SUBSTANCE, a word connected with certain discussions in logic and metaphysics. Substance is correlative with quality or attribute. Every substance must have attri butes, and every attribute must be the attribute of some substance. The substance gold has the attributes weight, color, etc. But as every power or property of a thing, every way that the thing affects us, may be called an attribute or quality, if all the attributes are counted off, there is nothing left; and the question then arises: What is the substance? To avoid this seeming inconsistency, it was assumed that everything whatsoever posses ses, besides its attributes, an unknown substratum that they rest upon, or inhere in—a mystical and inscrutable bond, that holds the attributes together, without being itself an attribute. This gratuitous assumption of what is, after all, a nonentity, was repudiated by Locke and others, who found a meaning for substance without departing from the knowable. Every object has some essential or fundamental quality, which being pres ent, it preserves its identity; and which being removed, it is no longer the same object, but another. Thus the substance of body or matter is not the remnant after all the qualities are substracted; it is the two fundamental and inerasable qualities, extension and resistance; size, shape, color, heat, odor, etc., may all be varied; but so long as extension and resistance in any degree are found, we have a piece of matter. On the same view, the substance of mind is whatever we regard as its fundamental essence, or distinguishing marks. We may adopt feeling, or volition, or intellect, or require a share of all three, according to our mode of defining the mind. It would, then, be a mere
confusion of language to talk of feeling, volition, and intellect as inhering in mind; they are mind, and there is nothing besides.
Notwithstanding the obviousness of this explanation, the employment of the words substance and attribute has led to such an inveterate demand for something that shall underlie all attributes—a substance of body, and a substance of mind—distinct from anything meant by the names, that many philosophers have considered it necessary to preserve the phantom as a thing of belief, if not of knowledge. The doctrine of an unknowable substance in the abstract very early allied itself with the popular theory of the perception of a material world (see PERCEPTION), and the same arguments are good, for or against both. Other names for expressing the same contrast are noumenon and phenomenon. The phenomenon is what shows itself to our senses, or is conceived by our intelligence—the qualities of extension and resistancein body; and of feeling, etc., in mind. The noumenon is something apart and beyond, something inconceivable and unknowable, but which, say some, we are instinctively led to believe in. Thus, in the great question above alluded to—the belief of an independent material world —the phenomenal manifestations are inextricably involved with our mental powers of conceiving, and would vary, if these were to vary; consequently, they cannot be the absolute, independent, self-existent reality; which drives one school of philosophy upon the expedient of believing in such a reality, although it must be for ever incomprehen sible to us.