  Of course, we can truly say many things about a given subject.  (E.g., ‘The cat is black’, ‘The cat is fat’, ‘The cat is asleep’, etc.)  The predicates of all these true statements correspond to forms really inhering in the relatively indeterminate subject. Hence we can speak of a “plurality of forms.” But the “plurality of forms,” in the sense in which our authors speak of it, refers to something more restricted, to the fact that we can predicate predicates of a given subject in a certain “nested” order. We can, for example, while taking about the very same cat, say “This is a body” (i.e., it is corporeal), “This body is alive” (i.e., it is an organism), “This organism is sensate” (i.e., it has sensation, it is an animal), “This animal is a cat,” “This cat is black,” etc. Each such predication attributes a form to the underlying, “material,” indeterminate subject, and each such subject is in turn a composite of a form and a deeper, underlying material subject. The picture we get then is the picture of some kind of primordial matter, corresponding to the bare ‘this' of the first predication (“This is a body”), to which is added a series of forms one on top of the other in a certain order, each one limiting and narrowing down the preceding ones. The structure that results is a kind of laminated structure, a metaphysical “onion” with several layers. On this picture, of course, substantial and accidental forms are both “layers of the onion” in exactly the same sense. The distinction between essential and accidental features of a thing would therefore have to be drawn in some other way.