Read Concerning Being And Essence Online

CHAPTER ONE 

BECAUSE indeed we must receive knowledge of the simple 
from the composite and arrive at what is prior from what 
is posterior, in order that beginning with the less difficult in- 
struction may be made more suitably, we should proceed from 
the meaning of being to the meaning of essence. 

Therefore one should know, as the Philosopher says in the 
fifth of the Metaphysics? that being by itself (ens per se) is 
said to be taken in two modes: in the one mode, that it is 
divided into ten genera; in the other, that it signifies the truth 
of propositions. Moreover the difference between these is that 
in the second mode everything can be called being concerning 
which an affirmative proposition can be formed, even if it 
posits nothing in the thing (in re}\ by virtue of this mode 
privations and negations are likewise called beings, for we say 
that affirmation is the opposite of negation, and that blindness 
is in the eye. But in the first mode only what posits something 
in the thing can be called being; consequently, according to 
the first mode blindness and such are not beings. The name 
essence, therefore, is not taken from being in the second mode, 
for in this mode some things are said to have essence which 
have not being, as is evident in privations, gut essence is taken 
from being only in the first mode; whence the Commentator 
says in the same place that 4 "being in the first mode is said 
to be what signifies the essence of the thing." And because, as 
has been said, being in this mode is divided into ten genera, 



8 Aristotle, Metaphysics, A> io j 7 a 22-35; a ^ s Met, E, b 17-35. 
4 Averroes, In Met. L.V., Comm. 14, f. 55 a 56. 

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