Part 4 (1/2)
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 a.n.a.lyse 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 universe(82): an observation which applies with equal 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 princ.i.p.al kinds of change, as a.n.a.lysed 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 pa.s.so_. 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_, t?
e??a?) 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 pa.s.sive 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 G.o.d, 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 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 (??s?a, _essentia_, t?
t? ?st?, _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?_ t? ?st? t?de t?.(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 points of view, abstracting and generalizing partial aspects of it as we compare it with other things and seek to cla.s.sify 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 t?de t?, or ??s?a p??t?, 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 cla.s.s-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 cla.s.s, what is essential to him _as a man_; it has distinguished this from the una.n.a.lysed something which makes him _this particular individual_ of his cla.s.s, 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 (??d??, _species_), and as thus capable of definition (?????, _ratio rei_). ”The essence,” says St.
Thomas, ”is that by which the thing is const.i.tuted 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 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 const.i.tutive 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_ (??s?a, _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 (f?s??, _natura_, from f??, _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 cla.s.sifying partial aspects of them, we apprehend part of the imperfectly grasped abstract essence of each individual as common to other cla.s.ses (generic), and part as peculiar to that cla.s.s itself (differential); and thus we differentiate cla.s.ses of things by what is only part of their essence, by what we call the _differentia_ of each cla.s.s, _distinguis.h.i.+ng mentally_ between it and the generic element: which two are really _one_, really identical, in every individual of the species thus defined and cla.s.sified.
But in the Aristotelian and scholastic view of the const.i.tution 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, const.i.tuted by two really distinct, substantial principles, primal matter (p??t? ???, _materia prima_) and substantial form (??d??, ??f?) 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 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 e?d??, ??f?, 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 const.i.tutive principle or principles from which all properties spring, is either _simple_ or _composite_ according as it is understood to consist of one such const.i.tutive principle, or to result from the substantial union of two const.i.tutive principles, a material and a formal. Thus, the essence of G.o.d, 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 cla.s.sifying 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 factors as ”material” and ”formal”
respectively, after the a.n.a.logy of the composition of corporeal or physically composite essences from the union of two really distinct principles, matter and form; the a.n.a.logy 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 const.i.tutives 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 a.n.a.lysed into their simplest const.i.tuents 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 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 const.i.tuent factors, and since it understands them to be intrinsically possible, or free from intrinsic incompatibility of their const.i.tuent factors, it conceives them to be capable of indefinitely repeated actualizations throughout time and s.p.a.ce-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 s.p.a.ce is not likely to be confounded with the _immensity_ or _ubiquity_ of G.o.d. 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 G.o.d, 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.