The peripatetic philosophy, obeying rationalist propensities, has
tried to eternalize the common-sense categories by treating them
very technically and articulately. A 'thing' for instance is a
being, or ENS. An ENS is a subject in which qualities 'inhere.' A
subject is a substance. Substances are of kinds, and kinds are
definite in number, and discrete. These distinctions are fundamental
and eternal. As terms of DISCOURSE they are indeed magnificently
useful, but what they mean, apart from their use in steering our
discourse to profitable issues, does not appear. If you ask a
scholastic philosopher what a substance may be in itself, apart from
its being the support of attributes, he simply says that your
intellect knows perfectly what the word means.
But what the intellect knows clearly is only the word itself and its
steering function. So it comes about that intellects SIBI PERMISSI,
intellects only curious and idle, have forsaken the common-sense
level for what in general terms may be called the 'critical' level
of thought. Not merely SUCH intellects either--your Humes and
Berkeleys and Hegels; but practical observers of facts, your
Galileos, Daltons, Faradays, have found it impossible to treat the
NAIFS sense-termini of common sense as ultimately real.
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