, happiness, duty, obligation,
moral law, etc. The supreme determining factor in all
such considerations will obviously be the ultimate end of man,
whatever this may be: his destiny as revealed by a study of his
nature and place in the universe. Now the nature of man is
studied in Psychology, as are also the nature, conditions and
effects of his free acts, and the facilities, dispositions and forms
of character consequent on these. Furthermore, not only from
the study of man in Psychology, but from the study of the
external universe in Cosmology, we amass data from which in
Natural Theology we establish the existence of a Supreme Being.
We then prove in Ethics that the last end of man, his highest
perfection, consists in knowing, loving, serving, and thus glorifying
God, both in this life and in the next. Hence we can see
how these branches of speculative philosophy subserve the
practical science of morals. And since a man’s interpretation of
the moral distinctions—as of right or wrong, meritorious or blameworthy,
autonomous or of obligation—which he recognizes as
pertaining to his own actions—since his interpretation of these
distinctions is so intimately bound up with his religious outlook
and beliefs, it is at once apparent that the science of Ethics will
be largely influenced and determined by the system of speculative
philosophy which inspires it, whether this be Theism, Monism,
Agnosticism, etc. No doubt the science of Ethics must take as
its data all sorts of moral beliefs, customs and practices prevalent
at any time among men; but it is not a speculative science
which would merely aim at a posteriori inferences or inductive
generalizations from these data; it is a practical, normative science
which aims at discovering the truth as to what is the right and
the wrong in human conduct, and at pointing out the right
application of the principles arising out of this truth. Hence it
is of supreme importance for the philosopher of morals to determine
whether the human race has really been vouchsafed a
Divine Revelation, and, convincing himself that Christianity
contains such a revelation, to recognize the possibility of supplementing
and perfecting what his own natural reason can discover
by what the Christian religion teaches about the end of man as
the supreme determining principle of human conduct. Not that
he is to take the revealed truths of Christianity as principles of
moral philosophy; for these are the principles of the supernatural
[pg 013]
Christian Theology of human morals; but that as a Christian
philosopher, i.e. a philosopher who recognizes the truth of the
Christian Revelation, he should reason out philosophically a
science of Ethics which, so far as it goes, will be in harmony
with the moral teachings of the Christian Religion, and will
admit of being perfected by these. This recognition, as already
remarked, will not be a hindrance but a help to him in exploring
the wide domains of the individual, domestic, social
and religious conduct of man; in determining, on the basis of
theism established by natural reason, the right moral conditions
and relations of man’s conduct as an individual, as a member of
the family, as a member of the state, and as a creature of God.
The nature, source and sanction of authority, domestic, social
and religious; of the dictate of conscience; of the natural moral
law and of all positive law; of the moral virtues and vices—these
are all questions which the philosopher of Ethics has to
explore by the use of natural reason, and for the investigation
of which the Christian philosopher of Ethics is incomparably
better equipped than the philosopher who, though possessing the
compass of natural reason, ignores the beacon lights of Divinely
Revealed Truths.

Esthetics, or the Philosophy of the Fine Arts, is that department
of philosophy which studies the conception of the beautiful and
its external expression in the works of nature and of man. The
arts themselves, of course, whether concerned with the realization
of the useful or of the beautiful, are distinct from sciences, even
from practical sciences.13 The technique itself consists in a skill
acquired by practice—by practice guided, however, by a set of
practical canons or rules which are the ripe fruit of experience.14
But behind every art there is always some background of more or
less speculative truth. The conception of the useful, however
which underlies the mechanical arts and crafts, is not an ultimate
conception calling for any further analysis than it receives in the
various special sciences and in metaphysics. But the conception of
the beautiful does seem to demand a special philosophical consideration.
On the subjective or mental side the esthetic sense, artistic
taste, the sentiment of the beautiful, the complex emotions accompanying
such experience; on the objective side the elements
[pg 014]
or factors requisite to produce this experience; the relation of
the esthetic to the moral, of the beautiful to the good and the
true—these are all distinctly philosophical questions. Up to the
present time, however, their treatment has been divided between
the other departments of philosophy—psychology, cosmology,
natural theology, general metaphysics, ethics—rather than grouped
together to form an additional distinct department.

V. Departments of Speculative Philosophy: Metaphysics.—The
philosophy which studies the order realized in
things apart from our activity, speculative philosophy, has been
variously divided up into separate departments from the first
origins of philosophical speculation.

When we remember that all intellectual knowledge of things
involves the apprehension of general truths or laws about these
things, and that this apprehension of intelligible aspects common
to a more or less extensive group of things involves the exercise
of abstraction, we can understand how the whole domain of speculative
knowledge, whether scientific or philosophical, can be differentiated
into certain layers or levels, so to speak, according to
various degrees of abstractness and universality in the intelligible
aspects under which the data of our experience may be considered.
On this principle Aristotle and the scholastics divided all speculative
knowledge into three great domains, Physics, Mathematics
and Metaphysics, with their respective proper objects, Change,
Quantity and Being, objects which are successively apprehended in
three great stages of abstraction traversed by the human mind in
its effort to understand and explain the Universal Order of things.

And as a matter of fact perhaps the first great common and
most obvious feature which strikes the mind reflecting on the
visible universe is the feature of all-pervading change (κίνησις),
movement, evolution, progress and regress, growth and decay;
we see it everywhere in a variety of forms, mechanical or local
change, quantitative change, qualitative change, vital change.
Now the knowledge acquired by the study of things under this
common aspect is called Physics. Here the mind abstracts merely
from the individualizing differences of this change in individual
things, and fixes its attention on the great, common, sensible
aspect itself of visible change.

But the mind can abstract even from the sensible changes
that take place in the physical universe and fix its attention on
a static feature in the changing things. This static element
[pg 015]
(τὸ ἀκίνητον), which the intellect apprehends in material things
as naturally inseparable from them (ἀκίνητον ἀλλ᾽ οὐ χωριστόν),
is their quantity, their extension in space. When the mind strips
a material object of all its visible, sensible properties—on which
its mechanical, physical and chemical changes depend—there
still remains as an object of thought a something formed of parts
outside parts in three dimensions of space. This abstract quantity,
quantitas intelligibilis—whether as continuous or discontinuous,
as magnitude or multitude—is the proper object of Mathematics.

But the mind can penetrate farther still into the reality of
the material data which it finds endowed with the attributes of
change and quantity: it can eliminate from the object of its
thought even this latter or mathematical attribute, and seize on
something still more fundamental. The very essence, substance,
nature, being itself, of the thing, the underlying subject and root
principle of all the thing’s operations and attributes, is something
deeper than any of these attributes, something at least mentally
distinct from these latter (τὸ ἀκίνητον και χωριστόν): and this
something is the proper object of man’s highest speculative
knowledge, which Aristotle called ἡ πρώτη φιλοσοφία, philosophia
prima, the first or fundamental or deepest philosophy.15

But he gave this latter order of knowledge another very
significant title: he called it theology or theological science,
ἐπιστήμη θεολογίκή, by a denomination derived a potiori parte,
from its nobler part, its culmination in the knowledge of God.
Let us see how. For Aristotle first philosophy is the science of
being and its essential attributes.16 Here the mind apprehends its
[pg 016]
object as static or abstracted from change, and as immaterial or
abstracted from quantity, the fundamental attribute of material
reality—as ἀκίνητον καὶ χωριστόν. Now it is the substance,
nature, or essence of the things of our direct and immediate experience,
that forms the proper object of this highest science. But in
these things the substance, nature, or essence, is not found in
real and actual separation from the material attributes of change
and quantity; it is considered separately from these only by an
effort of mental abstraction. Even the nature of man himself is
not wholly immaterial; nor is the spiritual principle in man, his
soul, entirely exempt from material conditions. Hence in so far
as first philosophy studies the being of the things of our direct
experience, its object is immaterial only negatively or by mental
abstraction. But does this study bring within the scope of our
experience any being or reality that is positively and actually
exempt from all change and all material conditions? If so the
study of this being, the Divine Being, will be the highest effort,
the crowning perfection, of first philosophy; which we may therefore
call the theological science. “If,” writes Aristotle,17 “there
really exists a substance absolutely immutable and immaterial,
in a word, a Divine Being—as we hope to prove—then such
Being must be the absolutely first and supreme principle, and
the science that attains to such Being will be theological.”

In this triple division of speculative philosophy into Physics,
Mathematics, and Metaphysics, it will naturally occur to one
to ask: Did Aristotle distinguish between what he called Physics
and what we nowadays call the special physical sciences? He
did. These special analytic studies of the various departments
of the physical universe, animate and inanimate, Aristotle described
indiscriminately as “partial” sciences: αἱ ἐν μέρει ἐπιστημάι—ἐπιστημαὶ
ἐν μέρει λεγόμεναι. These descriptive, inductive,
comparative studies, proceeding a posteriori from effects to causes,
he conceived rather as a preparation for scientific knowledge
proper; this latter he conceived to be a synthetic, deductive
explanation of things, in the light of some common aspect detected
in them as principle or cause of all their concrete characteristics.18
Such synthetic knowledge of things, in the light of
some such common aspect as change, is what he regarded as
scientific knowledge, meaning thereby what we mean by philosophical
[pg 017]
knowledge.19 What he called Physics, therefore, is what
we nowadays understand as Cosmology and Psychology.20

Mathematical science Aristotle likewise regarded as science
in the full and perfect sense, i.e. as philosophical. But just as
we distinguish nowadays between the special physical and human
sciences on the one hand, and the philosophy of external nature
and man on the other, so we may distinguish between the special
mathematical sciences and a Philosophy of Mathematics: with
this difference, that while the former groups of special sciences
are mainly inductive the mathematical group is mainly deductive.
Furthermore, the Philosophy of Mathematics—which investigates
questions regarding the ultimate significance of mathematical
concepts, axioms and assumptions: unity, multitude, magnitude,
quantity, space, time, etc.—does not usually form a separate department
in the philosophical curriculum: its problems are dealt
with as they arise in the other departments of Metaphysics.

Before outlining the modern divisions of Metaphysics we
may note that this latter term was not used by Aristotle. We
owe it probably to Andronicus of Rhodes († 40 b.c.), who, when
arranging a complete edition of Aristotle’s works, placed next in
order after the Physics, or physical treatises, all the parts and
fragments of the master’s works bearing upon the immutable and
immaterial object of the philosophia prima; these he labelled
τὰ μετὰ τὰ (βιβλία) φυσικα, post physica, the books after the
physics: hence the name metaphysics,21 applied to this highest
section of speculative philosophy. It was soon noticed that the
term, thus fortuitously applied to such investigations, conveyed a
very appropriate description of their scope and character if interpreted
in the sense of “supra-physica,” or “trans-physica”: inasmuch
[pg 018]
as the object of these investigations is a hyperphysical
object, an object that is either positively and really, or negatively
and by abstraction, beyond the material conditions of quantity
and change. St. Thomas combines both meanings of the term
when he says that the study of its subject-matter comes naturally
after the study of physics, and that we naturally pass from the
study of the sensible to that of the suprasensible.22

The term philosophia prima has now only an historical interest;
and the term theology, used without qualification, is now generally
understood to signify supernatural theology.

VI. Departments of Metaphysics: Cosmology, Psychology,
and Natural Theology.—Nowadays the term Metaphysics
is understood as synonymous with speculative philosophy:
the investigation of the being, nature, or essence, and essential
attributes of the realities which are also studied in the various
special sciences: the search for the ultimate grounds, reasons
and causes of these realities, of which the proximate explanations
are sought in the special sciences. We have seen that it has for
its special object that most abstract aspect of reality whereby
the latter is conceived as changeless and immaterial; and we
have seen that a being may have these attributes either by
mental abstraction merely, or in actual reality. In other words
the philosophical study of things that are really material not
only suggests the possibility, but establishes the actual existence,
of a Being that is really changeless and immaterial: so that
metaphysics in all its amplitude would be the philosophical science
of things that are negatively (by abstraction) or positively (in
reality) immaterial. This distinction suggests a division of
metaphysics into general and special metaphysics. The former
would be the philosophical study of all being, considered by
mental abstraction as immaterial; the latter would be the philosophical
study of the really and positively changeless and immaterial
Being,—God. The former would naturally fall into two
great branches: the study of inanimate nature and the study of
living things, Cosmology and Psychology; while special metaphysics,
the philosophical study of the Divine Being, would
constitute Natural Theology. These three departments, one of
special metaphysics and two of general metaphysics, would not
[pg 019]
be three distinct philosophical sciences, but three departments of
the one speculative philosophical science. The standpoint would
be the same in all three sections, viz. being considered as static
and immaterial by mental abstraction: for whatever positive
knowledge we can reach about being that is really immaterial
can be reached only through concepts derived from material
being and applied analogically to immaterial being.

Cosmology and Psychology divide between them the whole
domain of man’s immediate experience. Cosmology, utilizing
not only the data of direct experience, but also the conclusions
established by the analytic study of these data in the physical
sciences, explores the origin, nature, and destiny of the material
universe. Some philosophers include among the data of Cosmology
all the phenomena of vegetative life, reserving sentient
and rational life for Psychology; others include even sentient
life in Cosmology, reserving the study of human life for Psychology,
or, as they would call it, Anthropology.23 The mere matter
of location is of secondary importance. Seeing, however, that
man embodies in himself all three forms of life, vegetative, sentient,
and rational, all three would perhaps more naturally belong to
Psychology, which would be the philosophical study of life in
all its manifestations (ψυχή, the vital principle, the soul). Just
as the conclusions of the physical sciences are the data of Cosmology,
so the conclusions of the natural or biological sciences—Zoology,
Botany, Physiology, Morphology, Cellular Biology,
etc.—are the data of Psychology. Indeed in Psychology itself—especially
in more recent years—it is possible to distinguish a
positive, analytic, empirical study of the phenomena of consciousness,
a study which would rank rather as a special than as an
ultimate or philosophical science; and a synthetic, rational study
of the results of this analysis, a study which would be strictly
philosophical in character. This would have for its object to
determine the origin, nature and destiny of living things in
general and of man himself in particular. It would inquire into
the nature and essential properties of living matter, into the nature
of the subject of conscious states, into the operations and faculties
of the human mind, into the nature of the human soul and its
mode of union with the body, into the rationality of the human
[pg 020]
intellect and the freedom of the human will, the spirituality and
immortality of the human soul, etc.

But since the human mind itself is the natural instrument
whereby man acquires all his knowledge, it will be at once apparent
that the study of the phenomenon of knowledge itself, of
the cognitive activity of the mind, can be studied, and must be
studied, not merely as a natural phenomenon of the mind, but
from the point of view of its special significance as representative
of objects other than itself, from the point of view of its validity
or invalidity, its truth or falsity, and with the special aim of determining
the scope and limitations and conditions of its objective
validity. We have already referred to the study of human knowledge
from this standpoint, in connexion with what was said
above concerning Logic. It has a close kinship with Logic on
the one hand, and with Psychology on the other; and nowadays
it forms a distinct branch of speculative Philosophy under the
title of Criteriology, Epistemology, or the Theory of Knowledge.

Arising out of the data of our direct experience, external and
internal, as studied in the philosophical departments just outlined,
we find a variety of evidences all pointing beyond the domain of
this direct experience to the supreme conclusion that there exists
of necessity, distinct from this directly experienced universe, as
its Creator, Conserver, and Ruler, its First Beginning and its Last
End, its Alpha and Omega, One Divine and Infinite Being, the
Deity. The existence and attributes of the Deity, and the relations
of man and the universe to the Deity, form the subject-matter
of Natural Theology.

VII. Departments of Metaphysics: Ontology and
Epistemology.—According to the Aristotelian and scholastic conception
speculative philosophy would utilize as data the conclusions
of the special sciences—physical, biological, and human. It would
try to reach a deeper explanation of their data by synthesizing
these under the wider aspects of change, quantity, and being, thus
bringing to light the ultimate causes, reasons, and explanatory
principles of things. This whole study would naturally fall into
two great branches: General Metaphysics (Cosmology and
Psychology), which would study things exempt from quantity
and change not really but only by mental abstraction; and
Special Metaphysics (Natural Theology), which would study the
positively immaterial and immutable Being of the Deity.

This division of Metaphysics, thoroughly sound in principle,
[pg 021]
and based on a sane and rational view of the relation between
the special sciences and philosophy, has been almost entirely24
supplanted in modern times by a division which, abstracting from
the erroneous attitude that prompted it in the first instance, has
much to recommend it from the standpoint of practical convenience
of treatment. The modern division was introduced by
Wolff (1679-1755), a German philosopher,—a disciple of Leibniz
(1646-1716) and forerunner of Kant (1724-1804).25 Influenced
by the excessively deductive method of Leibniz’ philosophy,
which he sought to systematize and to popularize, he wrongly conceived
the metaphysical study of reality as something wholly
apart and separate from the inductive investigation of this same
reality in the positive sciences. It comprised the study of the
most fundamental and essential principles of being, considered in
themselves; and the deductive application of these principles to
the three great domains of actual reality, the corporeal universe,
the human soul, and God. The study of the first principles of
being in themselves would constitute General Metaphysics, or
Ontology (ὄντος-λόγος). Their applications would constitute three
great departments of Special Metaphysics: Cosmology, which he
described as “transcendental” in opposition to the experimental
physical sciences; Psychology, which he termed “rational” in opposition
to the empirical biological sciences; and finally Natural
Theology, which he entitled Theodicy (Θεός-δίκη-δικαιόω), using
a term invented by Leibniz for his essays in vindication of the
wisdom and justice of Divine Providence notwithstanding the
evils of the universe.

