Part IV, Chapter XLVI, 2

To understand the grounds on which they claim that abstract essences, or substantial forms, exist, we must consider what those words properly mean. Words serve to record our own thoughts and conceptions and reveal them to others. Some words name the things conceived: all kinds of bodies that act upon the senses and leave an impression in the imagination. Others name the imaginings themselves: the ideas, or mental images, we have of everything we see or remember. Others again name names, or different kinds of speech: universal, plural, singular, negation, true, false, syllogism, interrogation, promise, and Covenant name certain forms of speech. Still others show that one name follows from, or conflicts with, another. When someone says, “A man is a body,” he means that the name body necessarily follows from the name man, since they are different names for the same thing, man; their joining by the word is signifies this consequence. Just as we use the verb is, so the Latins use their verb est and the Greeks their esti, in all its forms. Whether all the other nations of the world have a corresponding word in their languages I cannot say, but I am certain they have no need of one. Placing two names in order could signify their connection, if that were the custom—for custom gives words their force—just as well as is, be, are, and similar words.

If there were a language without any verb answering to est, is, or be, those who spoke it would be no less capable of inference, conclusion, and every kind of reasoning than the Greeks and Latins. But what, then, would become of the terms entity, essence, essential, essentially, and many more derived from or dependent on that verb, in their most common uses? They are not names of things, but signs by which we indicate that we conceive one name or attribute to follow from another. When we say, “A man is a living body,” we do not mean that the man is one thing, the living body another, and the is, or being, a third. We mean that the man and the living body are the same thing, because “If he is a man, he is a living body” is a true consequence, signified by the word is. Therefore to be a body, to walk, to be speaking, to live, to see, and similar infinitives, as well as corporeality, walking, speaking, life, sight, and the like—which signify exactly the same things—are names of nothing, as I have explained more fully elsewhere.

But what purpose, someone may ask, does such subtlety serve in a work that professes to deal only with what is necessary to the doctrine of government and obedience? It serves to keep people from being deceived any longer by those who, through this doctrine of separated essences founded on Aristotle's vain philosophy, would frighten them out of obeying the laws of their country with empty names, just as people frighten birds from grain with an empty coat, a hat, and a crooked stick. On this foundation they say that when a man is dead and buried, his soul—that is, his life—can walk apart from his body and be seen at night among the graves. On the same foundation they say that the shape, color, and taste of a piece of bread are present where, according to them, no bread is present. On the same foundation they say that faith, wisdom, and other virtues are sometimes poured into a man, sometimes blown into him from heaven, as though virtuous people and their virtues could be separated. They make many other claims, too, that weaken subjects' dependence on their country's Sovereign Power. For who will strive to obey the laws if he expects obedience to be poured or blown into him? Who will not obey a priest who can make God rather than obey his Sovereign—or even God himself? And who, fearing ghosts, will fail to show great respect to people who can make the holy water that drives them away? Let this suffice as an example of the errors brought into the Church from Aristotle's entities and essences. Perhaps he knew his philosophy was false but wrote it because it accorded with and reinforced his people's religion, fearing Socrates' fate.

Once they have fallen into the error of separated essences, they are necessarily entangled in many further absurdities. Since they insist these forms are real, they must assign them a place. But they hold them incorporeal, without any quantitative dimensions, while everyone knows that place has dimensions and can be filled only by something corporeal. To preserve their credit they resort to a distinction: these forms are not anywhere circumscriptively, they say, but definitively. These terms are mere words, meaningless in this context, and pass only in Latin, which conceals their emptiness. Circumscribing a thing means nothing but determining or defining its place, so the two sides of the distinction mean the same. In particular, they affirm that a man's essence—which they call his soul—is entirely present in his little finger and entirely present in every other part of his body, however small, while the whole body has no more soul than any one of those parts. Can anyone believe God is served by such absurdities? Yet those who would believe in the existence of an incorporeal soul separated from the body must believe all this.

When asked to explain how an incorporeal substance can feel pain and be tormented in the fires of Hell or Purgatory, they have no answer at all except that we cannot know how fire can burn souls.

Again, since motion is a change of place, and incorporeal substances cannot occupy a place, they have difficulty making it appear possible for a soul to travel without its body from here to Heaven, Hell, or Purgatory, or for the ghosts of men—and, I might add, of the clothes they appear in—to walk at night through churches, churchyards, and other burial places. I do not know what answer they can give unless they say that ghosts walk definitively rather than circumscriptively, or spiritually rather than temporally; for distinctions so extravagant can be applied to absolutely any difficulty.

