Read Concerning Being And Essence Online

PREFACE xi 

Theology was in truth the final cause, and though indeed 
philosophy was in subordination to it, still philosophy had an 
autonomy of its own. Logic is the common instrument of phi- 
losophy and natural science, dealing with the natural order of 
substances and leading up to metaphysics or the doctrine of 
being qua being. By a shift in intention the modes of logic 
lead from corporeal substances by analogy to insights concern- 
ing extra-natural entities. Metaphysics or first philosophy deals 
with the transcendental predicates: being and non-being, one 
and many, true and false, good and evil, thing and something, 
examining the order of nature and the order of reason to test 
their accord, namely, the similitude or commensuration of the 
beings of nature to the beings of reason. Logic is the instrument 
for formulating simple and complex modes, the centrum of 
philosophy, and in order for philosophy to be a means to 
theological science logic must be promoted in its own order as 
if it were an end in itself. Philosophy as instrumented through 
logic deals with the natural order and in so doing supplies 
evidence for the confirmation of faith. Indeed it supplies the 
literal terms (grammar) from which rhetorical method ad- 
vances to an understanding of intelligences and finally to an 
analogical though finite and imperfect grasp of God's infinite 
being. 

The relation of philosophy to natural science was in essence 
the same in peripatetic scholasticism as it is today. A lack of 
emphasis on the discovery and perfection of mechanical or in- 
strumental material and efficient means need not obscure the 
relationship, since engineering does not exhaust the whole of 
human science* Scholasticism clearly appreciated the fact that 
before science could begin there must be a discipline inde- 
pendent of natural things in terms of which propositions about 
nature can be formulated. Today the pragmatists in their over- 
tures to logical positivism seem inclined to join two estates