General Metaphysics Book

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: CHAPTER IV. THREE ATTRIBUTES OF BEING, NAMELY, UNITY, TRUTH, AND GOODNESS. Synopsis. (1) Kvery Being is one: in connexion with which property various terms have to be explained, (a) Unity is transcendental, predicamental, mathematical, (b) Unity is specific and individual, (c) Unity is real or mental. (d) Unity is distinguished from uniqueness. () Allied with unity is identity. (/) To unity is opposed distinction. (2) Every Being is true, (a) Establishment of the proposition (A) The truth of Being is not a reality superadded to it, but is Being itself in its relation to the intellect, (c) This relation may be made either to the creative or to the created intellect, (d) Objections do not upset the doctrine. (3) Every Being is good, (a) A disputed question of priority between the good and Being, (b) How and why every Being is good, (c) Not every Being is equally good, and, what is more, evil is a reality which has to be explained in harmony with the goodness of all Being as such. (d) With the good is closely connected the idea of the Beautiful. (4) Hegelian opposition to our three attributes of Being. Notes and Illustrations. Our work is now to assign attributes to Being, in which procedure we must be careful to assert no properties but such as belong to Being qua Being, and are co-extensive with the transcendental term itself, which passes over all boundaries and quitedisregards the distinction sometimes drawn between Things and Persons. Persons are Things as we are now viewing them, and Being is anything and everything that is real. The attributes of Being, then, must form no addition to its reality, they must be identical with it, not only in the sense that all the determinations of Being are themselves, through and through, Being, but also in the se...Read More