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University; date: 17 April 2013

Metaphysical Themes 1274–1671Robert Pasnau

Print publication date: 2011

Print ISBN-13: 9780199567911Published to Oxford Scholarship Online: May-11DOI: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199567911.001.0001

Modes

Robert Pasnau (Contributor Webpage)

DOI: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199567911.003.0013

Abstract and Keywords

This chapter attempts to understand the status of a mode, as something realbut yet not a real accident. The pre‐history to Suárez's theory is traced, andthen Suárez's own view. The chapter argues that Descartes's conception ismuch like Suárez's, and that Descartes can be shown to be committed tomodes as real entities in his ontology over and above substances.

Keywords: modes, Olivi, Oresme, Suárez, Descartes

13.1. Overview

If we set to one side the many mind‐numbing intricacies of the metaphysicaldebates that run through our four centuries, and ask ourselves wherethe Aristotelians and their critics most crucially agree and disagree, theanswer is plain. By far the most significant point of agreement is that whatprimarily exist are substances, enduring through time as the subjects of the changeable properties we perceive through the senses. By far the mostsignificant point of disagreement concerns the status of these changeableproperties: are they real accidents, or are they mere modes of substance?

Although there were of course many other quite fundamental metaphysicaldisagreements during the period, this and the next ten chapters will makeclear just how much depends on the status of accidents.

It would be convenient if all the scholastics believed that all accidents arereal, and if their opponents all believed instead that all accidents are mere

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modes. Alas, the situation is far more complex. On one side, it is easy to findscholastic authors from the very start of our period treating at least someaccidents, if not all, as modes. On the other side, although post‐scholasticauthors quite uniformly describe accidents as modes, it is far from clear

what exactly they mean. For some, such talk seems to be wholly reductive: just a way of signaling that all there really are in the world are substances,variously modified. For others, modes seem to be a distinct category in theirontology. The focus of this chapter will be on the modal realists, setting asidethose authors who speak of modes reductively. To use again the terminologyof the previous chapter, I am distinguishing between modes, understood asthings in some sense, and structures, understood as ontologically innocentways in which things are.

There are so many different and overlapping sources for the doctrine of

modes that it seems hopeless to give a precise account of its origins, andprobably would have seemed hopeless to anyone at the time. Talk of modesplays a role in speculative grammar, for instance, and in the analysis of syncategorematic terms, as well as in discussions from natural philosophyof how qualitative forms can be more or less intense.1 Probably the centralstrand of development, however, is that described over (p. 245 ) the lastthree chapters. As we have seen, Albert the Great describes accidents asmodes in the 1260s, and Aquinas, soon after, proposes distinguishing theten categories in terms of ten distinct modes of being (modi essendi). AfterHenry of Ghent, the phrase modi essendi becomes associated especially withthe seven lesser categories, leaving items in the categories of Substance,Quality, and Quantity to be identified as res. Once Scotus's theory of realaccidents becomes ascendant, the debate over the status of the categoriescan be understood as a debate over whether all nine accidental categoriesdescribe res—fully real and distinct things—or whether some of themdescribe mere modes of res.2

Generalizing, we might say that from the earliest Latin attempts tounderstand Aristotelian hylomorphism there was a concern with describing ahalfway sort of existence associated with certain accidents. On the earliest,deflationary accounts, such halfway existence was associated with all the

accidents, whereas after 1274 only items in the lesser, “relative” categorieswere characterized in this way. When accidents are so understood, thequestion inevitably arises of what it could possibly mean to speak of a thingas having diminished existence. Insofar as we understand existence at (p.

246 ) all, it hardly seems to be the sort of thing that admits of degrees. Whatexists, wholly exists, and what does not exist, does not exist at all. So one




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might suppose, at any rate, if not for this pervasive tradition of locatingcertain accidents in this dubious region of gray.

There seem to be two basic scholastic strategies for explaining the

diminished existence of certain accidents. One strategy, formulated quiteexplicitly by Aquinas (§10.2), treats accidents as entities of a lesser sortinasmuch as they lack any existence of their own. This strategy of treatinga thing as distinct from its existence, which Aquinas similarly applies toprime matter (§3.1), has interesting implications for substantial unity andthe relationship of a whole to its parts, as we will see in §26.5. On its face,however, the doctrine looks quite obscure, inasmuch as it seems to separatethe question of what things there are (substances, forms, prime matter,etc.) from the question of what things exist (substances). The second basicstrategy understands accidents to exist in a lesser way inasmuch as their

existence depends on something else. That is, such lesser accidents existin their own right, but cannot exist apart from their subject. One greatadvantage of this way of proceeding is that it is less obscure, inasmuch aswe have some sense of what it means for one thing to be separable fromanother. A disadvantage, however, is that it is unclear what this sort of dependence has to do with having a diminished ontological status.

Although there are no easy generalizations that can be drawn here, theoverall trajectory of the debate runs from a long unsettled period duringwhich there was no fixed technical sense of mode, toward an increasingconsensus that modes are to be understood as real and distinct entities

in the second of the above ways: as depending on their subjects in a waythat makes them somehow less real and less distinct. This is how the notionof mode tends in general to develop, but unfortunately there is no pointduring our four centuries where a given usage becomes canonical. Since‘modus’ is simple the ordinary Latin word for way , it is often difficult to tellwhether an author is simply speaking casually about the way something is,or whether “the way” is to be taken with full metaphysical rigor, as a thingin its own right. As our period develops, ‘modus’ becomes more entrenchedas a technical term, but even then talk of modes remains equivocal betweenvarious more or less realistic senses. In contrast to a term like ‘substance,’

whose meaning remains roughly constant throughout our period (see PartII of this study), one cannot take for granted, at any point, that ‘mode’ isbeing used in any particular way. All one can do is go case by case, lookingcarefully at how individual authors employ the concept.

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Here, then, I will begin by looking at several isolated cases where modesare being treated with ontological seriousness. These treatments, as wewill see, anticipate the decisive contribution of Suárez, who explicitlyformulates a realistic conception of modes and gives them a central role in

his metaphysics. Suárez's treatment in turn shapes the main seventeenth‐century line of thought regarding modes, most prominently Descartes's.After working through all this material, I will attempt to address the mostdifficult questions of all: what is a mode, and what does it mean for a modeto exist but in a lesser way than substances or real accidents exist?

(p. 247 ) 13.2. Modal Realism: Olivi and Oresme

Talk of modes does not take on the technical precision of a theory untilthe late sixteenth century. Throughout the first of our four centuries,

however, one can find authors here and there who use ‘mode’ in the sort of ontologically committing way that would eventually become so important. Ihave already discussed the case of Peter Auriol (§11.4), who without usingthe term ‘mode’ offers what is nevertheless a theory of this sort, in order toaccount for how accidents inhere in their subject. Another case consideredbriefly above is John Wyclif (§11.1), whose opposition to real accidentsmanifests itself as a theory of modes—a term he uses repeatedly to capturethe sort of deflationary account he seeks to revive.3 Here, I will focus on twoother figures, Peter John Olivi and Nicole Oresme.

Olivi is the first scholastic author I have found to set out a theory of modes

as an ontological category distinct from both substances and accidents. That this is his view is not at all clear from most of his discussions of thecategories, where—as we saw in the previous chapter—he tends not to usethe term ‘mode,’ preferring instead to distinguish between the view thatthe categories distinguish between things that are essentially distinct, andthe weaker view that he himself defends, that they mark merely distinctreal aspects of things (rationes reales). Taken on its own, it is not clearwhether such aspects are ontologically innocent structures, or whether theyare modes in an ontologically committing sense. In other places, however,Olivi makes clear his commitment to an ontology of modes. In his Tractatus

de quantitate (1282), for instance, he writes that “quantity is not a kind of absolute form or essence, but only a kind of actual mode of being, sinceit cannot in any way without contradiction be or be brought about withoutsome absolute essence to which it belongs and in which it is grounded” (f.52vb). Expanding on that passage in an analytical table of contents thataccompanies this treatise, he considers whether this conception of mode






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violates a dictum that Olivi himself elsewhere accepts, that every accidentcan exist apart from its subject, at least by the power of God. He respondsthat “I would want to be understood to have made use of such claims onlyagainst those who do not distinguish between accidents that are absolute

forms and essences, and accidents that are only actual modes of being” (f.63vc). These passages are remarkable because they clearly distinguishbetween accidents, which are separable from their subjects, and modes,which are a kind of accident but yet, in virtue of their inseparability, arenot real accidents. Olivi goes on in this same passage to give two otherexamples of modes: spatial location and the arrangement of a thing'sintegral parts.4 Elsewhere, as we will see in §17.5, he also treats temporallocation as a mode.

(p. 248 ) There can be no doubt that for Olivi these modes are something

beyond the substance itself, because he argues that they are “somethingadded” to the substance. Consider this passage, which takes up twoobjections to his account of angels as having spatial location in virtue of having a certain modus essendi:

You might object to this argument by saying that being in acorporeal location (loco) does not add anything to the res thatis located, or to its being in itself, because if it were added,then [1] it seems [a] that what is added could miraculously bemade by God without that res, and also [b] that the res couldbe made by God without any such accident and so without anysuch location; and [2] it seems that what is added would be aquality, from which it would follow that local motion (motionto somewhere) would be the motion of alteration. To this itshould be said that where (or being here or there) does addsomething to the res that is here or there, but not somethingthat should be called a quality or a form that is absolute (orabsolutely applying to its subject). Instead, it is a thoroughlyrelational mode of being, which is called location or situation.(Summa II.32, I:586)

Olivi is imagining an objector (such as Ghent or, later, Ockham) who would

favor a reductive account of the category of Where. Both of the objectionstake for granted that what is added will be a real accident, separable fromits subject. Objection 1, at lines 2–4, points to the absurdity of (a) a wherewithout a subject, and (b) a subject without a where. (On the absurdity of the latter, see §16.3.) Objection 2, at lines 5–6, further takes for grantedsomething that Olivi himself believes, that the only real accidents are








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qualities (§12.4). But if locomotion involves the gain and loss of a quality,then we lose the standard Aristotelian distinction between locomotion andalteration. Olivi's reply is to deny that what is added, when a thing acquiresa new spatial location, is a real accident. Instead, it is a mode. (It is less

clear whether Olivi's real accidents, in the category of Quality, are real inthe precise sense described in §10.4. Plainly, though, his distinction betweenmodes and accidents requires treating accidents far more realistically thanis standard in the thirteenth century. We will encounter evidence of Olivi'srealism regarding accidents again in §14.1.)

Olivi goes on, following the passage just quoted, to offer his most detailedextant account of modes, by way of explaining exactly why a mode does notface the absurdities described above in objection 1:

As for what is said against this—that God could miraculously

[a] make a where without a res that is located, and [b] makethat res without any where—it should be said (as has beenshown elsewhere more fully [loc. unknown]) that [ad a] theseaccidents are actual and correlative modes of being in such away that they necessarily include in their meaning or characterthe actual existence of their subject. Such accidents cannot,without contradiction, be made without a subject. And [ad b]although the subject does not depend on its accident, as if it were conserved (p. 249 ) by it, still a subject is limited byits species to certain modes of being and standing disposed(se habendi). This is so inasmuch as such subjects cannot,without contradiction, be put into existence without some suchaccident, although they could without this or that one. (Ibid.,I:586–7)

Predictably, in response to (a), he insists on the feature of modes we sawhim stress earlier, that they are dependent on their subjects. Here, however,in response to objection (b), Olivi adds a further feature of modes, thatthey are properties of a subject such that the subject must have some oneinstance of their kind, although not any determinate one. In this case, a resmust be somewhere, although not anywhere in particular. For short, I will

say that modes depend on their subjects, inasmuch as they cannot existwithout their subject, and also that they determine their subjects, inasmuchas the subject of a mode must possess one or another mode from certaindeterminable classes. Among later authors, as we will see, both determinacyand dependency are defining characteristics of modes.5








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Another interesting example of modal realism can be found in the earlywork of Nicole Oresme. His Physics commentary (circa 1346) makesthe remarkable proposal that accidents in all nine categories should beunderstood as modes rather than “true forms.”6 In one respect, this is a

more radical proposal than Olivi's, because it denies to quality the statusof a real accident (§19.3). In another respect, however, the proposal is lessradical, or at any rate less austere, because it leads Oresme to countenancea much wider ontology than Olivi would tolerate, including not just items inall ten categories, but also res successiva, entities that wholly exist only overtime, rather than wholly at any one time (Ch. 18). For now, however, let usfocus simply on Oresme's account of what a mode is.

Oresme prefaces his discussion by stressing how useful it is to consideropposing viewpoints. In that spirit—“not asserting that the following opinion

is true, but open to the correction of others”—he offers his unorthodox view.First, he offers the standard account of what a substance is, and then thisstriking account of three ways of understanding accidents:

It should secondly be noted that an accident can be conceivedof in three ways:

In one way, an accident can be conceived of as a true forminhering in a substance, like a substantial form (althoughnot intrinsically in such a way that it is a demonstrated trueessence), divisible and extended with the extension of itssubject and properly signifiable by a substantial term, as is

conceived to be so in the case of whiteness.