Without in any way countenancing such an isolation of
metaphysics from the positive sciences, we may, nevertheless,
adopt the modern division in substance and in practice. While
recognizing the intimate connexion between the special sciences
and metaphysics in all its branches, we may regard as General
Metaphysics all inquiries into the fundamental principles of being
and of knowing, of reality and of knowledge; and as Special
Metaphysics the philosophical study of physical nature, of human
nature, and of God, the Author and Supreme Cause of all finite
reality. Thus, while special metaphysics would embrace Cosmology,
Psychology, and Natural Theology, general metaphysics
[pg 023]
would embrace Ontology and Epistemology. These two latter
disciplines must no doubt investigate what is in a certain sense
one and the same subject-matter, inasmuch as knowledge is
knowledge of reality, nor can the knowing mind (the subjectum
cognoscens) and the known reality (the objectum cognitum) be
wholly separated or studied in complete isolation from each
other. Yet the whole content of human experience, which
forms their common subject-matter, can be regarded by mental
abstraction from the two distinct standpoints of the knowing
mind and the known reality, and can thus give rise to two
distinct sets of problems. Epistemology is thus concerned with
the truth and certitude of human knowledge; with the subjective
conditions and the scope and limits of its validity; with the subjective
or mental factors involved in knowing.28 Ontology is
concerned with the objects of knowledge, with reality considered
in the widest, deepest, and most fundamental aspects under which
it is conceived by the human mind: with the being and becoming
of reality, its possibility and its actuality, its essence and its existence,
its unity and plurality; with the aspects of truth, goodness,
perfection, beauty, which it assumes in relation with our minds;
with the contingency of finite reality and the grounds and implications
both of its actual existence and of its intelligibility; with
the modes of its concrete existence and behaviour, the supreme
categories of reality as they are called: substance, individual
nature, and personality; quantity, space and time, quality and
relation, causality and purpose. These are the principal topics
investigated in the present volume. The investigation is confined
to fundamental concepts and principles, leaving their applications
to be followed out in special metaphysics. Furthermore,
the theory of knowledge known as Moderate Realism,29 the
Realism of Aristotle and the Scholastics, in regard to the validity
of knowledge both sensual and intellectual, is assumed throughout:
because not alone is this the true theory, but—as a natural
consequence—it is the only theory which renders the individual
things and events of human experience really intelligible, and
at the same time keeps the highest and most abstract intellectual
speculations of metaphysics in constant and wholesome contact
with the concrete, actual world in which we live, move, and have
our being.

VIII. Remarks on Some Misgivings and Prejudices.—The
[pg 024]
student, especially the beginner, will find the investigations in
this volume rather abstract; but if he remembers that the content
of our intellectual concepts, be they ever so abstract and universal,
is really embodied in the individual things and events of
his daily experience, he will not be disposed to denounce all
ultimate analysis of these concepts as “unprofitable” or “unreal”.
He will recognize that the reproach of “talking in the
air,” which was levelled by an eminent medieval scholastic30 at
certain philosophers of his time, tells against the metaphysical
speculations of Conceptualism, but not against those of Moderate
Realism. The reproach is commonly cast at all systematic
metaphysics nowadays—from prejudices too numerous and varied
to admit of investigation here.31 The modern prejudice which
denies the very possibility of metaphysics, a prejudice arising
from Phenomenism, Positivism, and Agnosticism—systems which
are themselves no less metaphysical than erroneous—will be examined
in due course.32

But really in order to dispel all such misgivings one has
only to remember that metaphysics, systematic or otherwise, is
nothing more than a man’s reasoned outlook on the world and
life. Whatever his conscious opinions and convictions may be
regarding the nature and purpose of himself, and other men, and
the world at large—and if he use his reason at all he must have
some sort of opinions and convictions, whether positive or
negative, on these matters—those opinions and convictions are
precisely that man’s metaphysics. “Breaking free for the
moment from all historical and technical definition, let us affirm:
To get at reality—this is the aim of metaphysics.” So writes
Professor Ladd in the opening chapter of his Theory of Reality.33
But if this is so, surely a systematic attempt to “get at reality,”
no matter how deep and wide, no matter how abstract and
universal be the conceptions and speculations to which it leads
us, cannot nevertheless always and of necessity have the effect
of involving us in a mirage of illusion and unreality.

The wonderful progress of the positive sciences during the
last few centuries has been the occasion of prejudice against
metaphysics in a variety of ways. It is objected, for instance,
that metaphysics has no corresponding progress to boast of; and
from this there is but a small step to the conclusion that all
metaphysical speculation is sterile. The comparison is unfair for
many reasons. Research into the ultimate grounds and causes
of things is manifestly more difficult than research into their
proximate grounds and causes. Again, while the positive sciences
have increased our knowledge mainly in extent rather than in
depth, it is metaphysics and only metaphysics that can increase
this knowledge in its unity, comprehensiveness, and significance.

A positive increase in our knowledge of the manifold data of
human experience is not the aim of metaphysics; its aim is to
give an ultimate meaning and interpretation to this knowledge.
It is not utilitarian in the narrower sense in which the positive
and special sciences are utilitarian by ministering to our material
needs; but in the higher and nobler sense of pointing out to us
the bearing of all human knowledge and achievement on our real
nature and destiny. True, indeed, individual leaders and schools
of metaphysics have strayed from the truth and spoken with conflicting
and uncertain voices, especially when they have failed to
avail themselves of Truth Divinely Revealed. This, however, is
not a failure of metaphysics but of individual metaphysicians.
And furthermore, it is undeniable withal, that the metaphysical
labours of the great philosophers in all ages have contributed
richly to the enlightenment and civilization of mankind—particularly
[pg 026]
when these labours have been in concord and co-operation
with the elevating and purifying influences of the Christian religion.
Of no metaphysical system is this so entirely true as of that embodied
in Scholastic Philosophy. The greatest intellect of the
Middle Ages, St. Thomas Aquinas, gave to this philosophy an
expression which is rightly regarded by the modern scholastic
as his intellectual charter and the most worthy starting-point
of his philosophical investigations. The following passage from
an eminent representative of modern scholastic thought36 is sufficiently
suggestive to admit of quotation:—

An overweening confidence in the power of the special sciences
to solve ultimate questions, or at least to tell us all that can be
known for certain about these problems, a confidence based on
the astonishing progress of those sciences in modern times, is the
source of yet another prejudice against metaphysics. It is a
prejudice of the half-educated mind, of the camp-followers of
science, not of its leaders. These latter are keenly conscious
that the solution of ultimate questions lies entirely beyond the
methods of the special sciences. Not that even the most eminent
scientists do not indulge in speculations about ultimate problems—as
they have a perfect right to do. But though they may be
themselves quite aware that such speculations are distinctly
metaphysical, there are multitudes who seem to think that a
theory ceases to be metaphysical and becomes scientific provided
only it is broached by a scientific expert as distinct from a metaphysician.40
But all sincere thinkers will recognize that no ultimate
question about the totality of human experience can be
solved by any science which explores merely a portion of this
experience. Nay, the more rapid and extensive is the progress of
the various special sciences, the more imperative and insistent
becomes the need to collect and collate their separate findings, to
interrogate them one and all as to whether and how far these
findings fit in with the facts and conditions of human life and
existence, to determine what light and aid they contribute to the
solution of the great and ever recurring questions of the whence?
and whither? and why? of man and the universe. One who is
a sincere scientist as well as an earnest philosopher has written
à propos of this necessity in the following terms:—

A final difficulty against philosophical research is suggested
by the thought that if the philosopher has to take cognizance of
all the conclusions of all the special sciences his task is an impossible
one, inasmuch as nowadays at all events it would take
a lifetime to become proficient in a few of these sciences not to
speak of all of them.

There is no question, however, of becoming proficient in them;
the philosopher need not be a specialist in any positive science;
his acquaintance with the contents of these sciences need extend
no farther than such established conclusions and such current
though unverified hypotheses as have an immediate bearing on
ultimate or philosophical problems.

Moreover, while it would be injurious both to philosophy and
to science, as is proved by the history of both alike, to separate
synthetic from analytic speculation by a divorce between philosophy
and science; while it would be unwise to ignore the conclusions
of the special sciences and to base philosophical research
exclusively on the data of the plain man’s common and unanalysed
experience, it must be remembered on the other hand that the
most fundamental truths of speculative and practical philosophy,
the truths that are most important for the right and proper
orientation of human life, can be established and defended independently
of the special researches of the positive sciences. The
human mind had not to await the discovery of radium in order
to prove the existence of God. Such supreme truths as the existence
of God, the immortality of the human soul, the freedom of
the human will, the existence of a moral law, the distinction between
right and wrong, etc., have been always in possession of
the human race. It has been, moreover, confirmed in its possession
of them by Divine Revelation. And it has not needed
either the rise or the progress of modern science to defend them.
These fundamental rational truths constitute a philosophia perennis:
[pg 029]
a fund of truth which is, like all truth, immutable, though our
human insight into it may develop in depth and clearness.

But while this is so it is none the less true that philosophy,
to be progressive in its own order, must take account of every
new fact and conclusion brought to light in every department of
scientific—and historical, and artistic, and literary, and every
other sort of—research. And this for the simple reason that every
such accession, whether of fact or of theory, is an enlargement
of human experience; as such it clamours on the one hand for
philosophical interpretation, for explanation in the light of what
we know already about the ultimate grounds and causes of things,
for admission into our world-outlook, for adjustment and co-ordination
with the previous contents of the latter; while, on the
other hand, by its very appearance on the horizon of human experience
it may enrich or illumine, rectify or otherwise influence,
this outlook or some aspect of it.42

If, then, philosophy has to take account of advances in every
other department of human research, it is clear that its mastery
at the present day is a more laborious task than ever it was in
the past. In order to get an intelligent grasp of its principles in
their applications to the problems raised by the progress of the
sciences, to newly discovered facts and newly propounded hypotheses,
the student must be familiar with these facts and hypotheses;
and all the more so because through the medium of a
sensational newspaper press that has more regard for novelty
than truth, these facts and hypotheses are no sooner brought to
light by scientists than what are often garbled and distorted
versions of them are circulated among the masses.43

Similarly, in order that a sound system of speculative and
[pg 030]
practical philosophy be expounded, developed, and defended at
the present time, a system that will embrace and co-ordinate the
achieved results of modern scientific research, a system that will
offer the most satisfactory solutions of old difficulties in new
forms and give the most reasonable and reliable answers to the
ever recurring questionings of man concerning his own nature
and destiny—it is clear that the insufficiency of individual effort
must be supplemented by the co-operation of numbers. It is
the absence of fulness, completeness, adequacy, in most modern
systems of philosophy, their fragmentary character, the unequal
development of their parts, that accounts very largely for the
despairing attitude of the many who nowadays despise and turn
away from philosophical speculation. Add to this the uncertain
voice with which these philosophies speak in consequence of
their advocates ignoring the implications of the most stupendous
fact in human experience,—the Christian Revelation. But there
is one philosophy which is free from these defects, a philosophy
which is in complete harmony with Revealed Truth, and which
forms with the latter the only true Philosophy of Life; and that
one philosophy is the system which, assimilating the wisdom of
Plato, Aristotle and all the other greatest thinkers of the world,
has been traditionally expounded in the Christian schools—the
Scholastic system of philosophy. It has been elaborated
by no one man, and is the original fruit of no one mind. Unlike
the philosophies of Kant or Hegel or Spencer or James or
Comte or Bergson, it is not a “one-man” philosophy. It cannot
boast of the novelty or originality of the many eccentric and
ephemeral “systems” which have succeeded one another so
rapidly in recent times in the world of intellectual fashion; but
it has ever possessed the enduring novelty of the truth, which is
ever ancient and ever new. Now although this philosophy may
have been mastered in its broad outlines and applications by
specially gifted individuals in past ages, its progressive exposition
and development, and its application to the vastly extended
and ever-growing domains of experience that are being constantly
explored by the special sciences, can never be the work of
any individual: it can be accomplished only by the earnest
co-operation of Christian philosophers in every part of the
civilized world.44

[pg 031]

In carrying on this work we have not to build from the
beginning. “It has sometimes been remarked,” as Newman
observes,45 “when men have boasted of the knowledge of modern
times, that no wonder we see more than the ancients because we
are mounted upon their shoulders.” Yes; the intellectual toilers
of to-day are heirs to the intellectual wealth of their ancestors.
We have tradition: not to despise but to use, critically,
judiciously, reverently, if we are to use it profitably. Thomas
Davis has somewhere said that they who demolish the past do
not build up for the future. And we have the Christian Revelation,
as a lamp to our feet and a light to our paths46 in all those
rational investigations which form the appointed task of the
philosopher. Hence,

Chapter I. Being And Its Primary Determinations.

1. Our Concept of Being: its Expression and Features.—The
term “Being” (Lat. ens; Gr. ὤν; Ger. Seiend; Fr. étant)
as present participle of the verb to be (Lat. esse; Gr. ἔιναι;
Ger. Sein; Fr. être) means existing (existens, existere). But the
participle has come to be used as a noun; and as such it does
not necessarily imply actual existence hic et nunc. It does indeed
imply some relation to actual existence; for we designate
as “being” (in the substantive sense) only whatever we conceive
as actually existing or at least as capable of existing; and it is
from the participial sense, which implies actual existence, that
the substantive sense has been derived. Moreover, the intelligible
use of the word “being” as a term implies a reference to some
actually existing sphere of reality.48 It is in the substantive
meaning the term will be most frequently used in these pages, as
the context will show. When we speak of “a being” in the
concrete, the word has the same meaning as “thing” (res) used
in the wide sense in which this latter includes persons, places,
events, facts and phenomena of whatsoever kind. In the same
sense we speak of “a reality,” this term having taken on a concrete,
in addition to its original abstract, meaning. “Being” has
also this abstract sense when we speak of “the being or reality
of things”. Finally it may be used in a collective sense to
indicate the sum-total of all that is or can be—all reality.

(a) The notion of being, spontaneously reached by the
human mind, is found on reflection to be the simplest of all
notions, defying every attempt at analysis into simpler notions.
It is involved in every other concept which we form of any
object of thought whatsoever. Without it we could have no
concept of anything.

(b) It is thus the first of all notions in the logical order, i.e.
in the process of rational thought.

[pg 033]

(c) It is also the first of all notions in the chronological order,
the first which the human mind forms in the order of time.
Not, of course, that we remember having formed it before any
other more determinate notions. But the child’s awakening
intellectual activity must have proceeded from the simplest,
easiest, most superficial of all concepts, to fuller, clearer, and more
determinate concepts, i.e. from the vague and confused notion of
“being” or “thing” to notions of definite modes of being, or
kinds of thing.

(d) This direct notion of being is likewise the most indeterminate
of all notions; though not of course entirely indeterminate.
An object of thought, to be conceivable or intelligible at all by
our finite minds, must be rendered definite in some manner and
degree; and even this widest notion of “being” is rendered
intelligible only by being conceived as positive and as contrasting
with absolute non-being or nothingness.49

(e) Further, the notion of being is the most abstract of all
notions, poorest in intension as it is widest in extension. We
derive it from the data of our experience, and the process by which
we reach it is a process of abstraction. We lay aside all the
differences whereby things are distinguished from one another;
we do not consider these differences; we prescind or abstract
from them mentally, and retain for consideration only what is
[pg 034]
common to all of them. This common element forms the explicit
content of our notion of being.

It must be noted, however, that we do not positively exclude
the differences from the object of our concept; we cannot do this,
for the simple reason that the differences too are “being,” inasmuch
as they too are modes of being. Our attitude towards
them is negative; we merely abstain from considering them
explicitly, though they remain in our concept implicitly. The
separation effected is only mental, subjective, notional, formal,
negative; not objective, not real, not positive. Hence the process
by which we narrow down the concept of being to the more
comprehensive concept of this or that generic or specific mode of
being, does not add to the former concept anything really new,
or distinct from, or extraneous to it; but rather brings out explicitly
something that was implicit in the latter. The composition
of being with its modes is, therefore, only logical composition,
not real.

On the other hand, it would seem that when we abstract a
generic mode of being from the specific modes subordinate to
the former, we positively exclude the differentiating characteristics
of these species; and that, conversely, when we narrow down the
genus to a subordinate species we do so by adding on a differentiating
mode which was not contained even implicitly in the generic
concept. Thus, for example, the differentiating concept “rational”
is not contained even implicitly in the generic concept “animal”:
it is added on ab extra to the latter50 in order to reach the specific
concept of “rational animal” or “man”; so that in abstracting
the generic from the subordinate specific concept we prescind
objectively and really from the differentiating concept, by positively
excluding this latter. This kind of abstraction is called objective,
real, positive; and the composition of such generic and differentiating
modes of being is technically known as metaphysical composition.
The different modes of being, which the mind can
distinguish at different levels of abstraction in any specific concept—such
as “rational,” “sentient,” “living,” “corporeal,” in the
concept of “man”—are likewise known as “metaphysical grades”
of being.

