VI. LITERARY BOOK from its parts having a contiguous position as to each other, and another thing, when they are not so. Numbers and speech are discrete, or disconnected quantity; a line, a superfices, or a body, HISTORY OF is a continuous one; such are place and time; for in numbers ENGLAND. there is no common term for the parts of a number in which they may cohere. Thus, if two fives be the parts of the number ten, the five and five do not cohere by any common term, but are distinct, though they make up the number ten. So in speech, we measure its quantity by long and short syllables, as in an oration; yet there is no common term by which the syllables cohere together, but every one is distinct." QUALITY is the relation which any thing has to another; as greater, double. On this subject, Aristotle makes many nice distinctions, and ends his chapter with intimating that it might be true to say, that no substance was among related things; but as it would be difficult, for any who had not often considered the point, to lay down any certainty upon it, he proceeds to a further discussion of this predicament, under two distinctions of it, in the Quali and the Qualitate; calling that the quality, according to which the quales are said to be.78 The Quantum receives neither more nor less; but it is a property of the Qualitas, that it is equal or unequal. Of the προς τι, or Relation. SUCH things are said to be pσ ; or, 'related to something ;' as far as whatever they are, they are said to be of others, or in some manner related to one thing; what is greater, is so to something else; thus, double to single. There are these relatives-habit, disposition, knowlege, sense and position; for all these are spoken of other things: as habit is the habit of some one; knowlege is the knowlege of some one; position is also where some real thing is situated. There is also contrariety in things related; as, virtue is contrary to vice, and knowlege to ignorance, but yet not in all; for there is nothing contrary to a double or a triple, but they have the more and less, are like and unlike, and differ in degree; and so equal and unequal." All relatives are conversive; as a servant is the servant of some master, and a master the lord of some servant. Relatives also 77 Arist. Bipont. vol. 1. p. 465. 79 Ibid. p. 474. 78 Ibid. c. 7. p.486. 80 and yet XI. HISTORY SCHOLAS TIC PHI exist together in nature, as, double and a half; and, where there CHAP. is a master there is a servant. They are likewise taken away together; take away the servant, and there is no master; this does not occur in all things, for the knowable taken away, takes away knowlege; yet if knowlege be taken away, that will not take away the knowable." His next chapter is devoted to his other predicaments, action LOSOPHY. and passion; the quando, ubi, and habere." He considers the opposites and contraries, and the prior and posterior; and after some remarks on these together, he proceeds to the topic of Motion, of which he makes six different kinds; generation, corruption, increase, diminution, alteration, and change of place; by which it is manifest that he calls mere change, and the actions of things on each other, specific motions. But with this liberty he might have made a thousand different heads of motion, instead of the six he has chosen. His chapter on the habere, or the modes of having, elucidates his distinctions of it; as in disposition, to have science and virtue; in quantity, to have some magnitude, as of four cubits; about some body, as a robe; or in a part, as a ring on a finger; or in a vessel, as corn and wine; or in possession, as a field, or house.83 This analysis of a system, now unanimously permitted by the intellectual world to become obsolete, and only adverted to at present as a matter of passed history, will suffice to shew what sort of topics amused our ancestors in their Aristotelian studies. From the Categories, they who loved them most deeply, passed to his other arguing works; his Analytics, his Topics, his Elenchi Sophistici, and his Metaphysics; but most were contented with the Categories. and use of The system and meaning of Aristotle in these Ca- The aim tegories are not easy to be traced, from the extreme Aristotle's brevity with which he has expressed them, but they Categories. lead our minds to the following observations: He considered nature as it was then known, and So Arist. Bipont. vol. 1. p. 480, 1. 