(p. 250 ) In a second way, it can be conceived that in no way isan accident outside the soul any res other than the substancethat is the subject. All there is is that substance, standing insuch a way as various predicates are said of it. In this way, theaccident would be nothing other than the substance (nothingexcept a predicate), and this is how some speak of everyaccident except quality.

In a third, distinct way, one can conceive of an accident notas a proper extended or inherent form as in the first way, normerely as the substance (or the predicate or linguistic item),as in the second way, but as something's being such or somuch. For example, whiteness would be nothing other thanbeing white, which would be properly signified by the concrete







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term [‘white’] together with the infinitive ‘being,’ and by theadjectival term. (In Phys. I.5)

The standard later scholastic view treats at least whiteness and other such

qualities as accidents in the first way—as real accidents (Ch. 10). Ockhamand his followers (the “some” referred to at line 9) think that qualities arethe only real accidents, and that all other so‐called accidents can eitherbe reduced to substance and quality, or can be treated as mere linguisticentities. But after setting out this familiar contrast between realists andnominalists, Oresme introduces a third kind of view (lines 11–18), on whichaccidents have some sort of positive ontological status, but not as true formsinhering in a subject. Rather, an accident would be understood as a subject'sbeing a certain way—for instance, being white or being round.

Very cautiously, Oresme proceeds to argue for this third view, across all nineof the accidental categories. His first conclusion is that ‘being’ is equivocalbetween substance and accident. Second, he concludes—again only asa position that is “plausible and open to correction”—that no accident isa form in the first of the above senses. (The principal argument for thisconclusion is that, if there were real accidents, then—contrary to his firstconclusion—‘being’ would be univocal between substance and accident. Suchunivocity, recall, is precisely the result that proponents of real accidentsafter Scotus are seeking [§10.5].) Third, Oresme argues against the secondaccount of ‘accident,’ arguing that no accident, in any of the categories,is simply a substance. (The argument here is simply that, with respect to

many authoritative passages, this reductive approach “destroys the text.”)Finally, Oresme concludes that every accident should be understood in thethird of the above senses, on the grounds that the other options have beeneliminated.7

To be sure, there is no argument here that would cause concern to Oresme'sopponents on either side. The passage is significant simply because it clearlysets out a third way, that of modes. Although Oresme does not use the term‘mode’ here, he uses it in many other places in connection with this theory. The following passage is particularly striking:

(p. 251 ) We should also take note of what the best division of being is. ‘Being,’ ‘res,’ and ‘something’ can be taken in oneway for that which truly is, and in this way it is sometimes thecase that to be something is [rightly] said to be nothing. Thuswe say that he who heats a thing does nothing, but insteadhe makes that which was earlier cold to be hot. In this way,







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unless a body or a substance is produced, it is not said thatsomething is made. In another way, broadly, those terms aretaken for an accident, condition, disposition, or mode of athing, or for that which is a thing's being situated thus. (In

Phys. II.6)

Oresme distinguishes two senses of ‘being.’ In a strict sense, all that countsis “a body or a substance” (lines 5), and when we casually speak of a bodyas being hot , we should say strictly speaking that there is no further beingthere—no heat—but just the body that becomes hot. If we want to countsuch accidents as beings, then we need to speak “broadly” and include the“condition, disposition, or mode of a thing” (lines 5–6). This way of dividingthe territory reflects Oresme's commitment to the equivocity of ‘being,’ andto the idea that accidents—even qualities like heat—are beings only in some

weaker sense. Here, and throughout Oresme's Physics commentary, ‘mode’is simply one among various terms that might equally well be used to talkabout accidents. But whatever the terminology, his discussion is significantbecause it attempts to make space for a kind of ontological item falling inbetween a genuine entity and nothing at all. It is hard to tell exactly whatOresme thinks a mode is, but the general tenor of his remarks points backtoward thirteenth‐century deflationary views, and the idea that for a mode toexist just is for its subject to exist in a certain way.

Modal realism remained an isolated phenomenon in the fourteenth century.Considered as a challenge to the orthodox doctrine of real accidents, the

theory of modes looked suspicious and perhaps even heretical. Indeed,Olivi and Wyclif were both censured for their theories of accidents, amongother things, and Auriol's views were perennially under a cloud of suspicion.Oresme was not so disreputable a figure, but only because he was morecautious. When it became clear after the condemnation of 1347 that histheory of accidents as modes was untenable (§19.5), Oresme backed off,and his later work abandons his early modal realism.8 It is, indeed, only veryrecently that scholars discovered the existence of a manuscript containingOresme's Physics commentary; perhaps the work was too controversial tohave widely circulated. Inasmuch, then, as none of the writings considered

in this section were widely known, the theory of modes lacked a visiblechampion until Suárez, in the late sixteenth century. Suárez, as we willsee, found a way to introduce modes without controversy, by postulatingthem not in place of but over and above real accidents. This is an (p. 252 )

instance of a phenomenon we will become increasingly familiar with as thisstudy unfolds (esp. Chs. 19–20): the way in which ecclesiastical authority







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suppressed philosophical innovation throughout the scholastic era, closingoff fertile avenues of inquiry that would come open only in the seventeenthcentury. The most significant consequence of censorship in the presentcontext was to preclude a debate over the different ways in which a theory

of accidents might be formulated. The doctrine of real accidents becamescholastic dogma, and to the extent that it was no more than dogma itbecame that much more difficult to defend in the seventeenth century. Afurther, more subtle consequence is that it remained unclear throughout thescholastic era exactly what modes are. Because these early champions of modal realism had so little influence, the terminology never became firmlyentrenched, and it is at least as common, in the fourteenth century, to find‘mode’ being used reductively. Thus, as we will see in §19.3, when Johnof Mirecourt suggests that only substances exist, and that accidents arenothing at all, he uses the term ‘mode’ to make this point (§19.3). And when

John Buridan and others attack this sort of reductive view, they attack itas a theory of modes (§19.5). Buridan is aware of views that lie in betweenreal accidents and full‐blown reductivism (indeed, as we saw in §11.1, heascribes such a view to Aristotle), but he does not describe these as theoriesof modes. Not long after Buridan, Albert of Saxony shows himself aware of the ambiguities here. Noting that an accidental form can be either “a resinhering in a subject” or else a mode, he asks: “Is this mode of standing(modus se habendi) the thing that so stands, or is it not that thing?” andresponds that either answer is possible: “it can be said that it is, and itcan be said that it is not” (In Phys. I.19, p. 251). With respect to his own

ontology, however, Albert leaves no room for anything but substances andreal accidents: “I hold that everything that exists is either a substance or anaccident, and that nothing—whether it is called a modus rei or a complexesignificabile—exists in reality unless it is a substance or an accident” (ibid.,I.18, p. 239).9

In general, throughout the fourteenth century, realistic and reductive usesof ‘mode’ exist side by side. And although future research will doubtlessuncover much more information about how ‘mode’ was used in the fifteenthand sixteenth centuries, I can see no sign of its playing a central role inscholastic metaphysics until the end of the sixteenth century, when Suárez

gives modes a crucial place in his metaphysics.

(p. 253 ) 13.3. The Suarezian Model

Suárez's importance for late scholastic thought tends to be absurdlyexaggerated by students of the period, with one going so far as to remark,









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in a prominent reference work, that: “Francisco Suárez was the mainchannel through which medieval philosophy flowed into the modern world.” This makes as little sense as describing David Lewis as the main channelthrough which analytic philosophy flowed into the twenty‐first century.

Arguably, Suárez was the best metaphysician of the sixteenth century, buthis philosophical influence was felt mainly in that area, and even there hewas just one voice among many. In view of the vast number of scholastictexts available in the seventeenth century, and the vast number of importantauthors holding widely divergent views, it is absurd, even if convenient,to single out any one figure as the dominant influence. Seventeenth‐century authors often do cite Suárez, and rely on his views implicitly, but notmarkedly more than they rely on Fonseca, Toletus, Zabarella, the Coimbrans,Pererius, and Scaliger—to say nothing of towering classical figures likeAquinas and Scotus. Moreover, focusing on the big names of the era does not

even capture the principal avenues through which scholastic ideas passed,which were textbooks and the tradition of studying and commenting directlyon Aristotle, which for many students remained their principal point of accessto scholastic thought.10

Even so, Suárez does seem to have been extremely important on the subjectof modes, given his very clear and careful account of what they are, and theextraordinary importance they have in his metaphysics. He introduces theterminology of ‘mode’ and ‘modal distinction’ in such a way as to make clearthat he takes himself to be doing something new:

We ought to posit among created things an actual distinctionin the nature of things (ex natura rei), prior to the operationof intellect, which is not such as there is between two res orentities that are entirely distinct. This distinction could becalled real in the general sense of the term, because it doestruly occur on the side of reality, and not through an extrinsicdenomination made by intellect. Still, to distinguish this fromthe other, greater real distinction, we can call it either adistinction in the nature of things,…or it can more properly becalled a modal distinction because, as I will explain, it alwaysoccurs between some res and its mode. (Disp. meta. 7.1.16)

The whole course of Disputation Seven—Suárez's well‐known discussionof distinctions—leads up to this point. Suárez has already explained howhe understands a real distinction, and a distinction of reason—topics thathe regards as relatively straightforward. The hard question, he thinks, iswhether any distinction falls between the two. In (p. 254 ) one sense he




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thinks there clearly is not, since there can be no middle ground betweenbeing dependent on mind and independent of mind, and no middle groundbetween being the same and being different (ibid., par. 10). Even so, amongthings that are different independently of mind, and so really distinct “in

the general sense of the term” (line 3), Suárez here announces that thereis a distinction to be drawn between two kinds of distinctions, real andmodal, where the first distinguishes between res and res, and the seconddistinguishes between res and mode (lines 2, 7). (Later [ibid., par. 26],he allows that two modes within the same subject can also be counted asmodally distinct from one another.)

The sense that Suárez is breaking new ground is borne out by a comparisonwith previous discussions. Although we have seen many precedents in earlierscholastic thought for the term ‘mode,’ the notion of a modal distinction

is uncommon before Suárez. De Soto, for instance, remarks in 1543 that“among all the philosophers before Scotus, there were only two distinctions:a distinction of reason, and a real distinction” (In Isag. “De universalibus,”q. 3, p. 41ab). Moreover, the only further sort of distinction that De Sotorecognizes (only to reject it) is Scotus's formal distinction, which is generallyunderstood as a distinction within a thing that is numerically one, and sowould seem to be quite different from the modal distinction. Now to be sureit would be possible to interpret the formal distinction in a way that brings itclose to the idea of a modal distinction. But this is not Suárez's path, nor isit a path that Scotus encourages. Scotus himself does, occasionally, speakof distinguishing between realitas and modus, but the contexts in whichhe does so are not closely related to the modal distinction as we know it.11

A more important precedent is Pedro Fonseca's discussion of the modaldistinction in his Metaphysics commentary (1577), which Suárez explicitlydraws on. Fonseca treats the notion of a modal distinction as if it werecommonplace, which suggests there are earlier precedents I am unawareof. But Fonseca too has an entirely different understanding of what a modaldistinction is, and he does not uses ‘mode’ to talk about a kind of lesseraccident.12

(p. 255 ) Suárez, then, seems to be doing something new, and the tone of

the discussion suggests he is well aware of this. He begins his case for theexistence of a modal distinction by describing what a mode is:

So as to prove and clarify the assertion [of the previouspassage], I claim that among created things, beyond theentities that are there—the substance and root of things, soto speak—there are found certain real modes, which are both




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something positive, and which in their own right ( per seipsos)act on those entities, giving them something that is outsidetheir whole essence as individuals existing in reality. (Disp.meta. 7.1.17)

Modes are here contrasted with entities (entitates), a term that for Suárez isat least roughly synonymous with ‘res.’ Suárez does not initially mention thetwo distinguishing features of modes described in §13.2: their dependenceon a subject, and their determination of a subject. For now, Suárez's concernis only to establish the credentials of modes as a mind‐independent featureof reality: thus they are “real,” “positive,” and causal agents “in their ownright.” Elsewhere he further makes it clear that modes “have some properexistence” and are “something existing in rebus” (Disp. meta. 47.2.8).(This is said explicitly in contrast to Fonseca, whose modes lack existence

entirely, and so cannot be categorial items at all. Also, unlike Oresme andWyclif, Suárez makes no appeal to the equivocity of ‘being’ to explain thediminished status of modes.) The attraction of this way of proceeding shouldbe immediately clear. If Suárez can show that modes are genuine featuresof the world, and then go on to show that they are in a certain way lesserentities than res, we would then have very strong reason for recognizing twosorts of mind‐independent distinctions, a greater one and a lesser one.13

Of course, simply describing what a mode is leaves open the question of whether any such things exist. This is the task Suárez immediately takesup, remarking that he will establish “by induction” that modes exist, which

is to say that he will establish it by listing various examples of modes. Atthis point, especially to a reader working backwards to Suárez from theseventeenth century, the discussion may seem to take a strange turn. Forrather than appeal to what might seem to be paradigmatic modes like shapeor motion, Suárez appeals instead to the inherence of quantity in a subject ashis leading example of what a mode is:

This [the claim of the previous passage] is clear by induction:for in the case of a quantity that is in a substance, for example,two things can be considered: first, the entity of the quantityitself; (p. 256 ) second, the union or actual inherence of that

quantity with its substance. The first we call simply the res of the quantity, including whatever belongs to the essence of thatindividual quantity occurring in reality, which remains and isconserved even if the quantity is separated from its subject.…The second (that is, the inherence) we call the mode of thequantity.…(Disp. meta. 7.1.17)





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After running through a list of things he does not mean by ‘mode’ in thiscontext, he concludes:

The inherence of quantity is called its mode because it issomething affecting that quantity, which serves to ultimately

determine the state and character of its existence, but doesnot add to it any new proper entity, but only modifies thepreexisting entity. (Ibid.)