As for eternity, they refuse to have it mean an endless succession of time. Otherwise they could not explain how God's will and his preordination of future things would not precede his foreknowledge of those same things, as an efficient cause precedes its effect or an agent its action; nor could they explain many other bold opinions of theirs about the incomprehensible nature of God. Instead, they teach that eternity is the present time standing still, a Nunc-stans, as the schools call it. Neither they nor anyone else understands this any more than they would understand a Hic-stans as infinite greatness of place.

When people divide a body in thought by counting its parts, they also count the parts of the place it filled. If we make many parts, then, we must make many places for them, so no one can conceive more or fewer parts than there are places for them. Yet they would have us believe that by God's almighty power one body can occupy many places at the same time, and many bodies one place at the same time, as if it honored divine power to say that what exists does not exist, or that what has happened has not happened. These are only a small portion of the absurdities forced upon them by disputing philosophically about the divine and incomprehensible nature instead of admiring and adoring it. God's attributes cannot signify what he is; they ought to signify our desire to honor him with the best names we can devise. But those who venture to reason about his nature from these attributes of honor lose their understanding on the first attempt, and fall from one difficulty into another, endlessly and without number. They resemble a man unfamiliar with court ceremony who enters the presence of someone grander than anyone he is used to addressing. Stumbling as he enters, he drops his cloak to keep from falling; trying to retrieve it, he drops his hat; and one mishap after another betrays his bewilderment and awkwardness.

As for physics, the knowledge of subordinate and secondary causes of natural events, they offer no causes at all, only empty words. If you ask why some kinds of bodies naturally sink toward the earth and others naturally rise away from it, the schools will tell you, following Aristotle, that the sinking bodies are heavy, and that heaviness makes them descend. But if you ask what they mean by heaviness, they define it as an endeavor to move toward the earth's center. Thus the cause of sinking is an endeavor to be below—which amounts to saying that bodies sink or rise because they do. Or they will tell you that the earth's center is the place of rest and preservation for heavy things, and therefore they strive to reach it: as though stones and metals could desire, or could discern where they wanted to be as a person does; or loved rest, as a person does not; or as though a piece of glass were less safe in a window than falling into the street.

If we ask why the same body seems larger at one time than another without anything being added to it, they say it is condensed when it seems smaller and rarefied when it seems larger. What are condensation and rarefaction? Condensation, they say, is when the very same matter contains less quantity than before; rarefaction, when it contains more. As though matter could lack a determinate quantity, when quantity is nothing but the determination of matter—that is, body—by which we say one body exceeds or falls short of another by this much or that. Or as though a body were first made without any quantity whatsoever, and more or less quantity were added later according to the density desired.

For the cause of the human soul, they say, Creatur Infundendo, and Creando Infunditur: that is, “It is created by being poured in,” and “poured in by being created.”

For the cause of sense they offer an omnipresence of species, that is, appearances of objects. When these appear to the eye, there is sight; to the ear, hearing; to the palate, taste; to the nostril, smell; and to the rest of the body, touch.

As the cause of willing some particular act, called Volitio, they assign the faculty—that is, people's general capacity to will now one thing and now another—called Voluntas. Thus they make the power the cause of the act, as though one could explain people's good or evil acts by citing their ability to do them.

And often they pass off their ignorance as the cause of natural events, merely disguising it in other words. They say fortune causes contingent things, meaning things whose cause they do not know. They attribute many effects to occult qualities, meaning qualities unknown to them and therefore, they suppose, to anyone else. They appeal to sympathy, antipathy, antiperistasis, specific qualities, and similar terms that signify neither the agent producing the effects nor the operation by which they are produced.

If metaphysics and physics of this kind are not vain philosophy, nothing ever was, and St. Paul had no need to warn us to avoid it.

Their moral and civil philosophy contains equally great or greater absurdities. If a man commits an injustice, that is, an act contrary to the law, they say God is the primary cause of the law and also the primary cause of that act and every other act, yet not at all a cause of the injustice, which is the act's failure to conform to the law. This is vain philosophy. One might as well say that one person makes both a straight line and a crooked one, while another makes the mismatch between them. Such is the philosophy of everyone who settles his conclusions before knowing his premises, professing to comprehend the incomprehensible, and turning attributes of honor into attributes of nature. This distinction was made to uphold the doctrine of free will: a human will not subject to the will of God.

