Chapter 4: Firsts
Firsts
Logic, Truth, and the Science that Determines First Principles
The First Science to Learn
Philosophy, as Thomas conceives it, is not a single body of knowledge with a single subject matter, but an ordered set of them. They can be ordered in various ways. One is the sequence in which they are suitably learned. In this sequence, what Thomas puts first is logic, because it teaches the general philosophical way or method.
Boys should first be instructed in logical matters, since logic teaches the way of all philosophy. Secondly, they should be instructed in mathematics, which neither requires experience, nor transcends the imagination. Thirdly, in natural things, which, though not exceeding sense and imagination, do require experience. Fourthly, in moral matters, which require experience and a mind free from passions . . . . And fifthly, in sapiential and divine things, which transcend the imagination and take a strong intellect.217
Logic is the mind directing its own activity, reason reasoning about reasoning, in order to reason well.218 But even though Thomas puts it first, I am only bringing it up now, because this book is not a course in Thomistic philosophy, but only a sketch of it, and because some of the (few) things that I want to say about his views on logic are easier to explain in light of things seen in the previous two chapters. (For similar reasons, I have put the discussion of Thomas’s moral thought in the final chapter.)
Like most Scholastics, Thomas takes logic quite seriously. He regards Aristotle’s logical writings as a systematic and fairly complete treatment of the discipline, and he has left us a finished commentary on the Posterior Analytics and an unfinished one on the De interpretatione. He also makes use of earlier medieval work in logic, for instance on the roles that words can play within statements or propositions, and on the various ways in which the same name might apply to many different things.219
Logic is about the operations of reason.220 Those that directly pertain to science and philosophy are of three basic types. The first is what Thomas sometimes calls the understanding of indivisibles, and sometimes simple apprehension. This operation results in a conception that is typically signified by a single word; it expresses the understanding of what some kind of thing is, some nature or form (or an object grasped in the manner of a nature or form). Such understanding may be more or less perfect. Not all natures are equally intelligible to us, and some of us may grasp a given nature better than others do.
Then there is what Thomas usually calls composition and division. By this he does not mean just any combination or separation of concepts. He means affirmative and negative judgment. From here on I shall call it affirmation and denial. It is the kind of judgment that is expressed in a proposition and is typically signified by a declarative sentence, in which a predicate is either applied to a subject or withheld from it.221
The third type of operation is reasoning. This is a process. It starts from things taken as known, and it ends in something taken as hitherto unknown and as now known in light of them. It consists in gathering up propositions already formed and combining them in some way, such that a new one results. A combination of this sort is called a syllogism. Scientific knowledge, in the strict sense, consists of syllogisms that possess a number of specific characteristics; these are treated in the Posterior Analytics. Scientific syllogisms are called demonstrations.
Truth
Of the three types of operation just listed, in a way the principal one is the second, affirmation and denial. Simple apprehension, by itself, is incomplete. It is like someone’s saying “Snow” and nothing more, so that we are left wondering, what about snow? What do you mean to affirm or deny of it? On the whole, knowledge that is fully actual is not the mere apprehension of the nature of a kind, but the judgment of something in accordance with such apprehension; for instance, a grammarian’s judgment that this A is an A.222 As for reasoning, it can certainly be a complete operation, but what completes or concludes it is precisely an affirmation or a denial.
Why does completion lie in affirmation and denial? The reason is that this is the proper seat of the intellect’s intrinsic perfection and end, which is truth.223 Thomas insists that truth, in the proper sense of the word, is “in the mind.”224 This is because, as we saw, cognitive activity terminates in the soul itself, through a likeness of the thing cognized. Of course, not all cognition is true. The likeness can be defective, distorting how the thing is cognized. So falsehood is in the mind as well, and most properly, in affirmation and denial.225 Thomas therefore says that it belongs properly to logic to consider both the true and the false.226 But simple apprehension cannot be either true or false, in the proper sense. This is because truth cannot be in it in the way that a cognitive power’s end must be in the power, namely, as something cognized. Simple apprehension does not include cognition of how the thing cognized compares with what is cognized about it. Such cognition, Thomas says, is found primarily in the judgment that a thing is (or, in the case of a denial, is not) such as is a form that it apprehends about the thing.227 This sounds abstruse, but he is speaking of very ordinary judgments, for instance Snow is white. To make this judgment is to have grasped the form called whiteness, compared snow with it, and found a match. Such a judgment, then, involves cognition of truth. Of course, the judgment itself might not be true cognition; it might only seem so to the one making it. It is true if the thing really is such—if snow is indeed white. If not, it is false.
This is Thomas’s notion of truth as the conformity or agreement (adaequatio) of intellect and thing. Obviously the idea is not that a true judgment about a thing is one that looks like the thing.228 The judgment that snow is white does not look like snow at all. Still, on Thomas’s account, the very nature of judgment—whether true or false—does present a certain analogy or proportion to the makeup of sensible things. He thinks that the relation between subject and predicate in a judgment reflects somewhat the composition of matter and form in things. To say that snow is white is, in effect, to assert the inherence of whiteness in snow, after the fashion of the inherence of a form in matter.229
However, this is only an analogy, not a strict isomorphism. Whereas the matter and form of a thing differ, an affirmative judgment asserts a kind of identity between its subject and its predicate. To judge that snow is white is to judge that snow is identical with something having whiteness.230 Moreover, the judgment does not imply that the thing judged possesses material and formal components that are directly signified by the subject and the predicate. For instance, the judgment that a man is an animal does not mean that man is matter for the form of animality. Thomas is only saying that subject and predicate play material and formal roles in the constitution of the judgment itself. Nor does a judgment have to mean that what the predicate signifies is a real form of any sort. We can give the status of forms to items that we understand not really to be forms. For instance, we can understand blindness to be a mere lack of the form of eyesight, not a real form in its own right; yet we give it the status of a form in judging that Milton was blind. In fact, on Thomas’s view, something can even be predicated of itself. In that case, the same thing plays a material role as subject, and a formal role as predicate. Blindness is blindness is a genuine predication, and a true one, even though blindness is certainly not matter for the form of blindness.231 Thomas goes so far as to hold that a concrete individual can be predicated of itself. Socrates is Socrates means, in effect, that Socrates is identical with something having the form of Socrates. We could call this form Socrateity. But the statement does not imply that there really is any such form in Socrates.232
Truth itself is a sort of form, and Thomas thinks there are as many instances of it as there are true judgments. But there is also a primary instance, which all others reflect; this is God.233 A true judgment can become false, and vice-versa, if the thing judged can change with respect to the feature that is affirmed or denied of it.234 Of future events not predetermined by present causes, our present judgments are proportionally indeterminate with respect to truth and falsehood.235 Yet there is always truth about such events in God. This is not because He predetermines them, but because His grasp of temporal things, unlike ours, is not successive or temporal.236 This point, however, involves issues that go beyond the science of logic.237
Why does truth consist in conformity with things? That is, why is such conformity the mind’s proper good or end? “The human intellect’s knowledge is somehow caused by things; whence it is that knowable things are a measure of human knowledge. For what is judged by the intellect is true by the fact that the thing is so, and not vice-versa.”238 The perfection and goodness of an effect is measured by its cause. Our knowledge is caused by things inasmuch as they are the objects that initiate its actualization.
