TREATISE ON THE CONSERVATION AND GOVERNMENT OF CREATURES · Question 1043

1Reply to Objection 3: Forms and accidents are not complete beings, since they do not subsist: but each one of them is something "of a being"; for it is called a being, because something is by it. Yet so far as their mode of existence is concerned, they are not entirely reduced to nothingness; not that any part of them survives, but that they remain in the potentiality of the matter, or of the subject.