According to those philosophers who look for the foundations of the universe in their own minds, substance is but a dead and fantastic thing—a ghost or abstracted shadow of many sensations, impossibly fused and objectified. These philosophers, in their intense introspection, try to catch thought alive, and the nearer they come to doing so, the more unstable and unsubstantial they find it to be. It exists only in the act of dominating or positing or meaning something; and before this something can be specified exhaustively, something else has taken its place, the limits of vision having expanded or its centre shifted. Such self-observation may be profound, or at least sincere, although what is true of life in one animal or at one moment might well be false of life in another instance, and mere nonsense to a different mind. In myself, I find experience so volatile that no insistence on its unsubstantial flux, maniacally creative, seems to me exaggerated. But before such observations of life in the quick can be turned into arguments against the existence of substance, three assumptions must be made silently, all three of which are false: first, that thought observes itself; secondly, that if thought is itself in flux it can observe nothing permanent; and lastly, that if direct observation offered no illustration of the permanent, nothing permanent could exist in fact, or could be reasonably believed to exist.

In the first place, living thought is so far from observing itself, that some philosophers deny its existence, and the others find the greatest difficulty in distinguishing it from its various objects. The terms of pure thought, in which observation is couched and in which it rests, I have found to be not thoughts but essences; and the objects of thought, when thought relapses into its animal form of belief, are again not thoughts but things. If later I contrast the order, rate, and natural locus of discourse with the movement of events in general which discourse is considering, I may begin to understand what a curious thing discourse is, and to have assurance of its existence. The introspection into which I may ultimately plunge, when I seem to be creating the world as I think it, is a violently artificial exercise, in which the wheels of life are reversed; and the knowledge I thus gain of my imaginative operations would itself be sheer raving, creating a dream about dreaming, unless these operations were domiciled in a natural being, and expressed his history and vulgar situation in the natural world; so that my eventual description, or rather dramatic reconstruction, of my own experience, is one of the latest forms of my knowledge, and its object one of the most derivative and insecure. It is a theme for literary psychology, of which transcendental self-consciousness, or autobiography, is one variety.

In the second place, permanence rather than change is native to the prime objects of thought. The only data observable directly are essences absolutely immutable in their nature, even if the one observed happens to be the essence of change; since even this, so long as it is present at all, presents change and nothing but change for ever. Attention of course is continually drawn from one essence to another; but this inconstancy in intuition could not be noticed, and could not actually exist, if the essence which drops out of view and that which succeeds it were not different, and each, therefore, always itself. Furthermore, granting that an animal mind is probably always changing in some respect, it by no means follows that no essence can be retained for more than one instant under the light of attention. On the contrary, change that was complete, and that substituted one totally new object for another totally destroyed, would afford no inkling of its own existence: only the permanent would ever appear to the mind. What happens is that some detail changes in a field that does not change, and for that reason the new element attracts attention, surprise, or joy. To hold something fast, to watch, to stare, to wait and lie low in the presence of a felt incubus, are primitive experiences; and the length of crawling time through which a strain endures is a conspicuous feature in sensation, especially in pain. This sense of duration doubtless involves the sense of something changing at the same time—of something coming or continuing to come as it threatened or as it was demanded—of some pulse of feeling recurring and mounting towards increased potency or increased fatigue. Yet in all this setting of cumulative change (which is but a perspective in the fancy) there often shines a fixed focus of interest; and the sense of something which lasts, and which remains itself whether I approach or elude it, is one of the first and loudest notes of awareness. Perhaps, when my mood is clear and musical, there is some permanent essence clearly revealed that arouses my curiosity and wonder; or when the stream runs thick and turbid, the obscure life of the psyche itself rises to the surface, and yields the primary criterion of happiness and naturalness in events. In either case in mastering, recognising, and positing what I find or what I want, I know the beginnings of speculative joy and of participation in eternity. The flux touches the eternal at the top of every wave. Whatever thwarts this achievement, or disturbs the deep rhythms of the life slumbering beneath, seems illegitimate; and until acquisitive or sexual impulses are aroused, the dozing animal counts on a perpetual well-being, and any change seems to it as hateful as it is incredible.