81 Ibid. c. 7. p. 500. HISTORY OF ENGLAND. BOOK language as expressing what was known. He did VI. not contemplate any progress in science, nor anticiLITERARY pate its advancement, and therefore did not mean to frame any system for extending it: he felt himself to be living in an highly cultivated age, which had succeeded to other periods and nations, like the Egyptian and Ethiopian, the Phenician and the Chaldean, which had been all greatly celebrated for their wisdom and learning; and therefore he did not suppose that nature was not sufficiently known, nor foresee the immense additions which the last three centuries have made to it; nor, consequently, did he think of devising any means to promote the discovery of what he did not perceive to be deficient, nor believe to be penetrable by mortal intellect. Confining his view, or as he intended, extending it, to all that was then known of nature and man, he observed that all properties and words had reference to some particular thing, which he called a subject; there was always something to which his predicaments were applicable, or in which they inhered: something was substance; had quantity or quality, or relation; was in some place, time, or position, and was having, doing, or suffering; this something he called a subject; it was a fox, a vulture, a boy, or a horse, or any analogous thing that was spoken of. This subject was also, in his conception, a substance, not as we now usually mean by the term a solid substantial thing, but rather a subsisting thing. The Aristotelian substance may be considered to mean what the word subsistence may be used to express. Considering the word used to denote subsistences, or substances in this meaning, he perceived that many related to what our metaphysicians have usually called OF THE SCHOLAS TIC PHI LOSOPHY. abstract ideas; they did not signify any particular CHAP. subject or individual, as the brown horse in the field, XI. or Socrates, or the elm-tree in that hedge, but were HISTORY general terms for all the individuals of these classes; as, a horse, a man, a tree; these terms, and the ideas or things which they implied, he called primary substances; his primary substances were therefore our general terms or abstract ideas; as a ship, a palace, a king, and not any particular king, palace, or ship. All other substances, that is, all really and visibly existing things, he named secondary substances; thus, winds or castle, the Thames, Bonaparte, lord Nelson, or the duke of Wellington, would be some of his secondary substances; as, a fortress, a river, an emperor, an admiral, or a general, would be, in 'his philosophical vocabulary, primary ones. He found other terms, also, like his primary substances, having reference to no precise individual object, yet to be applied to, or enumerated of them; as the word animal; he remarked, that many different classes of things were implied by it, as birds, beasts, fishes and insects, as well as men. He therefore distinguished these as comprising a separate body of words, and he named them genera, and the classes they comprehended, either of words or things, he called species; animal was a genus; and man, beast, and bird, were species of that genus, for, however dissimilar to each other, they all agreed in being animals. Another class of words and actual properties he found to be arrangeable under the term DIFFERENCES. Each species had some qualities which distinguished them from each other; as, that man is rational; so man and some animals are unlike others, in being HISTORY OF ENGLAND. BOOK biped; as some creatures are in being pedestrian, VI. and others volatile; some are carnivorous, and others LITERARY feed on grass; all these distinctions he called differences. While again, each class of animals had something peculiarly and solely its own; as man's risibility; and these he called PROPRIUM. All the changeable actions and qualities of things, which might or might not be in them, or done by them, as their motions, positions, colors, &c. he named ACCIDENTS, because they were variable circumstances. But the ten things discriminated in his ten predicaments seemed to him to comprehend all known nature, and all the terms which language was using to express whatever we knew in it, and all that was doing in it. Every known thing, and every used term, was either a substance, which was his first predicament, or it expressed quantity, quality, relation, place, time, position, action, suffering or having, which were his other nine categories or predicaments. Thus he considered himself to have classed all nature and all languages under these ten distinctions; and he proposed to his pupils to study nature and language in this classification. He cannot be justly accused for not having provided for the enlargement of knowlege, for he does not appear to have anticipated such a thing, and it did not come within his object. His aim was to lead his scholars to acquire and arrange what was known, and not to explore what was knowable. His system did not reach to the unknown, nor direct to it; it was applied to knowlege as it existed in his day; and as far as his system is beneficial, it is equally applicable to all the knowlege that exists at any succeeding time, however greatly it may have been mul |