(f) Since the notion of being is so simple that it cannot be
analysed into simpler notions which might serve as its genus and
differentia, it cannot strictly speaking be defined. We can only
describe it by considering it from various points of view and
comparing it with the various modes in which we find it realized.
This is what we have been attempting so far. Considering its
fundamental relation to existence we might say that “Being is
that which exists or is at least capable of existing”: Ens est id
quod existit vel saltem existere potest. Or, considering its relation
to its opposite we might say that “Being is that which is not
absolute nothingness”: Ens est id quod non est nihil absolutum.
Or, considering its relation to our minds, we might say that “Being
is whatever is thinkable, whatever can be an object of thought”.

(g) The notion of being is so universal that it transcends all
actual and conceivable determinate modes of being: it embraces
infinite being and all modes of finite being. In other words it
is not itself a generic, but a transcendental notion. Wider than
all, even the widest and highest genera, it is not itself a genus.
A genus is determinable into its species by the addition of differences
which lie outside the concept of the genus itself; being,
[pg 036]
as we have seen, is not in this way determinable into its
modes.

2. In what Sense are all Things that Exist or can Exist
said to be “Real” or to have “Being”?—A generic concept
can be predicated univocally, i.e. in the same sense, of its
subordinate species. These latter differ from one another by characteristics
which lie outside the concept of the genus, while they all
agree in realizing the generic concept itself: they do not of course
realize it in the same way,53 but as such it is really and truly in
each of them and is predicated in the same sense of each. But
the characteristics which differentiate all genera and species from
one another, and from the common notion of being, in which
they all agree, are likewise being. That in which they differ
is being, as well as that in which they agree. Hence we do not
predicate “being” univocally of its various modes. When we
say of the various classes of things which make up our
experience that they are “real” (or “realities,” or “beings”),
we do not apply this predicate in altogether the same sense
to the several classes; for as applied to each class it connotes
the whole content of each, not merely the part in which
this agrees with, but also the part in which it differs from, the
others. Nor yet do we apply the concept of “being” in a totally
different sense to each separate determinate mode of being.
When we predicate “being” of its modes the predication is not
merely equivocal. The concept expressed by the predicate-term
“being” is not totally different as applied to each subject-mode;
for in all cases alike it implies either actual existence or some relation
thereto. It only remains, therefore, that we must regard
the notion of being, when predicated of its several modes, as
partly the same and partly different; and this is what we mean
when we say that the concept of being is analogical, that being is
predicated analogically of its various modes.

Analogical predication is of two kinds: a term or concept
may be affirmed of a variety of subjects either by analogy of attribution
or by analogy of proportion. We may, for instance, speak
not only of a man as “healthy,” but also of his food, his countenance,
[pg 037]
his occupation, his companionship, etc., as “healthy”.
Now health is found really only in the man, but it is attributed
to the other things owing to some extrinsic but real connexion
which they have with his health, whether as cause, or effect, or
indication, of the latter. This is analogy of attribution; the
subject of which the predicate is properly and primarily affirmed
being known as the primary analogue or analogum princeps,
those to which it is transferred being called the analogata. It
underlies the figures of speech known as metynomy and synechdoche.
Now on account of the various relations that exist between
the different modes of being, relations of cause and effect,
whole and part, means and end, ground and consequence, etc.—relations
which constitute the orders of existing and possible
things, the physical and the metaphysical orders—being is of course
predicated of its modes by analogy of attribution; and in such
predication infinite being is the primary analogue for finite beings,
and the substance-mode of being for all accident-modes of being.

Inasmuch, however, as being is not merely attributed to these
modes extrinsically, but belongs to all of them intrinsically, it is
also predicated of them by analogy of proportion. This latter
sort of analogy is based on similarity of relations. For example,
the act of understanding bears a relation to the mind similar to
that which the act of seeing bears to the eye, and hence we say
of the mind that it “sees” things when it understands them. Or,
again, we speak of a verdant valley in the sunshine as “smiling,”
because its appearance bears a relation to the valley similar to
that which a smile bears to the human countenance. Or again,
we speak of the parched earth as “thirsting” for the rains, or of
the devout soul as “thirsting” for God, because these relations
are recognized as similar to that of a thirsty person towards the
drink for which he thirsts. In all such cases the analogical concept
implies not indeed the same attribute (differently realized) in
all the analogues (as in univocal predication) but rather a similarity
in the relation or proportion in which each analogue
embodies or realizes some attribute or attributes peculiar to itself.
Seeing is to the eye as understanding is to the mind; smiling is
to the countenance as the pleasing appearance of its natural
features is to the valley. Rain is to the parched earth, and God
is to the devout soul, as drink is to the thirsty person. It will be
noted that in all such cases the analogical concept is affirmed
primarily and properly of some one thing (the analogum princeps),
[pg 038]
and of the other only secondarily, and relatively to the
former.

Now, if we reflect on the manner in which being is affirmed of
its various modes (e.g. of the infinite and the finite; or of substance
and accident; or of spiritual and corporeal substances;
or of quantities, or qualities, or causes, etc.) we can see firstly
that although these differ from one another by all that each of
them is, by the whole being of each, yet there is an all-pervading
similarity between the relations which these modes bear each to
its own existence. All have, or can have, actual existence: each
according to the grade of perfection of its own reality. If we
conceive infinite being as the cause of all finite beings, then the
former exists in a manner appropriate to its all-perfect reality,
and finite beings in a manner proportionate to their limited
realities; and so of the various modes of finite being among
themselves. Moreover, we can see secondly, as will be explained
more fully below,54 that being is affirmed of the finite by virtue
of its dependence on the infinite, and of accident by virtue of its
dependence on substance.55 Being or reality is therefore predicated
of its modes by analogy of proportion.56

Is a concept, when applied in this way, one, or is it really
manifold? It is not simply one, for this would yield univocal
predication; nor is it simply manifold, for this would give equivocal
predication. Being, considered in its vague, imperfect,
inadequate sense, as involving some common or similar proportion
or relation to existence in all its analogues, is one; considered
as representing clearly and adequately what is thus
similarly related to each of the analogues, it is manifold.

Analogy of proportion is the basis of the figure of speech
known as metaphor. It would be a mistake, however, to infer
from this that what is thus analogically predicated of a number
of things belongs intrinsically and properly only to one of them,
being transferred by a mere extrinsic denomination to the others;
and that therefore it does not express any genuine knowledge
[pg 039]
on our part about the nature of these other things. It does give
us real knowledge about them. Metaphor is not equivocation;
but perhaps more usually it is understood not to give us real
knowledge because it is understood to be based on resemblances
that are merely fanciful, not real. Still, no matter how slender
and remote be the proportional resemblance on which the analogical
use of language is based, in so far forth as it has such a
real basis it gives us real insight into the nature of the analogues.
And if we hesitate to describe such a use of language as “metaphorical,”
this is only because “metaphor” perhaps too commonly
connotes a certain transferred and improper extension of the
meaning of terms, based upon a purely fanciful resemblance.

All our language is primarily and properly expressive of
concepts derived from the sensible appearances of material
realities. As applied to the suprasensible, intelligible aspects of
these realities, such as substance and cause, or to spiritual realities,
such as the human soul and God, it is analogical in another sense;
not as opposed to univocal, but as opposed to proper. That is,
it expresses concepts which are not formed directly from the
presence of the things which they signify, but are gathered from
other things to which the latter are necessarily related in a
variety of ways.57 Considering the origin of our knowledge, the
material, the sensible, the phenomenal, comes first in order, and
moulds our concepts and language primarily to its own proper
representation and expression; while the spiritual, the intelligible,
the substantial, comes later, and must make use of the concepts
and language thus already moulded.

If we consider, however, not the order in which we get our
knowledge, but the order of reality in the objects of our knowledge,
being or reality is primarily and more properly predicated
of the infinite than of the finite, of the Creator than of the
creature, of the spiritual than of the material, of substances than
of their accidents and sensible manifestations or phenomena.
Yet we do not predicate being or reality of the finite, or of
creatures, in a mere transferred, extrinsic, improper sense, as if
these were mere manifestations of the infinite, or mere effects of
the First Cause, to which alone reality would properly belong.
For creatures, finite things, are in a true and proper sense also
real.

The observations we have just been making in regard to the
analogy of being are of greater importance than the beginner can
be expected to realize. A proper appreciation of the way in
which being or reality is conceived by the mind to appertain
to the data of our experience, is indispensable to the defence of
Theism as against Agnosticism and Pantheism.

3. Real Being and Logical Being.—We may next illustrate
the notion of being by approaching it from another standpoint—by
examining a fundamental distinction which may be
drawn between real being (ens reale) and logical being (ens
rationis).

We derive all our knowledge, through external and internal
sense perception, from the domain of actually existing things,
these things including our own selves and our own minds. We
form, from the data of sense-consciousness, by an intellectual
process proper, mental representations of an abstract and universal
character, which reveal to us partial aspects and phases of the
natures of things. We have no intuitive intellectual insight into
these natures. It is only by abstracting their various aspects, by
comparing these in judgments, and reaching still further aspects
by inferences, that we progress in our knowledge of things—gradually,
step by step, discursivé, discurrendo. All this implies
reflection on, and comparison of, our own ideas, our mental views
of things. It involves the processes of defining and classifying,
affirming and denying, abstracting and generalizing, analysing
and synthesizing, comparing and relating in a variety of ways
the objects grasped by our thought. Now in all these complex
functions, by which alone the mind can interpret rationally what
is given to it, by which alone, in other words, it can know reality,
the mind necessarily and inevitably forms for itself (and expresses
[pg 043]
in intelligible language) a series of concepts which have for
their objects only the modes in which, and the relations by means
of which, it makes such gradual progress in its interpretation of
what is given to it, in its knowledge of the real. These concepts
are called secundae intentiones mentis—concepts of the second
order, so to speak. And their objects, the modes and mutual
relations of our primae intentiones or direct concepts, are called
entia rationis—logical entities. For example, abstractness is
a mode which affects not the reality which we apprehend intellectually,
but the concept by which we apprehend it. So, too, is
the universality of a concept, its communicability or applicability
to an indefinite multitude of similar realities—the “intentio universalitatis,”
as it is called—a mode of concept, not of the realities
represented by the latter. So, likewise, is the absence of other
reality than that represented by the concept, the relative nothingness
or non-being by contrast with which the concept is realized
as positive; and the absolute nothingness or non-being which is
the logical correlative of the concept of being; and the static,
unchanging self-identity of the object as conceived in the abstract.64
These are not modes of reality as it is but as it is conceived.
Again, the manifold logical relations which we establish
between our concepts—relations of (extensive or intensive) identity
or distinction, inclusion or inherence, etc.—are logical entities,
entia rationis: relations of genus, species, differentia, proprium,
accidens; the affirmative or negative relation between predicate
and subject in judgment;65 the mutual relations of antecedent
and consequent in inference. Now all these logical
entities, or objecta secundae intentionis mentis, are relations established
by the mind itself between its own thoughts; they have,
no doubt, a foundation in the real objects of those thoughts as
well as in the constitution and limitations of the mind itself; but
they have themselves, and can have, no other being than that
which they have as products of thought. Their sole being consists
in being thought of. They are necessary creations or products of
the thought-process as this goes on in the human mind. We see
[pg 044]
that it is only by means of these relations we can progress in
understanding things. In the thought-process we cannot help
bringing them to light—and thinking them after the manner of
realities, per modum entis. Whatever we think we must think
through the concept of “being”; whatever we conceive we must
conceive as “being”; but on reflection we easily see that such
entities as “nothingness,” “negation or absence or privation of
being,” “universality,” “predicate”—and, in general, all relations
established by our own thought between our own ideas representative
of reality—can have themselves no reality proper, no
actual or possible existence, other than that which they get from
the mind in virtue of its making them objects of its own thought.
Hence the scholastic definition of a logical entity or ens rationis
as “that which has objective being merely in the intellect”:
“illud quod habet esse objective tantum in intellectu, seu … id
quod a ratione excogitatur ut ens, cum tamen in se entitatem non
habeat”.66 Of course the mental process by which we think such
entities, the mental state in which they are held in consciousness,
is just as real as any other mental process or state. But the
entity which is thus held in consciousness has and can have no
other reality than what it has by being an object of thought.
And this precisely is what distinguishes it from real being, from
reality; for the latter, besides the ideal existence it has in the
mind which thinks of it, has, or at least can have, a real existence
of its own, independently altogether of our thinking about it.
We assume here, of course—what is established elsewhere, as
against the subjective idealism of phenomenists and the objective
idealism of Berkeley—that the reality of actual things does not
consist in their being perceived or thought of, that their “esse”
is not “percipi,” that they have a reality other than and independent
of their actual presence to the thought of any human
mind. And even purely possible things, even the creatures of
our own fancy, the fictions of fable and romance, could, absolutely
speaking and without any contradiction, have an existence in the
actual order, in addition to the mental existence they receive
from those who fancy them. Such entities, therefore, differ from
entia rationis; they, too, are real beings.

4. Real Being and Ideal Being.—The latter of these
expressions has a multiplicity of kindred meanings. We use it
here in the sense of “being known,” i.e. to signify the “esse
intentionale,” the mental presence, which, in the scholastic theory
of knowledge, an entity of whatsoever kind, whether real or
logical, must have in the mind of the knower in order that he
be aware of that entity. A mere logical entity, as we have seen,
has and can have no other mode of being than this which consists
in being an object of the mind’s awareness. All real being,
too, when it becomes an object of any kind of human cognition
whatsoever—of intellectual thought, whether direct or reflex;
of sense perception, whether external or internal—must obtain
this sort of mental presence or mental existence: thereby alone
can it become an “objectum cognitum”. Only by such mental
[pg 046]
mirroring, or reproduction, or reconstruction, can reality become
so related and connected with mind as to reveal itself to mind.
Under this peculiar relation which we call cognition, the mind,
as we know from psychology and epistemology, is not passive:
if reality revealed itself immediately, as it is, to a purely passive
mind (were such conceivable), the existence of error would be
unaccountable; but the mind is not passive: under the influence
of the reality it forms the intellectual concept (the verbum mentale),
or the sense percept (the species sensibilis expressa), in and through
which, and by means of which, it attains to its knowledge of the
real.

But prior (ontologically) to this mental existence, and as partial
cause of the latter, there is the real existence or being, which
reality has independently of its being known by any individual
human mind. Real being, then, as distinguished here from ideal
being, is that which exists or can exist extramentally, whether it
is known by the human mind or not, i.e. whether it exists also
mentally or not.

5. Fundamental Distinctions in Real Being.—Leaving
logical and ideal being aside, and fixing our attention exclusively
on real being, we may indicate here a few of the most fundamental
distinctions which experience enables us to recognize in our study
of the universal order of things.

(a) Possible or Potential Being and Actual Being.—The first
of these distinctions is that between possibility and actuality, between
[pg 047]
that which can be and that which actually is. For
a proper understanding of this distinction, which will be dealt
with presently, it is necessary to note here the following divisions
of actual being, which will be studied in detail later on.

(b) Infinite Being and Finite Beings.—All people have a
sufficiently clear notion of Infinite Being, or Infinitely Perfect
Being: though not all philosophers are agreed as to how precisely
we get this notion, or whether there actually exists such a
being, or whether if such being does exist we can attain to a
certain knowledge of such existence. By infinite being we mean
a being possessing all conceivable perfections in the most perfect
conceivable manner; and by finite beings all such beings as have
actually any conceivable limitation to their perfection. About
these nominal definitions there is no dispute; and scholasticism
identifies their respective objects with God and creatures.

(c) Necessary Being and Contingent Beings.—Necessary being
we conceive as that being which exists of necessity: being which
if conceived at all cannot be conceived as non-existent: being in
the very concept of which is essentially involved the concept of
actual existence: so that the attempt to conceive such being as
non-existent would be an attempt to conceive what would be
self-contradictory. Contingent being, on the other hand, is being
which is conceived not to exist of necessity: being which may
be conceived as not actually existent: being in the concept of
which is not involved the concept of actual existence. The same
observations apply to this distinction as to the preceding one.
It is obvious that any being which we regard as actual we must
regard either as necessary or as contingent; and, secondly, that
necessary being must be considered as absolutely independent,
as having its actual existence from itself, by its own nature;
while contingent being must be considered as dependent for its
actual existence on some being other than itself. Hence necessary
being is termed Ens a se, contingent being Ens ab alio.

(d) Absolute Being and Relative Beings.—In modern philosophy
the terms “absolute” and “relative,” as applied to being,
correspond roughly with the terms “God” and “creatures” in
the usage of theistic philosophers. But the former pair of terms
is really of wider application than the latter. The term absolute
means, etymologically, that which is loosed, unfettered, disengaged
or free from bonds (absolutum, ab-solvere, solvo = se-luo, from
λύω): that, therefore, which is not bound up with anything else,
[pg 048]
which is in some sense self-sufficing, independent; while the
relative is that which is in some way bound up with something else,
and which is so far not self-sufficing or independent. That,
therefore, is ontologically absolute which is in some sense self-sufficing,
independent of other things, in its existence; while
the ontologically relative is that which depends in some real way
for its existence on something else. Again, that is logically
absolute which can be conceived and known by us without reference
to anything else; while the logically relative is that which we
can conceive and know only through our knowledge of something
else. And since we usually name things according to the
way in which we conceive them, we regard as absolute any
being which is by itself and of itself that which we conceive it to
be, or that which its name implies; and as relative any being
which is what its name implies only in virtue of some relation to
something else.69 Thus, a man is a man absolutely, while he is
a friend only relatively to others.