In this way change itself, when it is rhythmic and regular, wears to intuition the form of sustained being. The life of the body, by its latent operation, sets a measure and scale for the duration of any passing vision. There is an ever-present background felt as permanent, myself always myself; and there is a large identity in the universe also, familiar and limited in spite of its agitation, like a cage full of birds. Everything seems to be more or less prolonged; comfort, digestive warmth, the past still simmering, the brooding potentiality of things to come, shaping themselves in fancy before they have occurred. Both sleep and watchfulness are long drawn out, so is the very sense of movement. Though change be everywhere, it remains everywhere strange and radically unwelcome: for even when, as in destructive passion or impatience, it is imperatively sought, it is sought as an escape from an uncomfortable posture, in the hope of restoring a steady life, and resting in safety.

Thus the notion of permanence behind change—which is a chief element in the notion of substance—is trebly rooted in experience; because every essence that appears is eternally what it is; because many congenial images and feelings appear lastingly; and because whatever interrupts the even flow and luxurious monotony of organic life is odious to the primeval animal.

In the third place, even if direct experience did not illustrate the permanent, the order of events when reflected on would suggest and impose a belief in it. I reserve for another occasion all discussion of the laws of nature or of the constant quantities of matter or energy: the most ordinary recognition of things being as they were, and remaining always at hand, posits their substantial nature. Suppose all intuition was instantaneous; and in one sense it may be said always to be so, because specious durations have no common scale, and the most prolonged may be treated as a single moment, as the dome of St. Peter’s may be seen through a keyhole. Instantaneous intuition, when suspended, may be suspended only for a moment, and instantly recovered, as when I blink. Such brief interruptions to perception are bridged over in primary memory, and do not break the specious identity and continuity of the object. It does not follow, however, that the interruption is not felt. On the contrary, it is felt and resented just because beneath it the object is sensibly continuous. There is a stock optical experiment in which a pencil is made to cross the field of vision between the eye and a book, without ever hiding any part of the page. What binocular vision does in that instance, the persistence of impressions does in the case of an intermittent stimulus. The interruption is startling and obvious, but the continuity of the object is obvious too. This experience may be repeated on a larger scale. The psyche, being surrounded by substances, is adapted to them, and does not suspend her adjustments or her beliefs whenever her sensations are interrupted. Children recognise and identify things and persons more readily than they distinguish them. As intuition is addressed to terms in discourse which are eternal in their nature, though the intuition of them is desultory, so faith and art are addressed to habits in substance, which without arresting the perpetual and pervasive flux of experience (nor perhaps that of substance itself) manifest its dynamic permanence; and, of course, it is on its dynamic side, not pictorially or intuitively, that substance is conceived, posited, measured, and trusted.

Hence the discovery, big with scientific consequences, that an existing thing may endure unchanged, although my experience of it be intermittent. The object of these recurrent observations is not conceived, as a sophistical psychology would have it, by feigning that the observations are not discrete. Every one knows, when he shuts and opens his eyes, that his vision has been interrupted; the interruption is the point of the game. The notion that the thing persists was there from the beginning; until I blinked, I had found it persisting, and I find it persisting still after I open my eyes again. In considering the fortunes of the object posited, I simply discard the interruption, as voluntary and due to a change in myself which I can repeat at will. In spontaneous thought I never confuse the changes which the thing may undergo in its own being with the variations in my attention nor (when I have a little experience) with shifts in my perspectives. I therefore recognise it to be permanent in relation to my intermittent glimpses of it; and this without in the least confusing or fusing my different views, or supposing them to be other than discrete and perhaps instantaneous.

On the same principle, as education advances, a thing which stimulates different senses at once or successively is easily recognised to be the same object; and this, again, is done without in the least fusing or confusing colour with hardness or sound with shape. And with the growth of the arts and of experience of the world, the persisting and continuous engine of nature is clearly conceived as the common object which all my senses and all my theories describe in their special languages at their several awakenings. That the syllables are broken does not make their messages conflicting; on the contrary, they supplement one another’s blindness, and correct one another’s exuberance. Substance was their common object from the beginning, faith in substance not being a consequence of reasoning about appearances, but an implication of action, and a conviction native to hunger, fear, feeding, and fighting; as an aid and guide to which the organs of the outer senses are developed, and rapidly paint their various symbols in the mind. The euphony and syntax of sense, far from disproving the existence of substance, arise and change in the act of expressing its movement, and especially the responsive organisation of that part of it which is myself.

