SUBSTANCE (OF, substance, substaunce, Fr. substance, from Lat. substantia, being, essence, material, from substare, to stand under or among, from sub, under + stare, to stand). A term frequently used in logic and metaphysics. Substance is correlative with quality o• at tribute. Every substance must have attributes, and every attribute mu -,t 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 except the relations in which they stand to each other. But popular thought. and popular philosophy assume that everything whatsoever possesses, besides its at tributes, all unknown substratum; that they rest upon or inhere in a mystical and inscrutable thing, that holds the attributes together, without being itself an attribute.
This view appears at the very dawn of phil osophical speculation, having been doubtless an inheritance from pre-scientific and pre-eritical thinkers, and has persisted through all the cen turies up to the present. It appears in the doc trine of the Ionic philosophers (see IONIAN SCHOOL) as air or earth or water, in Heraclitus (q.v.) as fire, and in Parmenides (q.v.) as pure being. In Aristotle we have a more critical view, according to which the individual realities of experience are substances. while species are second substances. But Aristotle did mit answer the question what it is in the individual reali ties of experience that constitutes their sub stantiality. The Stoics returned to the idea of a substrate as the bearer of attributes, and this view persisted through the 'Middle Ages as the only one advocated, except by the Nominalists (see NOMINALISM ) . In modern philosophy Des cartes and Spinoza share this substrate theory. Leibnitz moved away from this sta tie conception and regarded substance as a being capable of action or 'primitive force,' but it was his great opponent Locke who put definitely away the old substrate theory. "All our ideas of the several sorts of substances are nothing but collections of simple ideas, with a supposition of something to which they belong, and on which they subsist, though of this supposed something we have no clear distinet idea at all." "All the simple ideas, that thus united in one substratum make up our complex ideas of several sorts of substances, are no others but such as we have received from sensation or reflection," while "most of the simple ideas that make up our complex ideas of substances, when truly considered, are only powers." Berkeley went further. Locke had accepted the existence of material as well as spiritual `powers:* Berkeley maintained that "the suppo sition of externa) bodies is not necessary for producing our ideas; since it is granted they are produced sometimes, and might possibly be produced always in the same order we see them in at present, without their eoneurrenee." Hence "there is not any other substance than xpirit, or that which perceives." About this substance. however, Berkeley could give no con sistent account. At one time we are told that thing or being "comprehends under it two entirely distinct and heterogeneous, which have in common but the name. viz. Spirits and Ideas. The former are active. in visible substances—the latter are inert, ileetin,g, or independent beings, which subsist not by themselves, but are supported by or exist in minds or spiritual substanees." But in another
place we are told that "the soul always thinks; and in truth whoever shall go about to divide in his thoughts, or abstract the existence of a spirit from its cogitation, will, I believe, find it no easy task." Hume developed the idea con tained in the last quotation and arrived at the result that all substance is an 'unintelligible ehinnera.' Kant emphasized these 'relations' which united perceptions, and found in them the essence of substance. Substance with him is a category of relation, which when schematized, i.e. brought into relation with time and space, be comes the permanence of the real in time, or the idea of the real as presupposed in the em pirical determination of time, and as persisting while all else changes." But this view has a de fect. There is too much absoluteness in the conception. It is not necessary that there should be anything which persists through all changes. It is only necessary that there should be some quality which remains relatively un changing, while other qualities change. The quality forms then the nucleus around which the changes gather as variations of a thing. The same thing does not always remain unchanged in the same quality. Now it may be this qual ity. now that. 'Were it necessary that some one quality should remain unchanged, that quality would come to be considered the substance of the thing. But the fact that the relatively perma nent quality of one stage of change becomes the relatively changing quality of another stage makes it impossible to identify the substance with any one quality. On this account some philosophers prefer to regard substantiality as shifting from time to time.
But perhaps a more satisfactory definition of substance can be obtained from the true theory of judgment. Going back to Aristotle's concep tion of substance (nbaia) as that of which predi cation is made, we find (see JUDGMENT) that predication is always made of a synthesis of at tributes. The orange of which yellowness is predicated is an object which is yellow, grows on a tree, developed from a flower, is going to be eaten by me next minute, etc. The orange is the synthesis of all these quantities or attri butes, some of which may he past and some not yet existent. The only object of which all the qualities of an orange are predicable is the totality of the predicable qualities. This totality exists at any one time, not as a whole, but in part. At no one moment is it consummated as a whole. All the stages of its history are neces sary to its totality. but it is not necessary that these stages should be taken out of the real order of succession in which they stand and made to exist contemporaneously before the totality of the process can exist. A temporal whole is from its very nature not a whole at any one time shorter than the whole time of its existence, and the whole time of its existence has within it the distinctions of priority and subsequence which make it impossible to summate the whole into one moment. Now the synthesis of all the quali ties which appear to common sense as the quali ties of a thing is itself the substance of that thing. Used in this sense substance is no longer what its etymology indicates, viz. a something standing behind phenomena, but it is what the Greek term means, viz. the being of which attributes are predicable. See Pumosorlly;