ESSENCE
544
ESSENCE
and to which they are necessarily referred. Thus the
notion of the essence is seen to tie the abstract coiniter-
part of the concrete entity; the latter signifying that
which is or may he (ens aclu, cits potenlid), while the
former points to the reason or ground why it is pre-
cisely what it is. As furnishing in this manner an
answer to the question What? {QuiJ?) — as, e. g.,
What is man? — essence is equivalent to quhhiity; ami
thus, as St. Thomas remarks (I, Q. iii, a. 8), the es-
sence of a thing is that which is expressed by its defi-
nition. Essence and nature express the same reality
envisaged in the two points of view as being or acting.
As the essence is that whereby any given thing is that
which it is, the ground of its characteristics and the
principle of its being, so its nature is that whereby it
acts as it does, the essence considered as the founda-
tion and principle of its operation. Hence again St.
Thomas: "Nature is seen to signify the essence of a
thing according as it has relation to its proper opera-
tion" (De enfe et essentia, cap. i). Furthermore,
essence is also in a manner synonymous with form,
since it is chiefly by their formal principle that beings
are segregated into one or other of the species. Thus,
while created spiritual things, because they are not
composed of matter and form, are specifically what
they are by reason of their essences or " forms" alone,
the" compounded beings of the corporeal world receive
their specification and determination of nature, or
es,sence, principally from their substantial forms. A
further synonym of essence is species; but it is to be
carefully noted that essence in this connexion is used
rather with a logical or metaphysical connotation
than with a real or physical one. This distinction is
of considerable importance. The real or physical es-
sence of compound entities consists in, or results
from, the union of the constituent parts. Thus if
we consider man as a being composed of matter and
form, body and soul, the physical essence will be the
bod}' andsoul. Apart from any act of abstraction,
body and soul exist in the physical order as the con-
stituents of man. On the other hand, we may con-
sider man as the result of a composition of gcjius
proximum and differenlia ultima, i. e. of his animality
and his rationality. Here the essence, humanity, is
metaphysical or logical. Thus, while the real es-
sence, to speak still only of composite beings, consists
in the collection of all those physical component parts
that are reciuired to constitute the entity what it is,
either actually or potentially existent, without which
it can be neither actual nor potential, the logical es-
sence is no more than the composition of ideas or no-
tions, abstracted mentally and referred together in
what are known as "second intentions".
This consideration provides a basis for the distinc- tion of essences according to the tiegree of physical and metaphysical complexity or simplicity which they severally display. The Supreme Being has — or rather is — a uni(iue and utterly simple essence, free from all composition, whether physical or metaphysical. Moreo\er, in God — otherwise, as we shall see, than in creatures — there is no distinction of any kind between His es.scnce and His existence. Spiritual created Ix'ings, however, as free from the composition of matter and form, have physically simple essences; yet they arc. composite in that their essences are the result of a union of genus and differentia, and are not identical with their existence. In the angel the es- sence is the species consequent on this imion. Cor- poreal creatures not only share in metaphysical com- plexity of essence, but have, on account of their material composition, a physical complexity as well. The characlcristic attributes of the es.sence are im- mutal)ility, iiulivisibility, necessity, and infinity. — Since the essence of anything is that whereby the thing is what it is, it follows dire<tly from the principle of contradiction that essences nuist be immutable. This, of course, is not true in the sense that physical es.sences
cannot be brought into being or cease to exist, nor that
they cannot be decomposed into their constituent
parts, nor yet that they are not subject to accidental
modification. The essence of God alone, as stated
above, is so entirely free from any sort of composition
that it is in the strictest sense immutable. Every
essence, however, is immutable in this, that it cannot
be changed or broken up into its constituent parts and
yet remain the same essence. The attribute is tran-
scendental and is applied to essence precisely as it is
essence. Thus, while the essence of any given man
may be broken up into body and soul, animality and
rationality, man as man and humanity as humanity
is changeless. One intlividual ceases to exist; the
essence itself, whether verified or not in concrete actu-
ality, persists. The tiefinition, " man is a rational
animal", is an eternally immutable truth, verifiable
whenever and wherever the subject man is given,
either as a concrete and existent entity, or as a mere
potentiality. Similarly, essences are said to be in-
divisible; that is to say, an essence ceases to be what
it is when it is broken up into its constituents. Neither
body nor soul alone is man. Neither animality nor
rationality, taken separately, is humanity. There-
fore, precisely as essence, it is indivisible. In like
manner necessity is predicated of essences. They are
necessary in that, though they may be merely possible
and contingent, each must of necessity always be
itself. In the order of actual being, the real essence is
necessarily what it is, since it is that whereby the
thing is what it is; in the order of the merely possible,
it must necessarily be identical with itself. Finally,
essences are said to be eternal and infinite in the nega-
tive sense that, as essences, there is no reason for their
non-existence, nor for their limitation to a given num-
ber of individuals in any species. From what has
been said, the distinction between essence considered
as physical and as metaphysical will be apparent. It
is the metaphj'sical essence that is eternal, immutable,
indivisible, necessary, etc.; the physical essence that is
temporal, contingent, etc. In other wortls, the meta-
physical essence is a formal universal, while the physi-
cal essence is that real particiilarization of the uni-
versal that provides the basis for the abstraction.
So far the present article has been occupied in ex- hibiting the Scholastic view with regard to essence, and in obtaining a certain precision of thought rather than in raising any problems intimately connected with the subject. Notice must be taken, however, of a philosophical tradition which has found adherents mainly among British philosophers and which is at variance with the Scholastic. This tradition would treat as futile and illusory any investigation or discus- sion concerning the essences of things. By those who hold it, either the fact of essence is Hatly denied and what we conceive of un<ler that name is relegated to the region of purely mental phenomena; or, what practically amounts to the same thing, that fact is judged to be doubtful and consequently irrelevant; or again, while the fact itself may be fully atlmitted, essence is declared to be imknowable, except in so far as we may be said to know that it is a fact. Of those who take up one or other of these positions with regard to the essence of things, the most prominent may be cited. Hobbes and Locke, iMill, Hume, Ueid, and Bain, the Positivists and the Agnostics generally, to- gether with a considerable mnnber of scientists of the present day, would not inipro]ierly be described as either doubtful or dogmatically negative as to the reality, meaning, and cognoscibility of essence. The projioncnts and defenders of such a position are by no means always consistent. While they make state- ments of their case, based for the most part on purely subjective views of the nature of reality, that the essences of beings are nonentities, or at least imknow- able, and, as a consequence, that the whole science of metaphysics is no more than a jargon of meaningless