So much for the objections to the belief in substance which may be raised from the point of view of self-consciousness, when this is regarded as the principle of knowledge or even of universal existence, neither of which it is.

Objections to the belief in substance may also come from a different quarter (or one ostensibly different), in the name of critical sense and economy in the interpretation of appearances. Suppose, the empiricist may say, that your substance exists: how does it help you to explain anything? You never have seen, and you never will see, anything but appearances. If you trust your memory (as it is reasonable to do, since you must, if you are to play the game of discourse at all) you may assume that appearances have come in a certain order; and if you trust expectation (for the same bad reason) you may assume that they will come in somewhat the same order in future. These assumptions are not founded on any proof or on any real probability, but it is intelligible that you should make them, because the mind can hardly be asked to discredit its vistas, when it has nothing else by which to criticise them. But why should you interpolate amongst appearances, or posit behind them, something that you can never find? That seems a gratuitous fiction, and at best a hypostasis of grammar and names. You want a substance because you use substantives, or because your verbal logic talks in subjects and predicates.

But let us grant, the empiricist will go on, that your substance is possible, since everything is possible where ignorance is complete. In what terms can you conceive it, save in terms of appearance? Or if you say it exists unconceived, or is inconceivable, it will simply encumber your philosophy with a metaphysical world, in addition to the given one, and with the hopeless problem of relating the two.

These empirical objections to the belief in substance might in strictness be ruled out, since (in so far as they deny substance) they rest on the same romantic view of self-consciousness as the source of knowledge and being as do the transcendental objections just considered. Empiricism, however, has the advantage of being less resolute in folly. Such terms as appearance, phenomenon, given fact (meaning given essence plus thing posited), and perception (meaning intuition plus belief) are all used sophistically to cover the muddles of introspection. They are not analysed critically, but are allowed to retain in solution many of the assumptions of common sense. The essence given is confused with the intuition of it which is not given, but which common sense knows is implicated. This intuition is then confused with the belief, prompted by animal impulse and, for analysis, utterly gratuitous, that a thing or event exists definable by the essence given. This belief finally is confused with the existence of its object, which it merely posits and cannot witness. This object, in psychological idealism, is some ulterior intuition or (as it is called by common sense, which assumes a material object producing it) some ulterior perception. But it is utterly impossible that one perception should perceive another, and it is improper to call an intuition a perception when it has no existing object.

In consequence of this halting criticism of immediate experience, empiricism admits the existence of many feelings or ideas deployed in time and referred to in memory and in social intercourse; and in admitting this (let me repeat) it admits substance in principle. Such a flux of feelings or ideas is a permanent hidden substance for purposes of knowledge, even if each of them, being a momentary life, might not be called by that name. Each feeling or idea is substantial, however, in respect to any memory or theory, contained in some other moment, which may refer to it; and this memory or theory is an appearance of that substantial but remote fact.

Let us suppose that David Hume, in spite of his corpulence, was nothing but a train of ideas. Some of these composed his philosophy, and I, when I endeavour to learn what it was, create in my own mind a fresh train of ideas which refer to those in the mind of Hume: and for me his opinions are a substance of which my apprehension is an appearance. My apprehension, in this case, is conceived to be an apprehension of a matter of fact, namely, the substance of Hume at some date; and in studying his philosophy I am learning nothing but history. This is an implication of empiricism, but is not true to the facts. For when I try to conceive the philosophy of Hume I am not considering any particular ideas which may have constituted Hume at one moment of his career; I am considering an essence, his total system, as it would appear when the essences present in his various reflective moments are collated; and, therefore, I am really studying and learning a system of philosophy, not the presumable condition of a dead man’s mind at various historical moments.

