Substance

Article 2. Substance

a) Definition　　b) Classification　　c) Our Knowledge of Substance　　d) Existence of Real Substances　　e) Faulty Doctrines about Substance　　f) Subsistence　　g) The Human Substance

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a) Definition of Substance

We have seen that by force of its name (hence, by its nominal definition) substance is the support of accidents. And right here the student is warned not to take the term support in too literal a meaning. For substance is not to be conceived as a kind of nucleus, or core, or kernel, wrapped up in accidents as an ear of corn is wrapped up in its husks. You cannot come at substance in a bodily thing by tearing away an outer wrapping of accidentals. Substance is not handled, in its pure or unaffected form, by the hands, or laid hold of by the senses. No man hath seen substance at any time. Substance is known, it is understood; it is necessarily understood by the mind or intellect in its investigation of the universe. Nor is it a mere postulate of mind, a mere supposition of intellect; it is a known reality.

The real definition of substance is this: Substance is a reality which is fitted for existence itself (or in itself, or by itself) and does not require some other thing in which it is to have being as a mark, modifier, qualification, or characteristic. The essential point about a substance is that it is existible per se, or by itself.

b) Classification of Substance

1. Primary — Secondary. A primary substance (usually called by its Latin name, substantia prima) is an existing individual substance. Thus, Tom, Mary, this tree, my guardian angel, are primary substances. A primary substance is called also a physical substance.—A secondary substance (substantia secunda) is a substance conceived abstractly and universally by the mind. The universal man (that is, the essence man conceived in the idea or concept of man) is predicable of all individual human beings. A secondary substance is defined as a reality which is not an accidental, but is predicable of things other than itself. A primary substance is a concrete, individual, actually existing substance; a secondary substance is the essence of a substantial reality conceived universally in the mind. A primary substance is an actual individual; a secondary substance is a universal. A secondary substance is sometimes called a metaphysical substance.

2. Complete — Incomplete. A primary substance is complete when it is a finished nature, fitted for existence with all its connatural functions, not ordinated towards another substance for substantial union therewith. A man or a tree or an angel is a complete substance.—A primary substance is incomplete when it is ordinated towards another substance for substantial union therewith. Prime matter and substantial form are incomplete substances; they come together in substantial union to constitute a body. A substance may be incomplete in one of two ways: (a) It may be incomplete both in substantiality and in species, that is, incapable of existence either as a substance or as the complete essence towards which it is ordinated. Thus, the life-principle of a plant is incomplete both in substantiality and in species. (b) A substance may be incomplete in species only. Thus the human soul is a complete soul; it is a substance which can exist without its co-substance, the organic body. But the human soul is not the complete species man; it is incomplete in species.

3. Simple — Compound. A simple substance is not made up of parts, that is, it is not made up of two or more incomplete substances. A plant-soul, a human soul, or any substantial form is a simple substance, even though incomplete. An angel is a simple and complete substance.—A compound or composed substance is made up of two or more incomplete substances. A body (made of matter and form), a man (made of body and soul), are examples of compound substance.

4. Material — Non-material. A material substance is either composed of matter (and is therefore a body) or it is dependent upon matter. A tree or a man is a material substance. So is the life-principle or soul of a tree. This life-principle is not, indeed, made up of matter, but it depends upon matter; it cannot exist or function without the material organism which it vivifies or makes alive.—A non-material or spiritual substance is neither composed of matter, in whole or in part, nor is it dependent upon matter for its existence and proper operations. The human soul is a spiritual or non-material substance; so is an angel. In passing, it must be noted that while a spiritual (or non-material) substance is always a simple substance, it does not follow that every simple substance is spiritual. The substantial form of any body, as, for instance, the life-principle which is the substantial form of a plant, is simple, for it is not made up of bodily parts; but it is material, because it depends upon matter.

c) Our Knowledge of Substance

We have no intuitive knowledge of substance. That is, we have no immediate and direct mental grasp of substance as such. Our knowledge begins with the action of the senses; and the senses do not have substance as their object. The senses lay hold of accidents. But the intellect, taking the findings of the senses, discerns the underlying reality which we call substance. Nor is this a mere supposed foundation for accidents. It is not, as John Locke (1632–1704) declared, “an unknown something” which the mind posits as the support for accidents. Substance is far from unknown. We may know much about it, gathering justified data by the intellectual investigation of sense-findings. But, we repeat, we have no immediate and intuitive knowledge of substance as such; we have a justifiably derived knowledge of it.

Our concept of substance is not an arbitrary postulate; it is not an artificial construct of the mind. It is an implicit concept — “infolded” in the earliest cognitions of life. When we began to know things, we took the world around us at face value, and the things that we experienced we considered as existing in their own right. But soon we noticed that the cry of a baby was a different sort of thing from the baby itself; it was quickly understood as something that depends upon the baby and proceeds from the baby, and does not have existence in or by itself. So too we noticed that the movement of a lad scampering home from school was more manifestly a dependent thing than the lad himself. Substance and accident are inevitable classifications forced upon the mind, not by its bent or bias, not by some mysterious outer force, but by recognised reality.

d) Existence of Real Substances

That substances exist in reality, and that the concept of substance is no mere figment or fiction of mind, is a fact made evident by three things: (1) consciousness; (2) sentient experience; (3) reason.

1. Consciousness makes us aware that each of us is a reality which remains permanent under a continuous succession of changes and variations. Each of us expresses this consciousness in such phrases as, “I think,” “I used to feel,” “I wish,” “I was near death some years ago, but today I am in the best of health.” Each of us is aware of his thoughts and feelings, his states of conviction and of health, as something distinct from and different from himself. The thoughts come and go, the feelings are altered, but the self — the “I” — abides. The conviction grows in a reasonable man that there are not merely experiences that do not happen to anybody, and a stream of events that has no channel in which to flow.