It is obvious that the primary and general meaning of the
terms “absolute” and “relative” can be applied and extended in
a variety of ways. For instance, all being may be said to be
“relative” to the knowing mind, in the sense that all knowledge
involves a transcendental relation of the known object to the
knowing subject. In this widest and most improper sense even
God Himself is relative, not however as being, but as known.
Again, when we apply the same attribute to a variety of things
we may see that it is found in one of them in the most perfect
manner conceivable, or at least in a fuller and higher degree
than it is found in the others; and that it is found in these
others only with some sort of subordination to, and dependence
on, the former: we then say that it belongs to this primarily
or absolutely, and to the others only secondarily or relatively.
This is a less improper application of the terms than in the preceding
case. What we have especially to remember here is that
there are many different kinds of dependence or subordination,
all alike giving rise to the same usage.

Hence, applying the terms absolute and relative to the predicate
“being” or “real” or “reality,” it is obvious in the first
place that the potential as such can be called “being,” or “reality”
only in relation to the actual. It is the actual that is
being simpliciter, par excellence; the potential is so only in
[pg 049]
relation to this.70 Again, substances may be termed beings absolutely,
while accidents are beings only relatively, because of
their dependence on substances; though this relation is quite
different from the relation of potential to actual being. Finally
all finite, contingent realities, actual and possible, are what they
are only because of their dependence on the Infinite and Necessary
Being: and hence the former are relative and the latter
absolute; though here again the relation is different from that of
accident to substance, or of potential to actual.

Since the order of being includes all orders, and since a being
is absolutely such-or-such in any order only when that being
realizes in all its fulness and purity such-or-such reality, it follows
that the being which realizes in all its fulness the reality of being
is the Absolute Being in the highest possible sense of this term.
This concept of Absolute Being is the richest and most comprehensive
of all possible concepts: it is the very antithesis of that
other concept of “being in general” which is common to everything
and distinguished only from nothingness. It includes in
itself all actual and possible modes and grades and perfections
of finite things, apart from their limitations, embodying all of
them in the one highest and richest concept of that which makes
all of them real and actual, viz. the concept of Actuality or
Actual Reality itself.

Chapter II. Becoming And Its Implications.

6. The Static and the Changing.—The things we see
around us, the things which make up the immediate data of our
experience, not only are or exist; they also become, or come into
actual existence; they change; they pass out of actual existence.
The abstract notion of being represents its object to the mind in
a static, permanent, changeless, self-identical condition; but if
this condition were an adequate representation of reality change
would be unreal, would be only an illusion. This is what the
Eleatic philosophers of ancient Greece believed, distinguishing
merely between being and nothingness. But they were mistaken;
for change in things is too obviously real to be eliminated by
calling it an illusion: even if it were an illusion, this illusion at
least would have to be accounted for. In order, therefore, to
understand reality we must employ not merely the notion of
being (something static), but also the notion of becoming, change,
process, appearing and disappearing (something kinetic, and
something dynamic). In doing so, however, we must not fall
into the error of the opposite extreme from the Eleatics—by
regarding change as the adequate representation of reality. This
is what Heraclitus and the later Ionians did: holding that
nothing is, that all becomes (πάντα ρέι), that change is all reality,
that the stable, the permanent, is non-existent, unreal, an illusion.
This too is false; for change would be unintelligible without at
least an abiding law of change, a permanent principle of some
sort; which, in turn, involves the reality of some sort of abiding,
stable, permanent being.

We must then—with Aristotle, as against both of those one-sided
conceptions—hold to the reality both of being and of
becoming; and proceed to see how the stable and the changing
can both be real.

To convince ourselves that they are both real, very little
[pg 052]
reflection is needed. We have actual experience of both those
elements of reality in our consciousness and memory of our own
selves. Every human individual in the enjoyment of his mental
faculties knows himself as an abiding, self-identical being, yet as
constantly undergoing real changes; so that throughout his life
he is really the same being, though just as certainly he really
changes. In external nature, too, we observe on the one hand
innumerable processes of growth and decay, of motion and
interaction; and on the other hand a similarly all-pervading
element of sameness or identity amid all this never-ending change.

7. The Potential and the Actual. (a) Possibility,
Absolute, Relative, and Adequate.—It is from our experience
of actuality and change that we derive not only our notion
of temporal duration, but also our notion of potential being or
possibility, as distinct from that of actual being or actuality. It
is from our experience of what actually exists that we are able to
determine what can, and what cannot exist. We know from experience
what gold is, and what a tower is; and that it is intrinsically
possible for a golden tower to exist, that such an object
of thought involves no contradiction, that therefore its existence
is not impossible, even though it may never actually exist as a
fact. Similarly, we know from experience what a square is, and
what a circle is; and that it is intrinsically impossible for a square
circle to exist, that such an object of thought involves a contradiction,
that therefore not only is such an object never actually
existent in fact, but that it is in no sense real, in no way possible.

Thus, intrinsic (or objective, absolute, logical, metaphysical)
possibility is the mere non-repugnance of an object of thought to
actual existence. Any being or object of thought that is conceivable
in this way, that can be conceived as capable of actually
existing, is called intrinsically (or objectively, absolutely, logically,
metaphysically) possible being. The absence of such intrinsic
capability of actual existence gives us the notion of the intrinsically
(objectively, absolutely, logically, metaphysically) impossible.
We shall return to these notions again. They are
necessary here for the understanding of real change in the actual
universe.

Fixing our attention now upon the real changes which characterize
the data of our experience, let us inquire what conditions
are necessary in order that an intrinsically possible object of
thought become here and now an actual being. It matters not
[pg 053]
whether we select an example from the domain of organic nature,
of inorganic nature, or of art—whether it be an oak, or an iceberg,
or a statue. In order that there be here and now an actual
oak-tree, it is necessary not only (1) that such an object be intrinsically
possible, but (2) that there have been planted here an
actual acorn, i.e. an actual being having in it subjectively and
really the passive potentiality of developing into an actual oak-tree,
and (3) that there be in the actual things around the acorn
active powers or forces capable of so influencing the latent, passive
potentiality of the acorn as gradually to evolve the oak-tree therefrom.
So, too, for the (1) intrinsically possible iceberg, there are
needed (2) water capable of becoming ice, and (3) natural powers
or forces capable of forming it into ice and setting this adrift in
the ocean. And for the (1) intrinsically possible statue there are
needed (2) the block of marble or other material capable of becoming
a statue, and (3) the sculptor having the power to mould
this material into an actual statue.

In order, therefore, that a thing which is not now actual, but
only intrinsically or absolutely possible, become actual, there
must actually exist some being or beings endowed with the active
power or potency of making this possible thing actual. The latter
is then said to be relatively, extrinsically possible—in relation to
such being or beings. And obviously a thing may be possible
relatively to the power of one being, and not possible relatively
to lesser power of another being: the statue that is intrinsically
possible in the block of marble, may be extrinsically possible
relatively to the skilled sculptor, but not relatively to the unskilled
person who is not a sculptor.

Furthermore, relatively to the same agent or agents, the production
of a given effect, the doing of a given thing, is said to be
physically possible if it can be brought about by such agents acting
according to the ordinary course of nature; if, in other words
they have the physical power to do it. Otherwise it is said to
be physically impossible, even though metaphysically or intrinsically
possible, e.g. it is physically impossible for a dead person to
come to life again. A thing is said to be morally possible, in
reference to free and responsible agents, if they can do it without
unreasonable inconvenience; otherwise it is considered as morally
impossible, even though it be both physically and metaphysically
possible: as often happens in regard to the fulfilment of one’s
obligations.

[pg 054]

That which is both intrinsically and extrinsically possible is said
to be adequately possible. Whatever is intrinsically possible is
also extrinsically possible in relation to God, who is Almighty,
Omnipotent.

8. (b) Subjective “Potentia,” Active and Passive.—Furthermore,
we conceive the Infinite Being, Almighty God, as
capable of creating, or producing actual being from nothingness, i.e.
without any actually pre-existing material out of whose passive
potentiality the actual being would be developed. Creative
power or activity does not need any pre-existing subject on which
to exercise its influence, any subject in whose passive potentiality
the thing to be created is antecedently implicit.

But all other power, all activity of created causes, does
require some such actually existing subject. If we examine
the activities of the agencies that fall within our direct experience,
whether in external nature or in our own selves, we shall
find that in no case does their operative influence or causality
extend beyond the production of changes in existing being, or
attain to the production of new actual being out of nothingness.
The forces of nature cannot produce an oak without an acorn,
or an iceberg without water; nor can the sculptor produce a
statue except from some pre-existing material.

This consideration will help us to realize that all reality
which is produced by change, and subject to change, is essentially
a mixture of becoming and being, of potential and actual.
The reality of such being is not tota simul. Only immutable
being, whose duration is eternal, has its reality tota simul: it
alone is purely actual, the “Actus Purus”; and its duration is
one eternal “now,” without beginning, end, or succession. But
mutable being, whose duration in actual existence is measured
by time, is actualized only successively: its actuality at any particular
instant does not embody the whole of its reality: this
[pg 055]
latter includes also a “was” and “will be”; the thing was
potentially what it now is actually, and it will become actually
something which it now is only potentially; nor shall we have
understood even moderately the nature or essence of any mutable
being—an oak-tree, for example—until we have grasped the fact
that the whole reality of its nature embraces more than what we
find of it actually existing at any given instant of its existence.
In other words, we have to bear in mind that the reality of such
a being is not pure actuality but a mixture of potential and
actual: that it is an actus non-purus, or an actus mixtus.

We have to note well that the potential being of a thing is
something real—that it is not merely a modus loquendi, or a
modus intelligendi. The oak is in the acorn in some true and
real sense: the potentiality of the oak is something real in the
acorn: if it were not so, if it were nothing real in the acorn, we
could say with equal truth that a man or a horse or a house is
potentially in the acorn; or, again with equal truth, that the
oak is potentially in a mustard-seed, or a grain of corn, or a
pebble, or a drop of water. Therefore the oak is really in the
acorn—not actually but potentially, potentia passiva.

The oak-tree is also really in those active forces of nature
whose influence on the acorn develop the latter into an actual
oak-tree: it is in those causes not actually, of course, but virtually,
for they possess in themselves the operative power—potentia
activa sive operativa—to educe the oak-tree out of the acorn.
These two potential conditions of a being—in the active causes
which produce it, and in the pre-existing actual thing or things
from which it is produced—are called each a real or subjective
potency, potentia realis, or potentia subjectiva, in distinction from
the mere logical or objective possibility of such a being.

And just as the passive potentiality of the statue is something
real in the block of marble, though distinct from the actuality of
the statue and from the process by which this is actualized, so is
the active power of making the statue something real in the
sculptor, though distinct from the operation by which he makes
the statue. If an agent’s power to act, to produce change, were
not a reality in the agent, a reality distinct from the action of the
latter; or if a being’s capacity to undergo change, and thereby
to become something other, were not a reality distinct from the
process of change, and from the actual result of this process—it
would follow not only that the actual alone is real, and
[pg 056]
the merely possible or potential unreal, but also that no change
can be real, that nothing can really become, and nothing really
disappear.73

9. (c) Actuality: Its Relation to Potentiality.—It
is from our experience of change in the world that we derive our
notions of the potential and the actual, of active power and
passive potentiality. The term “act” has primarily the same
meaning as “action,” “operation,” that process by which a
change is wrought. But the Latin word actus (Gr. ἐνέργεια,
ἐντελέχεια) means rather that which is achieved by the actio,
that which is the correlative and complement of the passive
potentiality, the actuality of this latter: that by which potential
being is rendered formally actual, and, by way of consequence,
this actual being itself. “Potentia activa” and its correlative
“actus” might, perhaps, be appropriately rendered by “power”
(potestas agendi) and “action” or “operation”; “potentia passiva”
and its correlative “actus,” by “potentiality” and “actuality”
respectively.

In these correlatives, the notion underlying the term “actual”
is manifestly the notion of something completed, achieved,
perfected—as compared with that of something incomplete, imperfect,
determinable, which is the notion of the potential.
Hence the notions of potentia and actus have been extended
widely beyond their primary signification of power to act and the
exercise of this power. Such pairs of correlatives as the determinable
and the determined, the perfectible and the perfected,
the undeveloped or less developed and the more developed, the
generic and the specific, are all conceived under the aspect of
this widest relation of the potential to the actual. And since
we can distinguish successive stages in any process of development,
or an order of logical sequence among the contents of our
concept of any concrete reality, it follows that what will be conceived
as an actus in one relation will be conceived as a potentia
in another. Thus, the disposition of any faculty—as, for example,
the scientific habit in the intellect—is an actus or perfection of
the faculty regarded as a potentia; but it is itself a potentia
which is actualized in the operation of actually studying. This
illustrates the distinction commonly drawn between an “actus
primus” and an “actus secundus” in any particular order or line
of reality: the actus primus is that which presupposes no prior
[pg 057]
actuality in the same order; the actus secundus is that which
does presuppose another. The act of knowing is an actus secundus
which presupposes the cognitive faculty as an actus primus:
the faculty being the first or fundamental equipment of the soul
in relation to knowledge. Hence the child is said to have knowledge
“in actu primo” as having the faculty of reason; and the
student to have knowledge “in actu secundo” as exercising this
faculty.

The actus or perfecting principles of which we have spoken
so far are all conceived as presupposing an existing subject on
which they supervene. They are therefore accidents as distinct
from substantial constitutive principles of this subject; and they
are therefore called accidental actualities, actus “accidentales”.
But the actual existence of a being is also conceived as the complement
and correlative of its essence: as that which makes the
latter actual, thus transferring it from the state of mere possibility.
Hence existence also is called an actus or actuality: the
actus “existentialis,” to distinguish it from the existing thing’s
activities and other subsequently acquired characters. In
reference to these existence is a “first actuality”—“Esse est actus
primus”; “Prius est esse quam agere”: “Existence is the first
actuality”; “Action presupposes existence”—while each of these
in reference to existence, is a “second actuality,” an actus secundus.

When, furthermore, we proceed to examine the constitutive
principles essential to any being in the concrete, we may be able
to distinguish between principles which are determinable, passive
and persistent throughout all essential change of that being,
and others which are determining, specifying, differentiating
principles. In water, for example, we may distinguish the
passive underlying principle which persists throughout the
decomposition of water into oxygen and hydrogen, from the
active specifying principle which gives that substratum its
specific nature as water. The former or material principle (ὕλη,
materia) is potential, compared with the latter or formal principle
(μορφή, εἶδος, ἐντελέχεια, forma, species, actus) as actual.
The concept of actus is thus applied to the essence itself: the
actus “essentialis” or “formalis” of a thing is that which we
conceive to be the ultimate, completing and determining principle
of the essence or nature of that thing. In reference to this as
well as the other constitutive principles of the thing, the actual
existence of the thing is a “second actuality,” an actus secundus.

[pg 058]

In fact all the constitutive principles of the essence of any existing
thing, and all the properties and attributes involved in the
essence or necessarily connected with the essence, must all alike
be conceived as logically antecedent to the existential actus
whereby they are constituted something in the actual order, and
not mere possible objects of our thought. And from this point
of view the existence of a thing is called the ultimate actualization
of its essence. Hence the scholastic aphorism: “Esse est
ultimus actus rei”.

The term actus may designate that complement of reality by
which potential being is made actual (actus “actuans”), or this
actual being itself (actus “simpliciter dictus”). In the latter sense
we have already distinguished the Being that is immutable, the
Being of God, as the Actus Purus, from the being of all mutable
things, which latter being is necessarily a mixture of potential
and actual, an actus mixtus.

Now if the essences of corporeal things are composite, if they
are constituted by the union of some determining, formative
principle with a determinable, passive principle—of “form” with
“matter,” in scholastic terminology—we may call these formative
principles actus “informantes”; and if these cannot actually
exist except in union with a material principle they may be
called actus “non-subsistentes”: e.g., the formative principle or
“forma substantialis” of water, or the vital principle of a plant.
If, on the other hand, there exist essences which, being simple,
do not actualize any material, determinable principle, but subsist
independently of any such, they are called actus “non-informantes,”
or actus “subsistentes”. Such, for example, are God, and pure
spirits whose existence is known from revelation. Finally, there
may be a kind of actual essence which, though it naturally actualizes
a material principle de facto, can nevertheless continue to
subsist without this latter: such an actual being would be at
once an actus informans and an actus subsistens; and such, in
fact, is the human soul.

Throughout all distinctions between the potential and the
actual there runs the conception of the actual as something more
perfect than the potential. There is in the actual something positive
and real over and above what is in the potential. This is an
ultimate fact in our analysis; and its importance will be realized
when we come to apply the notions we have been explaining to
the study of change.