Notice, however, that being measured by things in this way is not the same as being dominated or mastered by them. Although things initiate the mind’s actualization, the mind itself has a very active role too. It abstracts the natures of things from matter and thereby makes them actually able to function as intelligible objects, and it is what produces the affirmation or the denial in which the truth is properly found. Moreover, the truth is in us, not in things, and it is our good and end, not theirs. And there are truths that are not just means to something else, but for their own sake. These are theoretical or speculative truths. A free being, Aristotle says, is one that is for its own sake and not just for another’s.239 What is only for another’s sake is a tool or a slave. And of all speculative knowledge, the freest is wisdom, because it is not even a means to other truth.240 Rather, all other truth serves it. The wise man is his own master to the highest degree. On the other hand, he is not the “master of nature.” He does not determine the natures of things or decide how things shall naturally be and act.
This account of truth, of course, regards us. God’s knowledge is not actualized by “things.” It is God Himself, and its truth is His very being.241 Things—the very natures of things—are its effects, and it measures them.
Still, we do after all have knowledge that causes and measures a few things, such as artifacts. Both in relation to God’s knowledge and in relation to this knowledge of ours, things themselves can, in a sense, be called true.242 They are true if how they are is how the knowledge that causes them says they should be. This is only a qualified sense of truth, however, since the conformity to the knowledge is not in the thing as something known. It is merely the thing’s being so.
Knowledge that causes things and thereby measures them is called practical knowledge. This is opposed to theoretical or speculative knowledge, which simply beholds things and does not cause them. Thomas insists, however, that practical and speculative knowledge are works of one and the same power of intellect.243 The power is the same because the formal object is the same. The difference between them is accidental to the object’s nature. They differ only in the goals to which they order their objects. Intellect working speculatively aims only to consider the truth; working practically, it orders and applies the truth that it knows to action. Nevertheless, “practical intellect cognizes truth just as speculative intellect does.”244 Clearly, what truth is in the two cases, the ratio veri, must be the same. Otherwise the parallel would be specious. Thomas is explicit about this.245
This means that practical knowledge too is measured by things. How so, if it measures things? The answer, I believe, is that it measures and is measured in different respects.246 If you judge truly that you need to go to bed, and if you go to bed on account of that judgment, then your action of going to bed is true (in a qualified sense) by its conformity to your judgment. But your judgment is true (in the proper sense) because it conforms to your going to bed. I do not mean that it is true because going to bed is something that you actually do; indeed, you may be prevented from going to bed, and yet the judgment may still be true. But the judgment is true because your going to bed is something that you need—this being what the judgment both asserts and conforms to. If it were not something that you needed, the judgment would be false. And in that case, your action’s conforming to it would not make your action true in any sense.
Thomas and the Critique of Knowledge
From a modern point of view, or at least a nineteenth- or twentieth-century one, Thomas’s account of human cognition may seem naïve. It simply takes for granted that we can grasp real things, as they really are, and that we can thereby measure against them our own thoughts about them. Thomas even assumes that we can reach the perfection of cognition that is called knowledge, which constitutes a vantage-point from which to make judgments that cannot but be, and cannot but seem to be, true of things. Thomas does not think that, in order to be rigorous, philosophy must begin with a general critique of knowledge and only subsequently determine its content. He is aware of radical forms of skepticism, but he does not pay much attention to them. This is partly because he thinks no one can genuinely believe them (though some may think they can). He thinks there are many things that we all know and cannot reasonably doubt that we know, even if no formulations of them can preempt all questions.
But perhaps the real issue is not how seriously to take skepticism. If Thomas’s account of cognition now looks naïve (or at least did so until recently), it is largely, I think, because he does not share the modern tendency to think of cognition as bearing primarily on representations of things; i.e., ideas, impressions, or what have you. It may indeed be naïve to assume that a representation of a thing presents the thing as it is, or even that the thing exists at all. But while Thomas is perfectly aware that much of our mental life involves working with representations, he consciously rejects the view that these are what it originally or chiefly feeds upon.247 To put it in his terms, and to repeat a point already made, but worth stressing, he denies that the form inhering in a cognitive power, by which the power is first actualized, is that which is primarily known.248 The form is only that by which the thing from which it originates is known.
The heart of the matter, I think, is the very notion that external things themselves can be the proper determinants of our cognition of them. The modern tendency is to suppose that they cannot. In the thirteenth century it was not so hard to think that they can, because there was current a notion of something enabling them to do so, something in them that is intrinsically self-communicative: the very notion of form. (I mean, the Aristotelian notion.) With the overthrow of Scholasticism, that notion fell into virtual oblivion. Things became inert, not only physically but also cognitively. The mind has had to look mainly to itself for the constitution of its objects.
Today many cognitive theorists regard knowledge itself as something material, and so as quite similar in nature to the material things known. A minority regard it as immaterial or spiritual. But the latter tend to think of spirit as something no less closed in on itself than a body is—as a “sort of stuff, as it were immaterial matter, a refined ethereal medium.”249 Theorists in either group may grant that cognition does presuppose some sort of influence of the things to be cognized upon the cognizer. But my point is that hardly anyone conceives of cognition as a kind of union with the things, a joint activity of subject and object. Thomas’s view, as we saw, is that even though actual knowledge of material things is not in the things but in the knower, it is nevertheless an actuality of the things too, as knowable (even though this is rather accidental to the things). And the cognitive likenesses, or forms, from which our knowledge originally proceeds are essentially the effects of the things, and in a way they are the same as forms inhering in the things—the same in formula.250
It is for this very reason that not all our cognition is necessarily true, but can, in some cases, be either true or false. If our primary objects were in our minds, we could hardly err about them at all.251 And there would be no strong grounds for saying that our mind’s end, truth, consists in judging about external things as they are. The evaluation of the representations might very well have other criteria. And in that case, we might indeed want a critique of any claim to know, or even to need to know, external things as they are. But the modern tendency has been simply to assume, without argument, that our primary objects are in our minds. This too seems somewhat naïve.
