Accident (metaphysics)

“ The quantity, even of an absolute accident, can only be expressed by means of a mentally-conceived relation.
The whole condition or state of a substance, so far as it is variable, is a complex accident; the independent quantities which are at once necessary and sufficient to express completely this complex accident, are independent accidents. To express the same complex accident, different systems of independent accidents may be employed; but the number of independent accidents in each system will be the same. ”

“ How an accident may be understood to be in its subject. 3. When an accident is said to be in a body, it is not so to be understood, as if any thing were contained in that body; as if, for example, redness were in blood, in the same manner, as blood is in a bloody cloth, that is, as a part in the whole; for so, an accident would be a body also. But, as magnitude, or rest, or motion, is in that which is great, or which resteth, or which is moved, (which, how it is to be understood, every man understands) so also, it is to be understood, that every other accident is in its subject. ”

“ PROPOSITION VI. Accidents do not continue in existence during two time-atoms.
PROPOSITION VII. Both positive and negative properties have a real existence, and are accidents which owe their existence to some causa efficiens.
PROPOSITION VIII. All existing things, i.e., all creatures, consist of substance and of accidents, and the physical form of a thing is likewise an accident.
PROPOSITION IX. No accident can form the substratum for another accident. ”

“ Nay, on the contrary, why, because one particle of matter has a certain property, should all particles have the same? Why, because particles have instanced the property a thousand times, should the thousand and first instance it also? It is prima facie unaccountable that an accident should happen twice, not to speak of it happening always. If we expect a thing to happen twice, it is because we think it is not an accident, but has a cause. What has brought about a thing once, may bring it about twice. ”

“ Nor do they admit that any accidents determine the nature of a substance, or predispose it to receive certain other accidents: for, according to their opinion, an accident cannot be the substratum of another accident, as we have shown in explaining the ninth proposition ”

“ And not unfrequently do accidents befall such an one, and he hurts himself grievously; hence come those accidents which we may call indefinite, for of this kind of accident there is often no definite cause, for the cause of it is casual, and that is indefinite. ”

“ From these classifications of accidents it will be at once apparent that the general notion of accident, as a dependent mode of being, superadded to the essence of a substance and in some way determining the latter, is realized in widely different and merely analogical ways in the different ultimate classes of accidents. ”

“ Thus for example, the proper cause by itself of an house or a ship is the art of the mason, the carpenter, or the shipwright; but accidental causes are music, geometry, and whatever else may happen to be joined with the art of building houses or ships, in respect either of the body, the soul, or any exterior thing. Whence it appears, that the cause by itself must needs be determinate and one; but the causes by accident are never one and the same, but infinite and undetermined. For many—nay, infinite—accidents, wholly different one from the other, may be in one and the same subject. ”

“ Of accidents however which are not per se after the manner in which things per se have been defined, there is no demonstrative science, since it is not possible to demonstrate the conclusion of necessity, because accident may possibly not be present, for I speak of accident of this kind. ”

“ The accidents and events of life are, as is obvious, one special way in which the calls I speak of come to us; and they, as we all know, are in their very nature, and as the word accident implies, sudden and unexpected. ”

“ Accidents which are directly connected with material bodies, e.g., colour and taste, are easily understood, and correct notions are formed of them. There are, however, accidents which are connected with other accidents, e.g., the splendour of colour, or the inclination and the curvature of a line; of these it is very difficult to form a correct notion, especially when the accident which forms the substratum for the other accident is not constant but variable. Both difficulties are present in the notion of time: it is an accident of motion, which is itself an accident of a moving object ”

“ Secondly, because these accidents are not where the atmosphere is, nay more, the atmosphere is displaced by the motion of these species. Thirdly, because accidents do not pass from subject to subject, so that the same identical accident which was first in one subject be afterwards in another; because an accident is individuated by the subject; hence it cannot come to pass for an accident remaining identically the same to be at one time in one subject, and at another time in another. ”

“ What is life but one long chain of accidents, if by accident we understand all that falls out without our own intention or volition. We cannot control these accidents. There is a power above circumstance and accident that controls them, as gravitation controls the motions of material things. ”

“ There is no need to banish from reality this clear evidence that the accident has not the nature of that whole—by us called body—to which it belongs, nor of the permanent properties which accompany the whole. ”

“ Now the appearance or disappearance of such an accident in a substance undoubtedly involves a real change in the latter, and not merely in our thought; when a body moves, or comes to rest, or alters its form, there is a change in the reality as well as in our thought; and in this sense these accidents are real and intrinsic to their substances. ”

“ The concept of an accident really distinct from its substance involves no intrinsic repugnance. Yet an accident is a mode of being which is so weak and wanting in reality, if we may speak in such terms, that it cannot naturally exist except by inhering, mediately or immediately, in the stronger and more real mode of being which is substance. But an incomplete substance is a higher grade of reality than any accident. Therefore if accidents can be real, a fortiori incomplete substances can be real. ”

“ Is the Creator of all to be limited and only his creature unlimited? How often, in the midst of a great accident, has not some mind suggested a redress totally at variance with the rules by which the accident was produced, creating a surprise to usual circumstances, and checking the catastrophe before it could recover its equanimity and prearranged and understood mode of conduct! ”

