The Accidental Being

There are principles and causes which are generable and destructible without ever being in course of being generated or destroyed.

For otherwise all things will be of necessity, since that which is being generated or destroyed must have a cause which is not accidentally its cause. Will A exist or not? It will if B happens; and if not, not. And B will exist if C happens.

And thus if time is constantly subtracted from a limited extent of time, one will obviously come to the present. This man, then, will die by violence, if he goes out; and he will do this if he gets thirsty; and he will get thirsty if something else happens; and thus we shall come to that which is now present, or to some past event.

For instance, he will go out if he gets thirsty; and he will get thirsty if he is eating pungent food.

This is either the case or not; so that he will of necessity die, or of necessity not die. And similarly if one jumps over to past events, the same account will hold good; for this-I mean the past condition-is already present in something.

Everything, therefore, that will be, will be of necessity; e.g. it is necessary that he who lives shall one day die; for already some condition has come into existence, e.g. the presence of contraries in the same body. But whether he is to die by disease or by violence is not yet determined, but depends on the happening of something else.

The process goes back to a certain starting-point. But this no longer points to something further. This then will be the starting-point for the fortuitous, and will have nothing else as cause of its coming to be. But to what sort of starting-point and what sort of cause we thus refer the fortuitous-whether to matter or to the purpose or to the motive power, must be carefully considered.

Part 4

Let us dismiss accidental being.

But since that which is in the sense of being true, or is not in the sense of being false, depends on combination and separation, and truth and falsity together depend on the allocation of a pair of contradictory judgements (for the true judgement affirms where the subject and predicate really are combined, and denies where they are separated, while the false judgement has the opposite of this allocation;

It is another question, how it happens that we think things together or apart; by ’together’ and ‘apart’ I mean thinking them so that there is no succession in the thoughts but they become a unity); for falsity and truth are not in things-it is not as if the good were true, and the bad were in itself false-but in thought; while with regard to simple concepts and ‘whats’ falsity and truth do not exist even in thought–this being so, we must consider later what has to be discussed with regard to that which is or is not in this sense.

But since the combination and the separation are in thought and not in the things, and that which is in this sense is a different sort of ‘being’ from the things that are in the full sense (for the thought attaches or removes either the subject’s ‘what’ or its having a certain quality or quantity or something else), that which is accidentally and that which is in the sense of being true must be dismissed.

The cause of the former is indeterminate, and that of the latter is some affection of the thought, and both are related to the remaining genus of being, and do not indicate the existence of any separate class of being.

Therefore let these be dismissed, and let us consider the causes and the principles of being itself, qua being. (It was clear in our discussion of the various meanings of terms, that ‘being’ has several meanings.)