[pg 059]

The notion of grades of perfection in things is one with
which everyone is familiar. We naturally conceive some beings
as higher upon the scale of reality than others; as having “more”
reality, so to speak—not necessarily, of course, in the literal sense
of size or quantity—than others; as being more perfect, nobler,
of greater worth, value, dignity, excellence, than others. Thus
we regard the infinite as more perfect than the finite, spiritual
beings as nobler than material beings, man as a higher order of
being than the brute beast, this again as surpassing the whole
vegetable kingdom, the lowest form of life as higher on the scale
of being than inorganic matter, the substance-mode of being as
superior to all accident-modes, the actualized state of a being
as more perfect than its potential state, i.e. as existing in its
material, efficient and ideal or exemplar causes. The grounds
and significance of this mental appreciation of relative values in
things must be discussed elsewhere. We refer to it here in order
to point out another scholastic aphorism, according to which the
higher a thing is in the scale of actual being, and the more perfect
it is accordingly, the more efficient it will also be as a principle
of action, the more powerful as a cause in the production of
changes in other things, the more operative in actualizing their
passive potentialities; and conversely, the less actual a thing is,
and therefore the more imperfect, the greater its passive capacity
will be to undergo the influence of agencies that are actual and
operative around it. “As passive potentiality,” says St. Thomas,74
“is the mark of potential being, so active power is the mark of
actual being. For a thing acts, in so far as it is actual; but is
acted on, so far as it is potential.” Our knowledge of the nature
of things is in fact exclusively based on our knowledge of their
activities: we have no other key to the knowledge of what a
thing is than our knowledge of what it does: “Operari sequitur
esse”: “Qualis est operatio talis est natura”—“Acting follows
being”: “Conduct is the key to nature”.

A being that is active or operative in the production of a
change is said to be the efficient cause of the change, the latter
being termed the effect. Now the greater the change, i.e. the
higher and more perfect be the grade of reality that is actualized
in the change, the higher too in the scale of being must be the
efficient cause of that change. There must be a proportion in
degree of perfection or reality between effect and cause. The
[pg 060]
former cannot exceed in actual perfection the active power, and
therefore the actual being, of the latter. This is so because we
conceive the effect as being produced or actualized through the
operative influence of the cause, and with real dependence on this
latter; and it is inconceivable that a cause should have power to
actualize other being, distinct from itself, which would be of a
higher grade of excellence than itself. The nature of efficient
causality, of the influence by which the cause is related to its
effect, is not easy to determine; it will be discussed at a subsequent
stage of our investigations (ch. xi.); but whatever it be, a
little reflection should convince us of the truth of the principle
just stated: that an effect cannot be more perfect than its cause.
The mediæval scholastics embodied this truth in the formula:
Nemo dat quod non habet—a formula which we must not interpret
in the more restricted and literal sense of the words giving and
having, lest we be met with the obvious objection that it is by
no means necessary for a boy to have a black eye himself in
order to give one to his neighbour! What the formula means
is that an agent cannot give to, or produce in, any potential
subject, receptive of its causal influence, an actuality which it
does not itself possess virtually, or in its active power: that no
actuality surpassing in excellence the actual perfection of the
cause itself can be found thus virtually in the active power of the
latter. There is no question of the cause or agent transferring
bodily as it were a part of its own actuality to the subject which
is undergoing change75; nor will such crude imagination images
help us to understand what real change, under the influence of
efficient causality, involves.76 An analysis of change will enable
us to appreciate more fully the real difficulty of explaining it,
and the futility of any attempt to account for it without admitting
the real, objective validity of the notions of actual and potential
being, of active powers or forces and passive potentialities in the
things that are subject to change.

[pg 061]

10. Analysis of Change.—Change (Mutatio, Motus,
μεταβολή, κίνησις) is one of those simplest concepts which cannot
be defined. We may describe it, however, as the transition of a
being from one state to another. If one thing entirely disappeared
and another were substituted for it, we should not regard the
former as having been changed into the latter. When one
thing is put in the place of another, each, no doubt, undergoes a
change of place, but neither is changed into the other. So, also,
if we were to conceive a thing as absolutely ceasing to exist, as
lapsing into nothingness at a given instant, and another as coming
into existence out of nothingness at the same instant (and in the
same place), we should not consider this double event as constituting
a real change of the former thing into the latter. And
although our senses cannot testify to anything beyond sequence in
sense phenomena, our reason detects in real change something other
than a total substitution of things for one another, or continuous
total cessations and inceptions of existence in things. No doubt,
if we conceive the whole phenomenal or perceptible universe and all
the beings which constitute this universe as essentially contingent,
and therefore dependent for their reality and their actual existence
on a Supreme, Necessary Being who created and conserves them,
who at any time may cease to conserve any of them, and produce
other and new beings out of nothingness, then such absolute
cessations and inceptions of existence in the world would not be
impossible. God might annihilate, i.e. cease to conserve in existence,
this or that contingent being at any instant, and at any
instant create a new contingent being, i.e. produce it in its totality
from no pre-existing material. But there is no reason to suppose
that this is what is constantly taking place in Nature: that all
change is simply a series of annihilations and creations. On the
contrary, the modes of being which appear and disappear in real
change, in the transition of anything from one state to a really
different state of being, do not appear de novo, ex nihilo, as absolute
beginnings out of nothingness; or disappear totaliter, in nihilum,
as absolute endings or lapses of reality into nothingness. The
real changes which take place in Nature are due to the operation
of natural causes. These causes, being finite in their operative
powers, cannot create, i.e. produce new being from nothingness.
They can, however, with the concurrence of the Omnipotent
Being, modify existing modes of being, i.e. make actual what was
only potential in these latter. The notion of change is not
[pg 062]
verified in the conception of successive annihilations and creations;
for there is involved in the former concept not merely the notion
of a real difference between the two actual states, that before and
that after the change, but also the notion of some potential reality
persisting throughout the change, something capable of being actually
so and so before the change and actually otherwise after the
change. For real change, therefore, we require (1) two positive and
really different states of the same being, a “terminus a quo” and a
“terminus ad quem”; and (2) a real process of transition whereby
something potential becomes actual. In creation there is no real
and positive terminus a quo; in annihilation there is no real and
positive terminus ad quem; these therefore are not changes in
the proper sense of the term. Sometimes, too, change is affirmed,
by purely extrinsic denomination, of a thing in which there is no
real change, but only a relation to some other really changing
thing. In this sense when an object unknown or unthought of
becomes the actual object of somebody’s thought or cognition, it
is said to “change,” though the transition from “unknown” to
“known” involves no real change of state in the object, but only
in the knowing subject. If thought were in any true sense
“constitutive” of reality, as many modern philosophers contend,
the change in the object would of course be real.

Since, therefore, change consists in this, that a thing which
is actually in a given state ceases to be actually such and begins
to be actually in another state, it is obvious that there persists
throughout the process some reality which is in itself potential
and indifferent to either actual state; and that, moreover, something
which was actual disappears, while some new actuality
appears, in this persisting potentiality. The abiding potential
principle is called the matter or subject of the change; the
transient actualizing principles are called forms. Not all these
“forms” which precede or result from change are necessarily
positive entities in themselves: they may be mere privations of
other forms (“privatio,” στέρησις): not all changes result in the
acquisition of a new degree of positive actual being; some result
in loss of perfection or actuality. Still, even in these cases, the
state characterized by the less perfect degree of actuality has a
determinate actual grade of being which is proper to itself, and
which, as such, is not found actually, but only potentially, in the
state characterized by the more perfect degree of actuality.
When, then, a being changes from a more perfect to a less
[pg 063]
perfect state, the actuality of this less perfect state cannot be
adequately accounted for by seeking it in the antecedent and
more perfect state: it is not in this latter state actually, but only
potentially; nor do we account for it by saying that it is “equivalently”
in the greater actuality of the latter state: the two
actualizing principles are really distinct, and neither is wholly or
even partially the other. The significance of this consideration
will appear presently in connection with the scholastic axiom:
Quidquid movetur ab alio movetur.

Meanwhile we must guard against conceiving the potential
or material factor in change as a sort of actual but hidden core
of reality which itself persists unchanged throughout; and the
formative or actualizing factors as superficially adorning this
substratum by constantly replacing one another. Such a substitution
of imagination images for intellectual thought will not
help, but rather hinder, all accurate analysis. It is not the
potential or material factor in things that changes, nor yet the
actualizing or formal factors, but the things themselves; and if
“things” are subject to “real change” it is manifest that this
fact can be made intelligible, if at all, only by intellectually
analysing the things and their changes into constitutive principles
or factors which are nor themselves “things” or “changes”.
Were we to arrive only at principles of the latter sort, so far
from explaining anything we would really only have pushed
back the problem a step farther. It may be that none of the
attempts yet made by philosophers or scientists to offer an
ultimate explanation of change is entirely satisfactory,—the
scholastic explanation will be gradually outlined in these pages,—but
it will be of advantage at least to recognize the shortcomings
of theories that are certainly inadequate.

We are now in a position to state and explain the important
scholastic aphorism embodying what has been called the
Principle of Change (“Principium Motus”): Quidquid movetur,
ab alio movetur: “Whatever undergoes change is changed by
something else”. The term motus is here taken in the wide
sense of any real transition from potentiality to actuality, as is
evident from the alternative statements of the same principle:
Nihil potest seipsum reducere e potentia in actum: “Nothing can
reduce itself from potentiality to actuality,” or, again, Potentia,
qua talis, nequit per semetipsam ad actum reduci, sed reducitur ab
alio principio in actu: “The potential as such cannot be reduced
[pg 064]
by itself to the actual, but only by some other already actual
principle”.77 This assertion, rightly understood, is self-evidently
true; for the state of passive potentiality, as such, involves the
absence of the correlative actuality in the potential subject; and
since the actual, as such, involves a perfection which is not in
the potential, the latter cannot confer upon itself this perfection:
nothing can be the adequate principle or source of a perfection
which is not in this principle or source: nemo dat quod non habet.

We have already anticipated the objection arising from the
consideration that the state resulting from a change is sometimes
in its totality less perfect than the state which existed prior to
the change. Even in such cases there results from the change a
new actuality which was not in the prior state, and which cannot
be conceived as a mere part or residue of the latter, or regarded
as equivalently contained in the latter. Even granting, as we
must, that the net result of such a change is a loss of actuality or
perfection in the subject of change, still there is always a gain
which is not accounted for by the loss; there is always a new
actual state which, as such, was not in the original state.

A more obvious objection to the principle arises from the
consideration of vital action; but it is based on a misunderstanding
of the principle under discussion. Living things, it is objected,
move themselves: their vital action is spontaneous and immanent:
originating within themselves, it has its term too within themselves,
resulting in their gradual development, growth, increase
of actuality and perfection. Therefore it would appear that they
move and perfect themselves; and hence the so-called “principle
of change” is not true universally.

In reply to all this we admit that vital action is immanent,
remaining within the agent to perfect the latter; also that it is
spontaneous, inasmuch as when the agent is actually exercising
vital functions it need not be actually undergoing the causal
influence of any other created agent, or actually dependent on
any such agent. But it must, nevertheless, in such action, be
dependent on, and influenced by, some actual being other than
itself. And the reason is obvious: If by such action it increases
[pg 065]
its own actual perfection, and becomes actually other than it was
before such action, then it cannot have given itself the actuality
of this perfection, which it possessed before only potentially. No
doubt, it is not merely passively potential in regard to such actual
perfections, as is the case in non-vital change which results in the
subject from the transitive action of some outside cause upon the
latter. The living thing has the active power of causing or producing
in itself these actual perfections: there is interaction
between its vital parts: through one organ or faculty it acts upon
another, thus educing an actuality, a new perfection, in this
other, and thus developing and perfecting its own being. But
even considered as active it cannot be the adequate cause of the
actuality acquired through the change. If this actuality is something
really over and above the reality of its active and passive
potential principles, then it remains true that change implies the
influence of an actual being other than the subject changed: Quid
quid movetur, ab alio movetur.

We have seen now that in the real order the potential presupposes
the actual; for the potential cannot actualize itself, but
can be actualized only by the action of some already actual being.
Nor can we avoid this consequence by supposing the
potential being to have had no actual beginning in time, but to be
eternally in process of actualization; for even so, it must be eternally
actualized by some other actual being—a position which Aristotle
and some scholastics admit to be possible. Whether, then, we conceive
the actualization as beginning in time or as proceeding from
all eternity, it is self-contradictory to suppose the potential as
capable of actualizing itself.

It is likewise true that the actual precedes the possible in the
order of our knowledge. The concept of a thing as possible presupposes
the concept of that thing as actual; for the possible is
understood to be possible only by its intelligible relation to actual
existence. This is evidently true of extrinsic possibility; but our
knowledge even of the intrinsic possibility of a thing cannot be
the first knowledge we possess in the order of time. Our first
knowledge is of the actual; for the mind’s first cognitive act
must have for object either itself or something not itself. But it
knows itself as a consciously acting and therefore actual being.
And it comes to know things other than itself only by the fact
that such other things act upon it either immediately or mediately
through sense-consciousness; so that in every hypothesis its first
known object is something actual.79

11. Kinds of Change.—Following Aristotle,80 we may recognize
a broad and clear distinction between four great classes
of change (μεταβολή, mutatio) in the phenomena of our sense
experience: local change (κίνησις κατὰ τόπον, φορά, latio);
quantitative change (κατὰ τὸ πόσον, ἀύζησις ἤ φθίσις, augmentatio
vel diminutio); qualitative change (κατὰ τὸ ποίον, ἀλλοίωσις,
alteratio); and substantial change (κατ᾽ οὐσίαν, γένεσις ἤ φθορά).
The three former are accidental, i.e. do not reach or affect the
essence or substance of the thing that is changed; the fourth is
substantial, a change of essence. Substantial change is regarded
as taking place instantaneously, as soon as the condition brought
about by the accidental changes leading up to it becomes
naturally incompatible with the essence or nature of the subject.
The accidental changes, on the other hand, are regarded as taking
place gradually, as realizing and involving a succession of states
or conditions in the subject. These changes, especially when
they take place in corporeal things, are properly described as
[pg 069]
movement or motion (motus, motio). By movement or motion in
the strict sense we therefore mean any change which takes place
gradually or successively in a corporeal thing. It is only in a
wider and improper sense that these terms are sometimes applied
to activity of whatsoever kind, even of spiritual beings. In this
sense we speak of thoughts, volitions, etc., as movements of the
soul, motus animae; or of God as the Prime Mover ever in motion,
the Primum Movens semper in motu.

With local change in material things, as also with quantitative
change, growth and diminution of quantity (mass and volume),
everyone is perfectly familiar. From the earliest times, moreover,
we find both in science and philosophy the conception of
matter as composed of, and divisible into, ultimate particles,
themselves supposed to admit of no further real division, and
hence called atoms (ἄ-τομος, τέμνω). From the days of Grecian
atomism men have attempted to show that all change in the
Universe is ultimately reducible to changes of place, order,
spatial arrangement and collocation, of those hypothetical
atomic factors. It has likewise been commonly assumed that
change in mass is solely due to change in the number of
those atoms, and change in volume (of the same mass) to the
relative density or closeness with which the atoms aggregate
together; though some have held—and it is certainly not inconceivable—that
exactly the same material entity, an atom let us
say, may be capable of real contraction and expansion, and so
of real change of volume: as distinct from the apparent contraction
and expansion of bodies, a change which is supposed to be
due to change of density, i.e. to decrease or increase in the
dimensions of the pores or interstices between the smaller constituent
parts or molecules. However this may be, the attempts
to reduce all change in physical nature to mere mechanical change
i.e. to spatial motions of the masses (molar motions), the molecules
(molecular motions), and the atoms or other ultimate components
of matter (whether vibratory, undulatory, rotatory or
translational motions), have never been satisfactory.

Qualitative change is wider than material change, for it includes
changes in spiritual beings, i.e. in beings which are outside
the category of quantity and have a mode of existence altogether
different from the extensional, spatial existence which characterizes
matter. When, for instance, the human mind acquires knowledge,
it undergoes qualitative change. But matter, too, has qualities,
[pg 070]
and is subject to qualitative change. It is endowed with active
qualities, i.e. with powers, forces, energies, whereby it can not
merely perform mechanical work by producing local changes in
the distribution of its mass throughout space, but also produce
physical and chemical changes which seem at least to be different
in their nature from mere mechanical changes. It is likewise
endowed with passive qualities which appear to the senses to be
of various kinds, differing from one another and from the
mechanical or quantitative characteristics of size, shape, motion,
rest, etc. While these latter are called “primary qualities” of
bodies—because conceived to be more fundamental and more
closely inherent in the real and objective nature of matter—or
“common sensibles” (sensibilia communia), because perceptible
by more than one of our external senses—the former are called
“secondary qualities,” because conceived to be less characteristic
of the real and objective nature of matter, and more largely subjective
products of our own sentient cognitive activity—or “proper
sensibles” (sensibilia propria), because each of them is apprehended
by only one of our external senses: colour, sound, taste, odour,
temperature, material state or texture (e.g. roughness, liquidity,
softness, etc.). Now about all these perceived qualities and their
changes the question has been raised: Are they, as such, i.e. as
perceived by us, really in the material things or bodies which
make up the physical universe, and really different in these
bodies from the quantitative factors and motions of the latter?
Or, as such, are they not rather partially or wholly subjective
phenomena—products, at least in part, of our own sense perception,
states of our own consciousness, having nothing really
corresponding to them in the external matter of the universe
beyond the quantitative, mechanical factors and motions whereby
matter acts upon our faculties of sense cognition and produces
these states of consciousness in us? This is a question of the
first importance, the solution of which belongs to Epistemology.
Aristotle would not allow that the objective material universe
can be denuded, in the way just suggested, of qualities and
qualitative change; and scholastic philosophers have always
held the same general view. What we have to note here, however,
in regard to the question is simply this, that even if the
world of matter were thus simplified by transferring all qualitative
change to the subjective domain of consciousness, the reality of
qualitative change and all the problems arising from it would
[pg 071]
still persist. To transfer qualitative change from object to subject,
from matter to mind, is certainly something very different
from explaining it as reducible to quantitative or mechanical
change. The simplification thus effected would be more apparent
than real: it would be simplifying the world of matter by transferring
its complexity to the world of mind. This consideration
is one which is sometimes lost sight of by scientists who advance
mechanical hypotheses as ultimate explanations of the nature
and activities of the physical universe.

