Compendium of the Study of Theology

more serious attention. It is founded on Aristotle’s doctrine that “a name signifies without time”. The reply is that this is true as to signification, not as to reality (quantum ad significandum, non quantum ad rem). This means substantially that, though the name Cæsar may be applied both to the present and the past Cæsar, there is really a “new imposition” when it is applied to the latter; the name is used equivocally. In the same way infinite or privative predicates, like the term “not-just,” may be applied alike to an existent or non-existent person: from the privative proposition, “the man is not-just” or “unjust,” we may infer the negative proposition “the man is not just,” but from “the man is not unjust,” we cannot infer “the man is just,” for the truth might be that the man is dead, and for that reason is neither just nor unjust. In such cases the name “man” is used equivocally. Then Bacon attempts to deal with the difficulty noticed by Aristotle as attaching to such propositions as “he is being made beautiful”: this contains a contradiction, since what is being made beautiful is not really beautiful. The reader may before now have begun to suspect that Bacon has entered upon a line of thought which would end in the denial of the possibility of motion, according to the old sophistic contention that, if a thing moves, it must move either where it is or where it is not, and yet both assertions are absurd. Bacon himself now begins to feel the difficulty; if only the present exists, he asks, how can motion and time exist, when it is of their essence to be ever ceasing to be? He replies by drawing a distinction. There are two kinds of becoming (fieri). A thing may be said to be becoming (in fieri) when it tends to a future being—a future state which when reached will be permanent: in this case, it is implied, it can only be said to have the predicate expressing this state potentially, e.g., when we say “this man is becoming, or being made, beautiful”. The other kind of becoming is when the subject wants nothing but becoming to complete its being: that is the kind of becoming which is proper to time and motion, and such becoming is something actually present (tale fieri non tollit esse debitum talibus rebus). Bacon