Aristotle
Categories or Predicaments given by Aristotle, both in his treatise
called by that name and elsewhere. For our purpose it is enough to
point out that the particular sensible Hoc Aliquid is declared to be
the ultimate subject, to which all Universals attach, as determinants
or accompaniments; and that, if this condition be wanting, the
unattached Universal cannot rank among complete Entia. The subject or
First Substance, which can never become a predicate, is established
as the indispensable ultimate subject for all predicates; if that
disappears, all predicates disappear along with it. The Particular
thus becomes the keystone of the arch whereon all Universals rest.
Aristotle is indeed careful to point out a gradation in these
predicates: some are essential to the subject, and thus approach so
near to the First Substance that he calls them Second Substances;
others, and the most in number, are not thus essential; these last
are Concomitants or Accidents, and some of them fall so much short of
complete Entity that he describes them as near to Non-Entia.[20] But
all of them, essential or unessential, are alike constituents or
appendages of the First Substance or Particular Subject, and have no
reality in any other character.
[Footnote 20: Aristot. Metaph. E. p. 1026, b. 21: [Greek: phai/netas
ga/r to/ sumbebêko\s e)ggu/s ti tou= mê\ o)/ntos].
There cannot be a stronger illustration of the difference between the
Platonic and the Aristotelian point of view, than the fact that Plato
applies the same designation to all particular objects of sense--that
they are only midway between Entia and Non-Entia (Republic, v. pp.
478-479).]
We thus have the counter-theory of Aristotle against the Platonic
Realism. Instead of separate Universal Substances, containing in
themselves full reality, and forfeiting much of that reality when
they faded down into the shadowy copies called Particulars, he
inverts the Platonic order, announces full reality to be the
privilege of the Particular Sensible, and confines the function of
the Universal to that of a predicate, in or along with the
Particular. There is no doctrine that he protests against more
frequently than the ascribing of separate reality to the Universal.
The tendency to do this, he signalizes as a natural but unfortunate
illusion, lessening the beneficial efficacy of universal
demonstrative reasoning.[21] And he declares it to be a corollary
from this view of the Particular as indispensable subject along with
the Universal as its predicate--That the first principles of
Demonstration in all the separate theoretical sciences must be
obtained by Induction from particulars: first by impressions of sense
preserved in the memory; then by multiplied remembrances enlarged
into one experience; lastly, by many experiences generalized into one
principle by the Noûs.[22]
[Footnote 21: Aristot. Analyt. Poster. I. xxiv. p. 85, a. 31, b. 19.]
[Footnote 22: See the concluding chapter of the Analytica Posteriora.
A similar doctrine is stated by Plato in the Phædon (p. 96, B) as one
among the intellectual phases that Sokrates had passed through in the
course of his life, without continuing in them.]
While Aristotle thus declares Induction to be the source from whence
Demonstration in these separate sciences draws its first principles,
we must at the same time acknowledge that his manner of treating
Science is not always conformable to this declaration, and that he
often seems to forget Induction altogether. This is the case not only
in his First Philosophy, or Metaphysics, but also in his Physics. He
there professes to trace out what he calls beginnings, causes,
elements, &c., and he analyses most of the highest generalities. Yet
still these analytical enquiries (whatever be their value) are
usually, if not always, kept in subordination to the counter-theory
that he had set up against the Platonic Realism. Complete reality
resides (he constantly repeats) only in the particular sensible
substances and sensible facts or movements that compose the aggregate
Kosmos: which is not generated, but eternal, both as to substance and
as to movement. If these sensible substances disappear, nothing
remains. The beginnings and causes exist only relatively to these
particulars. Form, Matter, Privation, are not real Beings, antecedent
to the Kosmos, and pre-existent generators of the substances
constituting the Kosmos; they are logical fragments or factors,
obtained by mental analysis and comparison, assisting to methodize
our philosophical point of view or conception of those substances,
but incapable of being understood, and having no value of their own,
apart from the substances. Some such logical analysis (that of
Aristotle or some other) is an indispensable condition even of the
most strictly inductive philosophy.
There are some portions of the writings of Aristotle (especially the
third book De Animâ and the twelfth book of the Metaphysica) where he
appears to lose sight of the limit here indicated; but, with few
exceptions, we find him constantly remembering, and often repeating,
the great truth formulated in his Categories: that full or
substantive reality resides only in the Hoc Aliquid, with its
predicates implicated with it, and that even the highest of these
predicates (Second Substances) have no reality apart from some one of
their particulars. We must recollect that, though Aristotle denies to
the predicates a _separate_ reality, he recognizes in them an
_adjective_ reality, as accompaniments and determinants: he
contemplates all the ten Categories as distinct varieties of
existence.[23] This is sufficient as a basis for abstraction, whereby
we can name them and reason upon them as distinct objects of thought
or points of view, although none of them come into reality except as
implicated with a sensible particular. Of such reasoning Aristotle's
First Philosophy chiefly consists; and he introduces peculiar phrases
to describe this distinction of reason between two different points
of view, where the real object spoken of is one and the same. The
frequency of the occasions taken to point out that distinction marks
his anxiety to keep the First Philosophy in harmony with the theory
of Reality announced in his Categories.