If all material things and processes could be ultimately
analysed into configurations and local motions of space-occupying
atoms, homogeneous in nature and differing only in size and
shape, then each of these ultimate atomic factors would be itself
exempt from intrinsic change as to its own essence and individuality.
In this hypothesis there would be really no such
thing as substantial change. The collection of atoms would form
an immutable core of material reality, wholly simple and ever
actual. Such an hypothesis, however, is utterly inadequate as
an explanation of the facts of life and consciousness. And even
as an account of the processes of the inorganic universe it encounters
insuperable difficulties. The common belief of men has
always been that even in this domain of reality there are fundamentally
different kinds of matter, kinds which differ from one
another not merely in the shape and size and configuration and
arrangement of their ultimate actual constituents, but even in the
very substance or nature of these constituents; and that there
are some material changes which affect the actual substance
itself of the matter which undergoes them. This belief scholastics,
again following Aristotle, hold to be a correct belief, and one
which is well grounded in reason. And this belief in turn involves
the view that every type of actual material entity—whether
merely inorganic, or endowed with life, or even allied with a
higher, spiritual mode of being as in the case of man himself—is
essentially composite, essentially a synthesis of potential and actual
principles of being, and therefore capable of substantial change.
The actually existing material being scholastics describe as
materia secunda, the ὕλη ἐσχάτη of Aristotle; the purely potential
factor, which is actualized in this or that particular kind of matter,
they describe as materia prima, the ὕλη πρώτη of Aristotle; the
actualizing, specifying, formative principle, they designate as
forma substantialis (εἶδος). And since the purely potential principle
[pg 072]
cannot actually exist except as actualized by some formative
principle, all substantial change or transition from one substantial
type to another is necessarily both a corruptio and a generatio.
That is, it involves the actual disappearance of one substantial
form and the actual appearance of another. Hence the scholastic
aphorism regarding substantial change: Corruptio unius est generatio
alterius: the corruption or destruction of one kind of
material thing involves the generation of another kind.

The concepts of materia prima and forma substantialis are
concepts not of phenomenal entities directly accessible to the
senses or the imagination, but of principles which can be reached
only mediately and by intellect proper. They cannot be pictured
in the imagination, which can only attain to the sensible. We
may help ourselves to grasp them intellectually by the analogy
of the shapeless block of marble and the figure educed therefrom
by the sculptor, but this is only an analogy: just as the
statue results from the union of an accidental form with an
existing matter, so this matter itself, the substance marble, is
composed of a substantial form and a primordial, potential matter.
But there the analogy ceases.

Furthermore, when we consider that the proper and primary
objects of the human intellect itself are corporeal things or bodies,
and that these bodies actually exist in nature only as composite
substances, subject to essential or substantial change, we shall
realize why it is that the concept of materia prima especially,
being a mediate and negative concept, is so difficult to grasp;
for, as the scholastics describe it, translating Aristotle’s formula,
it is in itself neque quid, neque quantum, neque quale, neque aliquid
eorum quibus ens determinatur.81 But it is through intellectual
concepts alone, and not through imagination images, that we
may hope to analyse the nature and processes even of the world
of corporeal reality; and, as St. Thomas well observes, it was
because the ancient Greek atomists did not rise above the level
of thinking in imagination images that they failed to recognize
the existence, or explain the nature, of substantial change in the
material universe82: an observation which applies with equal
[pg 073]
force to those scientists and philosophers of our own time who
would fain reduce all physical processes to mere mechanical
change.

Those, then, are the principal kinds of change, as analysed
by Aristotle and the scholastics. We may note, finally, that the
distinction between immanent and transitive activity is also applied
to change—that is, to change considered as a process, not
to the result of the change, to change in fieri, not in facto esse. Immanent
movement or activity (motio, actio immanens) is that of which
the term, the educed actuality, remains within the agent—which
latter is therefore at once both agens and patiens. Vital action is
of this kind. Transitive movement or activity, on the other
hand (motio, actio transiens), is that of which the term is some
actuality educed in a being other than the agent. The patiens is
here really distinct from the agens; and it is in the former, not
in the latter, that the change takes place: actio fit in passo. All
change in the inorganic universe is of this sort (101).

Chapter III. Existence And Essence.

12. Existence.—In the preceding chapters we examined
reality in itself and in its relation to change or becoming. We
have now to examine it in relation to its actual existence and to
its intrinsic possibility (7, a).

Existing or being (in the participial sense: esse, existere,
τὸ εἶναι) is a simple, indefinable notion. A being is said to exist
when it is not merely possible but actual, when it is not merely
potential in its active and passive causes but has become actual
through those causes (existere: ex-sisto: ex-stare: to stand forth,
distinct from its causes); or, if it have no causes, when it simply
is (esse),—in which sense God, the Necessary, purely Actual
Being, simply is. Thus, existence implies the notion of actuality,
and is conceived as that by which any thing or essence is, distinct
from nothingness, in the actual order.83 Or, again, it is the actuality
of any thing or essence. About any conceivable being we may ask
two distinct questions: (a) What is it? and (b) Does such a being
actually exist? The answer to the former gives us the essence,
what is presented to the mind through the concept; the answer
to the latter informs us about the actual existence of the being or
essence in question.

To the mind of any individual man the real existence (as
also the real essence) of any being whatsoever, not excepting his
own, can be known only through its ideal presence in his mind,
through the concept or percept whereby it becomes for him a
“known object,” an objectum cognitum. But this actual presence
of known being to the knowing mind must not be confounded
with the real existence of such being (4). Real being does not get
its real existence in our minds or from our minds. Our cognition
does not produce, but only discovers, actually existing reality.
The latter, by acting on the mind, engenders therein the cognition
[pg 075]
of itself. Now all our knowledge comes through the senses;
and sense cognition is excited in us by the direct action of
material or phenomenal being on our sense faculties. But
through sense cognition the mind is able to attain to a knowledge
both of the possibility and of the actual existence of suprasensible
or spiritual realities. Hence we cannot describe existence as the
power which material realities have to excite in us a knowledge
of themselves. Their existence is prior to this activity: prius est
esse quam agere. Nor can we limit existence to material realities;
for if there are spiritual realities these too have existence, though
this existence can be discerned only by intellect, and not by
sense.

13. Essence.—In any existing thing we can distinguish
what the thing is, its essence, from its actual existence. If we
abstract from the actual existence of a thing, not considering
whether it actually exists or not, and fix our attention merely on
what the thing is, we are thinking of its real essence. If we
positively exclude the notion of actual existence from our concept
of the essence, and think of the latter as not actually existing,
we are considering it formally as a possible essence. There
is no being, even the Necessary Being, whose essence we cannot
think of in the former way, i.e. without including in our concept
the notion of actual existence; but we cannot without error
positively exclude the notion of actual existence from our concept
of the Necessary Being, or think of the latter as a merely possible
essence.

Taken in its widest sense, the essence of a thing (οὐσία,
essentia, τὸ τί ἐστι, quod quid est, quidditas) means that by which a
thing is what it is: id quo res est id quod est: that which gives
us the answer to the question, What is this thing? Quid est haec
res? τί ἐστι τόδε τι.84 Now of course any individual thing is
what it is just precisely by all the reality that is in it; but we
have no direct or intuitive intellectual insight into this reality;
we understand it only by degrees; we explore it from various
[pg 076]
points of view, abstracting and generalizing partial aspects of it
as we compare it with other things and seek to classify and define
it: ratio humana essentias rerum quasi venatur, as the scholastics
say: the human mind hunts, as it were, after the essences or
natures of things. Understanding the individual datum of sense
experience (what Aristotle called τόδε τι, or οὐσία πρώτη, and
the scholastics hoc aliquid, or substantia prima), e.g. this individual,
Socrates, first under the vaguest concept of being, then gradually
under the more and more determinate concepts of substance,
corporeal, living, sentient, rational, it finally forms the complex
concept of his species infima, expressed by his lowest class-name,
“man,” and explicitly set forth in the definition of his specific
nature as a “rational animal”. Nor does our reason fail to
realize that by reaching this concept of the specific essence or
nature of the individual, Socrates, it has not yet grasped all the
reality whereby the individual is what he is. It has reached
what he has in common with all other individuals of his class,
what is essential to him as a man; it has distinguished this from
the unanalysed something which makes him this particular individual
of his class, and which makes his specific essence this
individual essence (essentia “atoma,” or “individua”); and it has
also distinguished his essence from those accidental and ever
varying attributes which are not essential to him as a man,
and from those which are not essential to him as Socrates.
It is only the unfathomed individual essence, as existing hic et
nunc, that is concrete. All the mind’s generic and specific representations
of it—e.g. of Socrates as a corporeal substance, a
living being, a sentient being, a rational animal—are abstract,
and all more or less inadequate, none of them exhausting its
knowable reality. But it is only in so far as the mind is able to
represent concrete individual things by such abstract concepts,
that it can attain to intellectual knowledge of their nature or
reality. Hence it is that by the term “essence,” simply and sine
addito, we always mean the essence as grasped by abstract
generic or specific concepts (ἔιδος, species), and as thus capable of
definition (λόγος, ratio rei). “The essence,” says St. Thomas,
“is that by which the thing is constituted in its proper genus or
species, and which we signify by the definition which states what
the thing is”.85 Thus understood, the essence is abstract, and
[pg 077]
gives the specific or generic type to which the individual thing
belongs; but we may also mean by essence, the concrete essence,
the individual person or thing (persona, suppositum, res individua).
The relations between the objects of those two concepts of essence
will be examined later.

Since the specific essence is conceived as the most fundamental
reality in the thing, and as the seat and source of all the
properties and activities of the thing, it is sometimes defined or
described, in accordance with this notion of it, as the primary
constitutive of the thing and the source of all the properties of
the thing. Conceived as the foundation of all the properties of
the thing it is sometimes called substance (οὐσία, substantia).
Regarded as the source of the thing’s activities, and the principle
of its growth or development, it is called the nature of the thing
(φύσις, natura, from φύω, nascor).86

Since what makes a thing that which it is, by the same fact
differentiates this thing from every other thing, the essence is
rightly conceived as that which gives the thing its characteristic
being, thereby marking it off from all other being. In reality,
of course, each individual being is distinct by all that it is from
every other. But since we get our intellectual knowledge of
things by abstracting, comparing, generalizing, and classifying
partial aspects of them, we apprehend part of the imperfectly
grasped abstract essence of each individual as common to other
classes (generic), and part as peculiar to that class itself (differential);
and thus we differentiate classes of things by what is only
part of their essence, by what we call the differentia of each class,
distinguishing mentally between it and the generic element:
which two are really one, really identical, in every individual of
the species thus defined and classified.

But in the Aristotelian and scholastic view of the constitution
of any corporeal thing, there is a danger of taking what is really
only part of the essence of such a thing for the whole essence.
According to this view all corporeal substance is essentially composite,
constituted by two really distinct, substantial principles,
primal matter (πρώτη ὕλη, materia prima) and substantial form
(ἔιδος, μορφή) united substantially, as potential and actual principles,
to form one composite nature or essence. Now the kind,
or species, or specific type, to which a body belongs—e.g., a horse,
an oak, gold, water, etc.—depends upon the substantial form which
[pg 078]
actualizes the matter or potential principle. In so far as the
corporeal essence is known to us at all it is known through the
form, which is the principle of all the characteristic properties and
activities of that particular kind of body. Hence it is quite natural
that the εἲδος, μόρφη, or forma substantialis of a body should
often be referred to as the specific essence of the body, though of
course the essence of the body really includes the material as well
as the formal factor.

We may look at the essence of any being from two points of
view. If we consider it as it is conceived actually to exist in the
being, we call it the physical essence. If we consider it after the
manner in which it is apprehended and defined by our intellects
through generic and differentiating concepts, we call it the metaphysical
essence. Thus, the essence of man conceived by the two
defining concepts, “rational animal,” is the metaphysical essence;
the essence of man as known to be composed of the two really
distinct substantial principles, soul and body, is the physical essence.
Understood in this way both are one and the same essence
considered from different points of view—as existing in the actual
order, and as conceived by the mind.87

The physical essence of any being, understood as the constitutive
principle or principles from which all properties spring,
is either simple or composite according as it is understood to consist
of one such constitutive principle, or to result from the substantial
union of two constitutive principles, a material and a
formal. Thus, the essence of God, the essence of a purely
spiritual being, the essence of the human soul, are physically
simple; the essence of man, the essences of all corporeal beings,
are physically composite.

According to our mode of conceiving, defining and classifying
essences by means of the abstract generic and differential grades of
being which we apprehend in them, all essences, even physically
simple essences, are conceived as logically and metaphysically composite.
Moreover we speak and think of their generic and differential
[pg 079]
factors as “material” and “formal” respectively, after the
analogy of the composition of corporeal or physically composite
essences from the union of two really distinct principles, matter
and form; the analogy consisting in this, that as matter is the
indeterminate principle which is determined and actuated by form,
so the generic concept is the indeterminate concept which is made
definite and specific by that of the differentia.88 But when we
think of the genus of any corporeal essence as “material,” and the
differentia as “formal,” we must not consider these “metaphysical
parts” as really distinct; whereas the “physical parts” of a
corporeal substance (such as man) are really distinct. The
genus (animal), although a metaphysical part, expresses the
whole essence (man) in an indeterminate way; whereas the
“matter” which is a physical part, does not express the whole
essence of man, nor does the soul which is also a physical part,
but only both together. Not a little error has resulted from the
confusion of thought whereby genus and differentia have been
regarded as material and formal constitutives in the literal sense
of those expressions.

14. Characteristics of Abstract Essences.—When we
consider the essences of things not as actually existing, but as
intrinsically possible—the abstract, metaphysical essences, therefore—we
find that when as objects of our thought they are
analysed into their simplest constituents and compared or
related with themselves and with one another they present
themselves to our minds in these relations as endowed with
certain more or less remarkable characteristics.

(a) In the first place, being abstract, they present themselves
[pg 080]
to the mind as being what they are independently of actual
existence at any particular time or place. Their intelligibility is
something apart from any relation to any actual time or place.
Being intrinsically possible, they might exist at any time or
place; but as possible, they are out of time and out of place—detemporalized
and delocalized, if we may be permitted to use
such expressions.89

(b) Furthermore, since the intellect forms its notions of them,
through the aid of the senses and the imagination, from actual
realizations of themselves or their constituent factors, and since
it understands them to be intrinsically possible, or free from
intrinsic incompatibility of their constituent factors, it conceives
them to be capable of indefinitely repeated actualizations throughout
time and space—unless it sees some special reason to the
contrary, as it does in the case of the Necessary Being, and
(according to some philosophers) in the case of purely immaterial
beings or pure spirits. That is to say it universalizes them, and
sees them to be capable of existing at any and every conceivable
time and place. This relation of theirs to space is not likely to
be confounded with the immensity or ubiquity of God. But
their corresponding relation to time is sometimes described as
eternity; and if it is so described it must be carefully distinguished
from the positive eternity of God, the Immutable Being. To
distinguish it from the latter it is usually described as negative
eternity,—this indifference of the possible essence to actual
existence at any particular point of time.

(c) Thirdly, essences considered apart from their actual existence,
and compared with their own constitutive factors or with
one another, reveal to the mind relations which the mind sees to
[pg 081]
be necessary, and which it formulates for itself in necessary judgments,—judgments
in materia necessaria. By virtue of the
principle of identity an abstract essence is necessarily what it is,
what the mind conceives it to be, what the mind conceives as its
definition. Man, as an object of thought, is necessarily a rational
animal, whether he actually exists or not. And if he is thought
of as existing, he cannot at the same time be thought of as non-existing,—by
the principle of contradiction. An existing man is
necessarily an existing man,—by the principle of identity. These
logical principles are rooted in the nature of reality, whether
actual or possible, considered as an object of thought. There is thus
a necessary relation between any complex object of thought and
each of the constituent factors into which the mind can analyse
it. And, similarly, there is a necessary negative relation—a
relation of exclusion—between any object of thought and anything
which the mind sees to be incompatible with that object as a
whole, or with any of its constituent factors.

Again, the mind sees necessary relations between abstract
essences compared with one another. Five and seven are
necessarily twelve. Whatever begins to exist actually must have
a cause. Contingent being, if such exists, is necessarily dependent
for its existence on some other actually existing being. If
potential being is actualized it must be actualized by actual being.
The three interior angles of a triangle are necessarily equal to two
right angles. And so on.

But is the abstract essence itself—apart from all mental
analysis of it, apart from all comparison of it with its constituent
factors or with other essences—in any sense necessary? There is
no question of its actual existence, but only of itself as an object of
thought. Now our thought does not seem to demand necessarily,
or have a necessary connexion with, any particular object of which
we do de facto think. What we do think of is determined by our
experience of actual things. And the things which we conceive
to be possible, by the exercise of our reason upon the data of our
senses, memory and imagination, are determined as to their
nature and number by our experience of actual things, even
although they themselves can and do pass beyond the domain of
actually experienced things. The only necessary object of
thought is reality in general: for the exercise of the function of
thought necessarily demands an object, and this object must be
reality of some sort. Thought, as we saw, begins with actual
[pg 082]
reality. Working upon this, thought apprehends in it the foundations
of those necessary relations and judgments already referred
to. Considering, moreover, the actual data of experience, our
thought can infer from these the actual existence of one Being
Who must exist by a necessity of His Essence.