First for Us versus First Simply
Logic is the first philosophical science to study. But what Aristotle and the tradition after him call first philosophy is another science, namely metaphysics.252 And even if logic is about the things that properly have truth and falsehood, it is metaphysics that he calls the science of truth.253 Metaphysics is the science of truth in the sense that it achieves truth to the highest degree. And it is in just that sense that it is first philosophy. It is the dominant philosophical science, because it aspires to and reaches the dominant truths, those that explain all the others, and because the whole aim of philosophy is truth. Yet the true is not the proper subject matter of metaphysics, but of logic. The highest science is not mainly about truth. Most truths are not about truth. Truth is in the mind, but the mind is not mainly about itself, and most truths, including the primary or dominant truths, are about things not in the mind. They are about real things, things in rerum natura. The subject of metaphysics is not what is true, but simply what is. Thomas’s term for it is ens. I shall use the word being, taking it as in the expression, a human being. I shall also want to use that word occasionally for what Thomas calls esse, to be. English does not always allow using the infinitive as he does. But I shall try to avoid ambiguity, and often I shall simply leave esse untranslated.
Metaphysics does, of course, have things to say about truth. It may even have the last word (I mean, the last philosophical word). But the nature of truth is not a major factor in the nature of being.254 The nature of being is found mostly in rerum natura. And the primary truths are those that are about the primary beings, the ones that account for all the others—the primary causes. This is because “each thing is in respect of truth as it is in respect of being.”255 A truth is true to a higher degree inasmuch as it is about a being that is to a higher degree.256 So metaphysics aims at truth about the primary, highest beings, and about how they explain or account for the rest. Aristotle is sure that these beings are everlasting.257
It would be a little more accurate, however, to say that the aim of metaphysics is to know as much truth about those beings as human reason can, given its point of departure. The distinction between the first science to learn and that which is simply primary is an illustration and an application of Aristotle’s observation, at the beginning of the Physics, that the things that are first and more knowable to us are not the same as those that are first and more knowable by nature or in themselves.258 Much of our learning consists in going from the former to the latter. Things more familiar to us stand in need of explanation, and we need to find out about the things that explain or account for them. We experience this need every time we wonder why something is, or happens, in the way that it is or does. Continuing the pursuit, we may eventually reach things needing no further explanation at all. They will be the primary things.
Thomas explains:
Those things are more knowable in themselves that have more of the nature of being (plus habent de entitate); for each thing is cognizable insofar as it is a being. But those are more beings, which are more in act; and hence they are by nature cognizable to the highest degree. But with us it is the reverse, because we proceed in understanding from potency to act, and the starting point of our cognition is from sensible things, which are material, and intelligible [only] in potency; whence they are known to us prior to the separate [=immaterial] substances, which are better known by nature, as is clear in Metaphysics II.259
He is referring to that passage in which Aristotle says that our minds are related to the most evident things as the eyes of bats to the daylight; the passage is just a few lines prior to those cited earlier in this section.260 Thomas’s gloss on this passage is that we can know of immaterial things only what we can infer from the things that we abstract from sensible images—that is, the natures of bodily beings—and that from this starting-point it is not possible to form a proper notion of the natures of immaterial things. Such natures are out of proportion to sensible things.261 They are not directly visible us, even intellectually.
First for Us and First Simply
The general rule just considered, that what is first for us differs from what is first simply, is not entirely without exceptions. Thomas calls attention to a most important exception in commenting on a passage in Nicomachean Ethics VI. This passage is yet another reminder of Metaphysics II. Aristotle says that wisdom (sophia), taken without qualification, must be the most certain form of knowledge.262 Thomas explains that this is because wisdom reaches the things that are in themselves most knowable, namely the first principles of beings. These are most knowable in themselves, he observes, even though some of them are less known to us, namely the immaterial beings. And then he explains why he says some of them and not all: “extremely universal principles (universalissima principia) are also more known to us, such as those things that pertain to being (ens), inasmuch as it is being; the cognition of which pertains to unqualified wisdom, as is clear in Metaphysics IV.”263
What principles is Thomas talking about? They are not immaterial substances. In fact they are not substances at all. They are the features or the attributes or (we can even say) the natures that belong most universally to things. What is most universal in this way is being itself, together with the features that it brings with it, insofar as it is being. These features are not agents or efficient principles. Rather they are formal principles of a certain sort.264 They are principles of distinctions. Being is the basis of the absolutely most universal distinction. If being and non-being were not distinct, there would be no distinctions at all. For instance, if being white were not distinct from not being white, it would not be distinct from being black. It is distinct from being black only because being black implies not being white.
Thus, being is also the most universal principle of understanding. And it is principle of the most universal truth, that which is called the principle of non-contradiction. This truth is a principle relative to all the other, less abstract truths, and to the processes of reasoning by which the mind moves from one truth to another. One way of formulating it is even in terms of the opposition between affirmation and denial.265 To consider or to formulate it in this way, and indeed to call it the principle of non-contradiction, is to see it from a logical point of view. Nevertheless, it is not a truth confined to logical matters. That is, it is not about reason or affirmation or denial, at least not solely or even primarily. It is about everything that affirmation and denial can be about, which is to say, everything—all being. It is founded on the simple apprehension of being. Affirming something’s being white excludes denying it, because something’s being white excludes its not being white.
And Thomas is saying that being and its companions are what are first known to us. Now, this thesis is not incompatible with the view that what a boy should first study is logic. Logic is only the first science to learn. There is understanding prior to science. Science is reasoned, teachable knowledge. It presupposes unteachable knowledge, sheer understanding of certain things. Obviously a boy comes to logic already having understood many things. And what he first understood was not thought itself, or even truth, but simply being.266 He abstracted the notion of it from sensible things.267 So the fact that our boy studies logic first does not at all entail that the first things he understands are logical things. The very first thing must be being. Other things, its proper attributes, come close on its heels.268
But what is striking is that this first thing understood, or this set of things—being and its entourage—is very definitely something metaphysical. The Ethics commentary passage could hardly be clearer about this. It speaks of those things that pertain to being, inasmuch as it is being, which is exactly what Thomas takes to be the subject of metaphysics. And it says, citing Metaphysics IV, that the cognition of them pertains to unqualified wisdom. The wisdom taught in Metaphysics IV, of course, pertains to metaphysics itself. And elsewhere Thomas says that metaphysics “regards the maximally universal principles, which indeed are being (ens) and the things that follow upon being, such as one and many, potency and act.”269
How can these principles pertain to metaphysics, if a boy already knows them, and if he will not learn metaphysics until much later in his intellectual life (if ever)? I think the answer is fairly simple. Aristotle himself, in the Ethics VI passage that Thomas is glossing, even seems to hint at it. He argues that the wise man must not only know what follows from principles, but also “verify” (aletheuein) the principles themselves.270 Perhaps he means that the wise man must not only grasp the principles, so that he can reason to conclusions in light of them, but also express them accurately in speech, defend them against objections, and determine their very role as principles.271 He must see the priority that they enjoy, see how everything else depends on them. This is just what Aristotle does in Metaphysics IV, especially with the principle of non-contradiction. He formulates it with precision; he explains why it must be the most certain truth of all, one about which error is impossible, and which is known to anyone who knows anything at all; and he disputes with arguments to the contrary.272 Obviously our boy does not do these things. Yet he does know the truth of the principle of non-contradiction.