To understand the grounds for their claim that there are abstract essences, or substantial forms, we must first consider what those words properly mean. We use words to record our thoughts and ideas for ourselves and to communicate them to others. Some words name things we think about. These include all kinds of bodies that affect the senses and leave an impression in the imagination. Other words name the imagined impressions themselves: the ideas or mental images we have of things we see or remember. Others name names, or kinds of speech. Universal, plural, singular, negation, true, false, syllogism, question, promise, and covenant are names for certain forms of speech. Other words show that one name follows from, or conflicts with, another. When someone says, “A man is a body,” he means that the name body necessarily applies wherever the name man applies. They are different names for the same thing, a man. The word is, joining them together, shows this connection. Just as we use is, the Latins use est and the Greeks use esti in its various forms. I do not know whether all other nations have an equivalent word in their languages, but I am sure they do not need one. If that were the custom, simply placing two names in order could show their connection just as well as is, be, are, and similar words. Custom gives words their force.

Suppose a language had no verb corresponding to est, is, or be. Its speakers would still be just as capable as Greeks and Latins of making inferences, drawing conclusions, and reasoning in every way. But what would become of the terms entity, essence, essential, essentially, and the many related terms derived from that verb, as they are commonly used? They are not names of things. They are signs by which we show that we think one name or attribute follows from another. When we say, “a man is a living body,” we do not mean that the man is one thing, the living body another, and the is or being a third. We mean that the man and the living body are the same thing. The inference “If he is a man, he is a living body” is valid, and the word is expresses it. So phrases such as to be a body, to walk, to be speaking, to live, and to see, and words meaning the same thing, such as corporeality, walking, speaking, life, and sight, are names of nothing. I have explained this more fully elsewhere.

Someone may ask why I go into such fine distinctions in a work that claims to deal only with what is needed to understand government and obedience. My purpose is to stop people from letting themselves be deceived by those who teach separated essences on the basis of Aristotle's vain philosophy. They use empty names to frighten people away from obeying their country's laws, just as people scare birds from grain with an empty coat, a hat, and a bent stick. This doctrine is the basis for saying that when a man dies and is buried, his soul, meaning his life, can walk apart from his body and be seen at night among the graves. On the same basis, they say the shape, color, and taste of a piece of bread exist in a place where, according to them, there is no bread. They also say faith, wisdom, and other virtues are sometimes poured into a person or blown into him from heaven, as though virtuous people could be separated from their virtues. Many more such claims weaken subjects' dependence on their country's Sovereign power. Who will try to obey the laws if he expects obedience to be poured or blown into him? Who would not obey a priest who can make God, rather than obey his Sovereign, or even God himself? And who, if afraid of ghosts, will not highly respect people who can make the holy water that drives ghosts away? This is enough to illustrate the errors introduced into the Church through Aristotle's entities and essences. He may have known his philosophy was false, but written it because it agreed with and supported their religion, and because he feared the fate of Socrates.

Once people accept the error of separated essences, they necessarily become entangled in many further absurdities. If they claim these forms are real, they must give them a place. But they also claim they are incorporeal and have no measurable dimensions. Everyone knows a place has dimensions and can only be occupied by something bodily. So to preserve their reputation, they distinguish between being somewhere “circumscriptively” and being there “definitively.” These are just words, with no meaning here. They work only in Latin, which hides their emptiness. To circumscribe something is simply to determine or define its place, so the two terms in their distinction mean the same thing. In particular, they say a man's essence is his soul. They claim that the whole soul is in his little finger, and the whole soul is in every other part of his body, however small, while the whole body has no more soul than any one of its parts. Can anyone think God is served by such absurdities? Yet anyone who believes in an incorporeal soul separated from the body must believe all this.

When they are asked how an incorporeal substance can feel pain and be tortured in the fire of Hell or Purgatory, they have no answer except that we cannot know how fire burns souls.

Motion is a change of place, and incorporeal substances cannot occupy a place. This leaves them struggling to explain how a soul can leave the body and travel to Heaven, Hell, or Purgatory, or how people's ghosts—and, I might add, the clothes they appear in—can walk at night through churches, churchyards, and other burial places. I do not know what they can say except that ghosts walk “definitively,” not “circumscriptively,” or “spiritually,” not “temporally.” Such remarkable distinctions could be applied equally well to any difficulty at all.

