essence

Behind every sense of the word stands a philosopher's coinage: Latin essentia was built from esse, "to be," to translate Greek ousía, "being." In everyday prose it often sets the core of a thing against its outward signs, as when Addison calls gifts and alms "the expressions, not the essence" of charity. It usually takes of plus the thing described, as in the essence of jazz.

The kitchen and sickroom sense covers vanilla essence on the spice shelf and, in the nineteenth century, a restorative for the weak. In Letitia Elizabeth Landon's Romance and Reality (1831), a sleeper's face is bathed with essence. Harriet W. Daly in 1887 has fowls made into essence for fever patients. Unlike the distilled concentrate, it need not be distilled, and the flavor usually comes first: almond essence.

Pope's The Rape of the Lock (1712) shows the perfume sense in the plural, among the cares of a lady's toilette: the duty is not to "let th' imprison'd essences exhale." Scents kept in stoppered bottles are pictured as fragrance waiting to escape. The countable plural suits a dressing table of perfumes; the singular more often names a scent hanging in the air.

Distillation takes the word's philosophical meaning literally: what remains in the vial is offered as the plant's very being, the Latin essentia. The usual pattern names the source, either after of (essence of jojoba) or before the noun (rose essence). The word is countable or uncountable. Kept for flavoring or tonics, the same liquid shades into the kitchen extract; worn on the skin, it becomes a perfume.

Here the word is a term of art, paired against accident. An accident is a property a thing may have or lose and remain itself; its essence cannot go without the thing going too. The distinction is central to Aristotelian metaphysics, and existentialists made a slogan of reversing it: existence precedes essence. Unlike the everyday "inherent nature" sense, it claims to name what is real rather than apparent.

Milton's spirits in Paradise Lost (1667) show the older, material reading: their "Essence pure" is "uncompounded," not bound by joint, limb or bone. The question is what something is made of, not what it is like. The idea survives in quintessence, the "fifth essence" once held to compose the celestial spheres, which is why that word still suggests the purest form of a thing.

From what a spirit is made of, as in the "constituent substance" sense, the word slides to the spirit itself, and then it can be counted: an essence, essences. Washington Irving's German student in 1824 indulges in "fanciful speculations on spiritual essences," like Swedenborg. When the plural appears beside words like spiritual, read it as beings, not qualities.