Read Concerning Being And Essence Online

46 GLOSSARY 

Potency: Active, a power to operate; passive, a capacity to re- 
ceive. A power is to be understood as that which has a 
disposition or order to action. 

Privation: A negation in the subject. The absence of the formal 
principle required by the state in which the matter actually 
is. A privation : substance : : a negation : subject. 

Quality: A disposition of capacities or passive potencies, for the 
sake of an act; hence the order of operations according to 
which such a disposition of passive potencies become 
actual. 

Quantity: The passive diffusion of matter in a three dimen- 
sional medium, and the first accident of material substance. 

Quiddity: An expression used as a neutral term between nature 
and essence. Usually understood however as equivalent to 
essence. It stands for the peculiar nature of the thing, not 
however as the thing is as individuated by conditions of 
matter but as it is necessarily and primarily according to 
its mode of being. 

Relation: A general sign for a possible modification between 
a and b, or the respect in which one thing stands to an- 
other thing, as of anything to something. Ad aliquid: the 
order of one thing to another. 

Signs, Order of: Genus, difference and property are all 
predicated necessarily; the distinctions among them rest 
not on the way in which they are asserted of things, but 
on the mode in which they signify the things signified by 
their subjects. Hence such signs are terms in the purely 
rational science of logic. 

Substance: Secondary, an analytic analogue (similitude of be- 
ing, i.e. a nature) as expressed by genus, species, property 
and difference in the rational order. Aristotle observes that 
primary substance (a nature) is to secondary substance 
(the formulae in the intellect) as species is to genus. 

Truth: A transcendental predicate conformity of essence to