The vocabulary of philosophy, mental, moral, and metaphysical : with quotations and references for the use of students / by William Fleming ; edited by Henry Calderwood.
- Date:
- 1876
Licence: Public Domain Mark
Credit: The vocabulary of philosophy, mental, moral, and metaphysical : with quotations and references for the use of students / by William Fleming ; edited by Henry Calderwood. Source: Wellcome Collection.
Provider: This material has been provided by the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh. The original may be consulted at the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh.
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![VOCABULARY OF PHILOSOPHY. ACADEMY and ACADEMICS— See Vossius (De Philosophorum Sectis, 1657); Foucher (Dissertatio de Phil. Academ., 12, Paris, 1692); Gerlach (Com- mentatio Exhibens de Probabilitate Disputationes, 4to, Goett. ; Archer Butler’s Lects. on Ancient Philos., 4th series. ACATALEPSY (a, privative; and xstraX^/j, comprehensio, in- comprehensibility) is the term employed by Bacon (Adv. of Learning, Moffet’s trans., p. 140) to denote the doctrine held by the ancient academics and sceptics that human knowledge never amounts to certainty, but only to probability. “ Their chief error,” says Bacon, “ lay in this, that they falsely charged the perceptions of the senses.” Hence he says (Novum Organum, bk. i. aphor. 126), “ We do not meditate or propose acatalepsy, but eucatalepsy, for we do not derogate from sense, but help it, and we do not despise the understanding, but direct it.” Arcesilas, chief of the second Academy, taught that we know nothing with certainty, in opposition to the dogmatism of the Stoics, who taught x.xrx'h-/r^‘s, or the pos- sibility of seizing the truth. All sceptics and Pyrrhonians were called Acataleptics.—V. Academics. ACCIDENT (accido, to happen) is a modification or quality which does not essentially belong to a thing, nor form one of its constituent and invariable attributes ; as motion in relation to matter, or heat to iron. The scholastic definition of it is ens cntis or ens in alio, while substance was defined to be ens per se. “ Accident, in its widest technical sense (equivalent to attri- bute) is anything that is attributed to another, and can only be conceived as belonging to some substance (in which sense it is opposed to mbstance) ; in its narrower and more properly logical sense, it is a predicable which may be present or absent, the essence of the species remaining the same ; as for a man to be ‘walking,’ or ‘a native of Paris.’—Whately, Log., bk. ii. eh. 5, sec. 4, and index ; Aristotle (Metaphys., lib. iv. cap. 30).—V. Substance, Phenomenon. ACOSMIST (a, priv., and xoV^o.c, world). [One who theoretically denies the existence of the universe, as distinct from the Absolute Being.—Ed.] “ Spinoza did not deny the existence of God ; he denied the existence of the world ; he was con- sequently an acosmist, and not an atheist.”—Lewes, Biograph. Hist, of Philosophy, p. 1.](https://iiif.wellcomecollection.org/image/b2199531x_0022.jp2/full/800%2C/0/default.jpg)