(d) Finally, possible essences appear to the mind as immutable,
and consequently indivisible. This means simply that the
relations which we establish between them and their constitutive
factors are not only necessary but immutable: that if any constitutive
factor of an essence is conceived as removed from it, or
any new factor as added, we have no longer the original essence
but some other essence. If “animal” is a being essentially
embodying the two objective concepts of “organism” and
“sentient,” then on removing either we have no longer the
essence “animal”. So, too, by adding to these some other
element compatible with them, e.g. “rational,” we have no longer
the essence “animal,” but the essence “man”. Hence possible
essences have been likened to numbers, inasmuch as if we
add anything to, or subtract anything from, any given number,
we have now no longer the original number but another.90 This,
too, is only an expression of the laws of identity and contradiction.

15. Grounds of Those Characteristics.—In considering
the grounds or reasons of the various characteristics just enumerated
it may be well to reflect that when we speak of the
intrinsic possibility of a possible essence we conceive the latter as
something complex, which we mentally resolve into its constitutive
notes or factors or principles, to see if these are compatible.
If they are we pronounce the essence intrinsically
possible, if not we pronounce it intrinsically impossible. For
[pg 083]
our minds, absence of internal incompatibility in the content
of our concept of any object is the test of its intrinsic possibility.
Whatever fulfils this test we consider capable of existing.
But what about the possibility of the notes, or factors,
or principles themselves, whereby we define those essences, and
by the union of which we conceive those essences to be constituted?
How do we know that those abstract principles or
factors—no one of which can actually exist alone, since all are
abstract—can in certain combinations form possible objects of
thought? We can know this only because we have either experienced
such objects as actual, or because we infer their possibility
from objects actually experienced. And similarly our
knowledge of what is impossible is based upon our experience of
the actual. Since, moreover, our experience of the actual is
finite and fallible, we may err in our judgments as to what essences
are, and what are not, intrinsically possible.91

If now we ask ourselves what intelligible reason can we
assign for the characteristics just indicated as belonging to possible
essences, we must fix our attention first of all on the fundamental
fact that the human intellect always apprehends its object in an
abstract condition. It contemplates the essence apart from the
existence in which the essence is subject to circumstances of time
and place and change; it grasps the essence in a static condition
as simply identical with itself and distinct from all else; it sees
the essence as indifferent to existence at any place or time;
reflecting then on the actualization of this essence in the existing
order of things, it apprehends the essence as capable of indefinite
actualizations (except in cases where it sees some reason to
the contrary), i.e. it universalizes the essence; comparing it with
its constituent notes or elements, and with those of other essences,
it sees and affirms certain relations (of identity or diversity, compatibility
or incompatibility, between those notes or elements) as
holding good necessarily and immutably, and independently of
the actual embodiment of those notes or elements in any object
existing at any particular place or time. All these features of
the relations between the constituents of abstract, possible
essences, seem so far to be adequately accounted for by the fact
[pg 084]
that the intellect apprehends those essences in the abstract: the
data in which it apprehends them being given to it through
sense experience. What may be inferred from the fact that the
human intellect has this power of abstract thought, is another
question92. But granting that it does apprehend essences in
this manner, we seem to have in this fact a sufficient explanation
of the features just referred to.

We have, however, already suggested other questions about
the reality of those possible essences. Is their possibility, so far
as known to us, explained by our experience of actual things?
Or must we think them as eternally, necessarily and immutably
possible? From the manner in which we must apprehend them,
can we infer anything about the reality of an Eternal, Immutable,
Necessary Intelligence, in whose Thought and Essence
alone those essences, as apprehended by our minds, can find
their ultimate ground and explanation? These are the questions
we must now endeavour to examine.

16. Possible Essences as such are Something Distinct
from mere Logical Being, and from Nothingness.—There
have been philosophers who have held that the actual
alone is real, and only while it is actual; that a purely (intrinsically)
possible essence as such is nothing real; that the actual
alone is possible; that the purely possible as such is impossible.
This view is based on the erroneous assumption that whatever
is or becomes actual is so, or becomes so, by some sort of unintelligible
fatalistic necessity. Apart from the fact that it is
incompatible with certain truths of theism, such as the Divine
Omnipotence and Freedom in creating, it also involves the
denial of all real becoming or change, and the assertion that all
[pg 085]
actuality is eternal; for if anything becomes actual, it was previously
either possible or impossible; if impossible, it could never
become actual; if possible, then as possible it was something
different from the impossible, or from absolute nothingness.
Moreover, the intrinsically possible is capable of becoming actual,
and may be actualized if there exists some actual being with power
to actualize it; but absolute nothingness—or, in other words, the
intrinsically impossible—cannot be actualized, even by Omnipotence;
therefore the possible essence as such is something
positive or real, as distinct from nothingness. Finally, intrinsically
possible essences can be clearly distinguished from one
another by the mind; but their negation which is pure non-entity
or nothingness cannot be so distinguished. It is therefore
clear that possible essences are in some true sense something
positive or real. From which it follows that nothingness, in the
strict sense, is not the mere absence or negation of actuality, but
also the absence or negation of that positive or real something
which is intrinsic possibility; in other words that nothingness in
the strict sense means intrinsic impossibility.

Even those who hold the opinion just rejected—that the
purely possible essence as such has no reality in any conceivable
sense—would presumably admit that it is an object of human
thought at all events; they would accord to it the being it has
from the human mind which thinks it. It would therefore be an
ens rationis according to this view, having only the ideal being
which consists in its being constituted and contemplated by the
human mind. That it has the ideal being, the esse ideale or esse intentionale,
which consists in its being contemplated by the human
mind as an object of thought, no one will deny. But a little
reflection will show, firstly, that this ideal being is something
more than the ideal being of an ens rationis, of a mere logical
entity; and, secondly, that a possible essence must have some
other ideal being than that which it has in the individual human
mind.

The possible essence is not a mere logical entity; for the
latter cannot be conceived as capable of existing apart from the
human mind, in the world of actual existences (3), whereas the
former can be, and is in fact, conceived as capable of such
existence. Its ideal being in the human mind is, therefore,
something other than that of a mere logical entity.

The ideal being which it has in the human mind as an object
[pg 086]
of thought is undoubtedly derived from the mind’s knowledge
of actual things. We think of the essences of actually experienced
realities apart from their actual existence. Thus abstracted, we
analyse them, compare them, reason from them. By these processes
we can not merely attain to a knowledge of the actual
existence of other realities above and beyond and outside of our
own direct and immediate intuitional experience, but we can
also form concepts of multitudes of realities or essences as intrinsically
possible, thus giving these latter an ideal existence in our
own minds. Here, then, the question arises: Is this the only
ideal being that can be ascribed to such essences? In other
words, are essences intrinsically possible because we think them
as intrinsically possible? Or is it not rather the case that we
think them to be intrinsically possible because they are intrinsically
possible? Does our thought constitute, or does it not
rather merely discover, their intrinsic possibility? Does the
latter result from, or is it not rather presupposed by, our thought-activity?
The second alternative suggested in each of these
questions is the true one. As our thought is not the source of
their actuality, neither is it the source of their intrinsic possibility.
Solipsism is the reductio ad absurdum of the philosophy which
would reduce all actuality experienced by the individual mind to
phases, or phenomena, or self-manifestations, of the individual
mind itself as the one and only actuality. And no less absurd
is the philosophy which would accord to all intrinsically possible
realities no being other than the ideal being which they have as
the thought-objects of the individual human mind. The study
of the actual world of direct experience leads the impartial and
sincere inquirer to the conclusion that it is in some true sense a
manifestation of mind or intelligence: not, however, of his own
mind, which is itself only a very tiny item in the totality of the
actual world, but of one Supreme Intelligence. And in this same
Intelligence the world of possible essences too will be found to
have its original and fundamental ideal being.

17. Possible Essences have, besides Ideal Being, no
other sort of Being or Reality Proper and Intrinsic
to Themselves.—Before inquiring further into the manner in
which we attain to a knowledge of this Intelligence, and of the
ideal being of possible essences in this Intelligence, we may ask
whether, above and beyond such ideal being, possible essences
have not perhaps from all eternity some being or reality proper
[pg 087]
and intrinsic to themselves; not indeed the actual being which
they possess when actualized in time, but yet some kind of
intrinsic reality as distinct from the extrinsic ideal being, or
esse intentionale, which consists merely in this that they are objects
of thought present as such to a Supreme Intelligence or Mind.

Some few medieval scholastics93 contended that possible
essences have from all eternity not indeed the existence they
may receive by creation or production in time, but an intrinsic
essential being which, by creation or production, may be transferred
to the order of actual existences, and which, when actual
existence ceases (if they ever receive it), still continues immutable
and incorruptible: what these writers called the esse
essentiae, as distinct from the esse existentiae, conceiving it to be
intermediate between the latter on the one hand and mere ideal
or logical being on the other, and hence calling it esse diminutum
or secundum quid. Examining the question from the standpoint
of theism, these authors seem to have thought that since God
understands these essences as possible from all eternity, and
since this knowledge must have as its term or object something
real and positive, these essences must have some real and
proper intrinsic being from all eternity: otherwise they would
be simply nothingness, and nothingness cannot be the term of
the Divine Intelligence. But the obvious reply is that though
possible essences as such are nothing actual they must be distinguished
as realities, capable of actually existing, from absolute
nothingness; and that as thus distinguished from absolute nothingness
they are really and positively intelligible to the Divine Mind,
as indeed they are even to the human mind. To be intelligible
they need not have actual being. They must, no doubt, be
capable of having actual being, in order to be understood as
realities: it is precisely in this understood capability that their
reality consists, for the real includes not only what actually
exists but whatever is capable of actual existence. Whatever is
opposed to absolute nothingness is real; and this manifestly includes
not only the actual but whatever is intrinsically possible.

Realities or essences which have not actual being have only
[pg 088]
ideal being; and ideal being means simply presence in some
mind as an object of thought. Scholastic philosophers generally94
hold that possible essences as such have no other being than this;
that before and until such essences actually exist they have of
themselves and in themselves no being except the ideal being
which they have as objects of the Divine Intelligence and the
virtual being they have in the Divine Omnipotence which may
at any time give them actual existence. One convincing reason
for this view is the consideration that if possible essences as such
had from all eternity any proper and intrinsic being in themselves,
God could neither create nor annihilate. For in that hypothesis
essences, on becoming actual, would not be produced ex nihilo,
inasmuch as before becoming actual they would in themselves
and from all eternity have had their own proper real being; and
after ceasing to be actual they would still retain this. But creation
is the production of the whole reality of actual being from
nothingness; and is therefore impossible if the actual being is
merely produced from an essence already real, i.e. having an
eternal positive reality of its own. The same is true of annihilation.
The theory of eternally existing uncreated matter is no
less incompatible with the doctrine of creation than this theory
of eternally real and uncreated forms or essences.

Again, what could this supposed positive and proper reality
of the possible essence be? If it is anything distinct from the
mere ideal being of such an essence, as it is assumed to be, it
must after all be actual being of some sort, which would apparently
have to be actualized again in order to have actual
existence! Finally, this supposed eternal reality, proper to
possible essences, cannot be anything uncreated. For whatever
is uncreated is God; and since it is these supposed proper
realities of possible essences that are made actual, and constitute
the existing created universe, the latter would be in this view an
actualization of the Divine Essence itself,—which is pantheism
pure and simple. And neither can this supposed eternal reality,
proper to possible essences, be anything created. For such creation
would be eternal and necessary; whereas God’s creative
activity is admitted by all scholastics to be essentially free; and
although they are not agreed as to whether “creation from all
[pg 089]
eternity” (“creatio ab aeterno”) is possible, they are agreed that
it is not a fact.

Possible essences as such are therefore nothing actual.
Furthermore, as such they have in themselves no positive being.
But they are not therefore unreal. They are positively intelligible
as capable of actual existence, and therefore as distinct from
logical entities or entia rationis which are not capable of such
existence. They are present as objects of thought to mind; and
to some mind other than the individual human mind. About
this ideal being which they have in this Mind we have now in
the next place to inquire.

18. Inferences from our Knowledge of Possible
Essences.—We have stated that an impartial study of the actual
world will lead to the conclusion that it is dependent on a Supreme
Intelligence; and we have suggested that in this Supreme
Intelligence also possible essences as such have their primary ideal
being (16, 17). When the existence of God has been established—as
it may be established by various lines of argument—from
actual things, we can clearly see, as will be pointed out presently,
that in the Divine Essence all possible essences have the ultimate
source of their possibility. But many scholastic philosophers
contend that the nature and properties of possible essences, as apprehended
by the human mind, furnish a distinct and conclusive
argument for the existence of a Supreme Uncreated Intelligence.95
Others deny the validity of such a line of reasoning, contending
that it is based on misapprehension and misinterpretation of
those characteristics.

20. Essences are intrinsically Possible, not because
God can make them exist actually; nor yet because He
freely wills them to be possible; nor because He understands
them as possible; but because they are modes in
which the Divine Essence is Imitable ad extra.—(a) The
ultimate source of the extrinsic possibility of all contingent realities
is the Divine Omnipotence: just as the proximate source of the
extrinsic possibility of a statue is the power of the sculptor to
educe it from the block of wood or marble. But just as the
power of the sculptor presupposes the intrinsic possibility of the
statue, so does the Divine Omnipotence presuppose the intrinsic
possibility of all possible things. It is not, as William of Ockam
(† 1347), a scholastic of the decadent period, erroneously thought,
[pg 096]
because God can create things that such things are intrinsically
possible, but rather because they are intrinsically possible He can
create them.

(b) Not less erroneous is the voluntarist theory of Descartes,
according to which possible essences are intrinsically possible because
God freely willed them to be possible.108 The actuality of
all created things depends, of course, on the free will of God
to create them; but that possible essences are what they are, and
are related to each other necessarily as they are, because God has
willed them to be such, is absolutely incredible. Descartes seems
to have been betrayed into this strange error by a false notion of
what is requisite for the absolute freedom and independence of
the Divine Will: as if this demanded that God should be free to
will, e.g. that two plus two be five, or that the radii of a circle be
unequal, or that creatures be independent of Himself, or that
blasphemy be a virtuous act! The intrinsic possibility of essences
is not dependent on the Free Will of God; the actualization of
possible essences is; but God can will to actualize only such
essences as He sees, from comprehending His own Divine Essence,
to be intrinsically possible. But it derogates in no way
from the supremacy of the Divine Will to conceive its free volition
as thus consequent on, and illumined by, the Divine Knowledge;
whereas it is incompatible with the wisdom and sanctity of God,
as well as inconceivable to the human mind, that the necessary
laws of thought and being—such as the principles of contradiction
and identity, the principle of causality, the first principles of the
moral order—should be what they are simply because God has
freely willed them to be so, and might therefore have been otherwise.

(c) Philosophers who deny the validity of all the arguments
advanced by theists in proof of the existence of a transcendent
Supreme Being, distinct from the world of direct human experience,
endeavour to account in various ways for the intrinsic
possibility of abstract essences. Agnostics either deny to these
latter any reality whatsoever (16), or else declare the problem of
their reality insoluble. Monists of the materialist type—who try
to reduce all mind to matter and its mere mechanical energies
(11)—treat the question in a still more inadequate and unsatisfactory
manner; while the advocates of idealistic monism, like
Hegel and his followers, refer us to the supposed Immanent Mind
[pg 098]
of the universe for an ultimate explanation of all intrinsic possibility.
Certainly this must have its ultimate source in some mind;
and it is not in referring us to an Eternal Mind that these philosophers
err, but in their conception of the relation of this mind to
the world of direct actual experience. It is not, however, with such
theories we are concerned just now, but only with theories put forward
by theists. And among these latter it is surprising to find
some few110 who maintain that the intrinsic possibility of abstract
essences depends ultimately and exclusively on these essences
themselves, irrespective of things actually experienced by the
human mind, irrespective of the human mind itself, and irrespective
of the Divine Mind and the Divine Nature.

As to this view, we have already seen (19) that if we abstract
from all human minds, and from all actual things that can be
directly experienced by such minds, we are face to face either
with the alternative of absolute nothingness wherein the true and
the false, the possible and the impossible, cease to have any
intelligible meaning, or else with the alternative of a Supreme,
Eternal, Necessary, Omniscient and Omnipotent Being, whose
actual existence has been, or can be, inferred from the actual
data of human experience. Now the theist, who admits the
existence of such a Being, cannot fail to see that possible essences
must have their primary ideal being in the Divine Intellect, and
the ultimate source of their intrinsic possibility in the Divine
Essence Itself. For, knowing that God can actualize intrinsically
possible essences by the creative act, which is intelligent and free,
he will understand that these essences have their ideal being in
the Divine Intellect; that the Divine Intellect sees their intrinsic
possibility by contemplating the Divine Essence as the Uncreated
Prototype and Exemplar of all intrinsically possible
things; and that these latter are intrinsically possible precisely
because they are possible adumbrations or imitations of the
Divine Nature.

(d) But are we to conceive that essences are intrinsically
possible precisely because the Divine Intellect, by understanding
them, makes them intrinsically possible? Or should we rather
conceive their intrinsic possibility as antecedent to this act by
which the Divine Intellect understands them, and as dependent
only on the Divine Essence Itself, so that essences would be
[pg 099]
intrinsically possible simply because the Divine Essence is what
it is, and because they are possible imitations or expressions of it?
Here scholastics are not agreed.

