Ontology, or the Theory of Being

by P. Coffey

61. The Phenomenist Attack on the Traditional Doctrine of Substance.—Passing now to the question of the existence and nature of substances, and their relation to accidents, we shall find evidences of misunderstandings to which many philosophical errors may be ascribed at least in part. It is a fairly common contention that the distinction between substance and accident is really a groundless distinction; that we have experience merely of transient events or happenings, internal and external, with relations of coexistence or sequence between them; that it is an illusion to suppose, underlying these, an inert, abiding basis called “substance”; that this can be at best but a useless name for each of the collections of external and internal appearances which make up our total experience of the outer world and of our own minds. This is the general position of phenomenists. “What do you know of substance,” they ask us, “except that it is an indeterminate and unknown something underlying phenomena? And even if you could prove its existence, what would it avail you, since in its nature it is, and must remain, unknown? No doubt the mind naturally supposes this ‘something’ underlying phenomena; but it is a mere mental fiction the reality of which cannot be proved, and the nature of which is admitted, even by some who believe in its real existence, to be unknowable.”

Now there can be no doubt about the supreme importance of this question: all parties are pretty generally agreed that on the real or fictitious character of substance the very existence of genuine metaphysics in the traditional sense depends. And at first sight the possibility of such a controversy as the present one seems very strange. “Is it credible,” asks Mercier,[225] “that thinkers of the first order, like Hume, Mill, Spencer, Kant, Wundt, Paulsen, Littré, Taine, should have failed to recognize the substantial character of things, and of the Ego or Self? Must they not have seen that they were placing themselves in open revolt against sound common sense? And on the other hand is it likely that the genius of Aristotle could have been duped by the naïve illusion which phenomenists must logically ascribe to him? Or that all those sincere and earnest teachers who adopted and preserved in scholastic philosophy for centuries the peripatetic distinction between substance and accidents [pg 214] should have been all utterly astray in interpreting an elementary fact of common sense?”

There must have been misunderstandings, possibly on both sides, and much waste of argument in refuting chimeras. Let us endeavour to find out what they are and how they gradually arose.

Phenomenism has had its origin in the Idealism which confines the human mind to a knowledge of its own states, proclaiming the unknowability of any reality other than these; and in the Positivism which admits the reality only of that which falls directly within external and internal sense experience. Descartes did not deny the substantiality of the soul, nor even of bodies; but his idealist theory of knowledge rendered suspect all information derived by his deductive, a priori method of reasoning from supposed innate ideas, regarding the nature and properties of bodies. Locke rejected the innatism of Descartes, ascribing to sense experience a positive rôle in the formation of our ideas, and proving conclusively that we have no such intuitive and deductively derived knowledge of real substances as Descartes contended for.[226] Locke himself did not deny the existence of substances,[227] any more than Descartes. But unfortunately he propounded the mistaken assumption of Idealism, that the mind can know only its own states; and also the error of thinking that because we have not an intuitive insight into the specific nature of individual substances we can know nothing at all through any channel about their nature: and he gathered from this latter error a general notion or definition of substance which is a distinct departure from what Aristotle and the medieval scholastics had traditionally understood by substance. For Locke substance is merely a supposed, but unknown, support for accidents.[228] Setting out [pg 215] with these two notions—that all objects of knowledge must be states or phases of mind, and that material substance is a supposed, but unknown and unknowable, substratum of the qualities revealed to our minds in the process of sense perception—it was easy for Berkeley to support by plausible arguments his denial of the reality of any such things as material substances. And it was just as easy, if somewhat more audacious, on the part of Hume to argue quite logically that if the supposed but unknowable substantial substratum of external sense phenomena is illusory, so likewise is the supposed substantial Ego which is thought to underlie and support the internal phenomena of consciousness.

Hume's rejection of substance is apparently complete and absolute, and is so interpreted by many of his disciples. But a thorough-going phenomenism is in reality impossible; no philosophers have ever succeeded in thinking out an intelligible theory of things without the concepts of “matter,” and “spirit,” and “things,” and the “Ego” or “Self,” however they may have tried to dispense with them; and these are concepts of substances. Hence there are those who doubt that Hume was serious in his elaborate reasoning away of substances. The fact is that Hume “reasoned away” substance only in the sense of an unknowable substratum of phenomena, and not in the sense of a something that exists in itself.[229] So far from denying the existence of entities that exist in themselves, he seems to have multiplied these beyond the wildest dreams of all previous philosophers by substantializing accidents.[230] What he does call into doubt is the capacity of [pg 216] the human mind to attain to a knowledge of the specific natures of such entities; and even here the arguments of phenomenism strike the false Cartesian theory of knowledge, rather than the sober and moderate teachings of scholasticism regarding the nature and limitations of our knowledge of substances.

