Read Concerning Being And Essence Online

xxxiv PREFACE 

as such, whereas the concepts of metaphysics are abstractions 
from common intelligible matter and regulate the accord of 
concepts of reason to the modes of things according as being, 
one, true and good are present to the thing and the essence. 
Logic is a means between nature and metaphysics and only 
when so understood does it preserve its proper limitation and 
significance. 

Nature is an order of individuated things in which such 
things come to be and perish by a multiplication of formal 
act in matter consistent with the principle of one and many 
in material process. Substances are in nature simpliciter. But 
man in his finite and discursive capacity knows by virtue of 
analysis and only reaches synthesis after laborious efforts and 
even then only imperfectly. Man must know by division and 
composition or specially conditioned qualifying operations. The 
order of knowing is grounded in the order of existence through 
the continuity of abstraction, though the intellect must under- 
stand by means of its reflexive powers. 

The categories deal with the advention of accidents in sub- 
stance, corporeal substances which are delimited and hence 
limiting wholes. Hermann Weyl observes on page one, 30, of 
his Philosophic der Mathemati^ und Wissenschajt: "Auch die 
Aristotelische Logik war im wesentlichen abstrahiert aus der 
Mathematik"; and he might have observed that a natural sub- 
stance is like a finite magnitude or whole, though not neces- 
sarily quantitative as such. Genus, species, difference, property, 
and accident, the predicables, are fabrications of the intellect, 
but as analytic similitudes or analogues of substance they in- 
dicate discursively the necessary mode of a substance or the 
relative limitation of categoric accidents. A limited whole in the 
order of nature can be brought into commensuration with a 
limited whole in the order of reason, and thus Aristotle, and 
after him St. Thomas, affirm that nature divides readily into