If Motion is the Act of Substance, and Being and the Primaries in general are its Act, then Motion is not an accidental attribute: as the Act of what is necessarily actual [what necessarily involves Act], it is no longer to be considered as the complement of Substance but as Substance itself.For this reason, then, it has not been assigned to a posterior class, or referred to Quality, but has been made contemporary with Being.
The truth is not that Being first is and then takes Motion, first is and then acquires Stability: neither Stability nor Motion is a mere modification of Being.Similarly, Identity and Difference are not later additions: Being did not grow into plurality; its very unity was a plurality; but plurality implies Difference, and unity-in-plurality involves Identity.
Substance [Real Being] requires no more than these five constituents; but when we have to turn to the lower sphere, we find other principles giving rise no longer to Substance (as such) but to quantitative Substance and qualitative: these other principles may be regarded as genera but not primary genera.
16.As for Relation, manifestly an offshoot, how can it be included among primaries? Relation is of thing ranged against thing;it is not self-pivoted, but looks outward.
Place and Date are still more remote from Being.Place denotes the presence of one entity within another, so that it involves a duality; but a genus must be a unity, not a composite.Besides, Place does not exist in the higher sphere, and the present discussion is concerned with the realm of True Being.
Whether time is There, remains to be considered.Apparently it has less claim than even Place.If it is a measurement, and that a measurement of Motion, we have two entities; the whole is a composite and posterior to Motion; therefore it is not on an equal footing with Motion in our classification.
Action and Passivity presuppose Motion; if, then, they exist in the higher sphere, they each involve a duality; neither is a simplex.
Possession is a duality, while Situation, as signifying one thing situated in another, is a threefold conception.
17.Why are not beauty, goodness and the virtues, together with knowledge and intelligence, included among the primary genera?
If by goodness we mean The First- what we call the Principle of Goodness, the Principle of which we can predicate nothing, giving it this name only because we have no other means of indicating it- then goodness, clearly, can be the genus of nothing: this principle is not affirmed of other things; if it were, each of these would be Goodness itself.The truth is that it is prior to Substance, not contained in it.If, on the contrary, we mean goodness as a quality, no quality can be ranked among the primaries.
Does this imply that the nature of Being is not good? Not good, to begin with, in the sense in which The First is good, but in another sense of the word: moreover, Being does not possess its goodness as a quality but as a constituent.
But the other genera too, we said, are constituents of Being, and are regarded as genera because each is a common property found in many things.If then goodness is similarly observed in every part of Substance or Being, or in most parts, why is goodness not a genus, and a primary genus? Because it is not found identical in all the parts of Being, but appears in degrees, first, second and subsequent, whether it be because one part is derived from another-posterior from prior- or because all are posterior to the transcendent Unity, different parts of Being participating in it in diverse degrees corresponding to their characteristic natures.
If however we must make goodness a genus as well [as a transcendent source], it will be a posterior genus, for goodness is posterior to Substance and posterior to what constitutes the generic notion of Being, however unfailingly it be found associated with Being; but the Primaries, we decided, belong to Being as such, and go to form Substance.
This indeed is why we posit that which transcends Being, since Being and Substance cannot but be a plurality, necessarily comprising the genera enumerated and therefore forming a one-and-many.
It is true that we do not hesitate to speak of the goodness inherent in Being" when we are thinking of that Act by which Being tends, of its nature, towards the One: thus, we affirm goodness of it in the sense that it is thereby moulded into the likeness of The Good.But if this "goodness inherent in Being" is an Act directed toward The Good, it is the life of Being: but this life is Motion, and Motion is already one of the genera.
18.To pass to the consideration of beauty:
If by beauty we mean the primary Beauty, the same or similar arguments will apply here as to goodness: and if the beauty in the Ideal-Form is, as it were, an effulgence [from that primary Beauty], we may observe that it is not identical in all participants and that an effulgence is necessarily a posterior.
If we mean the beauty which identifies itself with Substance, this has been covered in our treatment of Substance.
If, again, we mean beauty in relation to ourselves as spectators in whom it produces a certain experience, this Act [of production]
is Motion- and none the less Motion by being directed towards Absolute Beauty.
Knowledge again, is Motion originating in the self; it is the observation of Being- an Act, not a State: hence it too falls under Motion, or perhaps more suitably under Stability, or even under both; if under both, knowledge must be thought of as a complex, and if a complex, is posterior.
Intelligence, since it connotes intelligent Being and comprises the total of existence, cannot be one of the genera: the true Intelligence [or Intellect] is Being taken with all its concomitants [with the other four genera]; it is actually the sum of all the Existents: Being on the contrary, stripped of its concomitants, may be counted as a genus and held to an element in Intelligence.