[Footnote 23: Aristot. Metaphys. [Greek: D]. p. 1017, a. 23: [Greek:
o)sachô=s ga\r le/getai (ta\ schê/mata tê=s katêgori/as),
tosautachô=s to\ ei)=nai sêmai/nei.]]
The Categories of Aristotle appear to have become more widely known
than any other part of his philosophy. They were much discussed by
the sects coming after him; and, even when not adopted, were present
to speculative minds as a scheme to be amended.[24] Most of the
arguments turned upon the nine later Categories: it was debated
whether these were properly enumerated and discriminated, and whether
the enumeration as a whole was exhaustive.
[Footnote 24: This is the just remark of Trendelenburg,
Kategorienlehre, p. 217.]
With these details, however, the question between Realism and its
counter-theory (whether Conceptualism or Nominalism) is not
materially concerned. The standard against Realism was raised by
Aristotle in the First Category, when he proclaimed the Hoc Aliquid
to be the only complete Ens, and the Universal to exist only along
with it as a predicate, being nothing in itself apart; and when he
enumerated Quality as one among the predicates, and nothing beyond.
In the Platonic Realism (Phædon, Timæus, Parmenides) what Aristotle
called Quality was the highest and most incontestable among all
Substances--the Good, the Beautiful, the Just, &c.; what Aristotle
called Second Substance was also Substance in the Platonic Realism,
though not so incontestably; but what Aristotle called First
Substance was in the Platonic Realism no Substance at all, but only
one among a multitude of confused and transient shadows. It is in the
First and Third Categories that the capital antithesis of Aristotle
against the Platonic Realism is contained. As far as that antithesis
is concerned, it matters little whether the aggregate of predicates
be subdivided under nine general heads (Categories) or under three.
In the century succeeding Aristotle, the Stoic philosophers altered
his Categories, and drew up a new list of their own, containing only
four distinct heads instead of ten. We have no record or explanation
of the Stoic Categories from any of their authors; so that we are
compelled to accept the list on secondary authority, from the
comments of critics, mostly opponents. But, as far as we can make
out, they retained in their First Category the capital feature of
Aristotle's First Category--the primacy of the First Substance or Hoc
Aliquid and its exclusive privilege of imparting reality to all the
other Categories. Indeed, the Stoics seem not only to have retained
this characteristic, but to have exaggerated it. They did not
recognize so close an approach of the Universal to the Particular, as
is implied by giving to it a second place in the same Category, and
calling it Second Substance. The First Category of the Stoics
(Something or Subject) included only particular substances; all
Universals were by them ranked in the other Categories, being
regarded as negations of substances, and designated by the term
Non-Somethings--Non-Substances.[25]
[Footnote 25: Prantl, Gesch. der Logik, I. vi. p. 420: [Greek:
_ou)/tina_ ta)koina\ par' au)toi=s le/getai]. &c.]
The Neo-Platonist Plotinus, in the third century after the Christian
era, agreed with the Stoics (though looking from the opposite point
of view) in disapproving Aristotle's arrangement of Second Substance
in the same Category with First Substance.[26] He criticizes at some
length both the Aristotelian list of Categories, and the Stoic list;
but he falls back into the Platonic and even the Parmenidean point of
view. His capital distinction is between Cogitables and Sensibles.
The Cogitables are in his view the most real (_i.e._ the Aristotelian
Second Substance is more real than the First); among them the
highest, Unum or Bonum, is the grand fountain and sovereign of all
the rest. Plotinus thus departed altogether from the Aristotelian
Categories, and revived the Platonic or Parmenidean Realism; yet not
without some Aristotelian modifications. But it is remarkable that in
this departure his devoted friend and scholar Porphyry did not follow
him. Porphyry not only composed an Introduction to the Categories of
Aristotle, but also vindicated them at great length, in a separate
commentary, against the censures of Plotinus; Dexippus, Jamblichus,
and Simplikius, followed in the same track.[27] Still, though
Porphyry stood forward both as admirer and champion of the
Aristotelian Categories, he did not consider that the question raised
by the First Category of Aristotle against the Platonic Realism was
finally decided. This is sufficiently proved by the three problems
cited above out of the Introduction of Porphyry; where he proclaims
it to be a deep and difficult enquiry, whether Genera and Species had
not a real substantive existence apart from the individuals composing
them. Aristotle, both in the Categories and in many other places, had
declared his opinion distinctly in the negative against Plato; but
Porphyry had not made up his mind between the two, though he insists,
in language very Aristotelian, on the distinction between First and
Second Substance.[28]
[Footnote 26: Plotinus, Ennead. vi. 1, 2.]
[Footnote 27: Simplikius, Schol. in Aristotel. Categ. p. 40, a, b,
Brandis.]
[Footnote 28: Prantl, Geschichte der Logik, I. xi. p. 634, n. 69.
Upon this account Prantl finds Porphyry guilty of "empiricism in its
extreme crudeness"--"jene äusserste Rohheit des Empirismus."]