It is clear that this distinction turns only upon the knower’s awareness of the attributes in question—whether that awareness is manifest or obscure, whether it needs investigation and inference or does not. The difference does not stem from the attribute itself, nor from the entity described by it. Hence there is, in reality, no divide between what they deem an essential constituent contained within the quiddity and what they deem a necessary accident lying outside the quiddity. With respect to the very quiddity—that is, the concrete subject that exists outside the mind—and to all of its necessary attributes, the matter is the same: the quiddity is not composed of one set of properties to the exclusion of another, nor is anything within it prior to the quiddity in external existence, contrary to their claim that the essential precedes the quiddity in both existence and conception.
Nor are these attributes independent substances existing outside the mind, possessed of parts like the parts of a composite body. They are simply properties inhering in the subject, and none of them can precede that subject.
When one says of a human being, for instance, “He is a sentient body, complete, self-moving by volition, rational,” the mind can picture these notions and articulate them, and each of them becomes a component of the proposition formed in one’s mind and uttered by one’s tongue. That proposition is indeed a composite of such components, but the human being who exists in external reality is not composed of them, nor are they prior to him, nor are they separate substances. Sound reason recognizes all of this as patently false.
Yet the Greek philosophers—and many who have followed them—often confuse what is conceived in the mind with what is found in external reality, as some of their earliest figures maintained, such as