Read Concerning Being And Essence Online

PREFACE 

IN RECENT times St. Thomas Aquinas has come to suggest 
problems and solutions which are of the first order of im- 
portance for speculative thought. And I do not mean merely 
for the history of philosophy or for the cloister-like seclusion of 
the class room in mediaeval philosophy. He is something more 
than a mere interval in the creative advance of evolution. First 
principles never become obsolete, and the doctrine of St. 
Thomas is replete with steady and rigorous ideas which can 
accomplish much in clarifying the present confusion of the 
arts and sciences. It is therefore time that he should leave the 
company of Latin scholars with their forbidding array of critical 
apparatus, footnotes, comments upon and citations of compara- 
tive sources, and the dead weight of the gloss which preserves 
the letter but destroys the spirit. 

This translation of the De Ente et Essentia renders into Eng- 
lish a very compact and highly significant matrix of arguments 
concerning the status of essence, being and existence. As a 
preparation for its principal task the opusculum examines the 
character of incomplex terms, genus, species and difference, 
how they stand to each other within the defined whole of an 
essence and in so doing how the incomplex terms are signs 
which signify the nature of individuated and unified substantial 
wholes existing in nature independently of the human mind. 
In addition, when St. Thomas passes from corporeal substances 
as such to "intelligences," man and the angels, an example is 
given of the rhetorical shift by which scholastic thought effected 
the trope from the literal to the figurative. This rhetorical shift 

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