Book 7
14
Now although we must also consider how we should express ourselves in each particular case, it is still more important to consider what the facts are. Hence now, since the language which we are using is clear, similarly essence also will belong primarily and simply to substance, and secondarily to other things as well; just as the what it is is not essence simply, but the essence of a quality or quantity.
15
For it must be either by equivocation that we say that these things are , or by adding and subtracting qualifications, as we say that the unknowable is knownsc. to be unknowable.; since the truth is that we use the terms neither equivocally nor in the same sense, but just as we use the term medical in relation to one and the same thing; but not of one and the same thing, nor yet equivocally. The term medical is applied to a body and a function and an instrument, neither equivocally nor in one sense, but in relation to one thing.Cf. Aristot. Met. 4.2.2.
16
However, in whichever way one chooses to speak of these things, it matters nothing; but this point is clear: that the primary and unqualified definition, and the essence, belong to substances. It is true that they belong equally to other things too, but not primarily . For if we assume this, it does not necessarily follow that there is a definition of anything which means the same as any formula; it must mean the same as a particular kind of formula, i.e. the formula of one thing—
17
one not by continuity like the Iliad, or things which are arbitrarily combined, but in one of the proper senses of one. And one has the same variety of senses as being. Being means sometimes the individual thing, sometimes the quantity, sometimes the quality. Hence even white man will have a formula and definition; but in a different sense from the definition of whiteness and substance.