What Aristotle means by “the principles” in the Ethics VI passage seems to be the most universal and fundamental truths on which demonstrative or scientific knowledge depends.273 Grasping the content of these principles would belong to the mental habit which he calls nous. Thomas calls it intellectus principiorum, the understanding of principles.274 A child can very well have this habit. It is not wisdom or metaphysics. Thomas, in fact, holds that it develops spontaneously in the mind, immediately upon grasping the terms or notions from which the principles are formed.275 However, Thomas also associates those very terms or notions with wisdom. The association serves to show why wisdom is even higher than the understanding of principles.
The truth and cognition of indemonstrable principles depends on the notion (ratio) of the terms; for, once it is known what a whole is and what a part is, immediately it is known that every whole is greater than its part. But cognizing the notion of being and non-being, and of whole and part, and of the other things that follow upon being, out of which indemonstrable principles are constituted as out of their terms, pertains to wisdom . . . .276
Now, this same passage continues: “. . . for common being is a proper effect of the highest cause (causae altissimae), namely God.” Common being is simply another way of referring to the subject of metaphysics. But metaphysics is called wisdom because it reaches the highest principles and causes. And the mention of God leaves no doubt that the highest of all are not the merely intrinsic, formal principles—being itself and its companions—but rather the separate, immaterial beings that are substances in their own right and are principles of the rest in the manner of extrinsic causes. They are principles upon which common being itself depends. Their type of universality is not that of a feature belonging to many things, but that of an origin or an end of many things.277 And these principles are certainly not first for us. Our boy may not be aware of them at all.
Nevertheless, if indeed he has grasped being, and if this pertains to wisdom or to metaphysics, then what he has grasped somehow pertains to the science that considers those principles; it is precisely what they are principles of. In some way, then, his understanding of being must be able to extend to them, at least potentially, even if he has not yet actually made the extension.278 If materiality were part of his very notion of being, then the very idea or the very question of immaterial beings would never be available to him. I do not mean that he can already judge that immaterial beings are really possible, in the sense of being truly compatible with the nature of being. Perhaps he does not yet know the nature of being well enough to form such a judgment. But his notion of being must in some way already orient his mind toward such things.
How Thomas thinks natural reason can rise to an actual grasp of immaterial beings and of God as the highest cause, cause of common being, will be considered in the next chapter. But there is something else that I think we should also notice about his view of the connection between the cognition of common being and the cognition of God. This is that its significance is not exclusively philosophical. “Only created rational nature,” he writes, “has an immediate order to God. For other creatures do not attain to anything universal, but only to something particular, sharing in divine goodness either by merely existing, as inanimate things do, or also by living and cognizing, as plants and animals do; but rational nature, inasmuch as it cognizes the universal nature of good and being, has an immediate order to the universal principle of being.”279 And he goes on to argue that this immediate order is the reason why the rational creature, and no other, is apt for a supernatural share in the divine good. There is no such thing as relating to God—the true God—without in some way relating to Him as universal principle of being, “creator of heaven and earth.”
Logic and Metaphysics
The relation between logic and metaphysics is not as simple as the foregoing remarks may make it seem. Thomas sees a certain kinship between the two sciences. It is something that the metaphysician can exploit, and it may also create pitfalls for him. Let me say a word or two about this.
A peculiarity of logic, among the sciences, is that the things that it is about, acts of reason, are themselves about things. In a sense, therefore, logic itself extends beyond reason’s acts, to whatever things those acts themselves might be about. And this means that in a sense logic extends to everything, because there is nothing that reason’s acts cannot be about. Other sciences deal with only a part of what there is. But we can see anything and everything from the logical point of view. This gives logic a special affinity with metaphysics.280
In another sense, however, logic is more remote from metaphysics than other sciences are. For although other sciences focus on more restricted features of things, as natural philosophy focuses on motion, the features that they focus on belong to the things themselves, in their own natures. Needless to say, being too, as considered by the metaphysician, is a feature that belongs to things themselves. Logic, however, extends to everything, not because its focus is a feature that belongs to the nature of everything, but only because its focus is something that relates to everything, namely reason. Even though things happen to have what it takes to be grasped by reason, this is rather incidental to the natures of the things themselves. A rock is not what it is because it is knowable in a certain way; it is knowable in that way partly because of what it is, and partly because of what our minds are.
Nevertheless, even though the way in which things relate to reason is incidental to them, it is still something that reason itself can consider about them. And this results in our attributing certain features to things themselves. For instance, when we say that dog is a universal, we are thinking of it as the object of an operation of reason, the operation of predicating. We mean that dog is something predicated of many individuals. Or if we say that dog is a species of animal, we mean that in the definition of dog, the genus-term is animal. We are seeing dog as an object of reason’s operation of defining. Thomas follows the usage of his day in calling such features—universal, species, genus, and other terms of logic applied to things—“logical intentions.”281 He even speaks of logic as the science of such intentions.282 And he says that such intentions are “extraneous to the natures of things.”283
This, however, does not mean that no other science treats them at all. Most do not, but there is one that does: metaphysics.284 This is partly because, in some weak sense, even they are beings, “beings of reason.” But it is also, and perhaps more importantly, because in certain ways such intentions reflect the being of things in themselves rather closely, and may even shed light on it; and in other ways they only reflect our ways of getting at things, and indicate little about the things themselves. The metaphysician needs to sort all this out.285
For example, Thomas holds that the most general ways or modes in which something is predicated of a subject—ways in which a subject is said to be somehow or other—correspond to the most general modes of being itself. These are the so-called categories, which is merely Greek for predicates. There are ten of them. The primary one is substance; the others are types of accidents, which affect or modify substances in different ways.286 Thomas often speaks of the division into the categories as a division of being, inasmuch as it is being. Here the logical features are of very direct service to the metaphysician. On the other hand, Thomas does not at all mean that everything which is truly predicated in a certain mode really has the corresponding mode of being. Adjectives, for instance, are predicated in the mode of accidents, but many things truly predicated as adjectives are not accidents.287 We can truly say that Socrates is human, but humanity is not an accident of Socrates. It would be a serious mistake to think that what every adjective signifies is really an accident.