2. Sentient experience of the bodily world around us gives us inevitable knowledge of things that are not, so to speak, standing on their own feet; things which exist by reason of something else. The color of an apple, the heat of a fire, the size of a house, the complexion and the disposition of a man, the speed of a horse, are things which do not, and normally cannot, exist independently of other things which they mark or qualify or affect. Now the apple may turn from green to red and still be an apple, and indeed the same apple; the man may turn from taciturn to gay, and be the same man. Hence, our sentient experience of the bodily world obtrudes upon us the fact that there are accidental things here existing; and that there are other things in which these accidental things exist, and which these accidental things qualify and affect. In a word, sentient experience (considered in mind) shows us the existence of substances as well as of accidents.

3. Reason accepts from nature, from science, from philosophy, the fact of the real existence of the world. Reason says: if things exist in the world, as they do, they must exist in themselves or in other things. If they exist in themselves, they are substances. If they exist in other things, they are accidents. But accidents cannot exist in other accidents, and these in other accidents, and so on forever. One must come finally to a reality which exists in itself, and this is substance.

e) Faulty Doctrines about Substance

We have set forth our doctrine of substance as a reality which, independently of the mind, exists or can exist itself. This doctrine is realistic, and it stands opposed to doctrines which are idealistic, that is, to doctrines which would make substance a mere figment of the mind, a baseless idea or ideal of the mind. Idealism of this type is already refuted in our study of the existence of real substances.

We have already seen that substance is not to be thought of as a core of reality wrapped in the folds of accidentals. Created substance is a limited and an imperfect mode of existence; it is bound up with its accidents, and is not adequately distinct from them. Hence there is no simple and direct and concrete way of coming at substance itself; one must take the path of abstraction and derivation; one must come at substance by way of mind working on the findings of sense.

Against certain mistaken views of substance we allege the clear doctrine which we have already set forth and evidenced. Descartes (1596–1650) thought of substance as self-existent reality, and thus made God the only true substance. Leibnitz (1646–1716) identified substance and nature. Spinoza (1632–1677) made substance an uncaused being (“that which, for its idea, requires the idea of no other thing”), thus identifying substance and God. We can and do know much about substance, but we do not and cannot know all about substance.

f) Subsistence

The crowning perfection by which an individual and actual substance stands, so to speak, on its own feet, ready to function as a rounded nature, is called subsistence. A substance that is a complete individual, not merely a portion or element of a larger substance; which has its own autonomy or its own way of acting, is a subsistent substance or, as it is called, a suppositum or supposit. A man or a tree is a supposit. A man’s hand is a substantial thing; it is a substance; but it is not a supposit; it has substantiality but not subsistence. For the man’s hand has not its own completeness and autonomy; it is a part of the man; its actions are the man’s actions. An old axiom says, Actiones sunt suppositorum, that is, the actions of a substance are the actions of the supposit. Thus, though a murder is committed by the stroke of an arm or the pressing of a finger against a trigger, the courts of law do not consign the arm or finger to gallows or electric chair; the courts condemn the man who used the arm or finger; he is the supposit, and “actions are of the supposit.”

For a reality to have subsistence, it must be: (1) a substance; an accident cannot be subsistent; (2) an individual substance, not a secondary substance, that is, a universal, an essence conceived objectively but abstractly and universally in the mind; (3) a complete substance, not the substantial part (essential or integral) of a compound substance; (4) an autonomous substance, that is, a substance that is a finished nature with its own laws and ways of acting (sui juris is the ancient Latin phrase for this requirement).

g) The Human Substance

When we speak of the human substance, we do not mean to say that there is a general or universal human mass of which individual men are the sharers or participants. We should more properly speak of human substances, for the only human substance that exists is that which is found in individual human beings. Things can actually exist only in individual, although they be unified in our knowledge, and mentally conceived in universal.

The individual human substance is a supposit, for it is a complete, individual, autonomous substance. Thus it has subsistence. More: its subsistence, its crowning perfection which sets it in being as a completely rounded nature functioning in its own connatural way, is subsistence of a special type and makes it a supposit of a special kind. Human subsistence makes the individual man a supposit of the rational order, that is, a supposit endowed with rationality, a supposit endowed in actu primo with understanding and free-will. Now, that type of subsistence which makes a substance a complete, individual, autonomous substance of the rational order, is called personality. And the substance which has such subsistence is a person. Of all creatures, only men and angels are persons.

Every human being has personality; every human being is a person. The term personality is used here in its strictly philosophical sense. It does not suggest, as it does in much popular “psychological” writing and discussion, a kind of impressiveness, a power to influence others. Personality is here understood as the subsistence which makes a substance a supposit of the rational order.

The divine Person of the Son of God took human nature and became man. But He did not take human personality. The Divine Person of the Son of God subsists henceforth also in human nature; the human nature taken by the Son of God has personal being through the very personality of the Son of God. In a word, the human nature of Christ is united with the Divine Person without having a human personality of its own. This is the mystery of the Hypostatic Union. The point is here mentioned merely by way of a philosophical note, of interest to the Catholic student.

Summary of the Article

In this Article we have learned the meaning of substance, and have studied the implications of both its nominal and its real definition. We have classified substance as primary and secondary; complete and incomplete; simple and compound; material and non-material. We have investigated our knowledge of substance, and have found that, while this is no intuitive and direct knowledge, it is derived knowledge that is true and reliable. We have demonstrated the existence of real substances in the world about us, drawing proofs from consciousness, sentient experience, and reason. We have briefly mentioned and criticized certain faulty notions about substance. We have learned the meaning of subsistence, and have dwelt upon that notable type of subsistence which is called personality. We have defined supposit and person.