If empiricists were a little more sceptical, they would perceive that in admitting knowledge of historical facts they have admitted the principle that the beliefs they call ideas may report the existence of natural substances. If the substance of this world is a flux, and even a flux of feelings, it is none the less substantial, like the fire of Heraclitus, and the existing object of such ideas as may describe it. But this reasonable faith is obscured by the confusions I mentioned above. The empiricist forgets that he is asserting the existence of outlying facts, because he half identifies them with the living fact of his present belief in them: and, further, because he identifies this living fact, his belief now, with the essence which it is attributing to those remote existences. He thinks he believes only what he sees, but he is much better at believing than at seeing.

Apart from this unconscious admission of the existence of substances, the empirical objections to substance in the singular express a distrust of metaphysics with which I sympathise, and they show a love of home truths which deserves to be satisfied.

In the first place, the substance in which I am proposing to believe is not metaphysical but physical substance. It is the varied stuff of the world which I meet in action—the wood of this tree I am felling, the wind that is stirring its branches, the flesh and bones of the man who is jumping out of the way. Belief in substance is not imported into animal perception by language or by philosophy, but is the soul of animal perception from the beginning, and the perpetual deliverance of animal experience. Later, as animal attention is clarified, and animal experience progresses, the description of these obvious substances may be refined: the tree, the wind, and the man may reveal their elements and genesis to more patient observation, and the first aspect they wore may be found to be a fused and composite appearance of many elaborate processes within them. But the more diffused substances in operation which I shall then come upon will be simply the constituents of the tree, the wind, and the man; they will be just as truly (though more calculably) the realities I confront and may use in action. They will be just as open to perception, although instruments or hypotheses may be required to extend the accidental range of my senses in observing them; and they will be just as much substances and not essences, that is, objects of belief posited in action, not images given in intuition. My notions of substance will therefore be subject to error, and capable of reform: I may arrive at the belief that earth, air, water, and fire are the substances in all things; later I may discover that fire is not a substance, but a form of motion; for earth, air, and water I may come to substitute the four or five score elements of chemistry, or more or less; and I may remain in doubt whether light and space and ether are substances or not. But all these opinions would be equally fantastic, and equally devoid of truth or falsehood, if there were no substance before me in the first instance which I was attempting to describe.

By a substance I understand what modern philosophers often call an “independent object”—a most unfortunate phrase, because precisely at the moment when a substance or an essence becomes my object, by becoming the theme of my discourse, it ceases to be independent of me in that capacity: and when this happens, before the cognitive relation between me and my object is established, a dynamic relation has probably arisen between the substance of that object and the substance of myself, causing me to make that intrusive substance the object of my attention. When a thing becomes my object it becomes dependent on me ideally, for being known, and I am probably, directly or indirectly, dependent on it materially, for having been led to know it. What is independent of knowledge is substance, in that it has a place, movement, origin, and destiny of its own, no matter what I may think or fail to think about it. This self-existence is what the name object jeopardises, and what the name substance indicates and asserts.

If abuses of language were not inevitable, I should be tempted to urge philosophers to revert to the etymological and scholastic sense of the words object and objective, making them refer to whatever is placed before the mind, as a target to be aimed at by attention. Objective would then mean present to imagination; and things would become objects of thought in the same incidental way in which they become objects of desire. But I will content myself with returning in my own person to the correct use of the word substance for whatever is self-existent, and with bestowing the term object on occasion upon any substance, essence, event, or truth, when it becomes incidentally the theme of discourse.

Substances are called things when found cut up into fragments which move together and are recognisable individually; and things are called substances when their diffuse and qualitative existence is thought of rather than their spatial limits. Flour is a substance and a loaf of bread is a thing; but there is nothing metaphysical about flour, nor is there any difference of physical status between a thing and the substance of it.

But is not the materia prima of Aristotle metaphysical? Is not the substance of Spinoza metaphysical? Are not souls and Platonic Ideas, which are also reputed to be substances, perfectly metaphysical?

Of course: and I shall have occasion, when surveying the realm of matter, to show that these and other metaphysical entities are only nominal essences, and cannot be the substance of anything.

