Suppose we had no such word as matter, would not our whole system of thought be different? Matter is not an object, perceived by our senses. We may even go further and say that matter by itself never exists. This or that matter exists, chemical substances, say, gold or silver, oxygen or hydrogen, exist; but matter, which some philosophers look upon as the most certain and concrete of all things, is simply an abstraction, something that may be predicated of many things, but that is never found by itself in rerum naturâ.
Some people define matter as what is ponderable and impenetrable, but here again, nothing exists that is simply ponderable, or impenetrable. It is always something else; it is iron, wood, stone, vapor, gas, but never matter, pur et simple.
It is clear, therefore, that matter is made by us, and that without some such word as matter, we could never have the faintest idea or concept of matter. For how should we call it? On the other hand, it is equally clear that we could not have the word matter, without the concept of matter. For what would be the use of it? Now, what follows from this apparent dilemma? If the concept cannot be prior to the name and the name cannot be prior to the concept, they must needs be simultaneous, or, more correctly, they must be the same thing under two aspects.
From an historical point of view, that is, if we consider the genesis of words and concepts, not in modern times, but during that period when words and concepts were framed for the first time, we are bound to admit that the word is really the prius. That period may be ever so far distant, but it was nevertheless a very real and truly historical period.
How did man arrive at such a word as matter? The word itself tells its own story. It came to us from French, it came into French from Latin. In Latin materies or materia still means wood and timber, though it has also assumed the meaning of matter, like the Greek ὕλη, which means both wood and matter. The process by which materies came to mean matter is clear. If materies meant originally the wood out of which a hut, a table, a chair, or a stick was made, it was naturally applied to other substances also, such as stone, bricks, or metal when used in the making of huts, tables, chairs, or sticks. In the same way we speak of a pen, i. e. a quill, though we mean a steel pen.
When the original special meaning of wood thus disappeared, there remained only the meaning of building material, material, and, at last, of matter and substance. We say now, What is the matter? What does it matter? but we little think of the solid beams out of which such expressions were hewn and fashioned. In this sense, therefore, we may say that historically the word materies came first, meaning a beam, and that gradually it shed its various attributes, one after the other, till there remained nothing but its trunk, and that is what we now mean by matter.
Here, therefore, we see the process of generalisation which is very important, particularly in the later periods of language and thought.
But it is the greatest mistake to suppose that language, such as we know it, what we might call historical language, always begins with the particular and then proceeds to the general. Adam Smith was one of the ablest defenders of the theory that the Primum Cognitum and the Primum Appellatum must have been the particular. But all the facts of language are dead against this theory. And yet, that theory has once more been put forward by a philosopher who prides himself on nothing so much as that his philosophy rests throughout on positive facts. I do not blame a philosopher who is ignorant of the results obtained by the Science of Language, so long as he abstains from touching on the subject. But constantly to appeal to language, and yet to ignore what has been achieved by comparative philologists, is unpardonable. No one is a greater sinner in that respect than Mr. Herbert Spencer.
When speaking of the process by which the abstract idea of color was formed he says:[137] 'The idea of each color had originally entire concreteness given to it by an object possessing the color; as some of the unmodified names, such as orange and violet, show us. The dissociation of each color from the object specially associated with it in thought at the outset, went on as fast as the color came to be associated in thought with objects unlike the first, and unlike one another. The idea of orange was conceived in the abstract more fully in proportion as the various orange-colored objects remembered, cancelled one another's diverse attributes, and left outstanding their common attribute. So it is if we ascend a stage, and note how there arises the abstract idea of color, apart from particular colors.'
[137] Data of Ethics, p. 124.