Another example appears in Thomas’s commentary on Book VII of the Metaphysics, regarding Aristotle’s inquiry into the nature of substance. Thomas says that Aristotle begins the inquiry from a logical point of view, considering substance as essence and as that which is captured in a definition.288 It is only a preliminary treatment, sketchy, but it is useful nonetheless.289 At the same time, Thomas is very insistent—and thinks Aristotle is too—that the components of a definition need not directly correspond to components in the thing defined. Even if man is truly defined as rational animal, human beings do not consist of instances of animality joined to instances of rationality. Rather, one and the same form, the human soul, actualizing prime matter, constitutes something that is both rational and animal (and also organic and bodily and substantial and existent).290
Thomas does find some thinkers taking merely logical features of things, or the relations among such features, for real features or real relations, and as a result, falling into no little confusion. The most conspicuous example, I suppose, would be that of Plato. In Thomas’s judgment, Plato posited the Forms or Ideas chiefly because he simply assumed that what is abstract in thought must exist abstractly in reality.291 But far worse, in Thomas’s judgment, is the approach of the twelfth-century Jewish thinker Solomon Ibn Gabirol, or Avicebron to the Latins. As Thomas reads him, Avicebron took each differentiating term in the definition of a substantial kind to stand for a distinct form in the substance; and he took what the most general term stands for, substance itself, to be the substrate and matter of all things except God.292 Thomas criticizes this procedure in many places. In De substantiis separatis, where the criticism is especially detailed and severe, he contrasts it very unfavorably with Plato’s approach. Plato rose to the highest beings by analyzing things into formal principles, whereas Avicebron analyzes things into material principles. This is “altogether repugnant to reason,” Thomas says, because matter is to form as potency to act, and potency is “less of a being” than act.293
I wonder whether Thomas would not also find potential confusion of this sort in certain views that are fairly widespread in analytical philosophy. For instance, it is common to hold that identity statements and predications are distinct and even opposed types of proposition; one and the same proposition cannot be both. An individual can be said to be identical with itself, but it cannot be predicated of itself. Only something like what Frege calls concepts—meaning, very roughly, what Thomas calls forms—can be predicated of anything. I think Thomas would say that this view gives too much metaphysical weight to mere modes of thought. As we saw, he thinks that an individual can be predicated of something, because reason can give it a formal role, even vis-à-vis itself. The fact that the individual is not really a form is irrelevant.294
Metaphysics and the Other Speculative Sciences
Metaphysics is first philosophy, and even wisdom—as far as this is within the reach of mere animals—because it reaches the very first principles and causes of things. It is the most “intellectual” science.295 This puts it at the extreme of the human mind’s natural perfection and, as such, in a class by itself. However, its being in a class by itself does not mean that it has little or nothing to do with the other sciences. On the contrary, it has a unique and fundamental bearing on them all. This is because it considers the principles of them all. Calling it wisdom alludes to this function.
First, there are the common principles, those pertaining to being as being. All the sciences use these principles. No science sets aside being and its attributes, as though they were merely accidental to its subject. The mathematician can set aside the sensible and physical characteristics of bodies because they are accidental to his subject, which is quantity. The fact that something is so large or so many does not, by itself, say anything about how the thing affects the senses or how it moves. But the fact that something is a man or a star, or even so large or so many, does say something, immediately, about how it is, its status as a being. The other sciences do not filter out the notions of being and its attributes. They constantly use such notions in their own accounts. But they take them for granted and do not focus on them. This is the metaphysician’s task. He tries to ascertain the exact meaning or meanings of each notion. Most, in fact, turn out to have several meanings. This enables him to give the truths based on these notions their most precise, rigorous formulation. These are the truths that apply to all things, the most common and hence very first principles, such as the principle of non-contradiction. By clarifying them, he is able to defend them against doubts or apparent objections, showing that these rest upon some kind of confusion and bringing to light the way in which the objector himself must willy-nilly be assuming them. In doing so, the metaphysician is clarifying and defending absolutely all scientific and philosophical activity.
But his consideration is not confined to the grand generalities. He also examines the proper subjects of the other sciences. That the other sciences take for granted their subjects’ status as beings means that they take the very existence of their subjects for granted. If someone denies the subject’s existence, the science of that subject has nothing to say in reply. To deny the subject is also to deny the science itself. Parmenides, for example, denies the existence of motion. In so doing he is silencing the physicist, whose discourses all take motion for granted. Answering Parmenides is a metaphysical task. He is saying, in effect, that the nature of being, “what exists,” excludes motion. The metaphysician has to show that it does not, by showing how the nature of motion can be “resolved” or analyzed in terms of the nature of being. To do this is also to give motion itself its most definitive formulation. As we saw, Aristotle defines motion as the act of what is in potency, insofar as it is in potency.296 In commenting on this, Thomas observes that potency and act are among the “first differences of being.”297 This means that they pertain to being as being. They are metaphysical. The metaphysician has examined the nature of being and found within it the distinction between act and potency—a distinction that Parmenides overlooked—and he explains motion in terms of this distinction. In so doing he confirms the existence of motion. Casting the light of being on motion does not make it vanish after all.
Thomas holds generally that it belongs to metaphysics to confirm both the existence and the essential definition, the “what it is,” of the subjects of the other sciences.298 The geometer, for example, gets the definition of magnitude or size from metaphysics.299 And although natural philosophy can obtain many definitions of physical things directly through sense-experience, it belongs to metaphysics to “determine” those definitions. Thomas gives the example of animal.300 The natural philosopher can define animal simply by the observable characteristics of sensation and self-motion. But getting down to the essence of animal means sooner or later getting to its form, which is a kind of soul. And clearly the definition of soul—which is in terms of substance, form, and act—is quite metaphysical. These pertain to being as being. In short, Thomas’s metaphysics not only overlaps with the other sciences but also penetrates them. In determining the principles proper to other sciences, it does not step down from its universal vantage-point. It is analyzing those principles into the principles of being. This in turn is part of its effort to trace things back to the first, universal cause. And this most of all is what puts it in a class by itself.301
Being and Matter, Metaphysics and Physics
As wisdom, metaphysics is in a class by itself. But in another way it is simply one science among others. Like the others, it constitutes an organized body of demonstrative knowledge about a determinate subject matter. It identifies the subject’s proper attributes and explains them in the light of the subject’s own principles and causes. As mentioned earlier, Thomas agrees with Avicenna, against Averroes, that the subject of metaphysics is ens commune, common being. This subject has its own attributes.