The discussion, which had been proceeding in a clear enough fashion, mayat this point seem to have run off the rails. (My earliest notes on DisputationSeven make just one remark at this point: “This is really obscure!”) Viewedin the proper perspective, however—the perspective of the last threechapters—it is easy to see what Suárez is up to. Although both shape andmotion are modes, for Suárez, he takes these to be hard and controversial

cases, wrapped up in disputes over the categories of Quantity, Quality, andWhere. He picks inherence as his leading example because he takes it tobe a clearer case. Indeed, as we have seen (Ch. 11), there was close to aconsensus among scholastic authors that something is needed to explainthe unity of accidents with their subjects. When quantity, for instance, isunderstood as a real accident (Ch. 14), it becomes the sort of absolute entity,or res, that may or may not be joined to a subject. But if an accident is notby its nature the sort of thing that necessarily inheres in a subject, thensome further explanation—beyond simply appealing to the thing's nature—is required for why it ordinarily does inhere. Moreover, and crucially, sincethat something will itself need to be joined to its subject, it cannot be a res,as Suárez goes on to argue in the following paragraph, because in that casewe would be embarked on the sort of vicious regress we encountered earlier(§11.3). Hence we need modes—things that are immediately united withtheir subject—to account for inherence. As obscure as the example looksthrough modern eyes, to a scholastic it would have looked like the paradigmcase of the usefulness of modes: here, and in other domains, they are theideal regress‐blockers, explaining inherence without requiring any furtherexplanation.14

Suárez goes on to fill out the induction by appealing to various other

contexts in which modes are required:• a quality's inhering in a subject (quality being the only other kindof real accident, beyond quantity, that Suárez recognizes);• the union of substantial form with matter;

(p. 257 )










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• the divine persons with respect to the divine nature;• presence and local motion (§17.5);• an action or a dependence on something else.

Suárez goes into detail regarding only the last of these, taking as hisexample light's dependence on the sun, but he issues a promissory notethat announces one of the main themes of the many disputations that lieahead: “this is not the place to talk about all of these cases, although asthis work progresses the occasion will arise” (ibid.). Indeed it does. If weconfine our attention only to the implications of Suárez's theory of modesfor his categorial theory—setting aside its place in causation, motion, andsubstantial unity, to say nothing of its various theological applications—then we find the distinction applied to the accidental categories in generalat Disputation 39.2, and then in detail over the subsequent fourteen

disputations, covering nearly 500 pages of dense Latin text. To foreshortenthe discussion radically, he distinguishes between(1) real accidents;(2) modes; and(3) improper and extrinsic accidents (Disp. meta. 16.1),

and classifies items in the nine accidental categories as follows:(1) quantity, some qualities;(2) action, where, some relations;(3) passion, when, having, position.

Subsequent chapters will consider some of the details of this framework, aswe turn to accidents in the individual categories.

Returning to the main line of argument in Disputation Seven, Suárez goes onto supplement his “inductive” argument—that is, enumerating cases—withwhat he calls an a priori argument for modes:

Creatures are imperfect, and so either dependent, composite,limited, or changeable with respect to various states of presence, union, or determination. As a result, they need suchmodes, by which they are made complete with respect to all

these [states]. This is so because, necessarily, this makingcomplete does not always occur through entirely distinctentities—indeed this cannot even be reasonably conceived asbeing the case—and so as a result real modes are required.(Disp. meta. 7.1.19)





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This does not seem particularly effective as an argument against a moreparsimonious ontology. A strict corpuscularian, for instance, will simply denythat things are intrinsically incomplete. A material substance, as such, hasa certain shape, size, and spatial location, and this in turn determines its

interactions with other things. Of course, whether such an austere picturecan be made to work has to be assessed on a case by case basis, but fornow the point is just that Suárez has hardly presented us with a compellinga priori argument for modes in general. Still, although not effective as anargument, this passage seems quite effective as a statement of the deepermetaphysical picture that lies behind Suárez's account. Substances onthis view are not simply free agents to which accidents may or may not beadded, but are radically incomplete entities that cannot exist at all untildetermined in various ways by things of another kind, modes. I will return tothis in §13.7.

(p. 258 ) Suárez's picture of substances as indeterminate suits perfectly theconception of modes we have seen others developing, because it accountsfor determinacy as a feature of the res–mode relationship: res do not dependon any particular mode, but must be determined by some one mode withina determinable class. This is one half of the mutual dependence identifiedearlier between res and mode. The second half—the dependency of modeon res—is implicit above, inasmuch as modes are regarded not as completethings in their own right, but as completers for their subjects, suggesting thatthey are united in a particularly intimate way. Suárez goes on to make thisexplicit at the end of this same paragraph:

[A] mode is not properly a res or an entity, unless one is usingthe term ‘being’ (ens) broadly and in the most general sense,for whatever is is not nothing. In contrast, if we take ‘entity’ forthat res that of itself and in itself is something, in such a wayas not at all to require its being intrinsically and essentiallyaffixed to another, but instead either is not capable of unionwith another, or else can be united only by means of a modethat is distinct in the nature of things from itself, then a modeis not properly a res or an entity. Here is where its imperfectionshows best: it must always be affixed to another, to which it is

immediately united per se, not by means of another mode.…(Ibid.)

Modes are beings, inasmuch as they are “not nothing” (line 2), but they arebeings of a lesser sort, inasmuch as they are dependent on their subjects ina special way (lines 6–8). Substances, in contrast, even if they need modes,






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do not need to be “affixed” to any particular mode. From here it is a simplematter, to which he immediately turns (Disp. meta. 7.1.20), to establish hisintended conclusion: that there is a lesser distinction on the side of things,a modal distinction. Suárez reaches this result, it should be noted, without

resting anything on the familiar idea that really distinct things are separablein two directions, whereas modally distinct things are separable in only onedirection. In the following section of Disputation Seven, Suárez introducesthese as the principal marks (signa) of the two kinds of distinctions, and Iwill return to this issue in §13.6. For now the important point is just that suchfacts are a consequence of there being distinct kinds of things in the world,existing in different ways. Hence the true basis for the modal distinction isthe existence of an intermediary kind of thing in the world, a thing that isneither fully distinct nor fully identical with its subject.15

13.4. The Seventeenth CenturyAfter Suárez, modes become an established part of the metaphysician'stoolkit. But this is not to say that there was, at least at first, any clearconsensus on what modes are. Among scholastics, one finds some, such asFranco Burgersdijk, who closely follow (p. 259 ) Suárez's usage. AlthoughBurgersdijk acknowledges that the nature of modes is “so abstruse as tomake it difficult to define them justly or appropriately,” he goes on to stressthat a mode is “something positive” that has an effect on its subject bylimiting or circumscribing it in a certain way (Inst. meta. I.7.1)—very muchthe terms that Suárez had used.16 Christoph Scheibler's Metaphysica (1617)is also deeply influenced by Suárez's theory of modes, embracing the ideathat they complete substances that are otherwise imperfect (I.8.5.2 n. 68).But Scheibler resists the Suarezian view that modes are beings in their ownright: “They do not add to the preexisting entity a new entity—as does heat,for instance, when it comes to be in water—but only modify the pre-existingentity” (n. 69). Moreover, although Scheibler accepts that the distinctionbetween mode and substance is more than merely conceptual, he rejectsSuárez's modal distinction, insisting that all distinctions are either real orconceptual, with nothing in between.

Various critics of scholasticism found it useful to appeal to modes in theirattacks on real accidents. David Gorlaeus, for instance, retains a short list of real qualities, including most importantly heat (§21.4), but dismisses otheraccidental forms—including shape and size, as well as the substantial unionof soul and body—as mere modes. The great question, in cases such asthis, is whether these modes are to be understood realistically, as in Suárez,








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or in the wholly reductive way that Buridan and others had supposed. InGorlaeus's case, the answer lies somewhere in between, since like Scheiblerhe wants to say that modes are not real entities, but yet that they are notmere beings of reason:

A mode in itself, as it is distinguished from a real being, doesnot have any real being. Rather, all this comes to it throughthat being of which it is a mode. For to be a real mode is tohave real existence—not, to be sure, its own proper existence,but another's, and not through itself, but through another,through whose existence it too exists. It is in this way thatthe shape and the size of the wax are modes of it. They aredistinct from it, since they can be separated, as when the waxis made round, but yet as distinct they do not have any properexistence of their own. (Exercitationes 2.1, pp. 27–8)

(p. 260 ) In effect Gorlaeus returns to the deflationary conception of accidentsstandard in the thirteenth century, retaining a robustly realistic account onlyin the case of a few central qualities.17

Other texts from the early seventeenth century, although they appeal tomodes, do not explain what they mean. Nathanael Carpenter might seemto be a modal realist in his Philosophia libera (1621), when he remarksthat “every mode of a being adds something to that being” (I.1, p. 11), buthis remarks are too compressed to engender any confidence. The case of Joachim Jungius is even less clear. Sounding like so many earlier figures

throughout our period, he remarks that “there are not as many entities in thenatural world as there are attributes; an attribute does not always add to itssubject some res distinct from that subject, but often only a mode as it wereof being (modum quasi entis)” (Praelectiones physicae I.4). So far as I havefound, Jungius offers no theory of modes.

As always when discussing modes, one can only go case by case. Thetendency, however, as the seventeenth century progresses, is toward anincreasingly realistic conception of modes. Pierre Gassendi, for instance,takes it to be just obvious in his polemics with Descartes that “modes are

not nothing but something more than mere nothing; they are therefore resof some kind, not substantial of course, but at least modal” (Disquisitio II.3.4,p. 117). Gassendi flies in the face of time‐honored usage when he insiststhat modes count as res, but his point is clear enough: modes are eithersomething or nothing, and they cannot be nothing. Given the particularweight he puts on the idea that our knowledge of substance is veiled by its




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properties (§7.1), and given that he conceives of those properties as modes,he can hardly fail to be a modal realist.18 Leibniz takes for granted a similarrealism, again in response to Descartes: “To deny a real distinction betweenmodes is an unnecessary change in the accepted use of words. For until now

modes have been considered as res and have been viewed as differing inreality—as in a piece of wax, for instance, a spherical shape differs from asquare one” ( Animadversiones in Principia Cartesiana ad art. I.60–1 [Phil.Schriften IV:365; tr. Loemker p. 390]). Malebranche too does not hesitate totreat modes as features of reality: “it is absolutely necessary that everythingin the world be either a being or a mode (manière) of a being” (Search after Truth III.2.8.ii [tr. p. 244]).19

(p. 261 ) As an exception to this pattern, one might think of Hobbes. AlthoughI have argued for Hobbes as the clearest case of an austerely reductive

theory of accidents (§7.1, §10.2), he nevertheless defines accidents in termsof modes: an accident, he says, is “the mode of conceiving a body” (Decorpore 8.2). But an accident here is not the mode of a body , but the modeof conceiving a body—that is, accidents have been made into subjectivefeatures of our conceptual framework. (Admittedly, since for Hobbeseverything is a body [§16.2], he is strictly speaking not entitled even to theexistence of modes of conceiving. But we cannot expect him to get to therock bottom of everything all at once.) When Hobbes is at his rigorous best,he makes it clear that bodies have neither accidents nor modes. Thus whathe tells Bramhall is not that accidents are mere modes, but that “I havedenied that there is any reality in accidents” (Works IV:305).20

Pierre Bayle's Dictionary (1697) offers a remarkable retrospective accountof how talk of accidents and modes developed over recent centuries. To aconsiderable degree, his account corresponds with my own.

The general doctrine of the philosophers is that the idea of being contains, immediately under it, two species, substanceand accident.…With regard to accidents, they all agreed,before the wretched disputes that divided Christendom,that they depend so essentially on their subjects of inhesionthat they cannot exist without them. This was their specific

character, which differentiated them from substances. The doctrine of transubstantiation overthrew this wholeidea and forced philosophers to say that an accident cansubsist without its subject.…They therefore admitted a realdistinction between a substance and its accidents.…But someof them continued to say that there were accidents whose








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distinction from their subject was not real, and which couldnot subsist outside of it. They called these accidents “modes.”Descartes, Gassendi, and in general all of those who haveabandoned scholastic philosophy have denied that an accident

is separable from its subject in such a way that it could subsistafter its separation, and have ascribed to all accidents thenature of those that are called “modes”.… (“Spinoza” DD,XIII:463 [tr. pp. 331–2])

As we saw in §10.2, Bayle is quite right to think accidents were initiallyconceived of as dependent on their subject (lines 2–4). To be sure, therole he ascribes to the Eucharist is oversimplified. Transubstantiation wasalready orthodoxy by the mid‐thirteenth century, at a time when deflationarytheories of accidents were still prevalent. As we have seen, deflationism

could allow for subsisting accidents by appealing to a change in modusessendi (§10.3). So although transubstantiation no doubt contributed to themove toward real accidents, it did not decide the case, and in part the casewas decided on philosophical grounds (§10.5). Even so, Bayle is again ontarget when he describes the theory of modes as a return to that earlierdeflationary view (lines 7–9). Talk of modes is not a way of rejecting thesubstance–accident distinction—on the contrary, that (p. 262 ) distinction ispart of “the general doctrine of the philosophers” (line 1), and it never wasoverthrown. But, as Bayle suggests, the term ‘accident’ had to go, debasedas it was by the disreputable scholastic doctrine of real accidents. Henceauthors like Descartes and Gassendi switched terminology entirely (lines9–12), referring to accidents of their preferred sort as modes. As we haveseen, the way had been prepared for that terminological shift by a long lineof scholastic authors.