“ Motion is not a substance; and if it is an accident it cannot migrate from subject to subject. The idea that corporeal efficient causality—even mechanical causality—can be explained by such a transference of actual accidental modes of being from agens to patiens is based on a very crude and erroneous conception of what an accidental mode of being really is (65) . ”

“ If a substance [250] has an accident, the latter is not attributed to the body as a whole, but is ascribed to every atom of which the body is composed. Thus in a white body every atom is white, in a moving body every atom is in motion, in a living body every atom is alive, and every atom is possessed of sense perception; for life and sense and reason and wisdom are accidents in their opinion like whiteness and blackness.
6. Accident does not last more than one moment of time. When God creates an atom he creates at the same time an accident with it. Atom without accident is impossible. ”

“ When a man has risen from a humble to a lofty position in life, carved his name deep into the core of the world, or fallen upon some sudden discovery with which his name is identified in all time coming, his rise, his work, his discovery is very often attributed to “accident.” The fall of the apple is often quoted as the accident by which Newton discovered the law of gravitation; and the convulsed frog’s legs, first observed by Galvani, are in like manner quoted as an instance of accidental discovery. ”

“ An absolute accident is one which not merely affects its substance intrinsically, giving the latter an actual determination or mode of being, of some sort or other, but which has moreover some entity or reality proper to itself whereby it thus affects the substance, an entity really distinct from the essence of the substance thus determined by it. ”

“ For example, if you fall over a cliff, you move under the influence of gravitation, and your centre of gravity describes just as correct a parabola as if you were already dead. Mechanical movements have not the characteristic of appropriateness, unless by accident, as when a drunken man falls into a waterbutt and is sobered. ”

“ Under these conditions it will often happen that some accidental circumstance, supervening at a particular movement upon our mental weariness, will upset the balance in the direction of one of the alternatives, to which then we feel ourselves committed, although an opposite accident at the same time might have produced the opposite result. ”

“ To satisfy these men, as well as may be, they answer best that define an accident to be the manner by which any body is conceived; which is all one as if they should say, an accident is that faculty of any body, by which it works in us a conception of itself. Which definition, though it be not an answer to the question propounded, yet it is an answer to that question which should have been propounded, namely, whence does it happen that one part of any body appears here, another there? ”

“ But, inasmuch as we are not wise enough to be able to unravel all these long and complicated series of causes and effects which lead to the falling of the branch upon the man, we call such an event an accident. ”

“ No real advance in metaphysics can take place, and natural science itself is in some danger, until the true history of the evidences of the laws of mechanical force is restored; and then it will soon appear that in the force of collision what we know is not material points determining one another’s opposite accelerations, but bodies by force of impenetrable pressure causing one another to keep apart. ”

“ Vitriol, which is intensely green, becomes white dust when pounded; this shows that that accident exists only in the aggregate, not in the atoms. This fact is more striking in the following instance: when parts of a living being are cut off they cease to live, a proof that the accident [of life] belongs to the aggregate of the living being, not to each atom. In order to meet this objection they say that the accident is of no duration, but is constantly renewed. ”

“ Accident is, in a wide sphere, such an every-day matter that we need not be surprised if it sometimes invades the territory where order is the rule. And one personification or another of the capricious power of chance easily helps us over the difficulties which further reflection might find in the exceptions. Yes, indeed, Exception has a peculiar fascination; it is a subject of astonishment, a θαῦμα, and the credulity with which in this first stage of pure association we adopt our supposed rules is matched by the equal credulity with which we adopt the miracles that interfere with them. ”

“ There is, in the third place, liability to error in our perception of common properties, and sequences in the accidents referrible to particular bodies—accidents, I mean, such as motion and magnitude, which are referrible to all bodies, and from which there is peculiar liability to error through the senses. But the motion produced by the act of sensation will differ from the sensation derived from these three modes of sensation—the first, while sensation is yet present, must be true ”

“ The great objection, of friction and resistance of an all-pervading medium, which will be urged against it, we regard as rather the offspring of a bewildered imagination, than of scientific induction. We can discover no such consequences as final ruin to our system through its agency; but even if such were discovered, we may answer, that nature nowhere tells us that her arrangements are eternal; but rather, that decay is stamped with the seal of the Almighty on every created thing. Change may be one of the great laws of matter and motion, and yet matter and motion be indestructible. ”

“ In a long series of events of the same kind, the mere chances of accident sometimes offer these curious veins of good or bad fortune, which many persons do not hesitate to attribute to a kind of fatality. ”

“ At that sight your man of science trembled! He knew that life is produced by the union of the thing and its principle, that death or inertia or gravity is produced by a rupture between a thing and the movement which appertains to it. ”

“ Again, the mechanical actions which produce heat—friction, and the collision of bodies—must from the nature of the case produce a shock, that is, an internal motion of particles, which indeed, we find, is often so violent as to break them permanently asunder. ”

“ But, to be plain, though also monotonous, the uncaused cause or the effect that is only a part of the whole, or the cause or the effect that refuses to share in the other's nature, or finally the causation that is now so individual and so manifold and so effective, and that was once so single and so complete, is something that must give any thinker pause. Can a moving body move an immobile body? Can some things in the universe be mobile; others not? Can the moving body and the moved body belong to different moments of time? Can motion lead to rest or rest to motion? ”

“ As if his little conceited consciousness could know what was happening as slowly as all that! It only means he's a physical failure on the earth, so he wants to make the whole universe a physical failure. ”