I think these explanations will suggest to the reader a sufficient answer to the other points raised by the empiricists against belief in substance. Substance does not reduplicate natural objects, but is identical with them. What it might be said to reduplicate (or rather to back up and to render significant) would be given essences. Certainly known substances, and other known objects, require to be posited by animal faith on occasion of intuitions, as that which these intuitions report. But there is hardly any reduplication here. Such representation as there is, is probably quite heterogeneous in aspect from its original, and even when—as in memory or a historical romance—some specious similarity is presumed, it is a highly selective and idealised reproduction, in a wholly different medium from the represented facts, and possessing utterly different functions and conditions of being. Nature in being discovered is not reproduced, but acquires a new dimension, and is extraordinarily enriched. Matters are ludicrously reversed if it is imagined that a pure spirit contemplating essences could invent a body and a world of matter surrounding it; the body exists first, and in reacting on its environment kindles intuitions expressive of its vicissitudes; and the commentary is like that which any language or chronicle or graphic art creates by existing. Substance is the speaker and substance is the theme; intuition is only the act of speaking or hearing, and the given essence is the audible word. Substance is on the same plane of being as trees and houses, but, like trees and houses, it is on an entirely different plane of being from the immediate terms of experience (which are essences) and from experience itself (which is spirit thinking).

As to the reproach that substance, because it is not an appearance presented exhaustively, must remain unconceived and inconceivable, it rests on a false ideal of human knowledge. Intuition of essence is not knowledge, but fancy and mental sport: and if logic and mathematics are called sciences, they are such only as expansions of given hypotheses according to given rules may be sciences, as there is a science of chess. They are not true nor human, except in the special form in which actual discourse and actual bodies happen to illustrate them. A preference for dialectic over knowledge of fact (which is knowledge of substance) may manifest a poetical and superior spirit, as might a preference for music over conversation; but it would be vain and suicidal for human knowledge to transfer that ideal to the general interpretation of experience. Substance being the object set before me in action, pursuit, and investigation cannot be antecedently in my possession, either materially or intellectually; it confronts me as something challenging respect and demanding study; and its intrinsic essence must remain always problematical, since I approach it only from the outside and experimentally. The essences by which it is revealed to me, and the hypotheses I frame about its nature, are so many provocations for me to manipulate and examine it, and to call it by various humorous names, expressive to me of its strange habits. My natural curiosity, if I am a healthy young animal, will prompt me to do this eagerly, and to turn my first luminous impressions into triumphant dogmas; but to pure spirit, when that awakes, all this faith and knowingness will seem childish.

To pure spirit substance and all its ways must remain always dark, alien, and impertinent. From the transcendental point of view, which is that of spirit, substance is an unattainable goal, or object-as-such, being posited, not possessed. Only essences please this jealous lover of light, and seem to it sufficient; it hates faith, existence, doubt, anything ulterior. Substance and truth offend it by their unnecessary claims; it would gladly brush them aside as superstitious obsessions. What ghostly thing, it says to itself, is this Speaker behind the voice, this Meaning behind the vision, this dark Substance behind the fair appearance? Substance interrupts and besets the spirit in its innocence, and in its mad play; one substance, which it calls the flesh, torments it from below, and a kindred substance, which it calls matter, prods, crushes, and threatens it from without. God also, another substance, looms before it, commanding and forbidding; and he is terrible in his wrath and obscurity, until it learns his ways. Yet, as religion shows, it is possible for the spirit to be tamed and chastened. The fear of substance may be the beginning of wisdom; and accustomed to the steady dispensations of that power, the spirit may grow pious and modest, and happy to be incarnate. God will then become in its eyes a source of protection and comfort and daily bread, as all substance is to those who learn how to live with it. When the lessons of experience are thus accepted, and spirit is domesticated in the world, the belief in substance explains everything; because if substance exists, a perpetual dependence in point of destiny, and a perpetual inadequacy in knowledge are clearly inevitable, and soon come to seem proper and even fortunate.

