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Logick; Or, The Right Use of Reason in the Inquiry After Truth
Logick Or The Right Use of Reason in the Inquiry After Truth Author:Isaac Watts Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: SECT. V. Of the Ten Categories.—Of Substance modified. rE have thus given an account of the two chief objects of our ideas, namely, substances and modes, a... more »nd their various kinds: and in these last Sections we have briefly comprised the greatest part of what is necessary in the famous ten ranks of being, called the ten predicaments, or categories of Aristotle, on which there are endless volumes of discourses formed by several of his followers. But that the reader may not utterly be ignorant of them, let him know the names are these: substance, quantity, quality, relation, action, passion, where, when, situation, and clothing. It would be mere loss of time to shew how ' loose, how injudicious, and even ridiculous, is this ten-fold division of things: and whatsoever farther relates to them, and which may tend to'improve useful knowledge, should be sought in ontology, and in other sciences. Besides substance and mode, some of the moderns would have us consider the substance modified, as a distinct object of our ideas : but I think there is nothing more that need be said on this subject than this, namely, There is some difference between a substance when it is considered with all its modes about it, or clothed in all its manners of existence, and when it is distinguished from them, and considered naked without them. SECT. VI. Of Not-Being. S being is divided into substance and mode, so we may consider not-being with regard to both, these. I."Not-being is considered as excluding all substance, and then all modes are also necessarily excluded; and this we call pure nihility, or mere nothing. This nothing is taken either jn a vulgar or a philosophical sense ; so we say, there is nothing in the cupt in a vulgar sense, when we mean there is no liquor in it; but we can...« less