13.5. Cartesian Modes

The previous section looked briefly at a wide range of figures. To reach anyfirm conclusions, however, we need to slow down. Let us look more carefully,then, at the most influential seventeenth‐century proponent of modes,Descartes, to see whether his usage fits the realistic conception of modes

that I have traced through the scholastic era.

I have already argued for Descartes's commitment to the substance–accidentdistinction from the side of substance (Ch. 8). That conclusion, all by itself,entails that Descartes is committed to some sort of accident‐like entities. If this commitment is genuine, however, then we would expect to find evidence










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of it in what he says about modes. Given the background just surveyed, itwill obviously not be enough to cite the bare fact that Descartes speaks of modes and the modal distinction. Without knowing how he is using thoseterms no conclusions can be drawn. What we have to ask, then, is whether

Descartes's modes satisfy the various characteristics of modes construedrealistically. Those characteristics can be summarized as follows:

• dependency: modes cannot exist apart from a substance;• determinacy: although a substance can exist apart from anygiven determinate mode, it must possess some mode from withineach determinable kind;• reality: modes exist, independently of the mind, although they arelesser entities than res;• causality: modes exercise causal influence on their subjects.

It is uncontroversial that Descartes's modes satisfy the first two of thesecharacteristics. When the Principles of Philosophy (1644) begins to use‘mode’ in a systematic way to talk about the accidental properties of athing, it does so by invoking the terminology of real and modal distinctions. There is not a real distinction between them, because for two things to bereally distinct it must be the case that each could exist apart from the other(I.60). Any two substances meet this test, but modes do not, because amode cannot exist apart from its substance. (There can, for instance, beno thoughts apart from a mind, and no shapes apart from a body.) Still,Descartes holds that not all distinctions are real distinctions, and thatthere is a modal distinction between modes and their substances (I.61). This distinction then gets applied specifically to the modes of thought andextension:

Thought and extension can also be taken as modes of asubstance, in so far as one and the same mind can havemany different thoughts, and one and the same body, withits quantity unchanged, can have many different modes of extension.…In this way, thought and extension are modallydistinct from substance, and can be understood no less clearlyand distinctly than (p. 263 ) substance can, provided they areregarded not as substances or res separate from other res, but

simply as modes of res. (Principles I.64)

Descartes's modes thus satisfy the dependency test, inasmuch as theycannot exist without substance. They also satisfy the determinacy test,inasmuch as a mind must always be thinking something, and a body must beextended somehow.21




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Like Suárez, Descartes treats one‐way and mutual separability as marksof the modal and real distinctions, respectively. As in Suárez, however,these are merely marks, ways in which we “recognize” the distinctness of things (Principles I.60–2). What defines the different distinctions are the

fundamental ontological categories that Descartes and Suárez both endorse.A real distinction occurs between two or more substances (Principles I.60);a modal distinction occurs between substance and mode, or betweentwo modes of the same substance (even if two distinct modes will oftenbe mutually separable). This way of proceeding is significant because itmeans we should not look to Descartes's various distinctions as a way of understanding his ontological scheme. Rather, the different distinctions area consequence of the scheme: it is because Descartes has an ontology of substance and mode that he can appeal to two sorts of distinctions.22

This remark brings us back to the question of just what sort of ontologicalweight modes have for Descartes. Although they satisfy the dependencyand determinacy test, there will be no reason to interpret them realisticallyunless they also satisfy at least the reality test, if not also the causality test.Evidence for the first of these is not hard to find. In the Third Meditation,Descartes remarks that “the ideas that represent substances to meare something greater and, so to speak, contain within themselvesmore of objective reality than the ideas that merely represent modesor accidents” (VII:40). This is to say that there is more reality in what isrepresented by those two kinds of ideas, which is just to say that substancesare more real than modes. (The French translation, after the phrase “moreobjective reality,” adds this: “that is to say, [these ideas] participate throughrepresentation in a higher degree of being or perfection” [IX:32].) Thiscertainly suggests that modes have some degree of reality. If that is notwhat Descartes meant, he had an opportunity to explain himself, becauseHobbes would press him on just this point:

(p. 264 ) Moreover, D. C. should reconsider what he wants tosay by “more of reality.” Does reality admit of more and less?Or, if he thinks that one res is more of a res than another,he should consider how this can be explained to us with thatdegree of clarity that every demonstration calls for, and that

he himself has employed elsewhere. (Third Objections, VII:185)

This is just the line we should expect from Hobbes, who flatly insists thatonly substances exist and that accidents are nothing beyond ways of conceiving substance (§7.1, §10.2). Descartes might have seized on Hobbes'squery as an opportunity to make clear that—at least among creatures—








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substances are all equally real, and what is not a substance is nothing atall. Remarkably, however, Descartes restates his original claim even moreforcefully:

I have explained well enough how reality admits of more

and less: it does so, of course, inasmuch as a substance ismore of a res than a mode; and if there are real qualities orincomplete substances, they are more of a res than are modes,but less than are complete substances; and, finally, if there isan infinite and independent substance, it is more of a res thana finite and dependent substance. All this is completely self‐evident. (Third Replies, VII:185)

This kind of hierarchy of being could scarcely be more scholastic, and seemsutterly incompatible with a reductive conception of modes.23

The Principles puts this same ontological scheme on a more systematicfoundation. That account begins at I.48: “All the objects of our perceptionwe regard as either res, or affections of res, or else as eternal truths, whichhave no existence outside our thought.” The next twenty paragraphs set outthis ontology in detail. According to this initial division, only eternal truths areexcluded from having existence outside our thought. This certainly suggeststhat “affections” (he will soon shift to talking of modes) do have mind‐independent reality. This suggestion gets amplified considerably in the laterFrench edition, where Descartes introduces a series of changes that allowhis technical terminology to be introduced in a less haphazard way. Here,

I.48 reads: “I distinguish all the objects of our perception into two kinds: thefirst contains all the things (choses) that have some existence, and the other,all the truths that are nothing outside our thought” (IXB:45). Included onthe side of “things that have some existence” are both substances and theirassociated properties ( proprietez ). The term ‘properties’ includes modes,but the terminology of ‘mode’ is held back until it can be explained in I.56.Accordingly, where I.51 had begun “In the case of those items that we regardas res or modes of res…” (VIIIA:24), the French version begins “In the caseof those items that we regard as having some existence…” (IXB:46–7), aphrase that looks ahead to both substances and modes. So what the Latin

version suggests, the French version makes explicit: that both substancesand modes are things that exist.

There thus seems to be quite solid textual support for the conclusion thatDescartes's modes satisfy the reality test. So far as I can find, moreover,there is no textual evidence against that conclusion. If Descartes had wanted




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an ontology of substance alone, he ought to have said so, as both Baconand Hobbes do (§10.2). He never does. If modes (p. 265 ) were meant tobe understood reductively, as mere structures (in the sense of §12.3), onewould expect him to have said so or, instead, to have refrained from using

the terminology of ‘mode’ at all. So although there is certainly historicalprecedent for an ontologically innocent understanding of ‘mode,’ thatinterpretation gains no support from anything that Descartes actually says.

What of the final feature of modes conceived realistically, causality ? Herematters are less clear. To be sure, it is easy enough to find Descartesappealing to modes in causal contexts, as either causes or effects. Motion,after all, is a mode (see, e.g., Principles I.65), and so if there is creaturelycausation at all in Descartes, modes must surely play a central role. Theproblem, however, is that someone who wants to read Descartes's modes

reductively can also read these claims reductively, so that to speak of amode's causing or being caused is simply shorthand for the claim thata substance‐so‐structured either causes or is caused. Given this sort of reductive strategy for explaining away apparent appeals to the causal roleof modes, it might seem that an interpretive standoff will be inevitablehere. There is, however, a special context that requires Descartes to isolatethe distinct causal role played by modes—the Eucharist. At the end of theFourth Replies, in an unusual foray into theological territory, Descartesproposes an account of how the appearances remain unchanged in the host,despite the bread's and wine's going out of existence. What gives rise tothe appearances, he argues, is not the bread and wine, but the surface thatsurrounds the bread and wine, which can endure through transubstantiation.Crucially, for our purposes, this line of thought requires two claims:

1. “I am convinced that there is nothing else whatsoever thataffects our senses beyond that surface alone that is the boundaryof the dimensions of the body that is sensed” (VII:249).2. “The surface of the bread or wine or any other body shouldnot here be understood as a part of the substance or even of thequantity of that same body, nor should it be understood as a partof the surrounding bodies. It should be understood as simply theboundary that is conceived to lie in between the individual particles

and the bodies that surround them; and this boundary has noreality whatsoever except a modal one” (VII:250–1).

According to (1), it is the surface of a body that acts on our senses.According to (2), that surface is a mode. There is no other way to read theseclaims, because transubstantiation requires Descartes to find something






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other than a substance to account for the ongoing continuity of appearances.(It cannot be a substance, because according to transubstantiation thesubstance of the bread and wine ceases to exist.) Of course, one mightwell complain that this is yet one more case of the pernicious influence of

transubstantiation on philosophy during this era. We know, indeed, thattwo of Descartes's most sympathetic readers, Mesland and Clerselier, feltuneasy about this account. Although we do not have their letters, we haveDescartes's replies, where he tries to explain how a surface, conceived as amode, can endure through the replacement of both the underlying substance(the bread and wine) and the surrounding air. The more Descartes saysabout this, the stranger the view seems, but what matters for our purposesis that these letters continue to rely on the two claims quoted above. Indeed, just about the least controversial claim made in this correspondence is thata (p. 266 ) mode can be a cause. I conclude, then, that Descartes's theory

of modes is fully realistic, in very much the same sense as Suárez's. Thisbecomes the prevailing usage in the later part of the century.24

13.6. Separability

Even if we now have some rough taxonomy of the different theoriesof modes, and who their proponents are, we are still a long way fromunderstanding what a mode is. This is one of the most perplexing questionsthat will arise over the course of this study, and to make any headway itis crucial to set aside an issue with which it can easily be entangled: thequestion of the separability of modes and accidents from their subject.As noted earlier, when Suárez and Descartes describe real and modaldistinctions in terms of two‐way versus one‐way separability, they meanto be offering a rough and ready mark of how to tell these two kinds of distinctions apart. They do not suppose that such facts about separabilityare what define the real and modal distinctions. Hence Suárez readily admitsvarious counterexamples, such as that of creatures being inseparable fromGod and yet being really distinct from God (Disp. meta. 7.2.25). Descartes,too, in the Fourth Replies, admits that God might be able to separate modesfrom their substance, even if this is inconceivable to us (VII:249). Whatdefines these different distinctions, for both Suárez and Descartes, are the

different ontological statuses of the entities in question. A real distinction just is a distinction between two res, whereas a modal distinction just is adistinction that involves entities of a lesser sort, modes. It is important toavoid the mistake, then, of supposing that modes can be understood throughan understanding of the modal distinction, and that the modal distinctionin turn can be understood in terms of a certain kind of separability. That




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gets the order of analysis precisely backwards. Rather, to understand whySuárez and Descartes (p. 267 ) postulate a modal distinction, one needs tounderstand what modes are. Once one understands modes, both the modaldistinction and inseparability will follow.25

Still, rather than set aside questions of separability entirely at this point, itwill be useful to understand something of how scholastic views in this areaevolved over the centuries. For although Descartes's way of setting out thisterritory comes from Suárez, Suárez's usage is idiosyncratic, and so liableto mislead. The more usual scholastic practice, as noted already (§13.3),is to recognize only two sorts of distinctions, real and conceptual. Sincethings that are merely conceptually distinct are really identical, the questionof a distinction on the side of reality is for most scholastic authors quitestraightforward: things are either the same or they are different. No further

nuances are required, or even possible. This was the opinio communis acrossthe spectrum of scholastic authors, from Ockham to Scotus to the Thomists.(As noted earlier, Scotus's famous formal distinction holds between thingsthat are really identical, and so is not relevant here.)26

Supposing one accepts just a single distinction on the side of reality, thequestion then arises of whether that sort of real distinction requires two‐wayor merely one‐way separability. The situation here is confusing. One thingthat is reasonably clear is that if a can exist without b, then a is not the sameas b. That is, one‐way separability is sufficient to establish non‐identity. Thisis a point that Scotus relies on in arguing for the reality of items in all ten

categories. With respect to relations, for instance, he argues as follows:Nothing is really the same as something without which itcan really exist without contradiction. But there are manyrelations without which their foundations can exist withoutcontradiction. Therefore there are many relations that are notreally the same as their foundation. (Ord. II.1.4–5, Vat. VII n.200)

