The Metaphysics of the School

Introduction. 4 Book I. The Definition. 50 Introduction. 50 Chapter I. The Genus of Metaphysics. 54 Chapter II. The Differentia. 62 Chapter III. Corollaries. 71 Book II. Being. 76 Chapter I. Essence. 80 Chapter II. Possible Being. 95 Chapter III. Existing Being. 112 Chapter IV. Possible and Existing Essence Contrasted. 135 Book III. Attributes of Being. 148 Chapter I. Attributes of Being in General. 148 Chapter II. Unity. 163 Chapter III. Truth. 286 Chapter IV. Goodness. 356 Glossary. 427 Introduction. THERE is a passage in the Leviathan of Hobbes, which I will set before the reader, not without a definite purpose, as a sort of Introit to my Preface. It is, as follows: 'There is yet another fault in the discourses of some men; which may also be numbered amongst the sorts of madness; namely, that abuse of words, whereof I have spoken before in the fifth chapter, by the name of absurdity. And that is, when men speak such words, as put together, have in them no signification at all; but are fallen upon by some, through misunderstanding of the words they have received, and repeat by rote; by others from intention to deceive by obscurity. And this is incident to none but those, that converse in questions of matters incomprehensible, as the School-men; or in questions of abstruse philosophy. The common sort of men seldom speak insignificantly, and are, therefore, by those other egregious persons counted idiots. But to be assured their words are without anything correspondent to them in the mind, there would need some examples; which if any man require, let him take a School-man in his hands and see if he can translate any one chapter concerning any difficult point, as the Trinity; the Deity; the nature of Christ; transubstantiation; free-will, &c., into any of the modern tongues, so as to make the same intelligible; or into any tolerable Latin, such as they were acquainted withal, that lived when the Latin tongue was vulgar. What is the meaning of these words, The first cause does not necessarily inflow any thing into the second, by force of the essential subordination of the second causes, by which it may help it to work? They are the translation of the title of the sixth chapter of Suarez' first book, of the concourse, motion, and help, of God.(1) When men write whole volumes of such stuff are they not mad, or intend to make others so?'(2) A German writer of great and deserved reputation shall take up the fugue. 'The soul of the Scholastic Philosophy, ' writes Brucker, 'and the hinge on which it all turned, was not an attentive inquiry after Truth, undertaken without prejudice and made up of connected truths deduced from concordant Principles; but the empty and ambitious affectation of a sort of subtlety that made show of great intellectual acumen. Furnished with dialectic and metaphysical weapons, it was wont to dispute, with extremest stretching of the brain, about questions most difficult indeed and acute, but commendable neither by reason of their utility nor of their certitude; and would come down into the area for the purpose of carrying on its countless philosophical skirmishes, with the help of verbal disputes, of worthless mental abstractions, of axioms assumed at hap-hazard, of distinctions destitute of the smallest foundation, and of the horrors of a barbarous terminology.'(3) A little further on, the same author deplores its 'obscure ideas, ' -- 'words without meaning, ' -- 'barbarous terms which had a sort of frightful sound from their very clatter;' and describes its teaching as the 'hobgoblins of boys, ' -- 'empty clouds, ' -- 'an immense ocean of verbal disputes.'(4)