They refuse to define eternity as an endless succession of time. If they did, they could not explain how God's will and his predetermination of future things would not come before his foreknowledge of those same things, as an effective cause comes before its effect and an agent before its action. Nor could they explain many other bold opinions about God's incomprehensible nature. Instead they teach that eternity is the present moment standing still, what the Schools call nunc-stans. Neither they nor anyone else understands that expression, any more than they would understand hic-stans as a description of infinitely vast space.

When we mentally divide a body by counting its parts, we also count the parts of the space it occupied. Thinking of more parts therefore means thinking of more places for them. No one can conceive of more or fewer parts than there are places for those parts. Yet they want us to believe that by God's almighty power one body can be in many places at once, and many bodies in one place at once. It is as though we honored divine power by saying that what exists does not exist, or that what happened did not happen. These are only a small fraction of the contradictions forced on them by trying to argue philosophically about the divine, incomprehensible nature instead of admiring and worshipping it. God's attributes cannot tell us what he is. They should express our wish to honor him with the best names we can think of. Those who try to reason from these names of honor about his nature lose their understanding at the first attempt. They stumble from one difficulty into another without end. They are like a man unfamiliar with court ceremonies who enters the presence of someone far more important than anyone he is used to addressing. He trips at the door, drops his cloak to keep from falling, then drops his hat while picking up the cloak. One awkward move after another reveals his alarm and lack of polish.

As for physics, the knowledge of the subordinate and secondary causes of natural events, they give us no causes at all, only empty words. Ask why some kinds of bodies naturally fall toward the Earth while others naturally move away from it. Following Aristotle, the Schools say those that fall are heavy, and heaviness makes them fall. Ask what heaviness means, and they define it as a tendency to go to the Earth's center. Thus the cause of falling is a tendency to go down. This amounts to saying that bodies rise or fall because they do. Or they tell us that the Earth's center is the place where heavy things rest and are preserved, so they tend toward it. That treats stones and metals as though they had desires and could recognize where they wanted to be, as people can; or as though they loved rest, unlike people; or as though a piece of glass were less safe in a window than it would be falling into the street.

Suppose we ask why the same body sometimes seems bigger than at other times, without anything being added to it. They say it is condensed when it seems smaller and rarefied when it seems bigger. What do those words mean? To be condensed is to have less quantity than before in precisely the same matter, and to be rarefied is to have more. But matter cannot exist without some definite quantity. Quantity is simply the measure of matter, that is, of body, by which we say one body is bigger or smaller than another by a given amount. Their account is as if a body could first be made with no quantity at all, and later be supplied with more or less quantity according to how dense it was meant to be.

For the cause of the human soul they say, Creatur Infundendo, and Creando Infunditur: “It is created by pouring it in,” and “Poured in by creation.”

For the cause of sensation they offer the presence everywhere of species, meaning the appearances of objects. When these appearances reach the eye, they call it sight; the ear, hearing; the palate, taste; the nostril, smell; and the rest of the body, touch.

As the cause of willing any particular action, which they call Volitio, they give the general capacity to will one thing at one time and another thing at another time, which they call Voluntas. They thus make the ability the cause of the act. That is like explaining people's good or evil actions by saying they were capable of doing them.

Often they disguise their own ignorance in other words and call it the cause of natural events. For instance, they say fortune causes contingent events, meaning events whose cause they do not know. They attribute many effects to hidden qualities, meaning qualities unknown to them and therefore, as they think, to everyone else. They also appeal to sympathy, antipathy, antiperistasis, specific qualities, and similar terms. None identifies either the agent producing the effects or the process that produces them.

If metaphysics and physics like this do not count as vain philosophy, nothing ever has; and St. Paul did not need to warn us to avoid it.

Their moral and civil philosophy is just as absurd, or more so. Suppose a man commits an injustice, that is, does something against the law. They say God is the primary cause of the law and the primary cause of that action and all other actions, yet not a cause at all of the injustice, meaning the action's failure to conform to the law. This is vain philosophy. One might just as well say one man makes both a straight line and a crooked line, while another makes them fail to match. That is the philosophy of people who decide on their conclusions before they know their premises. They pretend to understand what cannot be understood, and turn names meant to honor God into descriptions of his nature. This particular distinction was made to defend the doctrine of free will, meaning a human will not subject to God's will.