The argument might at first seem to be airtight. As an example to supportthe minor premise, Scotus offers the way a white thing can first be dissimilar

to another thing, then similar if that other thing becomes white (ibid., n.205). As for the major premise, it seems incontrovertible, because everyoneaccepts that a thing cannot be separable from itself. So where there is anysort of separability, even in one direction, there is not full and real identity.Scotus shows, indeed, that the major premise follows directly from the firstprinciple that the same thing cannot at the same time be F and not‐F. For





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suppose that a can exist without b. Then it can be the case that a exists andb does not exist. But then, if a = b, it follows that the same thing at the sametime exists and does not exist, a violation of our first principle. Hence one‐way separability entails non‐identity (ibid., n. 201). To deny the premise

is, moreover, a philosophical disaster, inasmuch as monism would theninescapably follow: “if that major is denied, there does (p. 268 ) not seem toremain any basis from which the distinction of beings can be proved” (ibid.,n. 202).27

It is, however, not so easy to prove the reality of items in the variousaccidental categories. If Scotus's argument were successful in establishingthat relations are really distinct from their subjects, then it could be used toyield the reality of any accidental property you like—whiteness, musicality,fatherhood, sitting, being a U.S. citizen, living in Colorado. Inasmuch as each

can be separated from its subject, each would be a real property. What givesScotus's argument its superficial appearance of success is the gap betweenbeing “not really the same” (line 3 above) and being really distinct . Thereis a gap here not because there is some sort of distinction that falls shortof a real distinction, but because the failure of identity between a and bentails the distinct reality of a and b only if we presuppose that a and b areboth things. If a and b fail to be identical because a is real and b is nothing,then we do not have a real distinction, or at any rate not the sort of realdistinction that establishes the reality of relations. Hence the category anti‐realist has nothing to fear from the above argument. (For another way toblock this sort of simple appeal to separability, see §14.3.)

Suppose, however, that we establish the existence of substances and theexistence of modes, and that we then appeal to their separability in onedirection to establish their distinctness. (This is Suárez's strategy, quiteexplicitly, in Disputation Seven, and this is how in effect I take Descartes tobe arguing in the wax passage [§8.2, §13.7].) The question then arises of what we are to make of the alleged fact that modes are separable in onlyone direction—that is, that they are dependent on their subjects. For Suárezand Descartes, this is a sign (albeit defeasible) that they are entities of alesser sort. But this was by no means the standard verdict. Scotus, as we saw

in §12.5, takes a position much like Suárez's in distinguishing between thosecategories that contain res, separable in both directions from their subjects,and the lesser, relational categories that contain mere modes, and that aredependent on their subjects. But Scotus does not conclude from this thatthe relational categories are entities of a lesser sort, or that they are anyless distinct from their subjects. They are, he argues, fully and really distinct.









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Ockham, in contrast, contends that for any two things that contingentlyexist, each can, at least by divine power, exist without the other—that is,he insists that separability always runs in both directions. (Hume wouldlater say something similar.) Ockham wields this principle against Scotus's

realistic ontology, arguing that if a thing exists then it can exist (p. 269 ) allby itself, something that seems absurd for many of Scotus's parvae res—relations? actions? where? when?—up and down the list of categories (§12.5).Generations of scholastics would subsequently line up in favor or againstOckham's principle: realists against it in order to safeguard the reality of therelational categories, and Thomists also against it in order to save the notionof purely potential prime matter as really distinct but inseparable from form.Suárez, in his characteristic way, is proposing a compromise: let Ockham'sstrict criterion hold for genuine res, but let there be another class of lesserentities that satisfy only the weaker criterion.28

The history of these ideas reveals just how precarious a position Suárez(and Descartes) have staked out. There is nothing at all inevitable about theidea that all genuine res should be mutually independent. There is nothingparticularly natural in the idea that less independent things are thereby lessreal. These are the terms of the Suarezian compromise, but their truth isfar from intuitively obvious, and both principles were widely rejected. Theway forward, however, is to set aside these debates over dependence andseparability, since these issues are posterior to the question of what modesand res are. As I have urged in earlier chapters (esp. §10.4), the notion of a real accident cannot be fleshed out in terms of its independence froma subject. Similarly, here, although modes are necessarily dependent ontheir subject, that dependence is a consequence of their nature and indeedmerely a defeasible mark of it. So with the issue of separability now set toone side, let us finally take up the question of what modes are supposed tobe.

13.7. What Are Modes?

I have stressed from the start of this chapter that there are variousapproaches to modal realism. One approach treats modes as real but without

having their own proper existence. What exists, on this sort of view, isthe substance. For a mode to exist just is for the substance to exist in acertain way. We have seen this understanding of mode in Oresme, Wyclif,Scheibler, and Gorlaeus, and it is in this sense that Aquinas (and many of his contemporaries) can rightly be said to treat accidents as modes (§10.2).One great advantage of this approach is that it points toward a non‐skeptical








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account of our knowledge of substance. If modes are ways of being of substances, then it seems (p. 270 ) plausible to say that, in grasping a mode,one just is grasping something about the substance itself. This does notnecessarily make the nature of a substance entirely transparent, but at least

it allows us to know some things about them. We saw Oresme make this sortof argument in §7.4. Despite this significant advantage, I will not try to saymore about this here. The view strikes me as seriously obscure, inasmuchas it requires distinguishing between the reality of a thing and its existence.Moreover, this is not the version of modal realism that would prove mostinfluential in the seventeenth century. (I will return to the distinction betweena thing and its existence in §18.5 and again in §26.5.)

A second approach toward modal realism would hold that although modesare real, they supervene on non‐modal features of the substance itself.

This is, to be sure, a theory that will seem much more natural to modernsensibilities, and for a while I thought it could be found in one or anotherauthor from our period. Since I no longer think that, I will again describe thisoption only briefly, but it is worth at least mentioning, because it sheds lighton the spectrum of possibilities open to a modal realist. To treat modes assupervening on substances requires distinguishing between two sets of facts,and then supposing that facts of the first kind undergo change only in virtueof facts of the second kind. So let our first kind of facts be shape, size, andmotion. Let our second kind of facts be the location of the substance's parts. Then facts of the first kind—call them modes—supervene on facts of thesecond kind, inasmuch as the shape, size, and motion of a thing all dependon facts about how the parts of that thing are located.

Why would anyone want to import this anachronistic notion of supervenienceto explain the theory of modes? One reason is that this provides a neatexplanation for why modes are associated with both dependency anddeterminacy. Dependency obtains, of course, because such modes dependon their subvening base—since there is no shape, say, without the locationof the thing's parts, the mode would depend on the substance, but thesubstance would not depend on the mode. At the same time, determinacyfollows as well, because the subvening facts about location always give rise

to one or another supervening mode. No matter how the parts are located,there must for instance be some further fact about the thing's shape. Asecond advantage is that this approach suggests an explanation for whymodes are said to have their puzzling halfway sort of existence, real but notas real as substances. We can understand such claims as meaning simplythat modes supervene on their subjects. Of course, there is the risk that









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such claims of supervenience will fuel a demand for reduction. In effect,this is Ockham's view. As we will see shortly (§14.3), he thinks that factsabout shape, size, and motion can be wholly accounted for in terms of facts about the location of a thing's parts. The present line of thought, in

contrast, contends that the supervenience relationship—at least in certaincases—describes a distinction that falls in between strict identity and realdistinctness. A final advantage of this approach is that it fits the way theseauthors sometimes talk. Consider this passage from Descartes:

By the word ‘surface’ I understand not any substance or realnature, which could be destroyed by God's omnipotence, butonly a mode or manner of being, which cannot be changedwithout a change in that in which or through which it exists— just as it involves a contradiction for the (p. 271 ) square shapeof a piece of wax to be taken away from it without any of the

parts of the wax changing their place. (To Mesland [1645],IV:163–4)

What comes before the dash constitutes a clear statement of supervenience,and what comes after the dash looks to be just the right sort of example: theshape of the wax supervenes on the location of its parts, and so counts as amode of the wax.

All the same, I think this cannot be the right way to understand modes duringour period. Certainly, it cannot be right for the scholastic modal realists wehave been considering, because they are very explicit in treating temporal

location itself as a mode (§17.5). If location is a mode, then there wouldseem to be no non‐modal base for modal properties like size, shape, andmotion to supervene on, and the theory falls apart. What about Descartes?Here there may be more room for supervenience, because the standardexamples of modes of extension are size, shape, and motion. One couldtherefore try to read Descartes as building facts about location into thesubstance‐level of his ontology, and then treating the various canonicalmodes of extension as supervening on such facts. This might have thefurther appeal of minimizing the impact of Descartes's modal realism, foralthough we could still take seriously his commitment to modes as real, we

would not have to regard them as fundamental in a way that threatens hisoverriding commitment to corpuscularianism. The facts about position, wemight say, are the deep facts that explain the way the material realm is, andthe modal facts simply ride on top of these. A grasp of such modes mightnot constitute a grasp of the underlying substance, but inasmuch as themodes supervene on facts at the substance level, the door would be open







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to working our way from the modal level to the substance. Still, even if theappeal is clear enough, the texts do not bear it out. For Descartes regularlydoes mention location as a mode of extension—most notably in his officialintroduction of the modes of extension in Principles I.48:

Perception, volition, and all the modes both of perceiving andof willing are referred to thinking substances. To extendedsubstance belong size (that is, extension itself in length,breadth, and depth), shape, motion, position (situs) of its parts,their divisibility, and the like.

In listing the “position of its parts” on the side of the modes, Descartes doesnot seem to retain any facts at the substance level on which the modal factscould supervene.29 And if this is true for body, it seems even more clearlytrue for mind, where it is hard to see how the supervenience interpretation

could possibly go. What sorts of facts at the substance level could particularthoughts and volitions possibly supervene on?

This leaves, so far as I can see, just one other way to understand whatmodes are. This third approach is, in a sense, the polar opposite of the previous one. Whereas supervenience treats the substance asdetermining its modes, this final approach treats the substance as radicallyindeterminate, and necessarily in need of modes in order to (p. 272 ) existat all. One great advantage of this approach is that it fits very closely withhow Suárez describes his theory. As we saw in §13.3, part of Suárez'scase for modes is an “a priori” argument, according to which “creatures

are imperfect, and…as a result they need such modes, by which they aremade complete with respect to all these states” (Disp. meta. 7.1.19). Weare now in a position to say a bit more about the sort of picture Suárez isinvoking, and what this shows about the nature of modes. If one takes modalrealism seriously, and furthermore places on the modal side all the factsabout location, arrangement, and the motion of particles, the result is toleave the substance itself “imperfect” or incomplete, in the sense that itwill have no location, no shape, no size. Those are facts on the modal side,not the substance side, and so to take seriously the reality of modes assomething distinct from the substance just is to strip the substance itself

of such geometric–kinetic properties. Now there is something admittedlyodd in this way of putting things—in saying that the substance will have nolocation, shape, or size. For in a sense of course the substance has a locationetc.—it has one precisely in virtue of its modes. In part we are revisiting thefamiliar puzzle that confronts anyone who would distinguish between a thingand its properties, and yet want to say that the substance has the properties






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(§6.2). What is new in this connection is that we are dealing with propertiesthat a substance cannot lack. On Suárez's picture, the substance is radicallyincomplete when considered all by itself, and cannot coherently exist withoutthe addition of entities of another sort, modal entities. This is in contrast

to the case of real accidents, which have a very different relationship totheir subject. Although real accidents inhere in substances, and therebylicense the ascription of a property to a substance, the substance does notneed any such real accident in order to exist. Real accidents like heat andcolor are ones that a substance can exist without (Chs. 19, 21)—they addsomething to the substance, but they do not complete the substance in theway that modes do. Accordingly, determinacy applies to modes, but not toreal accidents. Dependency too applies only to modes. Modes are dependenton their substance, because what they are, essentially, are completers of incomplete substances. Real accidents, in contrast, have no such character.

There is nothing about the nature of a material substance that demandscolor, for instance, given that bodies can be transparent. Hence substanceand real accident do not lock together in the way that substance and modedo.

