Accident
Accident
[Latin accidere, to happen what happens to be in a subject; any contingent, or nonessential attribute].
I. The obvious division of things into the stable and the unstable, the more or less independently subsistent and the dependent, or essentially inherent, appears beset with obscurity and difficulty as soon as it is brought under reflective consideration. In their endeavour to solve the problem, philosophers have followed two extreme tendencies. Some have denied the objectivity of the substantial or noumenal element, and attributed it wholly or in part to the mind; others have made the phenomenal or accidental element subjective, and accorded objectivity to substance alone. These two extreme tendencies are represented among the ancient Greek materialists and atomists on the one hand and the Eleatic pantheists on the other. Aristotle and his medieval followers steer a middle course. They hold to the objectivity both of substance and of accident, though they recognize the subjective factor in the mode of perception. They use the term accident to designate any contingent (i.e. nonessential) relation between an attribute and its subject. As such it is a merely logical denomination, one of the five predicables or universals, modes of systematic classification genus, difference, species, property, accident. In this sense it is called predicable, as distinguished from predicamental, accident, the latter term standing for a real objective form or status of things, and denoting a being whose essential nature it is to inhere in another as in a subject. Accident thus implies inexistence in substance i.e. not as the contained in the container, not as part in the whole, not as a being in time or place, not as effect in cause, not as the known in the knower; but as an inherent entity or mode in a subject which it determines. Accidents modify or denominate their subject in various ways, and to these correspond the nine “Categories”: quantity, in virtue whereof material substance has integrant, positional parts, divisibility, location, impenetrability, etc.; quality, which modifies substance immediately and intrinsically, either statically or dynamically, and includes such inherents of substance as habit, faculty, sense-stimuli, and figure or shape; relation, the bearing of one substance on another (e.g. paternity). These three groups are called intrinsic accidents, to distinguish them from the remaining six groups — action, passion, location, duration, position, habiliment — which, as their names sufficiently suggest, are simply extrinsic denominations accruing to a substance because of its bearings on some other substance. Quantity and quality, and, in a restricted sense. relation are said to be absolute accidents, because they are held to superadd some special form of being to the substance wherein they reside. For this reason a real, and not a merely conceptual, distinction between them and their subject is maintained. Arguments for the physical reality of this distinction are drawn from experience internal-consciousness attesting that the permanent, substantial self is subject to constantly-shifting accidental states — and external experience, which witnesses to a like permanence of things beneath the incessantly varying phenomena of nature. The supernatural order also furnishes an argument in the theology of the infused virtues which are habits supervening on, and hence really distinct from, the substance of the natural mind.
II. With the reaction against scholasticism, led on by Descartes, a new theory of the accident is devised, or rather the two extreme views of the Greeks referred to above are revived. Descartes, making quantity the very essence of matter, and thought the essence of spirit, denies all real distinction between substance and accident. While teaching an extreme dualism in psychology, his definition of substance, as independent being, gave occasion to Spinoza’s monism, and accidents became still more deeply buried in substance. On the other hand substance seems at last to disappear with Locke, the world is resolved into a congeries of qualities (primary, or extension, and secondary, or sensible properties). The primary qualities, however, still retain a foundation in the objective order, but with Berkeley they become entirely subjectified; only the soul is allowed a substantial element as the support of psychical accidents. This element is likewise dissolved in the philosophy of Hume and the Associationists. Kant considered accidents to be simply subjective categories of sense and intellect, forms according to which the mind apprehends and judges of things — which things are, and must remain, unknowable. Spencer retains Kant’s unknowable noumenon but admits phenomena to be its objective aspects or modifications.
III. Several other classifications of accidents are found in the pertinent treatises. It should be noted that while accidents by inhesion modify substance, they are witnesses to its nature, being the medium whereby the mind, through a process of abstraction and inference, builds its analogical concepts of the constitution of substances. From this point of view material accidents are classed as proper sensibles — the excitants of the individual senses, colour for sight, sound for hearing, etc. — and common sensibles — extension and its modes, size, distance, etc. — which stimulate two or more senses, especially touch and sight. Through these two groups of accidents, and concomitantly with their perception, the underlying subject is apperceived. Substance in its concrete existence, not in its abstract essence, is said to be an accidental object of sense.
IV. The modern views of accident, so far as they accord to it any objectivity, are based on the physical theory that all, at least material, phenomena (light, colour, heat, sound, etc.) are simply varying forms of motion. In part, the kinetic element in such phenomena was known to Aristotle and the Scholastics (cf. St. Thomas, De Anima, III, Lect. ii); but it is only in recent times that physical experimentation has thrown light on the correlation of material phenomena as conditioned by degrees of motion. While all Neo-Scholastic philosophers maintain that motion alone will not explain the objectivity of extension, some (e.g. Gutberlet) admit that it accounts for the sensible qualities (colour, sound, etc.). Haan (Philos. Nat.) frees the theory of motion from an extreme idealism, but holds that the theory of the real, formal objectivity of those qualities affords a more satisfactory explanation of sense-perception. The majority of Neo-Scholastic writers favour this latter view. (Pesch, Phil. Nat.)
