This essay suggests that Aquinas held a form of gradualism about material substances, according to which kinds of material things differ from each other in the degree in which their instances are unified by their specific principles of unity. The essay also discusses the relation between the gradualist claim and the political community, seen as a kind of substance: the case of the political communities brings exegetical weight to the argument supporting a substantial gradualist interpretation of Aquinas; on the other hand, the gradualist reading sheds new and significant light on Aquinas’ practical philosophy. The essay offers new insights into Aquinas’s conception of the form-matter relation and on his view bout the metaphysical consistency of political reality.
