1. BEING.
2. Let us further examine if these ten divisions be kinds, and how being could form a kind; for we are forced to begin our study here.
INTELLIGIBLE AND SENSE-BEING COULD NOT FORM A SINGLE KIND.
We have just said that intelligible being and sense-being could not form a single kind. Otherwise, above both intelligible being, and sense-being, there might be some third entity which would apply to both, being neither corporeal nor incorporeal; for if it were incorporeal, the body would be incorporeal; and if it were corporeal, the incorporeal would be corporeal.
QUESTIONS RAISED BY ARISTOTELIAN THEORIES.
In the first place, what common element is there in matter, form, and the concretion of matter and form? The (Aristotelians) give the name of “being” alike to these three entities, though recognizing that they are not “being” in the same degree. They say that form is more being than is matter, and they are right; they would not insist (as do the Stoics) that matter is being in the greater degree. Further, what element is common to the primary and secondary beings, since the secondary owe their characteristic title of “being” to the primary ones?
WHAT IS “BEING” IN GENERAL?
In general, what is being? This is a question to which the (Aristotelians) could find no answer; for such mere indication of properties is not an essential definition of what it is, and it would seem that the property of being a thing that is susceptible of successively admitting their contraries, while remaining identical, and numerically one, could not apply to all (intelligible) beings.
3. Can we assert that “being” is a category that embraces simultaneously intelligible being, matter, form, and the concretion of form and matter, on the same justification that one may say that the race of the Heraclidae form a kind, not because all its members possess a common characteristic, but because they are all descended from a common ancestry? In such case, the first degree thereof will belong to this being (from which all the rest is derived), and the second degree to the other things which are less beings. What then hinders that all things form a single category, since all other things of which one may say, “they subsist,” owe this property to “being?”
Might it then be said that the other things are affections (or, modifications), and that the beings are (hierarchically) subordinated to each other in a different manner? In this case, however, we could not stop at (the conception of) “being,” and determine its fundamental property so as to deduce from it other beings. Beings would thus be of the same kind, but then would possess something which would be outside of the other beings. Thus the secondary substance would be attributed to something else, and leave no meaning to “whatness” (quiddity or quality), “determinate form” (thatness), “being a subject,” “not being a subject,” “being in no subject,” and “being attributed to nothing else,” (as, when one says, whiteness is a quality of the body, quantity is something of substance, time is something of movement, and movement is something of mobility), since the secondary “being” is attributed to something else. Another objection would be, that the secondary being is attributed to the primary Being, in another sense (than quality is to being), as “a kind,” as “constituting a part,” as “being thus the essence of the subject,” while whiteness would be attributed to something else in this sense that it is in a subject. Our answer would be that these things have properties which distinguish them from the others; they will consequently be gathered into a unity, and be called beings. Nevertheless, no kind could be made up out of them, nor thus arrive at a definition of the notion and nature of being. Enough about this; let us pass to quantity.