Page:Catholic Encyclopedia, volume 1.djvu/124

ACCESSUS  is gradual and imperceptible, the augmentation belongs to the owner of the land. If it has been sudden and in large quantity, by the common law it belongs to the State. (2) Artificial.—This sort occurs (a) by specification, when one's labour or artistic talent is employed upon materials owned by another, so that a new substance or thing is produced. Where this is done in good faith, the product belongs to the artist or labourer with the obligation on his part of indemnifying the owner of the materials. (b) By adjunction, when one's labour and material have been so united with the property of another that they cannot be separated. The resultant then belongs to him who has contributed the more important component. (c) By blending, when materials of equal value appertaining to different owners, are mixed together. The thing or its price is then to be divided according to natural equity between the original possessors, if the mixture has been made in good faith; otherwise the weight of law is thrown in his favour whose right has been violated. (3) Mixed.—An example of the third kind of accession is the building of a house on another's ground, or the planting of trees or sowing of vegetables in another's field. The house, trees, etc., belong to the master of the soil after making suitable compensation to the builder, planter, etc.

2em

Accessus, a term applied to the voting in conclave for the election of a pope, by which a cardinal changes his vote and "accedes" to some other candidate. When the votes of the cardinals have been counted after the first balloting and the two-thirds majority has fallen to none of those voted for, at the following vote opportunity is granted for a cardinal to change his vote, by writing, Accedo domino Cardinali, mentioning some one of those who have been voted for, but not the cardinal for whom he has already voted. If he should not wish to change his vote, the cardinal can vote Nemini, i.e. for no one. If these supplementary votes of accession, added to those a candidate has received, equal two-thirds of the total vote, then there is an election. If not, the ballots are burned, and the usual ballot takes place the next day. (See .)

2em

Acciajuoli, name of three cardinals belonging to an illustrious Florentine family of this name.— noted for his learning, experience, and integrity, b. 1349; d. at Pisa, 31 May, 1408. He was made Archbishop of Florence in 1383, and Cardinal in 1385 by Pope Urban VI. He resisted all endeavours that were made to bring him over to the antipope, Clement VII, and defended by word and deed the regularity of the election of Urban VI. After this Pope's death, half the votes in the succeeding conclave were for Acciajuoli; but to end the schism, he directed the election towards Boniface IX. The new Pope made him Cardinal-Bishop of Ostia, and sent him to Germany, Slavonia, and Bulgaria to settle difficulties there. He afterwards became Governor of Naples, and guardian of the young King Ladislaus, whom he brought to Naples, and some time later accompanied on his march into Hungary. On his return he reconciled the Pope with the Orsini, and reformed the Benedictine monastery of St. Paul in Rome. He died on his way to Pisa, and was buried in Florence, at the Certosa, a monastic foundation of his family.—, b. at Florence, 1630; d. in Rome, 23 February, 1719, as Cardinal-Bishop of Ostia, in his eighty-ninth year.—, b. in Rome, 12 March, 1700. He was nuncio in Portugal, but was expelled with military force by Pombal (August, 1760) because of his interference in behalf of the Jesuits. Clement XIII made him Cardinal in 1759; he died at Ancona, as Bishop of that see, 4 July, 1766 (Duhr, Pombal, 1891, 121 sqq.). 2em

Accident [Latin accidere, to happen what happens to be in a subject; any contingent, or non-essential attribute].

I.—The obvious division of things into the stable and the unstable, the more or less independently subsistent and the dependent, or essentially inherent, appears beset with obscurity and difficulty as soon as it is brought under reflective consideration. In their endeavour to solve the problem, philosophers have followed two extreme tendencies. Some have denied the objectivity of the substantial or noumenal element, and attributed it wholly or in part to the mind; others have made the phenomenal or accidental element subjective, and accorded objectivity to substance alone. These two extreme tendencies are represented among the ancient Greek materialists and atomists on the one hand and the Eleatic pantheists on the other. Aristotle and his medieval followers steer a middle course. They hold to the objectivity both of substance and of accident, though they recognize the subjective factor in the mode of perception. They use the term accident to designate any contingent (i.e. non-essential) relation between an attribute and its subject. As such it is a merely logical denomination, one of the five predicables or universals, modes of systematic classification genus, difference, species, property, accident. In this sense it is called predicable, as distinguished from predicamental, accident, the latter term standing for a real objective form or status of things, and denoting a being whose essential nature it is to inhere in another as in a subject. Accident thus implies inexistence in substance—i.e. not as the contained in the container, not as part in the whole, not as a being in time or place, not as effect in cause, not as the known in the knower; but as an inherent entity or mode in a subject which it determines. Accidents modify or denominate their subject in various ways, and to these correspond the nine "Categories": (1) quantity, in virtue whereof material substance has integrant, positional parts, divisibility, location, impenetrability, etc.; (2) quality, which modifies substance immediately and intrinsically, either statically or dynamically, and includes such inherents of substance as habit, faculty, sense-stimuli, and figure or shape; (3) relation, the bearing of one substance on another (e.g. paternity). These three groups are called intrinsic accidents, to distinguish them from the remaining six groups—action, passion, location, duration, position, habiliment—which, as their names sufficiently suggest, are simply extrinsic denominations accruing to a substance because of its bearings on some other substance. Quantity and quality, and, in a restricted sense, relation are said to be absolute accidents, because they are held to superadd some special form of being to the substance wherein they reside. For this reason a real, and not a merely conceptual, distinction between them and their subject is maintained. Arguments for the physical reality of this distinction are drawn from experience; (a) internal-consciousness attesting that the permanent, substantial self is subject to constantly-shifting accidental states—and (b) external experience, which witnesses to a like permanence of things beneath the incessantly varying phenomena of nature. The supernatural order also furnishes an argument in the theology of the infused virtues which are habits supervening on, and hence really distinct from, the substance of the natural mind.

II.—With the reaction against scholasticism, led on by Descartes, a new theory of the accident is