As knowledge advances, my conception of substance becomes a map in which my body is one of the islets charted: the relations of myself to everything else may be expressed there in their true proportions, and I shall cease to be an egotist. In the symbolic terms which my map affords, I can then plan and test my actions (which otherwise I should perform without knowing it) and trace the course of other events; but I am myself a substance, moving in the plane of universal substance, not on the plane of my map; for neither I nor the rest of substance belong to the realm of pictures, nor exist on that scale and in that flat dimension. How we exist and what we are substantially must accordingly remain a problem to the end; even if by chance I should ever hit upon the essence of substance, nothing could test or maintain that miraculous moment of clairvoyance. The only sphere in which clairvoyance is normal is the sphere of mental discourse, one part of which may survey another in the very terms in which the other unrolled itself in act; as I may faithfully rehearse my own past or future thinkings, or those of men of my own mind. The probability of such clairvoyance diminishes as the similarity of structure and substance between me and the other creature diminishes; and it vanishes altogether where life dies down; so that in respect to inorganic substance I am indeed reduced to arbitrary symbols, at which that substance, if it could know them, would laugh. Yet for my purposes in studying inorganic substance (which is not interesting to me in itself) these symbols do very well: they arise on occasion of substantial events, and therefore appear in the same historical sequence; so that in surveying the order of my symbols I learn the order of real events, though my pictures certainly are not portraits of their substance. Yet even the pictorial quality of these symbols expresses true variations and variety in the substance of myself: it falls and rises with my life. For this reason the map I draw of the universe in my fancy, when I grow studious, becomes a truer and truer map, rendering the movement of substance within and without me with increasing precision, though always in an original notation, native to my senses and intellect.

False ideals of knowledge are also involved in the contention that the hypothesis of substance does not help to explain appearances, and even renders appearances inexplicable. What is explanation? In dialectic it is the utterance, in further words or images, of relations and terms implied in a given essence: it is the explication of meanings. But facts have no meaning in that sense. Essences implied ideally in their essences need never become facts too: otherwise the whole realm of essence would have to exist in act, and it would be impossible so much as to begin the survey of that horrible infinitude, for lack of any principle of emphasis to give me a starting-point, and create a particular perspective. No: facts are surds, they exemplify fragments of the realm of essence chosen for no reason: for if a will or reason choosing anything (say the good) were admitted, that will or reason would itself be a groundless fact, and an absolute accident. Existence (as the least insight into essence shows) is necessarily irrational and inexplicable. It cannot, therefore, contain any principle of explanation a priori; and substance, as I understand the term, being what exists in itself, it must be also (to borrow the rest of Spinoza’s definition of it) what is understood through itself, that is, by taking its own accidental nature as the standard for all explanations. If substance were some metaphysical principle, some dialectical or moral force, it might be expected to “explain” existence as a whole; but it ought not then to be called a substance; at best it would be a harmony or music which things somehow made. Such a harmony would not exist in things bodily and individually, rendering their essences existential, but would supervene upon them and float through them, like those principles which certain moody metaphysicians have dreamt of, as solving the riddle of the universe, and have called Sin, Will, Duty, the Good, or the Idea. Substance, as I understand the word, is nothing of that sort. It is not metaphysical, but simply whatever the physical substance may be which is found in things or between them. It therefore cannot “explain” these things, since they are its parts or instances, and it is simply their substance. They have one, since they may be cut up, ground into powder, dissolved into gases, or caused to condense again before our eyes; and if they are living things, we may observe them devouring and generating one another, the flux of substance evidently running through them, and taking on recurrent forms. When these habits of nature are taken (as they should be taken) as the true principle of explanation, the belief in substance does become a great means of understanding events. It helps me to explain their place, date, quality, and quantity, so that I am able to expect or even to produce them, when the right substances are at hand. If they were detached facts, not forms regularly taken on by enduring and pervasive substances, there would be no knowing when, where, of what sort, or in what numbers they would not assault me; and my life would not seem life in a tractable world, but an inexplicable nightmare.

I shall be thought a silly philosopher to mention this, as if it were not obvious; but why do so many wise philosophers ignore it, and defend systems which contradict it?

Finally, even if, in a moment of candour, the friend of phenomena was inclined to allow that substance, so understood, was neither metaphysical nor undiscoverable nor useless for explaining events, he might still urge that the belief in substance creates an insoluble difficulty, because opposite to substance appearance rises at once like a ghost; and how shall this ghost be laid or what room shall be found for it in the world of substance which we have posited? In other words, substance, by hypothesis, is the source of appearances: but how, remaining substance, can it ever produce them?