I believe this is the picture that both Suárez and Descartes have in mindwhen they claim that modes are entities of a lesser kind. The obscure ideaof a halfway sort of existence should be understood in terms of the veryspecial relationship that modes have to their subjects. What does the workhere is not simply the fact of one‐way separability. That fact all by itself has no particular ontological implications: creatures, for instance, do notexist any less than God simply because they are causally dependent onGod. What matters instead is that both modes and substances are radicallyincomplete in the way just described, so that neither is conceivable withoutthe other. Suárez captures this mutual interdependence by speaking of amodal distinction. Or, and this is perhaps the more illuminating way to putit, he describes mode and subject as in a certain way identical. Modes, hesays, are neither fully identical with their subjects nor fully distinct, but partlyidentical and partly distinct. Thus, between a mode and its (p. 273 ) subjectthere is “a certain kind of identity” (Disp. meta. 7.1.20), and a mode “hassome identity with the thing on which it acts” (ibid., par. 26). Such ways of

talking look hopeless on their face, but can be made sense of if understoodto refer to the sort of dependence at issue between mode and substance—not merely a contingent causal dependence as obtains between two res, buta necessary metaphysical dependence, such that substances cannot existwithout modes, and a mode cannot exist without its substance.30









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An interesting feature of the Suarezian model is that it crucially dependsnot just on facts about modes, but on facts about substance. One cannotunderstand his picture simply by thinking hard about what a mode issupposed to be—one also needs to think about what substances are. It is

because substances have a certain incompleteness that we must postulateentities of a certain special kind, partly distinct from their subjects andpartly the same. Yet if this is a strength of the theory, it might also seem tobe a weakness, because it requires embracing a conception of substancethat seems deeply obscure. The official grand narrative of this study (§1.3,§4.5) runs from the development of a scholastic ontology of metaphysicalparts, toward the corpuscularian rejection of such parts in favor of anontology of substance alone. Viewed from that perspective, the findingthat Descartes, say, is a modal realist might look like a minor wrinkle inthe overarching narrative. Yes, Descartes endorses modes, but modes are

things that barely exist at all, leaving substances to be the stars of thecorpuscularian show. This narrative could be sustained on the supervenienceapproach to modes. But the Suarezian model will not bear this construal,because Suárez builds up a theory of modes by tearing down the notion of substance. Whereas we would naturally suppose that substances exemplifythe concrete and particular, Suárez's substances are indeterminate and tothat extent metaphysical. They are, indeed, the counterparts at a higherlevel of composition to scholastic prime matter. The Suarezian substance isnot quite as indeterminate as prime matter—it is characterized by a certainspecific nature (dog, cat, stone) and endures only for as long as that nature

is preserved. Still, Suárez's dogs and cats and stones not only lack heat andcolor, but also lack shape, size, and location. Of course, in another sensethey most definitely have all of these features, but they do so only in virtueof being joined with further metaphysical parts. This is a familiar picturein the case of the real accidents, and one would expect Descartes to havenothing to do with it. But what we are now seeing is that the Suarezianmodel extends this story to the geometric–kinetic properties. Inasmuch asDescartes needs properties of that kind, and does not reduce them to thelevel of substance, he too embraces this Suarezian picture. To return toFrancis Bacon's memorable image (§7.2), substance gets shunted (p. 274 )

off into a minor role, as the indeterminate substratum, leaving modes to begiven all the leading parts.

The theory of modes is of course supposed to reduce one's ontologicalcommitments, by avoiding the sorts of obscurities that arise from treatingaccidents as real. Cartesian accidents are mere modes, and so supposedlyunobjectionable. But if modes too are real, even if less real, then it is not









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clear that the theory can avoid its own sort of metaphysical obscurities. These consequences may indeed seem bad enough to prompt a reevaluationof the evidence in favor of modal realism, or at least to make one wonderwhether the Suarezian model is the right one for Descartes. In defense of

these conclusions, I would again point to the wax passage from the SecondMeditation. I discussed this text at some length in §8.2, while arguing forthis same substance–mode distinction from the side of substance. Here Iwill confine myself to indicating briefly how Descartes's argument applies inthe present context, setting aside the details that were discussed more fullyalready. The aim of the wax passage is to show that we perceive modes of substance, not the substance itself. That requires some kind of substance–mode distinction that goes beyond a mere distinction of reason. (If thedistinction were merely of reason, then the most Descartes could concludeis that we perceive substance but without realizing it, because we do not

realize the identity between mode and substance. But he clearly thinksthat even a philosophically enlightened observer does not perceive thesubstance.) To get a distinction on the side of reality, Descartes invokes thechangeability of substance:

[S]urely the wax itself was not the sweetness of the honey,or the fragrance of the flowers, or that whiteness, shape, orsound, but rather the body that appeared to me a little whileago to manifest itself in certain ways (modis), and now indifferent ways. But what precisely is it that I so imagine? Letus concentrate and, after taking away what does not belong to

the wax, let us see what is left: surely, it is nothing other thana thing that is extended, flexible, and changeable. (VII:30–1)31

The passage appeals, in a way that is by now familiar, to the indiscernibilityof identicals. The substance (body) had certain modes, and now it has othermodes. The substance endures whereas the modes do not. Therefore thesubstance is something distinct from the modes. The crucial assumption hereis that the substance endures through change. Those who would deny this—a line of thought that stretches from Ockham and Buridan all the way toHobbes and then Locke (chs. 29–30)—do not face the same sort of pressureto separate the thing from its properties. But since Descartes wants to retain

at least this much of our commonsense ontology of enduring particulars, hefeels the need to distinguish between that which endures and that which(p. 275 ) changes. Since he cannot tolerate real accidents, he embracesSuárez's conception of modes, which is still a realistic theory of propertiesbut not quite so realistic. This diminished ontological commitment comeswith a price, however—the indeterminacy of substance. The logic of the









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wax passage requires removing all the changeable properties from thesubstance, and leaving it only with that which is essential to it. When we dothis to the substance—when we “distinguish the wax from its external forms—take the clothes off, as it were, and consider it naked” (VII:32)—we make

it into something wholly metaphysical, something that could not possiblyexist on its own, and something we can seemingly have no idea of, otherthan as the determinable subject of various determinate modes, existing inpotentiality for those modes. To a startling extent, we recreate the scholasticdoctrine of prime matter.

Notes:

(1) For speculative grammar, with its connection between modi significandiand modi essendi, see, e.g., Pinborg, “Speculative Grammar,” esp. pp. 262–

3. On syncategorematic terms, see Peter of Spain's claim that they signifynot things but instead modi essendi (see Klima, “Peter of Spain” p. 530). Forthe suggestion of a link between the theory of modes and the intension andremission of forms, see Normore, “Accidents and Modes” p. 683, who wouldseem to have Scotus in mind (see note 11 below).

(2) For other early scholastic examples of the res–mode distinction, seeNicholas of Strasbourg, Summa phil.: “Dicendum est enim quod res dupliciterpotest accipi.…Uno enim modo dicitur res omne illud quod non est nihil.…Alio modo dicitur res proprie, secundum quod distinguitur contra modumrei…” (in Imbach, “Metaphysik” p. 363 n. 22); Alexander of Alexandria,Quod. q. 6: “de accidentibus enim respectivis, quae sunt sex, puta quaemagis dicunt modum rei quam rem, satis videtur manifestum quod nonpossunt fieri sine subiecto, alias fierent sine suo essentiali.…Sua enimessentialitas est quod sint…modificationes rerum” (in Amerini, “Alessandro”p. 207 n. 66); James of Viterbo, distinguishing absolute and respectiveabsolutes, remarks that the latter cannot exist without a subject, not evenby divine power, because “haec enim accidentia non dicunt rem, sed modumrei” (Quod. II.1, p. 8)—in contrast, for James, color and other such qualitiesare res rather than modi essendi (ibid., p. 18); Dietrich of Freiberg, Deaccidentibus 17.9 (Opera III:77): “Concluditur ergo ex inductis quod accidens

non est nisi quidam modus seu dispositio substantiae, et hoc est essentiaeius in eo, quod ipsum est ens, nec habet aliquam essentiam absolutaequidditatis secundum se ipsum”; Auriol (Sent . IV.12.1.1, III:110aA) criticizesthe strategy of accounting for inherence in terms of a mode rather thana relational accident; Franciscus de Prato (1330s), Logica I.5.1, p. 381:“Hic tamen nota quod ‘res’ potest accipi dupliciter. Uno modo proprie et

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stricte, scilicet pro ipsa essentia reali. Et isto modo accipiendo ‘rem,’ illadicuntur distingui realiter quae dicunt plures essentias intrinse distinctasrealiter. Et isto modo non distinguuntur realiter omnia praedicamenta,sed solum tria praedicamenta isto modo distinguuntur realiter, scilicet

substantia, quantitas, et qualitas. Alio modo accipitur ‘res’ communiter etlarge non solum pro ipsa essentia, sed pro modo essendi sive pro modoreali ipsius essentiae. Potest enim una res habere diversos modos realessecundum quod res potest diversimode exigere et connotare aliam rem. Etisto modo accipiendo ‘rem,’ non oportet quod illa quae distinguuntur realiterhabeant diversas essentias vel quod differant realiter intrinsice, Et isto mododistinguuntur septem ultima praedicamenta….” None of these authors sayenough to make it clear whether their talk of modes should be understoodrealistically or reductively.

A particularly interesting early case is Durand of St. Pourçain, whodistinguishes between absolute and relative (respectivum) accidents, insuch a way that only the former count as res “per prius et simpliciter” (seealso Ch. 11 note 2). On the other hand, “res dicitur…per posteriusautem et secundum quid de respectu, qui non est res nisi quia est realismodus essendi; unde habet minimum de entitate, quia est solum modusentitatis” (Sent . I.30.2 n. 15, I:84vb). In a subsequent discussion, however,this talk of modes gets developed not along the realist lines that are thefocus of this chapter, but in the sort of deflationary way considered in §10.2,such that modes exist only in the sense that their subject exists: “respectusautem et universaliter omnes modi essendi sunt entia quia entis, non solumconcomitative sed quidditative et formaliter, quia nullam entitatem habentnisi hanc quae est esse huius.” In contrast, absolute accidents have theirown existence: “verbi gratia albedo quae est esse huius ut subiecti, putacygni, est aliquid esssentialiter praeter esse huius, quia esse huius non esteius essentia, sed modus essendi.…Sed essentia vel quidditas seu entitashorum modorum tota consistit in hoc quod est esse huius” (Sent . I.33.1 n. 15,I:89rv).

(3) For Wyclif, in addition to the passages quoted in §11.1, see De actibusanimae II.4, p. 123: “illa non habendat in superfluis, cum ponit omnem rem

esse substantiam, et accidentia esse modos substantiarum”; ibid., p. 127:“accidentia, quae sunt modi subiectorum…”; De eucharistia ch. 3, p. 63:“omne accidens formaliter inhaerens substantiae non est nisi veritas quaeest substantiam esse accidentaliter alicuius modi, ut hic supponitur, sed nullatalis veritas potest esse sine substantia.”










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(4) It is not perfectly clear how to read this particular passage. Here ishow it is printed in the 1509 edition: “huiusmodi accidentia quae tantumdicunt actuales modos essendi quale est: ubi: vel esse: hoc vel ibi velcontactus seu contiguitas duorum se tangentium aut unio continuitatis

partium et consimilia non possunt fieri absque hiis quorum sunt” (Tractatusde quantitate, tabula f. 63vc). This could be read as describing as many asfive different modes, but I think Olivi in fact means to describe only two: thelocation of a thing and the arrangement of its parts.

For Olivi on quantity as a mode, see also Summa IV.11 (in Maier, “DasProblem der Quantität” p. 168): “accidentia alia non possunt esse sinequantitate eadem ratione qua nec substantia corporalis potest sine illaesse, cuius altera duarum causarum dare oportet: aut quia scilicet quaelibetessentia corporalis habet propriam extensionem nil aliud dicentem nisi

partes illius essentiae prout sunt in situ diverso continuare, aut quia ipsaquantitas dicit quendam modum existendi, a cuius totali genere non potestaliquid corporale abstrahi, quamvis posset abstrahi a quocumque particulariipsius.” It is unclear whether relations can be modes. In Quod. III.2, he givesa negative answer to the question “An relatio addat aliquid realiter differensab illo in quo immediate fundatur.” As the wording of the question suggests,however, and the text itself confirms, Olivi means to deny only that a relationis a res really distinct from its foundation. Unfortunately, he does not thereoffer any positive account of what relations are.

(5) The great Anneliese Maier has documented Olivi's commitment

to modes in a series of works to which I am much indebted. See “DasProblem der Quantität” pp. 159–75; “An der Schwelle” pp. 355–62; “Dienaturphilosophische Bedeutung” I:358–61 [tr. Sargent, pp. 82–5]; “Bewegungohne Ursache” pp. 290–325. Maier remarks that, although Olivi comes back“immer wieder” to the question of modes, he does so “ohne jemals einepräzise ontologische Definition oder Analyse dieser modi zu geben” (“DasProblem der Quantität” p. 170). This is perhaps fair, inasmuch as Olivi'sdiscussions are scattered and unsystematic, but at the same time I think thathe does manage to identify quite precisely the distinctive features of modes.

(6) I am indebted to Stefan Kirschner and his collaborators for a copy of theirforthcoming edition of Oresme's Physics commentary. There is already aconsiderable literature on Oresme's use of modes in this text, in particulara series of works by Stefano Caroti. A good place to begin is Caroti's “NicoleOresme et les modi rerum,” along with the other papers found in thatsame volume, and the collection of papers in Caroti and Celeyrette, Quia




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inter doctores. On the dating of the commentary to before 1347, and itsrelationship to the condemnation of that year, see Caroti, “Les modi rerum…Encore une fois.” For Oresme's use of modes to account for motion and time,see §18.2.