Both common being and its attributes are features that are not confined to any particular category of beings. They are therefore termed transcendental.302 This does not mean that they go beyond being, or even beyond the categories, but that they go beyond any single category and run through all of them. They are those things that “follow upon being, such as one and many, potency and act,” as he says in the proem to the Metaphysics commentary. There are also others, such as true and good. But I suppose he mentions these, partly because they are the ones to which Aristotle devotes most attention in the Metaphysics, and partly because he himself thinks they stand especially close to the nature of being. As we saw, truth in the proper sense only pertains to being as it is in the mind; and good, although it is in things, involves a relation to appetite (especially intellectual appetite, will).303 By contrast, one means undivided, and a thing’s undividedness is in the thing itself—so much so that the being (esse) of a thing “consists in undividedness,” and “as each thing guards its being, so it guards its unity.”304 Again, “each thing has unity in the way that it has being.”305 As for act and potency, they stand, if anything, even closer to the nature of being. Indeed, unlike one and many, act and potency are themselves senses of the word being. After all, indivision is only a negation (of division). But act, like being, is something positive. And Aristotle insists that even matter and potency are positive, not to be identified with negation or privation.306
Just how fundamental act and potency are in Thomas metaphysics comes out in what I consider to be an especially important passage, and an extraordinarily synthetic one, even by Thomas’s standards, in which he explains what he regards as the most proper sense of the word being. In this passage he weaves together the two chief Aristotelian divisions of being—the division into act and potency, and the division into the categories—in a remarkable way. I would like to reflect a little on this passage.307
The passage’s first point is that a being, said properly, expresses something’s being in act. But potency is very much in the picture as well, because act “properly has order to potency.” This does not mean that act is for potency; it is the other way round. Nor does it mean that what is in act comes from what is in potency. Thomas thinks that some things are by nature in act and were never in potency. But act is intrinsically referred to potency, as what it is divided from. And so, he goes on, “something is called ‘a being’ (ens) unqualifiedly, according to that by which it is first divided from what is merely in potency.”308 This is rather obscure, but the next remark sheds at least some light on it: “. . . and this is the substantial being (esse) of each thing; whence, each is called ‘a being’ (ens), unqualifiedly, by virtue of its substantial being.”
What is substantial being? It is nothing mysterious. It is just the being, the actuality, that a thing has through that principle which we have insisted upon so much, its substantial form. Thus, the substantial being of a living thing is the being that it has through its soul. It is the thing’s life. And this, he is saying, makes the thing a being, unqualifiedly. I think we can put it this way: a living thing is, period, just because and so long as it is alive.309 It may also be other things—warm, white, strong—but to be these things is to be only in qualified ways. And likewise, the living thing ceases to be, period, not when it ceases to be warm or white or strong, but when it ceases to be alive.310 As Thomas says elsewhere, the ten categories are not an equal division of being. A being in the primary and unqualified sense is a substance in act, on account of its substantial being. Accidents only confer qualified modes of being: being warm, white, etc. These are only qualified, because they presuppose the initial division of the substance from mere potency, and only add some further actuality.311
We should also notice, however, that even these qualified acts have the substance for their proper subject. That is, properly speaking, what is hot, or what has being hot, is not heat itself, but what it is the heat of—a hot body. A hot body is a substance, even though in calling it hot we are considering an accidental feature of it and not its substantial being. Accidents are not, properly speaking, subjects of being. They are called beings only by their connection with substance, their serving as that by which a substance somehow is, in some qualified way.312 To be a subject of being is, in Thomas’s language, to subsist. Only substances have natures strong enough to enable them to subsist, to be in themselves and not in another.313
But let us go back for a moment to how Thomas presents substantial being. He says it is that by which a thing is first divided from what is merely in potency. What is this? We are already quite familiar with it. It is prime matter. And this is really rather striking. Thomas is saying that to call something a being in the proper sense is to say that it is a substance in act, and he is suggesting that to say this is always, ultimately, to make reference to matter. To be sure, one need not be saying that the thing itself has matter in it. But one is saying that it is divided, distinct, from the pure potency of matter. Apparently even the consideration of immaterial beings will involve this reference to matter. To say that they are beings to a higher degree or have more of the “nature of being” will mean that they are “farther from matter.” So even the metaphysician, concerned as he is with spiritual things, never entirely leaves behind the consideration of material things. This confirms once again that our mind’s proportionate object is corporeal nature and that this object conditions all of our thinking.314
Thomas’s metaphysician actually devotes a good deal of thought to material or physical things. His primary concern is with the nature of substance, as such.315 But his first and only direct encounter with the nature of substance is in material or corporeal substances. His field thus overlaps in significant ways with that of the natural philosopher. There is nothing very peculiar about this. Distinct sciences may very well treat the same thing. They are distinct because they focus on different features of it or treat it from different perspectives.
Clearly the perspectives of physics and metaphysics differ. One sign of this is simply the more limited scope of physics. It thinks in terms of the features proper to material things. It identifies and explains the various kinds of movements found in things, their ways of influencing each other through their movements, and so forth. Motion in the strict sense—continuous change—is a feature that requires matter. It is not something that material things share with immaterial things. Physics does not consider the material things precisely insofar as they are beings; that is a feature they somehow share with immaterial things. If, at the limit of its inquiry, it does reach something immaterial, it considers even this in physical terms, as a mover, unmoved, powerful, etc.; and this consideration itself is aimed at explaining the motions of physical things. The intrinsic condition of immaterial things is just not the sort of thing the physicist, as such, wonders about. There is no such thing as the physics of angels. But there is such a thing as the metaphysics of bodies, matter, and motion, inasmuch as they are beings.
How does it differ from the physics of them? Here I am not talking about how metaphysics determines principles for physics, but how it considers physical things from its own point of view, that of being. One difference is the very fact that the metaphysician compares material things with immaterial things. Only he can do that. Moreover, his interest in what we might call the material side of material things is minimal. Physics looks as closely as it can at the sensible features and other material dispositions of a thing, because they have a decisive bearing on the thing’s movements. But metaphysics can generally make do with a very summary treatment of such features.316 They do not contribute much to the account of a thing’s being.317 What especially capture the metaphysician’s interest are the forms of things. Of course, the physicist is interested in forms too, as principles of movement. But he is not so concerned with forms as principles of the very being of things, nor with their own status as beings. We will see an illustration of what this means in the next chapter.
It would be a mistake, however, to think that Thomas’s metaphysician simply sets aside the sensible and kinetic features of material things and treats their being in isolation from these. His perspective is not like that of the mathematician, who does consider quantity in isolation from such features. For being, unlike quantity, is not just one more feature alongside the others that things may have. All of the features of things are themselves beings. They somehow exist. Sensible qualities, motion, and matter itself are beings too, and the metaphysician will have something to say about their being. He will also have something to say about the being of mathematical objects, and, as we saw, even about the objects of logic, which are mere beings of reason.