62. The Scholastic View of our Knowledge in regard to the Existence and Nature of Substances.—What, then, are these latter teachings? That we have a direct, intellectual insight into the specific essence or nature of a corporeal substance such as gold, similar to our insight into the abstract essence of a triangle? By no means; Locke was quite right in rejecting the Cartesian claim to intuitions which were supposed to yield up all knowledge of things by “mathematical,” i.e. deductive, a priori reasoning. The scholastic teaching is briefly as follows:—

First, as regards our knowledge of the existence of substances, and the manner in which we obtain our concept of substance. We get this concept from corporeal substances, and afterwards apply it to spiritual substances; so that our knowledge of the former is “immediate” only in the relative sense of being prior to the latter, not in the sense that it is a direct intuition of the natures of corporeal substances. We have no such direct insight into their natures. But our concept of them as actually existing is also immediate in the sense that at first we spontaneously conceive every object which comes before our consciousness as something existing in itself. The child apprehends each separate stimulant of its sense perception—resistance, colour, sound, etc.—as a “this ”or a “that,” i.e. as a separate something, existing there in itself; in other words it apprehends all realities as substances: not, of course, that the child has yet any reflex knowledge of what a substance is, but unknowingly it applies to all realities at first the concept which it undoubtedly possesses “something existing in itself”. It likewise apprehends each such reality as “one” or “undivided in itself,” and as “distinct from other things”. Such is the child's immediate, direct, and implicit idea of substance. [pg 217] But if we are to believe Hume, what is true of the child remains true of the man: for the latter, too, “every perception is a substance, and every distinct part of a perception a distinct substance”.[231] Nothing, however, could be more manifestly at variance with the facts. For as reason is developed and reflective analysis proceeds, the child most undoubtedly realizes that not everything that falls within its experience has the character of “a something existing in itself and distinct from other things”. “Walking,” “talking,” and “actions” generally, it apprehends as realities,—as realities which, however, do not “exist in themselves,” but in other beings, in the beings that “walk” and “talk” and “act”. And these latter beings it still apprehends as “existing in themselves,” and as thus differing from the former, which “exist not in themselves but in other things”. Thus the child comes into possession of the notion of “accident,” and of the further notion of “substance” as something which not only exists in itself (οὐσία, ens in se subsistens), but which is also a support or subject of accidents (ὑποκείμενον, substans, substare).[232] Nor, indeed, need the child's reason be very highly developed in order to realize that if experience furnishes it with “beings that do not exist in themselves,” there must also be beings which do exist in themselves: that if “accidents” exist at all it would be unintelligible and self-contradictory to deny the existence of “substances”.

Hence, in the order of our experience the first, implicit notion of substance is that of “something existing in itself” (οὐσία); the first explicit notion of it, however, is that by which it is apprehended as “a subject or support of accidents” (ὑποκείμενον, sub-stare, substantia); then by reflection we go back to the explicit notion of it as “something existing in itself”. In the real or ontological order the perfection of “existing in itself” is manifestly more fundamental than that of “supporting accidents”. It is in accordance with a natural law of language that we name things after the properties whereby they reveal themselves to us, rather than by names implying what is more fundamental and essential in them. “To exist in itself” is an absolute perfection, essential to substance; “to support accidents” is only a relative perfection; nor can we know a priori but a substance might perhaps exist without any accidents: we only know that accidents [pg 218] cannot exist without some substance, or subject, or power which will sustain them in existence.

Can substance be apprehended by the senses, or only by intellect? Strictly speaking, only by intellect: it is neither a “proper object” of any one sense, such as taste, or colour, or sound; nor a “common object” of more than one sense, as extension is with regard to sight and touch: it is, in scholastic language, not a “sensibile per se,” not itself an object of sense knowledge, but only “sensibile per accidens,” i.e. it may be said to be “accidentally” an object of sense because of its conjunction with accidents which are the proper objects of sense: so that when the senses perceive accidents what they are really perceiving is the substance affected by the accidents. But strictly and properly it is by intellect we consciously grasp that which in the reality is the substance: while the external and internal sense faculties make us aware of various qualities, activities, or other accidents external to the “self,” or of various states and conditions of the “self,” the intellect—which is a faculty of the same soul as the sense faculties—makes us simultaneously aware of corporeal substances actually existing outside us, or of the concrete substance of the “ego” or “self,” existing and revealing itself to us in and through its conscious activities, as the substantial, abiding, and unifying subject and principle of these conscious activities.

Thus, then, do we attain to the concept of substance in general, to a conviction of the concrete actual existence of that mode of being the essential characteristic of which is “to exist in itself”.