Some111 hold that the intrinsic possibility of essences is formally
constituted by the act whereby the Divine Intellect, contemplating
the Divine Essence, understands the latter to be indefinitely
imitable ad extra; so that as the actuality of things results from
the Fiat of the Divine Will, and as their extrinsic possibility is
grounded in the Divine Omnipotence, so their intrinsic possibility
is grounded in the Divine Intellect. The latter, by understanding
the Divine Essence, would not merely give an ideal being to the
intrinsic possibility of essences, but would make those essences
formally possible, they being only virtually possible in the Divine
Essence considered antecedently to this act of the Divine Intellect.
Or, rather, as some Scotists explain the matter,112 this ideal
being which possible essences have from the Divine Intellect is
not as extrinsic to them as the ideal being they have from the
human intellect, but is rather the very first being they can be
said formally to have, and is somehow intrinsic to them after the
analogy of the being which mere logical entities, entia rationis,
derive from the human mind: which being is intrinsic to these
entities and is in fact the only being they have or can have.

Others113 hold that while, no doubt, possible essences have
ideal being in the Divine Intellect from the fact that they are
objects of the Divine Knowledge, yet we must not conceive these
essences as deriving their intrinsic possibility from the Divine
Intellect. For intellect as such presupposes its object. Just,
therefore, as possible essences are not intrinsically possible
because they are understood by, and have ideal being in, the
human mind, so neither are they intrinsically possible because
they are understood by, and have ideal being in, the Divine
Mind. In order to be understood actually, in order to have
ideal being, in order to be objects of thought, they must be
intelligible; and in order to be intelligible they must be
intrinsically possible. Therefore they are formally constituted
as intrinsically possible essences, not by the fact that they are
understood by the Divine Intellect, but by the fact that antecedently
[pg 100]
to this act (in our way of conceiving the matter: for
there is really no priority of acts or attributes in God) they are
already possible imitations of the Divine Essence Itself.

This view seems preferable as being more in accordance with
the analogy of what takes place in the human mind. The
speculative intellect in man does not constitute, but presupposes
its object. Now, while actual things are the objects of God’s
practical science—the “scientia visionis,” which reaches what is
freely decreed by the Divine Will,—possible things are the objects
of God’s speculative science—the “scientia simplicis intelligentiae,”
which is not, like the former, productive of its object, but rather
contemplative of objects presented to it by and in the Divine
Essence.

Why, then, ultimately will the notions “square” and “circle”
not coalesce so as to form one object of thought for the human
mind, while the notions “equilateral” and “triangle” will so
coalesce? Because the Essence of God, the Necessary Being,
the First Reality, and the Source of all contingent reality, affords
no basis for the former as a possible expression or imitation of
Itself; in other words, because Being is not expressible by
nothingness, and a “square circle” is nothingness: while the
Divine Essence does afford a basis for the latter; because
Necessary Being is in some intelligible way imitated, expressed,
manifested, by whatever has any being to distinguish it from
nothingness, and an “equilateral triangle” has such being and is
not nothingness.

It is hardly necessary to add that when we conceive the
Divine Essence, contemplated by the Divine Intellect, as containing
in itself the exemplars or prototypes of all possible things,
we are not to understand the Divine Essence as the formal
exemplar of each, or, a fortiori, as a vast collection of such formally
distinct exemplars; but only as virtually and equivalently
the exemplar of each and all. We are not to conceive that
possible essences are seen by the Divine Intellect imaged in the
Divine Essence as in a mirror, but rather as in their supreme
source and principle: so that they are faint and far off reflections
of It, and, when actualized, become for us the only means we
have, in this present state, for reaching any knowledge of the
Deity: videmus nunc per speculum.114

[pg 101]

21. Distinction Between Essence and Existence in
Actually Existing Contingent or Created Beings.—Passing
now from the consideration of possible essences as such,
to the consideration of actually existing essences, we have to
examine a question which has given rise to a great deal of
controversy, partly on account of its inherent difficulty, and
partly because of a multitude of ambiguities arising from confusion
of thought: What is the nature of the distinction between
essence and existence in the actually existing things of our
experience?

We have seen already that the concepts of essence and existence
are distinct from each other (12, 13); in other words,
that in all cases there is at least a logical distinction between the
essence and the existence of any being. We must, however,
distinguish between created or contingent beings and the
Uncreated, Necessary, Self-Existent Being. The latter exists
essentially, eternally, by His own Essence, so that in Him
essence and existence are really identical. His essence is formally
His Existence; and, therefore, in thinking of His Essence we
cannot positively exclude the notion of existence or think of
Him as non-existent. The distinction between essence and
existence, which we find in our thoughts, is, therefore, when
applied to God, a purely logical distinction, due solely to our
finite human mode of thinking, and having no ground or basis or
reason in the reality which is the object of our thought. On
this there is complete unanimity among scholastic philosophers.

But while we conceive that God actually exists by that
whereby He is God, by His Essence Itself, we do not conceive
that any created or contingent being exists by that whereby it
is what it is, by its essence. We do not, for example, regard
the essence of Socrates, whether specific or individual (that
whereby he is a man, or that whereby he is this man, Socrates),
as that whereby he actually exists. In other words, the essence
of the existing Socrates, being a contingent essence, does not
necessarily demand or imply that it actually exist. Our concept
of such an essence does not include the note of actual existence.
Therefore if we find such an essence actually existing we consider
this actually existing essence as caused or produced, and
conserved in existence, by some other being, viz. by the
Necessary Being: so that if it were not so created and conserved
[pg 102]
it would be a pure possibility and nothing actual.115 The
same difference between the Necessary Being and contingent
beings will be seen from considering their existence. The
abstract concept of existence is rendered definite and determinate
by the essence which it actualizes. Now every finite essence is
of some particular kind; and its existence is rendered determinate
by the fact that it is the existence of a definite kind of
essence. The existence of a contingent being we conceive as
the actuality of its essence; and its essence as a definite potentiality
of existence. Thus if we conceive existence as a perfection
it is restricted by the finite nature of the potentiality which
it actualizes. But the existence of the Necessary Being is the
plenitude of actuality, an existence not restricted by being the
existence of any essence that is determinate because finite, but
of an essence that is determinate by being above all genera and
species, by being infinite, by being Itself pure actuality, in no
sense potential but perfectly and formally identical with actual
existence. While, therefore, the essence of the Necessary Being
is a necessarily existing essence, that of a contingent being is
not necessarily existent, but is conceived as a potentiality which
has been de facto actualized or made existent by the Necessary
Being, and which may again cease to be actually existent.116 On
this too there is unanimity among scholastic philosophers.

[pg 103]

We distinguish mentally or logically between the essence of
an actually existing contingent being and its existence; considering
the former as the potential principle, in relation to the latter
as the actualizing principle, of the contingent existing reality.
But is the distinction between such an essence and its existence
something more than a logical distinction? Is it a real distinction?
This is the question in dispute. And in order to avoid misunderstanding,
we must be clear on these two points: firstly,
of what essence and existence is there question? and secondly,
what exactly are we to understand by a real distinction in this
matter?

22. State of the Question.—In the first place, there is no
question here of the relation of a possible essence as such to existence.
The possible essence of a contingent being, as such, has
no reality outside the Divine Essence, Intellect, Will, and Omnipotence.
Before the world was created the possible essences of
all the beings that constitute it were certainly really distinct from
the actual existence of these beings which do constitute the
created universe. On this point there can be no difference of
opinion. To contend that it is on the eternal reality of the possible
essence that actual existence supervenes, when a contingent
being begins to exist, would be equivalent to contending that it
is the Divine Essence that becomes actual in the phenomena of
our experience: which is the error of Pantheism.

Again, before a contingent thing comes into actual existence
it may be virtually and potentially in the active powers and
passive potentialities of other actually existing contingent things:
as the oak, for instance, is in the passive potentiality of the acorn
and in the active powers of the natural agencies whereby it is
evolved from the acorn; or the statue in the block of marble
and in the mind and artistic power of the sculptor. But neither
is there any question here of the relation of such potential being
[pg 104]
or essence as a thing has in its causes to the actual existence of
this thing when actually produced. Whatever being or essence
it has in its active and passive causes is certainly really distinct
from the existence which the thing has when it has been actually
produced. Nor is there any doubt or dispute about this point.
At the same time much controversy is due to misunderstandings
arising from a confusion of thought which fails to distinguish
between the essence as purely possible, the essence as virtually
or potentially in its causes, and the essence as actually existing.
It is about the distinction between the latter and its existence
that the whole question is raised. And it must be borne in mind
that this essence, whether it is really distinct from its existence
or not, is itself a positive reality from the moment it is created
or produced. The question is whether the creative or productive
act—whereby this essence is placed “outside its causes,” and is
now no longer merely possible, or merely virtual or potential in
its causes, but something real in itself—has for its term one reality,
or two realities, viz. the essence as real subjective potentiality of
existence, and the existential act or perfection whereby it is constituted
actually existent.117

The question is exclusively concerned with the essence which
began to exist when the contingent being came into actual existence,
and which ceases to exist when, or if, this being again
passes out of actual existence; and the question is whether this
essence which actually exists is really distinct from the existence
whereby it actually exists. Finally, the question concerns the
essence and existence of any and every actual contingent reality,
whether such reality be a substance or an accident. Of course
it is primarily concerned with the essence and existence of substances;
but it also applies to the essence and existence of
accidents in so far as these latter will be found to be really distinct
from the substances in which they inhere, and to have reality
proper to themselves.

23. The Theory of Distinctions in its Application to
the Question.—In the next place, what are we to understand by
a real distinction in this matter? Ambiguity and obscurity of
thought in regard to the theory of distinctions, and in regard to
the application of the theory to the present question, has been
probably the most fertile source of much tedious and fruitless
controversy in this connexion.

[pg 105]

Anticipating what will be considered more fully at a later
stage (30), we must note here the two main classes of distinction
which, by reflecting on our thought-processes, we discover
between the objects of our thought. The real distinction is that
which exists in things independently of the consideration of our
minds; that which is discovered, but not made, by the mind;
that which is given to us in and with the data of our experience.
For example, the act of thinking is a reality other than, and
therefore really distinct from, the mind that thinks; for the
mind persists after the act of thinking has passed away.

Opposed to this is the mental or logical distinction, which
is the distinction made by the mind itself between two different
concepts of one and the same reality; which is not in the reality
independently of our thought, but is introduced into it by our
thought, regarding the same reality under different aspects or
from different points of view. The mind never makes such a
distinction without some ground or reason for doing so.

Sometimes, however, this reason will be found exclusively in
the mind itself—in the limitations of its modes of thought—and
not in the reality which is the matter or object of the thought.
The distinction is then said to be purely logical or mental. Such
distinctions are entia rationis, logical entities. An example would
be the distinction between the concept “man” and the concept
“rational animal,” or, in general, between any definable object
of thought and its definition; the distinction, therefore, between
the essence and the existence of the Necessary Being is a purely
logical distinction, for in a definition it is the essence of the thing
we define, and existence is of the essence or definition of the
Necessary Being.

Sometimes, again, the reason for making a mental distinction
will be found in the reality itself. What is one and the same
reality presents different aspects to the mind and evokes different
concepts of itself in the mind: though really one, it is virtually
manifold; and the distinction between the concepts of these
various aspects is commonly known as a virtual distinction.
For example, when we think of any individual man as a
“rational animal,” though our concept of “animal nature” is
distinct from that of “rational nature,” we do not regard these in
him as two realities co-existing or combining to form his human
nature, but only as two distinct aspects under which we view the
one reality which is his human nature. And we view it under
[pg 106]
these two aspects because we have actual experience of instances
in which animal nature is really distinct and separated from
rationality, e.g., in the brute beast. Or, again, since we can recognize
three grades of life in man—vegetative, sentient, and
rational—we conceive the one principle of life, his soul, as virtually
three principles; and so we distinguish mentally or virtually
between three souls in man, although in reality there is only one.
Or, once more, when we think of the Wisdom, the Will, and the
Omnipotence of God, we know that although these concepts
represent different aspects of the Deity, these aspects are not
distinct realities in Him; but that because of His infinite perfection
and infinite simplicity they are all objectively one and the
same self-identical reality.

A virtual distinction is said to be imperfect (thus approaching
nearer to the nature of a purely logical distinction) when each of
the concepts whereby we apprehend the same reality only prescinds
explicitly from what is expressed by the other, although
one of them is found on analysis to include implicitly what is
expressed by the other. Such is the distinction between the
being and the life of any living thing; or the distinction between
the spirituality and the immortality of the human soul; or the
distinction between Infinite Wisdom and Infinite Power: the distinction
between the divine attributes in general. A virtual distinction
is said to be perfect (thus approaching nearer to the
nature of a real distinction) when neither of the concepts
includes either explicitly or implicitly what is expressed by the
other. Such, for instance, is the distinction between the principle
of intellectual life and the principle of animal or sentient life in
man; for not only can these exist separately (the former without
the latter, e.g. in pure spirits, the latter without the former,
e.g. in brute beasts), but also it will be found that by no analysis
does either concept in any way involve the other.118

Our only object in setting down the various examples just
given is to illustrate the general scholastic teaching on the
doctrine of distinction. In themselves they are not beyond
dispute, for the general doctrine of distinction is not easy of
application in detail; but they will be sufficient for our present
purpose. Probably the greatest difficulty in applying the general
doctrine will be found to lie in discriminating between virtual
distinctions—especially perfect virtual distinctions—and real
[pg 107]
distinctions.119 And this difficulty will be appreciated still more when
we learn that a real distinction does not necessarily involve
separability of the objects so distinguished. In other words there
may be, in a composite existing individual being, constitutive
factors or principles, or integral parts, each of which is a positive
real entity, really distinct from the others, and yet incapable of
existing separately or in isolation from the others. “Separability,”
says Mercier,120 “is one of the signs of a real distinction;
but it is neither essential to, nor a necessary property of the latter.
Two separable things are of course really distinct from each
other; but two entities may be really distinct from each other
without being separable or capable of existing apart from each
other. Thus we believe that the intellect and the will in man
are really distinct from each other, and both alike from the substance
of the human soul; yet they cannot exist isolated from
the soul.” Therefore, even though the objects which we apprehend
as distinct, by means of distinct concepts, be understood to
be such that they cannot actually exist in isolation from each
other, but only as united in a composite individual being, still if
it can be shown that each of them has its own proper reality independently
of our thought, so that the distinction between them
is not the result of our thought, or introduced by our thought
into the individual thing or being which we are considering, then
the distinction must be regarded as real. If, on the other hand,
it can be shown that the different aspects which we apprehend in
any datum by means of distinct concepts have not, apart from
the consideration of the mind, apart from the analytic activity
of our own thought, each its own proper reality, but are only
distinct mental views of what is objectively one and the same
reality, then the distinction must be regarded as logical, not real,—and
this even although there may be in the richness and fulness
of that one reality comparatively to the limited capacity of our
minds, as well as in the very constitution and modes of thought
of our minds themselves, a reason or basis for, and an explanation
of, the multiplicity of concepts whereby we attain to an understanding
of some one reality.

24. Solutions of the Question.—Postponing further
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consideration of the serious problems on the validity of knowledge
and its relation to reality, to which those reflections
inevitably give rise, let us now return to the main question:
the nature of the distinction between the essence and the existence
of any actually existing contingent being. We need not
be surprised to find that the greatest minds have been unable to
reach the same solution of this question. For it is but a phase
of the more general metaphysical problem—at once both
ontological and epistemological—of the nature of reality and the
relation of the human mind thereto. Nor will any serious
modern philosopher who is at all mindful of the wealth of
current controversial literature on this very problem, or of the
endless variety of conflicting opinions among contemporary
thinkers in regard to it, be disposed to ridicule the medieval
controversies on the doctrine of distinction as applied to essence
and existence. No doubt there has been a good deal of mere
verbal, and perhaps trifling, argumentation on the matter: it
lends itself to the dialectical skill of the controversialist who
“takes sides,” as well as to the serious thought of the open-minded
investigator. It is not, however, through drawing
different conclusions from the same premisses that conflicting
solutions of the question have been reached, but rather through
fundamentally different attitudes in regard to the premisses
themselves which different philosophers profess to find in the
common data of their experience. When we have once grasped
what philosophers mean by a logical or a real distinction as
applied to the relation between essence and existence we shall
not get any very material assistance towards the choice of a solution
by considering at length the arguments adduced on either
side.121

Those who believe there is a real distinction122 between the
essence and the existence of all actually existing contingent
beings mean by this that the real essence which comes into
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actual existence by creation, or by the action of created causes,
is a reality distinct from the existence whereby it actually
exists. The actually existing essence is the total term of the
creative or productive act; but what we apprehend in it under
the concept of essence is really distinct from what we apprehend
in it under the concept of existence: the existence being a real
principle which actualizes the essence, and this latter being itself
another real principle which is in itself a positive, subjective
potentiality of existence.123 Neither, of course, can actually exist
without the other: no actual existence except that of a real
essence; no existing essence except by reason of the existence
which makes it actual. But these two real principles of existing
contingent being, inseparable as they are and correlative, are
nevertheless distinct realities—distinct in the objective order and
independently of our thought,—and form by their union a really
composite product: the existing thing.