But the metaphysician looks especially at physical things and their proper principles, because physical things are substances, which is the primary sense of being itself. At the same time, they are not the substances that primarily interest him. He considers them mainly for the help they can give him in understanding something about immaterial substances, and about the first principles and causes of being as a whole. His gaze moves, so to speak, in the opposite direction from that of the physicist. The physicist starts with a fairly general and abstract consideration of sensible things, and descends more and more into their material details.318 The metaphysician starts in the same place, but he moves toward what is even more universal and immaterial.319 Once again, Thomas sees the procedure as an example of philosophical manuductio. “We cannot rise to the incorporeal things that transcend the senses except to the extent that we are led by the hand through sensible things.”320 We have to discern, in the sensible things, the character of effects of things that cannot be sensible or bodily. And then we have to use the notions that we have gathered from sensible things to build up some conception of the others. The results cannot but be modest. Nevertheless, Thomas finds them far from negligible.
217. In Eth., VI, lect. 7, §1211.
218. In Post. an., I, Proem., §1[1].
219. Under the latter heading belongs the doctrine of analogical names. Thomas wrote no treatise on this topic, and squaring the many passages of his that touch upon it is not easy. They are usually framed with a view to some particular application, the most important being language about God. Their interpretation has been heavily conditioned by Cardinal Cajetan’s De nominum analogia (1498), even though this work was not intended as a synthesis of them (see Hochschild, The Semantics of Analogy). Helpful sources of information are J. Ashworth’s “Analogy and Equivocation in Thirteenth-Century Logic: Aquinas in Context” and “Medieval Theories of Analogy.” The difficulties of interpretation make me shy away from attempting a synopsis. Below I shall say just a few things about Thomas on names common to God and creatures (141–42).
220. In Post. an., I, Proem., §2. Here and in the proem of the commentary on the De interpretatione Thomas offers interesting, complementary discussions of the tasks and divisions of logic. For a full discussion, see Schmidt, The Domain of Logic.
221. Declarative sentences signify, in an absolute way, a conception that is either true or false. There are also other complete utterances, but they are more or less incidental to reason’s intrinsic perfection. They signify orders by which reason directs others according to its conception: In Peryerm., I, lect. 7, §85[4]–86[5].
222. See De anima, II.5, 417a28–29; Metaph., XIII.10, 1087a15–25.
223. See In Peryerm., I, lect. 7, §85[4]; STh, I, q. 16, a. 1.
224. Thomas’s mens (mind) includes both intellectus (intellect) and voluntas (will, which is intellectual appetite). Occasionally he uses either mens or intellectus to refer to the human soul, as in STh, I, q. 75, a. 2. But taken strictly, they signify powers of the soul, not its very essence: STh, I, q. 79, a. 1.
225. STh, I, q. 17, a. 3.
226. In Meta., IV, lect. 17, §736.
227. STh, I, q. 16, a. 2. See In Peryerm., I, lect. 3, §24[2]–31[9]. As he explains in these passages, sensation is like simple apprehension and cannot be true or false, properly speaking.
228. On this see Scg, I, cap. 59, §495.
229. See In Meta., IX, lect. 11, §1898–1900.
230. STh, I, q. 85, a. 5, ad 3.
231. See STh, I, q. 13, a. 12.
232. Thomas speaks once, in another context, of socrateitas: De pot., q. 8, a. 3.
233. STh, I, q. 16, a. 6.
234. STh, I, q. 16, a. 8.
235. In Peryerm., I, lect. 13, §169[6]–175[12]; lect. 15, §201[2]–203[4].
236. In Peryerm., I, lect. 14, §191[16]–196[21]. See also Epistola ad Bernardum abbatem casinensem. On this and related topics, very helpful is Harm Goris, Free Creatures of an Eternal God.
237. In Peryerm., I, lect. 14, §199[24].
238. Scg, I, cap. 61, §512. Cf. Categories, 5, 4b8–9; Metaph., IX.10, 1051b6–9; STh, I, q. 16, a 5, ad 2.
239. Metaph., I.2, 982b25–26.
240. Metaph., I.2, 982b27–28; see In Meta., I, lect. 3, §56.
241. STh, I, q. 16, a. 5.
242. STh, I, q. 16, a. 1; see In Peryerm., I, lect. 3, §29[7]–30[8].
243. STh, I, q. 79, a. 11.
244. Ibid., ad 2.
245. STh, I-II, q. 64, a. 3.
246. I discuss this matter at some length in “Practical Truth and its First Principles.”
247. On this topic see O’Callaghan, Thomist Realism and the Linguistic Turn.
248. See above, 66.
249. Anscombe, “Analytical Philosophy and the Spirituality of Man,” 9. She is talking about Descartes.
250. That is, the primary cognitive forms are of this sort. From these we go on to make others, such as those by which we grasp negations or privations (darkness, death, evil), or those that reflect reason’s own activity about things (species and genus, subject and predicate, universal and particular, etc.).
251. See STh, I, q. 85, a. 2.
252. The secondary literature on Thomas’s metaphysics is vast. See Villagrassa, Bibliografia sulla metafisica. The most comprehensive single presentation is Wippel, The Metaphysical Thought of Thomas Aquinas. On many metaphysical themes I have found the writings of Lawrence Dewan, O.P., especially illuminating.
253. Metaph. II.1, 993b20; Scg, I, cap. 1, §5.
254. See In Meta., VI, lect. 4, §1243.
255. Metaph., II.1, 993b30–31.
256. See In Meta., II, lect. 2, §291–98.
257. Metaph., II.1, 993b28–30.
258. Physics, I.1, 184a16–21. See also Prior Analytics, 23, 68b35–7; Posterior Analytics, I.2, 71b33–72a5; Topics VI.4, 141b3–142a13; Metaph., VII.3, 1029b3–12.
259. In Phys., I, lect. 1, §7[7]. The reference is, again, to Metaph., II.1, 993b28–31.
260. Metaph. II.1, 993b9–11.
261. In Meta., II, lect. 1, §282–84. Thomas says many times that we cannot know what such things are, though we can know that they exist. He thinks this is Aristotle’s view; see also In Meta., IX, lect. 11, §1916.
262. Here he speaks of wisdom, whereas in Metaphysics II what he identifies with the science of truth is love of wisdom, philosophia. Perhaps it is because in Metaphysics II he is stressing the difficulty and limits of this science, whereas the Ethics passage is presenting it simply as the most perfect intellectual habit or virtue. Thomas also calls the most perfect intellectual virtue wisdom: STh, I–II, q. 57, a. 2; q. 66, a. 5.