(7) Oresme offers another general classification of forms at In Phys. III.6:“Tertio distinctio est quod quaedam formae sunt per se existentes, aliaesunt formae accidentales inhaerentes, ut imaginaretur consequenter dealiqua albedine, aliae sunt quae dicuntur conditiones, vel modi rerum, veltaliter se habere, sicut quaedam relationes et huiusmodi.” Here Oresmegoes on to argue that motion is a mode. See also In Phys. I.13: “supponodistinctionem quod haec nomina ‘res,’ ‘ens,’ ‘unum’ sunt equivoca.…Et ideouno modo accipitur ‘ens’ pro aliqua re demonstrata vere existente, sicutest homo, animal et albedo secundum communem viam. Secundo modo

accipitur equivoce et large pro modo rei sive conditione que proprie essetsignificabilis per orationem vel complexe; verbi gratia aetas non est aliquiddemonstratum sed est rem tantum durasse et fuisse a longo tempore, et sicde multis aliis rebus.” Another, similar division of senses of ‘ens’ appears atIn Phys. I.15.

(8) In a work that seems to be slightly earlier than the Physics commentary,Oresme describes Aristotle as holding “quod accidens non est separabilea substantia non solum secundum existentiam…sed etiam secundumquidditatem, quia non habet esse proprie: unde imaginabatur quod, sicutimpossibile est esse figuram sine figurato, ita de quolibet alio accidente,

et hoc est verum nisi per miraculum” (In De an. I.4, p. 119). Oresme showsevery sign of endorsing this view, which makes particularly clear theclose connection between his view and deflationary thirteenth‐centuryaccounts (and with Buridan's reading of Aristotle on accidents [see §11.1]).Interestingly, however, a very similar reworking of this question (ibid.,p. 500.74–81) takes a much more conventional view, declining to treataccidents as without any esse proprie. It seems likely these revisions reflectthe influence of the 1347 condemnations.

For another seemingly pre‐1347 text, see In De gen. et cor. I.2, pp. 11–12: “si

dicatur quod albedo incipit esse per alterationem, hoc non valet, quia albedonihil est nisi hoc esse album.”

(9) Buridan's hostility toward modes, understood reductively, is particularlyclear in this passage: “Ideo propter tales rationes, aliqui antiquissimiposuerunt accidentia non esse entia distincta a substantiis suis, sed deberetdici ‘modos substantiarum’: quod idem non solum nunc est calidum et







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post frigidum, aliter et aliter se habens, immo etiam ipsum nunc estcaliditas et post frigiditas, aliter et aliter se habens, sicut est idem nuncsphaericum et post cubicum. Et hanc opinionem tenuerunt et tenent, utputo, non quia credant eam esse veram, sed quia est difficile eos redarguere

demonstrative” (In De an. III.11). For Marsilius's similar remarks, see In Dean. III.7: “accidentia essent solum quidam modi se habendi substantiarum,qui non sunt distincti a substantia” (in Caroti, “Modi rerum and Materialism”p. 223 n. 39).

Albert of Saxony unfortunately says nothing more about his views on modes.He remarks that the place to take this issue up is not in the Physics, but inhis lectures on the Metaphysics, which have not survived. His reference tothe complexe significabile is to an abstract, proposition‐like entity postulatedby Gregory of Rimini and others. There was a close link between fourteenth‐

century debates over modes, as ways in which substances exist, and statesof affairs, as ways in which the world exists. For complexe significabilein general, see Nuchelmans, Theories of the Proposition and de Libera,Réference vide. For the connection between propositions and modes, seeAdams, “Things versus ‘Hows’ ”; Biard, “Les controverses”; and Caroti, “Laposition” pp. 335–42.

(10) For an even stronger statement of the view that Suárez's influenceis overstated, see Clemenson, Descartes' Theory of Ideas pp. 11–12.Clemenson doubts Suárez's influence even with regard to the theory of modes, and even with respect to Descartes. This seems to me to go too far.

For the contrasting credulous view regarding Suárez's influence, see Doyle,“Suárez, Francisco.”

On the role of scholastic textbooks, see, e.g., Reif, “Textbook Tradition”and Schmitt, “Galilei and the Text‐Book Tradition.” The practice of teachingdirectly from Aristotle's texts was common in the early part of the scholasticera, and was reinvigorated by the textual concerns of the humanists. Latein our period, the practice seems to have been particularly common inProtestant universities (see Methuen, “Teaching of Aristotle”). For oneseventeenth‐century reading list, apparently from a tutor at St. John's

College, Cambridge, see Curtis, Oxford and Cambridge in Transition pp.108–13. Among the many works listed, Suárez is not included, not even inmetaphysics, where instead Fonseca's works are recommended.

(11) See Ord. I.8.1.3 (Vat. IV nn. 138–40), where Scotus appeals to adistinction between realitas and modus to distinguish between whitenessand its degree of intensity. It seems doubtful to me that this plays any




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important role in the later theory of modes. Although Scotus does, as wesaw in §12.5, treat the lesser categories as describing modes rather thanres, and although this is surely an important step toward the later theory of modes, he explicitly postulates a real distinction between these modes and

their subjects, and has nothing to say in this context about a lesser, modaldistinction. Interestingly, Fernández García's Scotistic Lexicon contains alengthy discussion of the various kinds of distinctions (pp. 225–32), but doesnot even mention the modal distinction.

(12) Fonseca (In Meta. V.6.6.2, II:400) recognizes three senses of modiessendi, all of which have figured in earlier chapters: (1) real accidentslike shape, white, and sweet (§10.5); (2) the modi essendi that serve todistinguish the categories (§12.3); (3) the modus essendi that changes whenan accident goes from inhering in a subject to subsisting on its own in the

Eucharistic host (§10.3). Modes in the first sense are really distinct fromtheir subject. Modes in the second sense are distinct merely by reason. Onlymodes in the third sense count as modally distinct from their subject.

On the modal distinctions as predating Fonseca, see his In Meta. V.15.2.5(II:816E): “Opinio eorum qui sentiunt relationem a fundamento distinguimodali distinctione…recentiorum quorundam est propria.” Unfortunately,he mentions no names. Responding to this discussion, Suárez (Disp. meta.47.2.7) ascribes this view to Scotus (with some justification, as we sawin §12.5), and to the Thomist Chrysostomus Javelli, but Fonseca cites thesame passage from Javelli as supporting a formal distinction (II:818B). I

have not been able to consult Javelli's work. Báñez too describes Scotusas distinguishing shape and quantity “non realiter tanquam res a re, seddistinguunter formaliter ex natura rei, vel realiter formaliter, ut alii dicunt, veldistinguuntur sicut res et modus rei” (In Summam theol. I.3.4; I:147b).

Part of what makes it difficult to pin down the history of the modal distinctionis that a distinction between mode and res can appear in so many contexts.Here my interest is in modes as items in the accidental categories, butthe origins of the modal distinction may well lie elsewhere, as the case of Fonseca illustrates. For a detailed discussion of how the modal distinction

appears in late scholastic discussions of essence and existence, for instance,see Wells, “Suarez, Historian.”

Suárez cites Fonseca as a precedent for his use of ‘mode,’ but acknowledgesthat Fonseca “aliqua ponat exempla quae incerta nobis sunt” (Disp. meta.7.1.19). Fonseca is quite clear that modes lack their own existence: “…sirelatio sola modali distinctione distinguatur a fundamento siquidem illud












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ad non significabit entitatem ullam, cui peculiaris existentia conveniat, sedpurum quendam modum essendi ipsius fundamenti” (In Meta. V.15.2.5,II:817BC). Suárez, in addition to criticizing Fonseca in this regard, alsocriticizes him for including shape among real accidents: “et in hoc ordine

ponit figuram, sed immerito, quia in tertio constituitur, quia respectuquantitatis illam afficit tanquam modus, non tanquam res omnino ab illadistincta” (Disp. meta. 7.1.19; cf. Fonseca, In Meta. V.6.6.2, II:400).

(13) For further discussion of the causality exercised by modes, and theirimmediate union with their subjects, see Disp. meta. 16.1.21–22. Thispassage describes the relationship between subject and mode in terms veryclose to those that Auriol had used to describe the relationship betweensubject and accident (§11.4). For another useful discussion of the real andmodal distinctions, see Disp. meta. 47.2.7–9, where it is especially clear how

different Suárez's modal distinction is from Fonseca's.

(14) Although Suárez's choice of inherence as his leading example of a modedoubtless reflects his sense that this is a relatively clear case, his choice alsoreflects his desire to adhere to as much of a tradition as possible. The caseof inherence brings him into connection with Fonseca's third sense of mode(above), and so in turn with the earlier modus essendi tradition that Fonsecais following, which was made especially prominent by Giles of Rome (Ch. 10note 13). The fact that Suárez, in his discussion of precedents for his view,is unable to cite any clearer precedents (he also mentions Giles, Durand of St. Pourçain [note 2 above], and Didacus de Astudillo), is evidence of how

slight a foothold the theory of modes has even at the end of the sixteenthcentury, and so of how important Suárez is in bringing this theory intoprominence. Toletus, interestingly, regards the division into real distinctionsand distinctions of reason as exhaustive—he does not even mention themodal distinction (Comm. in univ. logicam, De praed. in comm. q. 3 [OperaII:193]).

(15) There are few good discussions of the scholastic theory of modes. Thebest I know of is that of Menn, “Suárez and Modes.” Still, I take issue withMenn at various places. He holds, for instance, that “the theory of modes

is characteristic of Jesuit philosophy” (“Suárez and Modes” p. 226), but it isnot clear what his basis for this conclusion is, since the only Jesuit authorshe discusses are Suárez and Fonseca, and he himself establishes quiteclearly that Fonseca's theory of modes is very different from Suárez's. Also,Menn overstates the place of modes in Suárez's category theory: “Suárezmaintains that figures (in the category of quality), and all beings in the







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categories of action, passion, where, when, and position, are modes ratherthan res” (p. 242). This gets the various categories only about half right, as Idiscuss in the main text.

For a good discussion of modes from the side of semantic considerations, seeKlima, “Buridan's Logic,” esp. pp. 490–1.

(16) Burgersdijk's full account of modes runs as follows: “Horum natura itaabstrusa est ut difficile sit eam justa convenientive definitione explicare,faciliusque sit, docere quid modus non sit quem quid sit. Ne tamen nihildicamus, videtur modus esse positiva quaedam, interna, et absolutaappendicula, qua res modificata, vel quoad esse vel quoad fieri, ut it adicam, limitatur ” (Inst. meta. I.7.1, original emphasis). See also ibid.,I.7.4: “Effectum modorum est res modificatas limitare, seu determinare,ac circumscribere”; ibid., I.7.9: “Modi additi rebus modificatis efficiuntaliqualem haud dubie compositionem.…” And see ibid., II.17.12, wheresecondary qualities grounded on the four Aristotelian primary qualities arereal accidents, whereas accidents based on shape and location are meremodes.

Another scholastic case is Eustachius a Sancto Paulo, who characterizes thefour principal categories as res and the lesser six as mere modes. Eustachiusgives no indication that modes are anything over and above the thing theymodify, and in general his discussion betrays no sign of Suárez's influence.See Summa I.1.3b.1.2 (I:46–7): “Ex iis etiam sequitur, quatuor duntaxat

esse praecipuas categorias; nempe Substantiae, Quantitatis, Qualitatis,et Relationis.…Sunt enim ista quatuor entium genera proprie loquendoformaliter seu essentialiter inter se et ab aliis distincta. At vero reliquasex summa genera non proprie dicuntur formaliter seu essentialiter interse aut ab aliis differre, neque enim si praecise spectentur, essentiae suntab aliis distinctae, sed modi tantum reliquorum entium. Ex. gr., actio etpassio sunt modi rei quae producitur, quatenus ab agente fit et in patiensrecipitur: neque enim calefactio sive active sive passive accipiatur alitera calore distinguitur, neque locus aliud quam quantitas essentialiter, sicutnec tempus aut situs; denique habitus essentialiter est ipsa res quae

haberi dicitur.” For the characterization of the four principal categoriesas containing res, see Eustachius's accompanying table (ibid., I:47).Eustachius's discussion of the modal distinction likewise fails to encourageeven slightly the idea that modes have any positive ontological status(Summa IV.3.3.2.7, III:46). Indeed, that discussion, dependent as it is on











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Fonseca's discussion of the modal distinction (note 12 above), does not evenmention modes in our sense as candidates for a modal distinction.

(17) For Gorlaeus on modes in place of accidents see Exercitationes 1.3, p.

13: “Nam peripateticorum accidentia non omnia nobis sunt entia, sed entiummodi: et quae entia sunt, scilicet lumen, calor, frigus etc. non accidentissed physicae naturae sunt species.” His Idea physicae ch. 12 gives a quickoverview of where he thinks one should invoke modes.

(18) For Gassendi, see also Syntagma II.1.6.1, where modes are “somethingfurther” within substances: “Cum ipsae ergo atomi tota sint materia,substantiave corporea quae in ipsis corporibus est, constat, si quid aliudin ipsis corporibus concipimus, esseve animadvertimus id non essesubstantiam sed solum substantiae modum aliquem—hoc est, certamquandam materiae materialiumve principiorum contexturam, concretionem,compositionem, aut consequentem ex ea raritatem vel densitatem, mollitiemvel duritiem, magnitudinem sive molem, delineationem seu figuram,colorem ac speciem, mobilitatem vel torporem, et quae id genus talia sunt,ex quibus ipsum corpus cui insunt tale potius sit ac denominetur quamaliud.…Hinc potest quidem Qualitas universe definiri Modus sese habendisubstantiae, seu status et conditio qua materialia principia inter se commistase habent” (I:372ab).

