Logic, Metaphysics, and the Natural Sociability of Mankind

Chapter 1. On Being

65 u p a r t i u On Being and the Common Attributes of Things c h a p t e r 1 On Being (De Ente) In antiquity the accepted division of philosophy was into natural philosophy , which contained all the speculative sciences about both corporeal and incorporeal things; moral philosophy, i.e., ethical and political philosophy; and logical philosophy, which included both logic and rhetoric. What metaphysics is The Aristotelians1 shifted all inquiry about the most general attributes of things and about God and the soul, from the territory of physics to that of metaphysics; they called metaphysics “the science of being in abstraction from matter”; and they meant it to contain the whole of the doctrine of the most common attributes, of the more general divisions of being, and of God and of the human mind. Ontology and pneumatology A different method has won favor among some more recent [writers]:2 they define ontology, as they call it, as the science of being and of the most common 1. “The Aristotelians”: see above, Hutcheson’s account of the Peripatetics, the Scholastics , and the Eclectics, in “Dissertation on the Origin of Philosophy,” pp. 6–8, and discussion in the introduction, pp. xxiii–xxvii. 2. Gerard de Vries, Determinationes Ontologicae (Outlines of Ontology) in De Natura 66 a synopsis of metaphysics attributes of things (which is inadequate). They follow it up with pneumatology , which is the doctrine of God and of the human mind, and with physics, which is the science of body. In presenting a short summary of these [sciences], we proceed from the more general to the less general.3 1. How beings are known Although our minds cannot make contact with anything without the intervention of some idea, whether proper or analogical, since it is not things themselves but ideas or perceptions which are presented directly to the mind, nevertheless we are compelled by nature itself to relate most of our ideas to external things as their images or representations.4 We retain the memory of a past sensation with completecertaintythatitpreviouslyexisted, and that we are able at will to recall a kind of faint idea of it, when the sensation itself no longer remains. This is very good evidence that certain ideas are representations of other things. In addition, every man has a consciousness of himself, or a certain sense which does not allow him to doubt that he remains the same today as he was yesterday, however much his thoughts may be changed or for some time intermitted; and he has no hesitation in ascribing to himself previous sensations, judgments, and feelings of which he retains the memory.5 This is also the source of the notion or intellection (informatio) of a true thing which is different from any idea at Dei et Humanae Mentis (On the Nature of God and the Human Mind ). Jean Le Clerc, Ontologia; sive de Ente in Genere (Ontology; or, On Being in General ). (This work was dedicated to John Locke.) 3. In the first edition, Metaphysicae Synopsis (1742), the three preceding paragraphs were located in a prolegomena. 4. It will be evident in what follows that in Hutcheson’s exposition of being, the various entities and categories of being are understood (as they were by Locke and Le Clerc) as ideas. In the ontology of de Vries, by contrast, being is predicated directly of objects or things. Hutcheson was also concerned, as some followers of Locke were not, to relate ideas to objects or real existences. See also Part I, chap. 3, sec. 4, n. 11, pp. 84–85. 5. In his letter to William Mace, 6 September 1727, Hutcheson had elaborateda similar theory of the self. See A Synopsis of Metaphysics, II, 3, 3, pp. 140–41. part i: on being 67 all. We are likewise impelled by nature for a similar reason to relate certain impressions which we have received by sight or touch, to things which are wholly external, of which they are images. All of this shows that things are real, different from ideas, and subject to them; and they are usually called objects of ideas. Now, since things are known by the intervention of ideas, and words are attached to ideas to perform their function in speaking, we must be careful in all our philosophy not to attribute to external things or to objects of ideas those things that belong...