Immaterial substance

“ But to return to Immaterial Spirits, that they should rule and govern infinite corporeal matter, like so many demy-Gods, by a dilating nod, and a contracting frown, and cause so many kinds and sorts of Corporeal Figures to arise, being Incorporeal themselves, is Impossible for me to conceive; for how can an Immaterial substance cause a Material corporeal substance, which has no motion in it self, to form so many several and various figures and creatures, and make so many alterations, and continue their kinds and sorts by perpetual successions of Particulars? ”

“ A Substance is a thing which can be conceived to exist by itself. All bodies are material substances. The soul, as a thinking subject, is an immaterial substance.
§ 81. An Attribute is a thing which depends for its existence upon a substance, e.g. greenness, hardness, weight, which cannot be conceived to exist apart from green, hard, and heavy substances.
§ 82. A Quality is an attribute which does not require more than one substance for its existence. The attributes just mentioned are qualities. ”

“ Besides the complex ideas we have of material sensible substances, of which I have last spoken, – by the simple ideas we have taken from those operations of our own minds, which we experiment daily in ourselves, as thinking, understanding, willing, knowing, and power of beginning motion, &c., co-existing in some substance, we are able to frame the complex idea of an immaterial spirit. And thus, by putting together the ideas of thinking, perceiving, liberty, and power of moving themselves and other things, we have as clear a perception and notion of immaterial substances as we have of material. ”

“ Here, then, is another contradiction to the material, and therefore another expression for the trivial: matter, as against vacancy or the privation of matter, yields the antithesis of material or immaterial, substantial and unsubstantial; matter, as against form, yields the antithesis of substance and shape, or otherwise of material and modal—what is matter and what is the mere modification of matter, its variation by means of ornament or shape. ”

“ Next, I say, It is more easie for the rational matter to put it self into such figures, and to make such encounters, then for an Immaterial mind or substance to imagine it; for no imagination can be without figure, and how should an Immaterial created substance present such Figures, but by making them either in it self or upon matter? ”

“ For how that can pierce, seal, and print a figure, which hath neither substance nor matter, my reason is not able to comprehend, since there can be no figure without matter or substance, they being inseparably united together, so, that where figure is, there is also substance, and where substance is, there is also figure; neither can any figure be made without a substance. You may say, Ideas, though they are not material or corporeal beings themselves, yet they may put on figures, and take bodies when they please: I answer, That then they can do more then Immaterial Spirits ”

“ Your Author endeavours very much to prove the existency of a Natural Immaterial Spirit, whom he defines to be an Incorporeal substance, Indivisible, that can move it self, can penetrate, contract and dilate it self, and can also move and alter the matter. ”

“ But we do not understand material and immaterial substances in the same way. The former we understand by a process of abstraction, which is impossible in the case of the latter, for there are no phantasms of what is immaterial. ”

“ The Immaterial does not exist; for even the Material which is not, is the Immaterial. Everything that is, is material. Now, however, there is nothing that is not; consequently, there is everywhere nothing immaterial. ”

“ What is in a substance cannot be separate from it. And is not all matter a compound of qualities? Hardness, extension, form, color, motion, rest—take away all these, and where is matter? To conceive of mind independent of matter, is as if we should conceive of color independent of a substance colored: What is form, if not a body of a particular shape? What is thought, if not something which thinks? Destroy the substance, and you destroy its properties; and so equally—destroy the properties, and you destroy the substance. ”

“ Each idea is an effect, but however difficult it may be to recur to the cause, can we possibly suppose it is not ascribable to a cause? If we can only form ideas of material substances, how can we suppose the cause of our ideas can possibly be immaterial? ”

“ If the word immateriality be understood, as it very well may, in the sense of universality, we may assert, with perfect truth and propriety, and as a known and proved fact, the immateriality of the mind, ego, or thinking principle. ”

“ What, after all, he exclaims, do we know of matter but as a something which possesses certain influences over us?—a something which is utterly unrepresented to us by the senses. And now this word "substance," which formerly expressed a thing so well known, and every moment handled and looked at, is transformed to an invisible, intangible, imperceptible substratum—an unknown upholder of certain qualities, or, in more exact language, an unseen power clothing itself in our attributes—an existence far more resembling what is popularly understood by spirit than by matter. ”

“ This I imagine may have in part arisen from the prepossession, which has almost universally prevailed, that ideas are immaterial beings, and therefore possess no properties in common with solid matter. ”

“ It should be noted that while accidents by inhesion modify substance, they are witnesses to its nature, being the medium whereby the mind, through a process of abstraction and inference, builds its analogical concepts of the constitution of substances. ”

“ But this consideration forces us still further, and we feel compelled to ask ourselves, whether, with our minds constituted as they are, we can believe in, or understand any thing wholly immaterial? Whether we can imagine the existence, for, example, of "force" without matter?—a shape which is formless?—a form visible to the eye, yet wholly immaterial? ”

“ But substances are not all that exist; attributes, if such things are to be spoken of, must be said to exist; feelings also exist. Yet when we speak of an object, or of a thing, we are almost always supposed to mean a substance. There seems a kind of contradiction in using such an expression as that one thing is merely an attribute of another thing. ”

“ What do we mean by saying that accidents inhere in substances as their subjects? Here we must at once lay aside as erroneous the crude conception of something as located spatially within something else, as contained in container, as e.g. water in a vessel; and the equally crude conception of something being in something else as a part is in the whole, as e.g. an arm is in the body. Such imaginations are wholly misleading.
The actually existing substance has its being or reality; it is an actual essence. ”

“ Is there anything more contradictory, more impossible, or more mysterious, than the creation of matter by an immaterial Being, who Himself immutable, causes the continual changes that we see in the world? ”