(19) The long entry for ‘modus’ in Goclenius's Lexicon (1613) does not comeanywhere close to the idea of a mode as an alternative to a real accident.

But the idea appears in Micraelius's Lexicon from a half‐century later, and isperfectly familiar a half‐century after that, in Chauvin's Lexicon. His entry for‘form’ remarks: “est ergo forma corporis naturalis, iuxta Recentiorum placita,nihil aliud quam, ipsius materiae cui inest, modus” (Lexicon p. 260b).

Spinoza's is of course the most prominent seventeenth‐century use of ‘mode,’ at least after Descartes. Given that, for Spinoza, all creaturesare modes (see, e.g., Ethics I P14 cor. 2), the realist–reductivist questionobviously takes on special salience here, but would require a separatestudy. Another noteworthy case is the Port‐Royal Logic (I.2, p. 47): “J'appelle

manière de choses, ou mode, ou attribut, ou qualité, ce qui étant conçu,dans la chose, et comme ne pouvant subsister sans elle, la determine àêtre d'une certaine façon, et la fait nommer telle.” See also Wilkins, Essay towards a Real Character II.1, p. 26, distinguishing substance and accidents:“…such things as subsist by themselves, or which (according to the oldlogical definition) require a subject of inhesion, though they are indeed




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nothing but the modes of substance.” Neither of these latter texts makesclear the extent of its metaphysical commitments.

(20) Hobbes does occasionally use the term ‘modus’ in connection with

accidents, remarking for instance that being white and the like “nihil aliudesse praeter corporis modum (possem apertius dicere actionem), quo varieagens in sentientes nunc uno modo nunc alio modo apparet” (De mundo28.4). What the parenthetical remark tells us is that modes for Hobbes arenot to be construed realistically, but are a description of the actions thata body undertakes in virtue of which it causes a certain experience in aperceiver.

(21) Given what Descartes thinks the modes of body are—e.g., size, shape,motion—it is obvious that they satisfy determinacy, at least with respect toany finite body. The situation is much less obvious for the modes of thought,but Descartes notoriously insists on the point even here—e.g., to Burman:“Et mens nunquam sine cogitatione esse potest; potest quidem esse sinecogitatione hac aut illa, sed tamen non sine omni, eodem modo ut corpus nequidem per ullum momentum sine extensione esse potest” (V:150).

(22) Kaufman, “Divine Simplicity,” contains a careful presentation of Descartes's various distinctions. Regarding dual separability and the realdistinction, see Med. VI (VII:78) and the Sixth Replies (VII:434): “quidquid estreale potest separatim ob omni alio subiecto existere; quicquid autem itaseparatim potest existere est substantia, non accidens.” Regarding one‐way

modal separability, see Med. VI (VII:78), Broadsheet (VIIIB:350), and a letterfrom around 1645: “Ita figura et motus sunt modi proprie dicti substantiaecorporeae, quia idem corpus potest existere nunc cum hac figura, nunc cumalia, nunc cum motu, nunc sine motu, quamvis, ex adverso, neque haecfigura neque hic motus possint esse sine hoc corpore” (IV:349). Rozemond,Descartes's Dualism pp. 5–6, is very good on the point that separabilityis merely a sign of a real distinction, and that both the real and modaldistinctions—in both Suárez and Descartes—are defined in terms of the sortsof things being distinguished.

(23) The Meditations' account of degrees of reality is set forth yet anothertime in the geometric restatement at the end of the Second Replies, axiom6 (VII:165): “Sunt diversi gradus realitatis, sive entitatis; nam substantiaplus habet realitatis, quam accidens vel modus; et substantia infinita, quamfinita.” See also to More, Aug. 1649 (V:403): “Translatio illa quam motumvoco non est res minoris entitatis quam sit figura: nempe est modus incorpore.”




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(24) For Descartes's ongoing correspondence regarding the role of modesin the Eucharist, see the Feb. 1645 letter to Mesland (IV:163–4): “…par cemot de superficie, je n'entens point quelque substance, ou nature réelle,qui puisse être detruite par la toute puissance de Dieu, mais seulement

un mode, ou une façon d'être.…”; see also the recently discovered spring1646 letter to Clerselier, where, by analogy, the surface in between thecandle and the air endures through changes to each, “et ayant les mêmesdispositions et mouvements excite ensuite les mêmes sentiments” (IV:743). Then, discussing the Eucharistic case directly: “la grandeur, la situation, lafigure, cette superficie moyenne, etc., comme ce n'êtaient que des modesou des façons d'être du pain et non point quelque chose de réel differentdu pain, il est aisé de concevoir que n'y arrivant aucun changement en cesmodes a cause que le Corps de N. S. J. C. prend precisement la place du pain,ils doivent encore paraître les mêmes et produire les mêmes effets, c'est

a dire exciter en nous les mêmes sentiments” (ibid., emphasis added). Forsurfaces both as modes and as the objects of sensation, see also the SixthReplies (VII:434): “cum omnis sensus tactu fiat, nihil praeter superficiemcorporum potest sentiri,…quae nihil aliud est quam modus.” See as well a1641 letter to Mersenne (III:387 n. 7).

For a careful and nuanced discussion of the historical context of Descartes's discussion of the Eucharist, see Ariew, “Descartes and the Jesuits.” On Descartes's appeal to the surface as a mode, see Laymon,“Transubstantiation.” For some reflections on why Descartes had to get intothis theological territory, given his rejection of real qualities, see §20.3.

It is unclear to me how controversial it is among modern scholars to identifyDescartes as a modal realist; there is surprisingly little discussion of theissue in the recent literature. For one particularly forthright example of the sort of reductive reading I mean to reject, see Nelson, “Introduction”:“The inventory of substances is the complete inventory of Descartes'sontology…” (p. 103); “It should not be thought, however, that modes havea kind of existence apart from the modified substance” (p. 104); “Modes arenot a separate item in the inventory of the universe. Instead, they provideways of conceiving substances as limited” (p.104). In contrast, Normore

has argued for the reality of Descartes's modes in an unpublished paper,“Cartesian Modes,” putting particular emphasis on Descartes's need to givemotion some reality. See also Chappell, “Descartes on Substance” pp. 252–3.

(25) Scheibler has an excellent discussion of the real distinction andhow two‐way separability serves as a defeasible test (Metaphys. I.8.3).







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Regarding the modal distinction he writes: “Ego primo dico non esseprosus necessarium ad distinctionem realem et rationis addere tertiam,quomodocunque dicatur, modalis an aliter” (ibid. I.8.5.1 n. 55). He thinks thiseven though he admits modes into his ontology (§13.4).

(26) For Ockham against an intermediary distinction, see e.g. Ord. I.2.9 (Op.theol. II:317): “…omnia quae sunt extra animam, saltem in creaturis, si sintaliquo modo distincta, sunt res realiter distinctae.” For further references anddiscussion, see Adams, William Ockham I:46–52. Suárez remarks that “multinegant posse excogitari aut intelligi mediam aliquam distinctionem” (Disp.meta. 7.1.9), and goes on to cite a long list of Thomists. See also thediscussion in Fonseca, In Meta. V.6.7 (II:404–10).

(27) For discussion of separability and the real distinction in Scotus, seeKing, “Scotus on Metaphysics” pp. 21–2; Henninger, Relations pp. 79–97; Pini, “Scotus's Realist Conception” p. 95. It is unfortunately commonamong recent scholars to suppose that a real distinction requires two‐wayseparability—see, e.g., Des Chene, Physiologia p. 124: “Substantial formand prime matter are really distinct only if each is capable, at least by theabsolute power of God, of existing without the other.”

Ockham makes a long and careful reply to Scotus on relations (Ord. I.30.1,Op. theol. IV:281–319), in which he accepts Scotus's major premise (IV:310).See the discussions in Adams, William Ockham ch. 7 and Henninger,Relations chs. 5, 7. Adams agrees with Ockham on Scotus's major premise,

calling it “uncontestable” (I:218). In the very similar discussion of LecturaII.1.4–5, Scotus remarks that “maior est ita manifesta quod est primumprincipium” (n. 185). Menn identifies Suárez as “the ‘shameless’ person of Scotus's fears, who denies that ‘things one of which can remain without theother are really distinct’ ” (“Suárez and Modes” p. 241). This is misleading,however, because Scotus is talking about someone so shameless as to denyall real distinctions, even between Socrates and Plato, or Socrates and astone (Ord. II.1.4–5; Vat. VII nn. 202–3). His argument is then that if we denythis, in an effort to avoid real relations, we have no way of responding tothe shameless monist. In fact Suárez himself offers an argument much like

Scotus's for the sufficiency of one‐way separability as a refutation of identity(Disp. meta. 7.2.3).

(28) For Ockham's insistence on two‐way separability, see e.g. Quod. VI.6(Op. theol. IX:605): “omnis res absoluta, distincta loco et subiecto ab alia reabsoluta, potest per divinam potentiam existere, alia re absoluta destructa.”See also Sent . prol. q. 1 (Op. theol. I:38) and the discussions in §14.3 and







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§19.2. The formulation in the main text is worded so as to exclude the caseof God and creatures. Since God cannot not exist, creatures cannot beseparated from God, even though they are really distinct from God. For abrief but very helpful discussion of these issues, see Adams, William Ockham

I:16–19. Adams alludes to a further complication here regarding wholesand parts, when she exempts from two‐way separability two distinct thingsthat stand to each other as whole to part. This is a tricky issue, given thatOckham denies that wholes are really distinct from their parts taken together(§28.5). Still, inasmuch as a whole is distinct from any one of its parts(§26.2), and yet cannot exist without it (§29.2), something like her furtherrestriction does seem necessary. Because of the complexity of the issues,the formulation in the main text, and in subsequent chapters, regretfullyignores these complications.

Against the requirement of two‐way separability, see Burley, In Phys. I, f.14vb: “illud principium est falsissimum et contradictionem includens, scilicetquod deus possit omnem rem absolutam distinctam ab alia re absolutafacere sine ea.” The same point is constantly urged by Thomists—see, e.g.,Durand of St. Pourçain, Quod. II.4, p. 189; Capreolus, Defensiones II.18.1.3(IV:150b); Cajetan, In De ente q. 9 (tr. p. 191); Báñez, In Summam theol.I.3.4, q. 2.

For Hume's version of the separability principle, see Treatise I.4.5, p. 233,and appendix, p. 634.

(29) Descartes also mentions location as a mode of extension at PrinciplesI.65: “figuras omnes, et situs partium, et ipsarum motus.” This passagesuggests that the Latin of Principles I.48 is probably mispunctuated: ratherthan the somewhat peculiar phrase ‘…situs, partium ipsarum divisibilitas, ettalia…’ it should likely read ‘…situs partium, ipsarum divisibilitas, et talia.’ The main text translates accordingly. The French translation also correctsthe mistake, with the phrase “situation des parties.” See also the thirdparagraph of Meditation V (VII:63), which likewise lists ‘situs’ among themodes, although without using the term ‘modus.’

(30) The obscurity of the notion of partial identity makes it tempting to treatthe modal distinction as entailing either that mode and res are not in anyrespect identical, or that they are wholly identical. Menn, for instance, writesthat the Jesuits “think that all accidents in the last seven categories arereally identical with some substance or quantity or quality, and distinguishedat most formally or modally” (“Suárez and Modes” p. 231). This is true,however, only if “really identical” is understood in a rather special sense, not











as meaning wholly identical, as one would expect, but as meaning not really distinct . Suárez's own practice, however, is to think of identity as coming indegrees (see, e.g., Disp. meta. 7.3.5). For other examples of his appealingto a “kind of identity” see Disp. meta. 7.2.9, where two modes of the same

substance are merely modally distinct, “quia licet non ratione sui, formaliterloquendo, saltem ratione rei quam modificant habent inter se quamdamrealem identitatem”; ibid., par. 10: “quae huiusmodi sunt non habent exproprio conceptu sufficientem entitatem in qua conserventur, sed solum exquadam identitate ad ea quibus insunt.”

(31) It seems to me Gassendi has in mind the indeterminacy of substanceapart from its modes in the Fifth Objections when he wonders how Descartescan strip the forms off and still claim to grasp what the wax is. “miror quidicas te, peracta illa detractione formarum quasi vestium, perfectius atque

evidentius percipere quid cera sit. Nam percipis quidem ceram ejusvesubstantiam debere esse aliquid præter ejusmodi formas; at quid illud sit,non percipis, nisi nos fallis.…Si dicas te absque ulla extensione, figura,coloreque concipere, dic, bona fide: qualenam ergo?” (VII: 271–2). Gassendi,I take it, accepts the indeterminacy of substance, but wants Descartes toacknowledge the epistemic consequences.

A conception of Descartes's indeterminate substance much like my own canbe found in Secada, Cartesian Metaphysics, e.g., pp. 14, 190, 249, thoughSecada does not seem to feel the obscurity of this doctrine.


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