Conatus: REVISED EDITION by Tom Wallace - HTML preview

C O N A T U S

kind of magic ingredient that delivered to things their crucial grounding in the real world. But quintessence was not necessarily from a heavenly realm or an abstract world of perfect forms, or from God. Quintessence could be earth-bound. It was form in its mundane sense that allowed air, fire, earth and water to take on the properties of the various substances we know in the world. Quintessence delivered something else. An essential character, we could say. And often this involved some kind of moral aspect. The fifth element is sometimes now referred to as love, sort of following from Empedocles. Sometimes quintessence itself is taken as the ‘materia prima’ — the primary substance. The Greeks used the term ‘hylē’. But to be clear about the meaning of essence I will explore other explanations below.

Does this help in the scientific quest for a substrate? Probably we are forced to say – not yet! Too much magic in quintessence, even without Heaven or God.

So let’s press on to consider the meaning of essence.

We noted above that Leibniz made a distinction between necessary truth and contingent truth. (We’ll be looking more closely at necessary and contingent truths in the next chapter.) A view related to necessary and contingent truth is ‘essentialism’. According to Aristotle, there are essential and accidental properties to a substance. Essentialism distinguishes between the qualities of a thing that are essential, or necessary, and those that are accidental — or, we might say — contingent. The necessary

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