Further, if
what exists is not a plurality of souls, but a plurality of parts of
one soul, which ought we to investigate first, the whole soul or its
parts? (It is also a difficult problem to decide which of these
parts are in nature distinct from one another.) Again, which ought
we to investigate first, these parts or their functions, mind or
thinking, the faculty or the act of sensation, and so on? If the
investigation of the functions precedes that of the parts, the further
question suggests itself: ought we not before either to consider the
correlative objects, e.g. of sense or thought? It seems not only
useful for the discovery of the causes of the derived properties of
substances to be acquainted with the essential nature of those
substances (as in mathematics it is useful for the understanding of
the property of the equality of the interior angles of a triangle to
two right angles to know the essential nature of the straight and
the curved or of the line and the plane) but also conversely, for
the knowledge of the essential nature of a substance is largely
promoted by an acquaintance with its properties: for, when we are able
to give an account conformable to experience of all or most of the
properties of a substance, we shall be in the most favourable position
to say something worth saying about the essential nature of that
subject; in all demonstration a definition of the essence is
required as a starting-point, so that definitions which do not
enable us to discover the derived properties, or which fail to
facilitate even a conjecture about them, must obviously, one and
all, be dialectical and futile.
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