SECT. IV.-ON MODE, QUALITY, PROPERTY, ESSENCE.

Two great truths press themselves on the reflecting mind when it contemplates this world of ours. One, the more obvious, is the mutability of all mundane objects. Nothing seems to be enduring, all is perceived as fluctuating. This has been a favourite theme with poets, to whom it has furnished a succession of kaleidoscope pictures; moralists and divines have dwelt upon it, in order to allure us to seek for something more stable than this world can furnish; and even libertines have turned it to their own use, and exhorted us to catch the enjoyment while it passes, to shoot the bird on the wing: "Let us eat and drink, for to-morrow we die." Philosophies have been built on this doctrine of the fluctuation of all things. Heraclitus of Ephesus taught that all things are in a perpetual flux; that we cannot enter the same stream twice; whereon Cratylus rebuked him, and showed that we cannot do so once. But there is another truth which has a no less important, indeed a deeper place in the nature of things. In the midst of all these mutations objects have, after all, a permanence. Ever changing, they are yet all the while ever the same. Persons of deeper thought, or at least more addicted to abstraction, looking beneath the changing surface, dwell on this permanence-which they discover to be like the fixed mountain, while the changes are merely it away, if one may be said to take away that which never had any existence, not even in imagination" (37). Berkeley was misled throughout by following the Lockian doctrines that the mind perceives immediately only its own ideas, and that substance is to be taken merely as the support or substratum of qualities. It is important to add that Berkeley is wrong (as Brown also is) in holding that we perceive material substance "as a combination of sensible qualities." I am not aware that intuitively we perceive qualities separately or a combination of them, we know body as an existing thing with extension and solidity. The doctrine of Cousin is: "Si nous cherchons l'origine de l'idée de phénomène, de qualité, d'attribut, elle nous est donnée par les sens s'il s'agit d'un attribut de la substance Extérieure; par la conscience, s'il s'agit d'un attribut de l'âme. Quant à la substance, qu'elle soit matérielle ou spirituelle, elle ne nous est donnée ni par les sens ni par la conscience, c'est une révélation de la raison dans l'exercice des sens et de la conscience" (Sér. II. t. iii. leç. 19). Sir W. Hamilton says, that when we think a quality we are constrained to think it "as inhering in some basis, substratum, hypostasis, or substance," which substance is represented as unknown: he speaks of being "compelled to refer it to an unknown substance" (Discuss. App. 1. A). I hold that in the one concrete act we know both substance and quality.

1 Aristotle, Met. I. 5, 6.

like the colours that pass over its surface; and some have so magnified it as to make it set aside the mutability. The Eleatics carried their doctrine so far as to maintain the oneness and unchangeableness of all being. The founder of the school, Xenophanes, identified this immutable oneness with the Divine Being. His disciple, Parmenides, degenerating in religious faith, though superior to the master in logical power, narrowed this unity into metaphysical being. Zeno, who followed, showed his subtlety by pointing out the difficulties in which they are involved who maintain the existence of multiplicity and motion. The expansive mind of Plato wrestled with both these extremes, and sought by his doctrine of supra-sensible ideas, and an exhuberance of subtleties, to establish a doctrine of being not inconsistent with multiplicity and change. In modern times Descartes and Spinoza have magnified the importance of Substance quite as much as the Eleatics did Being, while the great mass of physicists, and all the speculators of the Sensational School, never go down deeper than the fleeting, the superficial, and the phenomenal.

The wise, and the only proper course, is to assume both; to assume both as first truths. No attempt should be made to support either by mediate proof; each carries with it its own evidence. Neither can be set aside by any sophistical reasoning founded on the other. It is the business of philosophy not to attempt to discard either, but rather to give the proper account of each, when they will be seen not to be inconsistent. The doctrine of the permanence of objects is founded on being and substance. We must take a view of the other truth in this section.

Every substance, we have seen, is known as having being, power, and endurance. But every terrestrial substance is at the same time known as changing. Self changes as we look in upon it; the material world changes as we look out upon it. No attempt should be made to explain how the two can coëxist, the permanent and the changeable. For mind and body are known at one and the same time as both. The one is quite as much known, and therefore quite as conceivable ever afterwards, as the other; and there can be no difficulty (whatever metaphysicians may ingeniously urge in opposition) in conceiving of their compatibility, since they

were ever known to exist together. It is one of the permanent characters, both of mind and body, that they are ever known as changing. Their liability to change is an element in their very nature. Now the appropriate term to express the given state of any one substance is MODE; or if we wish a convenient change of phraseology, Modification, State, or Condition.

