Read Concerning Being And Essence Online

PREFACE xxxix 

but it is actually so known as a second intention in the active 
intellect and thus as freed from all improper accidents. The 
second intention is that by virtue of which the thing (that 
which exists) is known in its primary actuality, and hence as 
a necessary mode of essence. 

The categories deal with inherence on the basis of substance 
as the primary mode of being. They relate to qualified aspects 
of natures and are analytically formulable by means of the 
delimiting predicables as modes of substantial being. It should 
be observed that although there are as many kinds of being as 
there are kinds of predicaments (categories), yet all the sec- 
ondary categories reduce their qualifications to substance. Sub- 
stance is not a mode of inherence, but if it sometimes seems so 
it is according to the manner in which second intentions (sec- 
ondary substances) stand to first intentions which are assimi- 
lated from natures by the senses. Thus it is that genus is to 
species as matter is to form, since informed matter is the 
divisible in nature, wheras informed genus is that which is 
divisible in thought. 

Relations or the order of one thing to another express the 
mode in which act stands to potency as correlative opposites, 
and hence the order in which one thing is assimilated to an- 
other. It has been suggested by the figure of continuous propor- 
tion that in its necessary aspect this represents a compendent 
alteration in a relative magnitude or delimited whole with 
unity of formal act. Relations are grounded in the mode in 
which a modifies b, b is modified by a, or the mode in which 
a and b modify each other. The intellect reflecting on itself 
may abstract these relations and consider them under the rubric 
of typical properties, such as reflexiveness, asymmetry, sym- 
metry, transitiveness, etc.; but relations reduce to their terms, 
namely, substances. Relations do not possess a being over and 
above their natural concretion in things.