TWO:The woman was smiling now quite freely. All traces of passion and anxiety were gone. She knew the end had come, and she was prepared to accept it without complaint. Prout looked a little awkward as he bowed.After explaining at considerable length what Being is not, Aristotle now proceeds to ascertain what it is. He tells us that just as all number qua number must be either odd or even, so all Being qua Being must have certain universal attributes. These he sets himself to discover. When Descartes long afterwards entered on a somewhat similar inquiry, he fell back on the facts of his own individual consciousness. Aristotle, on the contrary, appeals to the common consciousness of mankind as embodied in ordinary language. In how many senses do we say that a thing is? The first answer is contained in his famous Ten Categories.239 These342 are not what some have supposed them to be, summa genera of existence, but summa genera of predication. In other words, they are not a classification of things, but of the information which it is possible to receive about a single thing, more especially about the richest and most concrete thing known to usa human being. If we want to find out all about a thing we ask, What is it? Of what sort? How large? To what does it belong? Where and when can we find it? What does it do? What happens to it? And if the object of our investigations be a living thing, we may add, What are its habits and dispositions? The question has been raised, how Aristotle came to think of these ten particular categories, and a wonderful amount of rubbish has been written on the subject, while apparently no scholar could see what was staring him in the face all the time, that Aristotle got them by collecting all the simple forms of interrogation supplied by the Greek language,240 and writing out their most general expressions.
TWO:They first wanted me to explain what put it into my head to come to Lige, and how I had managed to get there; but as the sisters heard of my empty stomach and my thirty miles, they would not listen to another word before I had put myself round a good square meal.