V. The teaching of Catholic philosophy on the distinct reality of certain absolute, not purely modal, accidents was occasioned by the doctrine of the Real Presence of the Body and Blood of Christ in the Eucharist, though the arguments for the theory are deduced from natural experience. The same doctrine, however, suggests the further question, whether such accidents may not be separable from substance. Reason alone offers no positive arguments for such separability. The most it can do is to show that separability involves no inherent contradiction, and hence no absolute impossibility; the Omnipotence that endows substance with the power of supporting accidents can, it is claimed, supply some other means of support. Nor would the accidents thus separated, and supernaturally supported, lose their character as accidents, since they would still retain their essential property, i.e. natural exigence of inhesion. Of course the intrinsic possibility of such separation depends solely on the supernatural interference of God, nor may it extend to all classes of accidents. Thus, e.g., it is absolutely impossible for vital faculties, or acts, to exist outside their natural subjects, or principles. Theorists who, like the Cartesians, deny the objective, distinct entity of all accidents have been obliged to reconcile this negation with their belief in the Real Presence by maintaining that the species, or accidents, of bread and wine do not really remain in the Eucharist, but that after Consecration God produces on our senses the impressions corresponding to the natural phenomena. This theory obviously demands a seemingly unnecessary multiplication of miracles and has at present few if any serious advocates. (See EUCHARIST.)
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JOHN RICKABY, General Metaphysics (New York, 1900); MIVART, On Truth (London, 1899); McCosh, First Truths (New York, 1894); MERCIER, Ontologie; NYS, Cosmologie (I.ouvain, 1903), GUTBERLET, Naturphilosophie, and Ontologie (Munster, 1894); PESCH, Philosophia Naturalis (Freiburg, 1897).
F.P. SIEGFRIED
The Catholic Encyclopedia, Volume ICopyright © 1907 by Robert Appleton CompanyOnline Edition Copyright © 2003 by K. KnightNihil Obstat, March 1, 1907. Remy Lafort, S.T.D., CensorImprimatur. +John Cardinal Farley, Archbishop of New York
Fuente: Catholic Encyclopedia
Accident
a term of philosophy used to express that which is merely adventitious to a substance, and not essential to it; e.g. roundness is an accident of any body, since it is a body all the same, whether it be round or square. In theology this word is used in connection with the Roman doctrine of transubstantiation, which teaches that the accidents of the bread and wine in the holy Eucharist continue to subsist without a subject: Accidentia autem sine subjecto in eodem [sacramento] subsistunt (Aquinas, Opuscula, p. 57). And the catechism of the council of Trent speaks in these terms: Tertium restat, quod in hoc Sacramento maximum atque mirabile videatur, panis videlicet et vini species in hoc Sacramento sine aliqua re subjecta constare (Par. 2, No. 44). In defense of this doctrine, Roman writers argue thus: If the eucharistic accidents have any subject, that subject must be either (1) the matter of bread, or (2) the surface of the Lord’s body, or (3) the air and other corpuscles contained in the pores, etc., of the matter, whatever it is, which, by God’s appointment, continue to subsist after the destruction of the matter, so as to produce the same sensations. Now (1) they cannot have the matter of bread for their subject, because that matter no longer subsists, and is changed into the body of Jesus Christ; (2) they cannot have the surface of the Lord’s body for their subject, because it is only present in an invisible manner; and (3) the air cannot be the subject of these accidents, because the same accidents, numero, cannot pass from one subject to another; and because, further, the air cannot at the same time be the substance of its own proper attributes and of those of bread (Thomas Aquinas, par. 3, qu. 77, art. 1, in corp). They argue further, that the contrary doctrine, viz., that they are not really the accidents of bread and wine, but only appear such to us, destroys the nature and idea of a sacrament and of transubstantiation. That a sacrament, by its very nature, is essentially a sensible sign, not only in relation to ourselves, but in itself, i.e., in the language of the schools, not only ex parte nostri, but exparte sui; and that, consequently, if all that there is real and physical in the eucharistic accidents consists in this, that God causes them to produce in us, after consecration, the same sensations which the bread did previously, the sacrament is no longer a sensible sign, exparte sui, in itself, but only ex parte nostri; and, therefore, when God ceases to produce such sensations in us, as, for instance, when the consecrated host is locked up in the pyx, it is no longer a sacrament. They argue also, that to hold that they are not pure, or absolute accidents, destroys equally the nature of transubstantiation, because (1) transubstantiation is a real conversion of the bread and wine into the body and blood of Jesus Christ. Now, in every conversion there must be something common to both substances remaining the same after the change that it was before, else it would be simply a substitution of one thing for another. As then, in the holy eucharist, the substances of bread and wine do not remain after consecration, it follows that what does remain is the pure accidents. (2) They who oppose the doctrine of absolute accidents teach that one body differs from another only in the different configuration of its parts; and that wherever there is the same configuration of parts, there is the same body; and wherever there are the same sensations produced, there is also the same arrangements of parts to produce them. If this be so, since, in the holy eucharist, the same sensations are produced after the consecration as before, there must be the same configuration of parts after consecration as before, or the same body; in other words, there is no change, no transubstantiation. Landon, Eccl. Dictionary, s.v. SEE TRANSUBSTANTIATION.
Fuente: Cyclopedia of Biblical, Theological and Ecclesiastical Literature
Accident
(Lat. accidens) (in Scholasticism) Has no independent and self-sufficient existence, but exists only in another being, a substance or another accident. As opposed to substance the accident is called praedicamentale; as naming features of the essence or quiddity of a being accidens praedicabile. Accidents may change, disappear or be added, while substance remains the same. Accidents are either proper, that is necessarily given with a definite essence (thus, the “faculties of the soul” are proper accidents, because to sense, strive, reason etc., is proper to the soul) or non-proper, contingent like color or size. — R.A.
In Aristotelian logic, whatever term can be predicated of, without being essential or peculiar to the subject (q.v.). Logical or predicable (q.v.) — opposed to property (q.v.) — is that quality which adheres to a subject in such a manner that it neither constitutes its essence nor necessarily flows from its essence; as, a man is white or learned.
Physical or predicamental (q.v.) — opposed to substance (q.v.) — that whose nature it is to exist not in itself but in some subject; as figure, quantity, manner.- — H.G.