СУЩЕСТВЕННЫЕ И НЕСУЩЕСТВЕННЫЕ СВОЙСТВА

Essential and Inessential Properties

The properties of things or phenomena distinguished according to the part they play in these things and phenomena. No thing can exist without its essential properties, but it can exist without some inessential properties. The essential properties are determined by the essence of the object.

In philosophy, essential properties were known as attributes, and inessential properties, as accidents. Drawing a distinction between properties is important for a characteristic of the knowledge of things as a definite evaluation flowing from the objective existence of objects.

By contrast, subjective idealism explains the distinction between the essential properties and the inessential properties from the standpoint of the subject, and fails to find any such distinction in nature itself. The difficulty of making a distinction between the two lies in the fact that in the initial stages of cognition both are brought out by means of the same logical method, namely, comparison. The actual distinction is arrived at later by tracing the properties to the essence, and when the essential reveals itself as the universal.

Human practice, in which a thing appears in its essential properties, is a decisive condition for drawing the distinction.