and he has failed to find the meaning of matter because it has been identified with a substrate which has no attributes, and is in truth nothing at all.
Substance exists only in appearing; it is not the mere togetherness of thinghood, but a more intense unity constituted by the accidents in determinate relation to one another. How is this unity to be understood? Perhaps the physical conception of energy is the clearest instance of it. Energy remains constant in quantity through all its changes, and is a permanent amid variety. Yet it exists only in its forms, it is not a colourless substrate of which the definite forms are illusory appearances. The destruction of one of the forms would destroy it itself. When we think by means of the conception of substance we organize the material of knowledge into a whole such that the details are set in their place by a necessity which flows through them. Their difference, thus, is not the last word about them, for each of them is the embodiment of the one substance; their nature is to reveal the immanent whole.[1]
2. Substance appears in its accidents as power or necessity, Kant, approaching the question from one side, had asked the nature of the principle which made it possible for mind to have duration or permanence presented to it in the object; and he found that there is required for that end the permanence of the phenomenal substrate itself, an enduring object which is the bearer of all change.[2] Hegel, rejecting the one-sided approach and bringing both aspects, change as well as permanence, within the scope of the deduction, renders the conception as that of substance appearing as power in its modes. Substance gives itself actual shape by establishing one form or accident, then passes into another, so that the first accident is withdrawn by it and replaced by another. Substance is thus a category of necessity. The full meaning of necessity is not yet realized, and will appear only later; but substance differs from thinghood in that its attributes are not indifferent to it but express it and constitute a determinate order by virtue of this inner power which ‘posits’
- ↑ ‘Substance, as this identity of the appearing, is the totality of the whole, and includes the accidents; and the accidental is the whole substance itself’ (Larger Logic, II. p. 221).
- ↑ V. Critique of Pure Reason, First Analogy.