263. In Eth., VI, lect. 5, §1181.
264. See STh, I–II, q. 9, a. 1.
265. STh, I–II, q. 94, a. 2.
266. See STh, I, q. 16, a. 3, ad 3; a. 4.
267. See In De Trin., q. 1, a. 3, ad 3 (cf. q. 5, a. 4, ad 5); De ver., q. 10, a. 11, ad 10.
268. See below, 170.
269. In Meta., Proem.
270. NE, VI.7, 1141a17–18.
271. Cf. STh, I, q. 66, a. 5, ad 4.
272. Metaph., IV.3–6, 1005b8–1009a38.
273. See In Post. an., I, lect. 18, §154[6]–155[7]; lect. 20, §168[2]–170[4].
274. EN VI.6, 1140b31–1141a8, which immediately precedes the discussion of wisdom, is about this habit.
275. STh, I–II, q. 51, a. 1; q. 63, a. 1.
276. STh, I–II, q. 66, a. 5, ad 4. That he means metaphysics, not theology, is clear from STh, I, q. 1, a. 6, ad 2.
277. See In De Trin., q. 5, a. 4; De ver., q. 10, a. 11, ad 10.
278. Interpreters dispute whether the ens that is the very first object of understanding coincides with the ens that is the subject of metaphysics. I cannot address the issue here. It seems to me, however, that the passage from the Ethics VI commentary leaves hardly any doubt about their coinciding. For a defense of this view, see Dewan, Form and Being, 47–60.
279. STh, II–II, q. 2, a. 3. I suppose he brings in the notion of good (which is certainly one of the associates of being—see, e.g., STh, I, q. 5, aa. 1 & 3) because he is talking about relating to God as principle or cause of being. The notion of the good involves the notion of the primary kind of cause, final cause (STh, I, q. 5, a. 4).
280. See In Post. an., I, lect. 20, §171[5]; In Meta., IV, lect. 4, §574; VII, lect. 2, §1287; lect. 3, §1308.
281. Here the word intention has nothing to do with a goal or purpose. Intentio was adopted to translate into Latin an Arabic word used by Avicenna to signify something like a meaning or a thought or a conception.
282. In De an, III, lect. 8, §718.
283. In Meta., IV, lect. 4, §574.
284. Scg, II, cap. 75, §1550; cf. In De Trin., q. 6, a. 1 (the first few lines of the corpus).
285. Much of the De ente et essentia is concerned with sorting out the relations between logical and real intentions about things, and between the components of a thing’s definition and the components of the thing itself.
286. In Phys., III, lect. 5, §322[15]. Thomas wrote no commentary on the Categories. He explains how the categories are distinguished in this passage of the Physics commentary and In Meta., V, lect. 9, §889–94.
287. See, e.g., STh, I, q. 39, a. 3.
288. In Meta., VII, lect. 3, §1306, 1308. Thomas thinks the logical approach runs throughout Book VII; see In Meta., VIII, lect. 1, §1681.
289. On the “sketchiness” of the logical approach to real things, see In Meta., VII, lect. 2, §1280; cf. lect. 11, §1536, and lect. 13, n. 1576. Generally on the ways in which logic is employed in the other sciences, see In Post. an., I, lect. 20, §171[5]; In Meta., IV, lect. 4, §576. Regarding logic and metaphysics, helpful is te Velde, “Metaphysics, Dialectics and the Modus Logicus according to Thomas Aquinas.”
290. STh, I, q. 76, a. 6, ad 1; cf. a. 3, ad 4, and a. 6, ad 2.
291. See, e.g., In Meta., XII, lect. 1, §2423; STh, I, q. 84, a. 1; q. 85, a. 1, ad 2.
292. This theory is set out in his best known work, Fons vitae. How influential this work was on Latin thinkers, for instance regarding the idea that spiritual creatures contain matter, is disputed.
293. De subst. sep., cap. 6.
294. On the lack of “ontological commitment” in Thomas’s inherence theory of predication, see G. Klima’s very illuminating “The Semantic Principles underlying Saint Thomas Aquinas’s Metaphysics of Being,” esp. 97–110.
295. In Meta., Proem.
296. See above, 36.
297. In Phys., III, lect. 2, §285[3].
298. In Meta., VI, lect. 1, §1147–51.
299. Ibid., §1149.
300. Ibid.
301. See STh, I–II, q. 57, a. 2.
302. See Aertsen, Medieval Philosophy and the Transcendentals.
303. Thomas thinks Aristotle’s formula at the beginning of the Nicomachean Ethics comes as close as anything can to a definition of the good: “what all desire” (NE, I.1, 1094a3; see In Eth., I, lect. 1, §9). The good’s special relation to the will is owing to its transcendental character; see De ver., q. 1, a. 1. Regarding the connection between good and being, a subtle but important point emerges in a passage to be examined below, STh, I, q. 5, a. 1, ad 1: even though good and being always go together, unqualified goodness and unqualified being do not. Something is unqualifiedly a being through its substantial act of being alone (on this see below, 105–6); but it is unqualifiedly good only when it is perfect and has the fullness being or actuality that is due to it according to its nature, which fullness includes not only its substantial act of being but also additional, accidental acts.
304. STh, I, q. 11, a. 1.
305. STh, I, q. 76, a. 2, ad 2.
306. See In Phys., I, lect. 15; STh, I, q. 5, a. 2, ad 1.
307. STh, I, q. 5, a. 1, ad 1.
308. This is surely an allusion to the account of act in Metaph. IX.6. See above, 62n34.
309. Generally speaking, this is what Thomas means by speaking of what is unqualifiedly (simpliciter) this or that: what is this or that, period. It is opposed to being this or that only in some respect (secundum quid).
310. See, e.g., STh, I, q. 76, a. 4 & a. 6; q. 77, a. 6.
311. Which, however, the thing needs in order to be unqualifiedly perfect and good; see above, 104n87.
312. See above, 39–40.
313. On the other modes of being as “weak” in comparison with substance, which has “firm and solid being,” see In Meta., IV, lect. 1, §540–43.
314. A good deal more can be said about STh, I, q. 5, a. 1, ad 1. I discuss it at some length in “How Many Acts of Being Can a Substance Have?”
315. See In Meta. VII, lect. 1, §1245–62.
316. For an example, see In Meta., VII, lect. 10, §1489.
317. See In Meta., III, lect. 4, §384.
318. See above, 81–82. Notice that physics, for Thomas, is the only science that considers the material cause: In Phys., I, lect. 1, §5[5]; In Meta., III, lect. 4, §384.
319. See In Meta., VII, lect. 11, §1526. Presumably both of them are moving, in different ways, from the confused sort of knowledge of things that we all begin with, toward knowledge that is more clear and distinct.
320. In Meta., VII, lect. 16, §1643; cf. lect. 11, §1526.