“ When we ask, however, how this non-physical reality of which the physical order is the phenomenal manifestation to our senses, is to be thought of, we find ourselves at once plunged into the same difficulties which we have already met, in a more general form, in discussing the concept of Substance. Popular thought, and science so far as it is content to accept the notions of popular thought without criticism, have commonly fallen back on the idea of the non-phenomenal ground of the physical order as an unperceived “substratum.” ”

“ Immaterial causations are those forces which act more directly upon man's immaterial nature, as association, religion, wealth, leisure, and government. Continuing the analysis, let us first examine physical stimulants. ”

“ And as for Colours, Sents, Light, Sound, Heat, Cold, and the like, those that believe them not to be substances or material things, surely their brain or heart (take what place you will for the forming of Conceptions) moves very Irregularly, and they might as well say, Our sensitive Organs are not material; for what Objects soever, that are subject to our senses, cannot in sense be denied to be Corporeal, when as those things that are not subject to our senses, can be conceived in reason to be Immaterial? But some Philosophers striving to express their wit, obstruct reason ”

“ Even those attributes of an object which might seem with greatest propriety to be called states of the object itself, its sensible qualities, its colour, hardness, shape, and the like, are in reality (as no one has pointed out more clearly than Brown himself) phenomena of causation, in which the substance is distinctly the agent, or producing cause, the patient being our own organs, and those of other sentient beings. ”

“ The absence from matter of any such substance is evidenced by the absurdity involved in the idea of its presence. Suppose the substance to exist: the qualities inherent in it must needs be as completely distinct from itself as pins are from a pincushion; the extension and solidity of an extended, solid substance can no more be identical with the substance than the nominative is identical with the genitive case. ”

“ And, lastly, when the author, correcting himself, as we think, says that the notion of substance reduces itself to what he calls a “fundamental phenomenon,” he does nothing but change the word, and in reality reverts to what we call substance. For in what sense does anything fundamental—that is to say, that to which other phenomena ultimately reduce themselves, and which cannot be reduced to any other—still preserve the name of phenomenon? ”

“ Whence we conclude that the principles of a material nature are the act by which such a nature is determined to act in a sphere and to cause local movement, and the potency on account of which the same nature is liable to receive local movement. And since the said act is called “the substantial form,” and the said potency “the matter,” we conclude that the essence of material substance consists of matter and substantial form.
This conclusion is by no means new; it expresses, on the contrary, the universal doctrine of the ancient philosophers on the essence of material substance. ”

“ But that does not make him an immaterial being—a being that has no properties in common with matter. The expression "an immaterial being," is a contradiction in terms. Immateriality is only another name for nothing. It is the negative of all existence. ”

“ Hence, while substances are universally regarded as real principles of their properties—as, for instance, the soul in regard to intellect and will, or corporeal substance in regard to quantity—they are not really efficient causes of their properties, i.e. they do not produce these properties by action. ”

“ The final destruction of all that we name material hasteth. Materialism is self-love, and more opaque than the solidity of material atoms is the condensation of mortal mind; but instead of concentrated matter we find it concentrated error. ”

“ Thus even if you admit that the adherents of substance can be allowed to conceive substance as matter, it is a fraud to slip substance into space on the plea that space expresses relations between substances. ”

“ Hence the words “matter” and “form,” as employed by us, have such a clear and precise sense that no room is left for their misinterpretation.
We therefore know, and clearly too, the essence of primitive material substance, whatever may be said to the contrary by some admirers of the old philosophy, who spurn the discoveries of modern physics, or by some [pg 674] modern thinkers, who revile all metaphysical analysis as mere rubbish.
The essential definition of material substance, as such, is therefore the following: Material substance is a being fit to cause and receive merely local motion. ”

“ But as for Created Immaterial Spirits, as they call them, it may be questioned whether they be Immaterial, or not; for there may be material Spirits as well as immaterial, that is, such pure, subtil and agil substances as cannot be subject to any humane sense, which may be purer and subtiller then the most refined air, or purest light ”

“ But the inconsistencies we have already found inherent in such a conception of Substance as is here presupposed, so inevitably make themselves felt upon any serious examination, that the doctrine regularly appears in the history of thought as a mere temporary halting-place in the advance to the more radical notion of matter as the entirely unknown non-phenomenal substratum of the sensible properties of bodies. ”

“ According to their opinion, colour, taste, motion or rest, combination or separation, etc., can be predicated of all substances, and, if a substance have the attribute of life, it must at the same time possess such other kinds of accidents, as wisdom or folly, freewill or the reverse, power or weakness, perception or any of its opposites, and, in short, the substance must have the one or the other of all correlative accidents appertaining to a living being. ”

“ The belief that what is ultimately real must be immutable is a very common one: it gave rise to the metaphysical notion of substance, and finds, even now, a wholly illegitimate satisfaction in such scientific doctrines as the conservation of energy and mass. ”

“ Man's organism was material,—why should not his mind, his most intimate self, follow the same analogy, and be material too? Hence its materiality was assumed. The word, indeed, by which the thinking principle is designated in all languages bears evidence to the inveteracy of the superstition that the conception of mind might be formed by conceiving a material substance of extreme fineness and tenuity. ”

“ Neither am I against those Spirits, which the holy Scripture mentions, as Angels and Devils, and the divine Soul of Man; but I say onely, that no Immaterial Spirit belongs to Nature, so as to be a part thereof; for Nature is Material, or Corporeal; and whatsoever is not composed of matter or body, belongs not to Nature; nevertheless, Immaterial Spirits may be in Nature, although not parts of Nature. But there can neither be an Immaterial Nature, nor a Natural Immaterial; Nay, our very thoughts and conceptions of Immaterial are Material, as made of self-moving Matter. ”