Read Concerning Being And Essence Online

PREFACE xxxvii 

increment which may or may not accrue in addition to the 
proper accident of a substance. It is derived from the material 
or contingent aspect of the matter as a margin of potency. A 
property, however, is a sort of secondary proper act, just as in 
man the property of risibility is an act issuing from an appre- 
hension within the intellect. Whereas properties issue from the 
proper accidents, contingent accidents do not. Contingent acci- 
dents may form descriptions, but they cannot signify what a 
thing is primarily as a nature or mode of substantial unity of 
this or that grade of perfection. 

The first intention is a sensation actualized in the potency 
of sense by the active agency of the sensible body; consequently, 
it is a sensible substitute of the thing, but to be understood as 
the substitute of the thing as it is and not as a sign referring 
to other things. As such it is a potential sign in the order of 
abstraction. Such intentions are the implicit subject matter of 
natural science. The second intention, or that by virtue of 
which what is known is known, is the analogue of the first 
intention as it is rendered intelligible by the intellect in act, 
and thus as existing as the essence of the sensible thing freed 
from all contingent increments of individuation. Further, it is 
the thing as ultimately analyzed by reflexive intellective acts 
whereby what is generically implicit in first intentions, and 
hence in like things, becomes discursively explicit, namely, 
according to signation by genus, species, difference, property 
and accident. 

Since the intellected essence expresses the necessary mode of 
being whereby the thing must be what it is, and hence dis- 
tinguishes the basis of generic similitude through specific act, 
individual difference (the basis of numerical multiplication of 
the individuals in quantified matter after the kind of a species) 
must ensue from a condition in addition to the essential mode 
of being. This condition ensues from accidents which advene