Logic, Metaphysics, and the Natural Sociability of Mankind

Chapter 5. On the Categories and the General Properties of Being

101 c h a p t e r 5 1 On the Categories and the General Properties of Being 1. We shall survey the chief general properties of beings by going briefly through the ten categories that Archytas2 is said to have first discoveredand Aristotle certainly confirmed, whatever the division of things may actually be. The ten categories are: substance, quantity, quality, relation, action, passion , place, time, position, and state. Substance Substance is a thing subsisting in itself, and which does not inhere in another thing as modes or accidents do, which are much better known than substances themselves. For the nature of substances is unknown, except that we draw from our own selves a sort of dim idea of a thing bereft of its qualities.3 The other things said about substances in the scholastics are not useful. Here are the definitions of the technical terms. Subsistence is the completeness of a substance and is lacking in parts of a natural thing which have been separated from the rest of it. A subsistent is defined as an underlying subject (suppositum) or individual nature (hypostasis ). A person is a suppositum endowed with reason. 1. This chapter was added in 1744. 2. Archytas, a Pythagorean who influenced Plato, is credited with the authorship of a work on categories by Simplicius in his commentaries on the categories of Aristotle. See Simplicius, On Aristotle’s “Categories 1–4,” p. 18. 3. In the third edition (1749)this notewasadded:“SeetheEssayof Locke,citedabove, on ideas of substances.” (Locke, Essay, II, chaps. 23–24.) 102 a synopsis of metaphysics 2. The kinds of quantity Quantity is an ambiguous word; and the various kinds of quantitiescannot be defined because they are represented by simple ideas. These [are] the simple kinds [of quantity]. [First,] magnitude, whichisappropriatetobody or space. [Magnitude is threefold.] It is itself threefold: linear, surface, and solid; of all three, there is a real nature and a distinct knowledge, though the first two are never found apart from the last. Time The second kind of quantity is time, whose spaceorextensioniscompletely different from the previous kind, and is called diuturnity or duration; it accompanies the actions and passions of the mind and all the motions of which the mind is conscious. For every thought carries with it a sense of a certain time, and every man is as conscious of that as he is aware of himself thinking. Hence it discerns order and sequence among the various operations of the understanding or the will; and it knows which things come first and which come after, and whether it has spent a long or a little time on a thing. Things are said to coexist with this series of thoughts, because they occupy the same portion of time. This coexistence, therefore, of time by no means fully describes the notion, since a third something has to be clearly recognized which equally measures both the sequence of thought and other things or events. And the notion of time should not necessarily be related to motion, even though we find in movements convenient measures of it.4 A good deal has been said about this before.5 4. In the third edition (1749) there is the following note: “See Locke, as above, on the modes of time.” (Locke, Essay, II, chaps. 14–15.) 5. The subject of time was examined in Part I, chap. 3, sec. 4, pp. 82–86, where Hutcheson argued that space and time are indeed ideas as Locke contended, not properties inherent in objects. But Hutcheson also held that we would be incapable of understanding things, their position and motion, “unless something real outside the mind corresponds to those ideas.” See the introduction for Hutcheson’s response to Edmund Law, p. xxiv, who considered it a consequence of Locke’s way of ideas that space and time had no real existence. part i: on being 103 True quantities uncertain Here we mention in passing that we cannot know by any sure indicator whether the true quantities of magnitudes and times equal, surpass or are surpassed by our ideas of them. It will, however, be readily agreed that the same relation among them is preserved in our ideas. It is bodies that excite the first ideas of figures; but the mind itself can variously compound them and can perfect and complete them more than the figures that are found...