Here again the objection arises out of false demands. As at first substance was condemned on the ground that knowledge should possess its object as intuition does its data (a demand which would rob knowledge of all transitive force), so now substance is condemned on the ground that causation should be dialectical and that reality should be uniform, so that if substance exists nothing should exist except substance. Whence these absurd postulates? In the first place, reality (since it includes the realm of essence) is infinitely omnimodal; and even when reduced to existence it may certainly take on as many dimensions and as many varieties as it likes. Substance is not more real than appearance, nor appearance more real than essence, but only differently real. When the word reality is used invidiously or eulogistically, it is merely in view of the special sort of reality which the speaker expects or desires to find in a particular instance. So when the starving gymnosophist takes a rope for a serpent, he misses the reality of that, which is lifeless matter; when the tourist gazing at an Arabic scroll calls it a frieze, he misses the reality of that, which is a pious sentiment; and when the millionaire buys a picture for its antiquity and its reputation, he misses the reality of that, which is a composition. When substance is asserted, appearance is not denied; its actuality is not diminished, but a significance is added to it which, as a bare datum, it could not have.

In the second place, in so far as causation is not sheer magic imputed by laying a superstitious emphasis on those phases which interest me most in the flux of things, causation is the order of generation in nature: whatsoever grows out of a certain conjunction in things, and only out of that conjunction, may be said to be caused by it. Nothing that happens is groundless, since whatever antecedents it actually has are adequate to produce it. Yet all that happens is marvellous, because like existence itself it is unfathomable, and, if we abstract from our familiarity with it, almost incredible. But the antecedents, the consequents, and the connection between them are equally remarkable in this respect, and equally perspicuous. The schoolboy will be delighted to learn how the refraction of the sun’s rays paints the rainbow on a shower, or on the spray of the waves; the farmer will perfectly understand that chickens are hatched from eggs; and I for one (though other philosophers are less fortunate) can perceive clearly that when animals react upon things in certain ways these things appear to them in certain forms; and the fact that they appear does not seem to me (so simple am I) to militate against their substantial existence.

Certainly neither the awakening of intuition, nor the character of the essences that appear, can be deduced dialectically from the state of the substance which produces them; but dialectic traces the implication of one essence in another and can never issue from the eternal world. It is perfectly impotent to express, much less to explain, any change or any existence. If dialectic ruled the world, all implications would always have been realised, no movement would have been possible, and the very discourse that pursues dialectic would have been congealed and identified from the beginning with the essence which it describes. Existence, change, life, appearance, must be understood to be unintelligible: on any other assumption the philosopher might as well tear his hair and go mad at once. But when that assumption has been duly made, and dialectic has been relegated to an innocuous dignity, the blossoming of substance into appearance becomes the most amiable of mysteries. If instead of admitting this evident and familiar kindling of mind in nature, which makes the charm of childhood, of morning, and of spring, I supposed that mind could animate no material body, and that the flame of spirit could rise from no natural hearth, I should not have a more intelligible world on my hands, but only a very miserable and ghostly one. I should be foolishly shutting myself up in myopic ignorance of that great world which is not mine nor like me, although I belong to it and feed on it unawares. Why should I think it philosophical to be so unintelligent, or to assert that appearances are the only possible realities, when these appearances themselves do their very best to inform me of the opposite? For though the poor things can’t be actually more than they are, they arrange themselves and troop together in such a manner that, if I make the least beginning in understanding them, I gather that they are voices of self-evolving things, on the same plane of reality as myself. Indeed, without such a background to lend them a subterranean influence over my own being, they would be unmeaning creations, and every transition from one to another of them would be arbitrary. If I am told that appearances are but loosely and unintelligibly bound to substance, I may reply that without substance appearances would be far more loosely and unintelligibly bound to one another. Appearances are at least conventional transcripts of facts; they are expressions of substance which may serve as signs of its movements; but what relation, moral or habitual, would each appearance, if taken absolutely and not as significant of things, retain to the other appearances that in dreaming or waking might follow upon it? None whatever: it is only in its organs and its objects that experience touches anything continuous or measurable and possesses a background on which to piece together the broken segments of its own orbit. That substance should be capable of attaining to expression in appearance is a proof that substance is fertile, not that it is superfluous. On the contrary, it is certain that if I knew the essence of substance, and if I made nature the standard of natural necessity, the emergence of appearance in the form and on the occasions in which it emerges would seem to me necessary and inevitable.