Note 94 — Chapter III · CATEGORIÆ.

Hobbes observes (First Philosophy, part ii. ch. xi. 6): “But we must not so think of Relation as if it were an accident differing from all the other accidents of the relative; but one of them, namely, that by which the comparison is made. For example, the likeness of one white to another white, or its unlikeness to black, is the same accident with its whiteness.” This may be true about the relations Like and Unlike (see Mr. John Stuart Mill, Logic, ch. iii. p. 80, 6th ed.) But, in Relations generally, the fundamentum may be logically distinguished from the Relation itself.

Aristotle makes the same remarks upon τὸ συμβεβηκὸς as upon τὸ πρός τι:— That it verges upon Non-ens; and that it has no special mode of being generated or destroyed. φαίνεται γὰρ τὸ συμβεβηκὸς ἐγγύς τι τοῦ μὴ ὄντος· τῶν μὲν γὰρ ἄλλον τρόπον ὄντων ἔστι γένεσις καὶ φθορά, τῶν δὲ κατὰ συμβεβηκὸς οὐκ ἔστιν. (Metaphys. E. p. 1026, b. 21.)