Simple substance

“ But this word, strange as the fact may appear, is still more completely spoiled for the purpose which it seemed expressly made for, than the word Thing. Being is, by custom, exactly synonymous with substance; except that it is free from a slight taint of a second ambiguity; being implied impartially to matter and to mind, while substance, though originally and in strictness applicable to both, is apt to suggest in preference the idea of matter. Attributes are never called Beings; nor are feelings. ”

“ I would fain ask those philosophers, who found so much of their reasonings on the distinction of substance and accident, and imagine we have clear ideas of each, whether the idea of substance be derived from the impressions of sensation or reflection? ”

“ 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? ”

“ But the spatial or primary qualities of a thing, although they may seem more permanent and more essential to the reality of the thing than the secondary qualities, are nevertheless only qualities. They are not the thing itself, but ways in which it affects us. It seems to us that these qualities must inhere in or belong to the thing, and so we try to form the idea of the real thing as a substance or substratum which has the qualities. ”

“ It is, you will perceive, nothing more than the enumeration of the constituent parts of the substance, and considers the substance, simply as it exists alone, without regard to any other bodies that may exist around it, or near it, and without any allusion to change of any kind. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Then, the qualities of all things, whether external or internal, the subtle or the coarse, will be apprehended, and the mind, in its entire substance and its relations to things, will be perfectly intelligent. ”

“ For it is in virtue of the concept of substance that the others also are said to be — quantity and quality and the like; for all will be found to involve the concept of substance, as we said in the first part of our work. ”

“ For instance, people speak of something which has certain attributes as form, and of something else which has certain other attributes as substance; ignorant as they are that form and substance are to be found existing without those particular attributes. ”

“ It has practically driven out that conception of 'Substance' which earlier philosophers set such store by, and by which so much unifying work used to be done—universal substance which alone has being in and from itself, and of which all the particulars of experience are but forms to which it gives support. ”

“ A 'thing' for instance is a being, or ENS. An ENS is a subject in which qualities 'inhere.' A subject is a substance. Substances are of kinds, and kinds are definite in number, and discrete. These distinctions are fundamental and eternal. As terms of DISCOURSE they are indeed magnificently useful, but what they mean, apart from their use in steering our discourse to profitable issues, does not appear. If you ask a scholastic philosopher what a substance may be in itself, apart from its being the support of attributes, he simply says that your intellect knows perfectly what the word means. ”

“ You will please to observe that by the word substance I here mean, in general, a being possessed of some primitive quality, abstracted from all particular or secondary modifications. Now, if all known primitive qualities may be united in one and the same being, we have no need to admit of more than one substance ”

“ But what is to prevent us from classifying the substance of mind, when the fundamental idea of its substance is that it is something which resembles no other substance, but constitutes a class or description of being that stands entirely by itself, and in which, for a knowledge of its properties we distinguish its properties from those of any other substance? ”

“ It follows that we must call this selfsame essence, at once individual and universal, substance—a conclusion, however, which Aristotle never drew in so many words, though he continued always to call essence substance, and definition a knowledge of substance. ”

“ Open any treatise on psychology and you will find [Pg 363] that although the general idea of substance is employed, it is only made use of after it has been legitimated by a fact of experience; it is not inferred from the pure category of substance that the soul is a substance; but only after we have established the idea of substance as a general type, we scrutinize the depth of consciousness to see if there is any thing there to which this type may apply. ”

“ Even those attributes of an object which might seem with greatest propriety to be called states of the object itself, its sensible qualities, its [pg 349] 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. ”

“ We have no sound notions either in logic or physics; substance, quality, action, passion, and existence are not clear notions; much less, weight, levity, density, tenuity, moisture, dryness, generation, corruption, attraction, repulsion, element, matter, form, and the like. ”

“ SUBSTANCE.—There is no substance without a form, an unformed substance not being any thing, 66. There is not any good or truth which is not in a substance as in its subject, 66. Every idea of man's, however sublimated, is substantial, that is, affixed to substance, 66. ”

“ By substance I mean what exists in itself and is conceived of by itself; the conception of which, that is, does not involve the conception of anything else as the cause of it. 4. By attribute I mean whatever the intellect perceives of substance as constituting the essence of substance. 5. Mode is an affection of substance, or is that which is in something else, by and through which it is conceived. 6. God is a being absolutely infinite; a substance consisting of infinite attributes, each of which expresses His eternal and infinite essence. ”

“ The tight link between word and idea shows up in such comparisons of human languages. The well-known distinction between form and substance that constituted the basis 30 years ago for broad criticism that has collapsed at present shows up here its childishness. Form and substance blend together to such a degree that in many instances the substance dissolves if the form changes. ”

“ At bottom the process is one of conception, and is everywhere, even in the sphere of simple sensible qualities, the same as that by which we are usually understood to attain to the notions of abstract goodness, perfect felicity, absolute power, and the like: the direct perception of a difference between compounds, and the imaginary prolongation of the direction of the difference to an ideal terminus, the notion of which we fix and keep as one of our permanent subjects of discourse. ”