From this account we see in what sense it is that substance implies mode, and mode implies substance. Mode implies substance, not only inasmuch as a state must be the state of something, but inasmuch as mode is the state of a substance liable to change, and so capable of manifesting itself in more than one phase. Substance implies mode, inasmuch as it must always be in a certain state, and is liable to be in different states. The maxim is more than a verbal one, more than a truism, more than an identical (analytic), judgment involved in the terms; it is a judgment affirming a truth intuitively discovered by the mind when looking at the things (a synthetic judgment a priori).

Every object is known not only as having being, but is known as having a certain being or nature. That by which it manifests itself to us may be something common to this one thing with other things, or it may be something peculiar to the thing itself. Every particular substance known, is known as at least having being and potency and an abiding nature, and is known also as possessing peculiar or distinguishing attributes. That by which the object is thus known to us as in itself, or as acting, may be called a quality of the substance. Sir W. Hamilton speaks of the qualities of substance as "its aptitudes and manners of existence and of action." 1

But let us properly understand the relation of the two, substance and quality. The two are ever known in one concrete act. Thus when at a given moment we know self as rejoicing, we do not know the self as separate, or the rejoicing as separate, but we grasp the self and the rejoicing at once. But then it is necessary for many purposes to distinguish between them, and we do so by analysis; indeed, the analysis is in a sense done for us naturally. For while self is rejoicing to-day, it may be grieving to-morrow. To express 1 Metaph. Lect. 8.

the distinction it is needful to have a nomenclature, and so we distinguish between the substance and the quality. Not that the substance can ever exist without the quality, or the quality without the substance. On the contrary, the one implies the other. The substance must always have at least the qualities by which all substance is characterized, and it may have many others. The qualities must always be qualities of a thing having these characteristics. The maxim that the substance implies the quality, is thus a proposition of the same character as that the substance implies the mode.

The word "substance" may be used either as an abstract or a general term. As an abstract term it designates the thing as having the characteristics of substance, which I believe to be existence, potency, and continuance. As a general term it denotes all those things which have the characteristics of substance. Quality, too, may be employed as an abstract or a general term. As an abstract term it denotes that in any given substance by which it acts or manifests itself. As a general term it denotes all the manifestations or actions of a substance. Some of these qualities are found in all substance: such are the characteristics of substance of which I have so often spoken. Others are peculiar to certain substances, or manifest themselves in certain substances at certain times. Particular qualities are known by us intuitively to be in mind or matter. Thus we know consciousness, personality, thought, and will, as in mind; while we know extension and incompressibility as being in matter; these may appropriately be styled Essential Qualities of spirit and body. Other qualities are discovered by a gathered experience. Both mind and body may have qualities which can never be known by us. As to the qualities which become known to us by experience, and the qualities concealed from us, we can never know whether any of them are, or are not, essential either to body or mind.

If this view be correct, we see that a wrong account is often given of substance and qualities, and the relation between them. Thus it is very common to say that substance is a thing behind the qualities or underneath them, acting as a substratum, basis, ground, or support. All such language is in its very nature metaphorical;

the analogy is of the most distant kind, and may have a misleading character. The substance is the very thing itself, considered in a certain aspect, and the qualities are its action or manifestation. Again, it is frequently said that qualities are known, whereas substance cannot be known, or if known, known only by some deeper or more transcendental principle of the mind. Now I hold that we never know quality except as the quality of a substance, and that we know both equally in one undivided act. This is a somewhat less mystical or mysterious account than that commonly given by metaphysicians, but is, as it appears to me, in strict accordance with the revelations of consciousness.

I have said that the term "quality" expresses all in the substance by which it acts or manifests itself. That in substance which acts, is power, and in all substance (we have seen) is power. The term PROPERTY, which signifies peculiar quality, might, I think, in accordance with a usage to which it has of late been approximating more and more, be appropriated to express the powers of any given substance, as the power of thinking or feeling in mind, or of gravity or chemical affinity in body. To vary the phraseology, the word Faculty may be employed when we speak of mental powers, and Force when we speak of material powers. It is the business of science to determine by observation and generalization, the powers or properties of mind and body.

Another phrase with the ideas involved in it requires to be explained here, and that is ESSENCE. It is a very mystical word, and a whole aggregate of foolish speculation has clustered round it. Still it may have a meaning. As applied logically to classes of objects, it has a signification which can be precisely fixed; it denotes the common quality or qualities which are found in all the members of the class. Thus the possession of four limbs is the essence of the class quadruped. It is to be remembered that when the class is one of what some logicians call Kinds, it is impossible to specify all the common qualities which go to constitute it. Thus we cannot tell all the attributes which go to make up such natural classes as those of metal, dog, or rose. All that we can do is to specify some of the more marked, which are signs of others. But for such logical purposes the phrase common attribute" or

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