The following study is an exercise in traditional metaphysics. By ‘traditional’ I mean, somewhat tendentiously, to qualify that method of thinking and those doctrines which, despite occasional interludes and conflicting interpretations, embodied the prevalent school of philosophy for nearly two thousand years. That is the school of Aristotelianism and its followers, in particular St Thomas Aquinas and the Thomists, who dominated philosophy throughout the medieval period, and whose ideas continued to exercise influence despite the advent of Cartesianism, the Scientific Revolution of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and the ascendancy of empiricism in anglophone philosophy. Its influence even lingered on into the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, to be found.