“ We find there sometimes constituents of sense picked up from ordinary intuition, determinate elements which to be sure should mean something else than they say; at other times what is inherently significant, viz. pure determinations of thought—like subject, object, substance, cause, universality, etc.—these are applied just as uncritically and unreflectingly as in every-day life, are used much as people employ the terms strong and weak, expansion and contraction. ”

“ And in another place, “Substance,” says he, “does not differ from being by any difference which would imply a new nature superadded to the being itself; but the name of substance is given to a thing in order to express its special mode of existing.”8 Two things, then, or two constituents, are needed, according to S. Thomas, that we may have a substance: a physical being and a special mode of existing. ”

“ For the attributes are simply what the understanding grasps as the essence of the one substance, which is determined in itself, and not through anything else. “But if these substances were distinguished by their affections, since substance is by nature prior to its affections it would follow that if from substance its affections were abstracted and it were regarded in itself, i.e. ”

“ Substance and Quality. The identification of the substance of things with their primary qualities, though useful in physical science, is metaphysically unjustifiable. § 5. Substance as an “unknowable substratum of qualities” adds nothing to our understanding of their connection. § 6. The thing cannot be a mere collection of qualities without internal unity. § 7. The conception of a thing as the law or mode of relation of its states useful but metaphysically unsatisfactory. ”

“ All the secondary qualities, colours, sounds, tastes, smells, heat, hardness, everything, in short, which is an affection of sense, may be generalized at one sweep into our mere knowledge of things. But the primary qualities, which are usually restricted to extension and figure, and which constitute, it is said, the objective or real essence of things, and which are entirely independent of us, into what shall they be generalized? ”

“ Connected with the distinction just made between ‘object’ in the sense of the qualities actually before the mind and ‘object’ in the sense of the whole thing which possesses the qualities actually before the mind, is another distinction of the utmost importance for a correct analysis of the constituents necessary to a valuable whole. ”

“ My point is that ‘good’ is a simple notion, just as ‘yellow’ is a simple notion; that, just as you cannot, by any manner of means, explain to anyone who does not already know it, what yellow is, so you cannot explain what good is. Definitions of the kind that I was asking for, definitions which describe the real nature of the object or notion denoted by a word, and which do not merely tell us what the word is used to mean, are only possible when the object or notion in question is something complex. ”

“ And thus, in every case where we fancy ourselves sure of a simple law of Nature, we must remember that a great deal of the fancied simplicity may be due, in the given case, not to Nature, but to the ineradicable prejudice of our own minds in favor of regularity and simplicity. ”

“ It may still, indeed, be said with truth, that the different feelings,—the states or affections of mind which we term complex,—are absolutely simple and indivisible, as much as the feelings or affections of mind which we term simple. ”

“ The following is one of the modes in which these abstract terms, Nature and Essence, are used as instruments of this fallacy. Some particular properties of a thing are selected, more or less arbitrarily, to be termed its nature or essence ”

“ About the specific nature of substances we know just precisely what their accidents reveal to us—that and no more. We have no intuitive insight into their natures; all our knowledge here is abstractive and discursive. ”

“ But truly in comparison with the wonderful fact that our thoughts, however different otherwise, can still be of the same, the question whether that same be a single thing, a whole class of things, an abstract quality or something unimaginable, is an insignificant matter of detail. Our meanings are of singulars, particulars, indefinites, problematics, and universals, mixed together in every way. ”

“ By the cognitive element, which is equally necessary with emotions to the existence of a valuable appreciation, I mean merely the actual cognition or consciousness of any or all of an object’s beautiful qualities—that is to say, any or all of those elements in the object which possess any positive beauty. ”

“ And holding still to the concrete, the particular, to the visible or sensuous, if you will, last as first, thinking of that as essentially the one vital and lively thing, really worth our while in a short life, we may recognise sincerely what generalisation and abstraction have done or may do, are defensible as doing, just for that—for the particular gem or flower—what its proper service is to a mind in search, precisely, of a concrete and intuitive knowledge such as that. ”

“ Nay, thou beholdest in our verses here Elements many, common to many worlds, Albeit thou must confess each verse, each word From one another differs both in sense And ring of sound—so much the elements Can bring about by change of order alone. But those which are the primal germs of things Have power to work more combinations still, Whence divers things can be produced in turn. ”

“ We may conclude with logic as sound and certain as is used in any scientific deduction, that every sense, faculty, and hope of the human soul has an objective reality in relation to which it is developed as surely as the wing argues an atmosphere, or the eye an ether. ”

“ All senses are used, not disused, but used in a sort of overtone of function which perceives without contact and translates with the deeper perception of the essence-sense rather than the crude extracts of the old senses. ”

“ Conceptions are distinguished on the one hand from sensation and perception, and on the other hand from the intuitions of pure reason or ideas. They are distinctly the product of thought and of the understanding, except when quite free from empirical elements. ”

“ The concept substance is an outcome of the C concept subject , and not conversely! If we surrender the concept soul, "the subject, the very conditions for the concept " substance " are lacking. Degrees of Being are obtained, but Being is lost. 1C Criticism of " reality ": what does a "plus or minus of reality " lead to, the gradation of Being in which we believe? ”