The Christian religion is so fearfully demoralizing (?) that it is a great pity that these Godless, Christless souls called Pantheists and Atheists can't get some solution of the great problem of world-making that would dispense with the Bible. How well they could get along if--if--if--they only had this great question settled.
"_Substance_ is that which is and abides;" "that which subsists of or by itself; that which lies under qualities; that which truly is--or _essence_." "It is opposed to _accident_." "In its logical and metaphysical sense it is that nature of a thing which may be conceived to remain when every other nature is removed or abstracted from it; the ultimate point in analyzing the complex idea of any object. _Accident_ denotes all those ideas which the analysis excludes as not belonging to the mere being or nature of the object." It is said that our first idea of _substance_ is, possibly, derived from the consciousness of self, the conviction that, while our sensations, thought and purposes are changing, we continue the same. "We see bodies also remaining the same as to quantity or extension, while their color and figure, their state of motion or rest may be changed." It has also been said that _substances_ are either primary, that is singular, individual _substances_; or secondary, that is genera, and species of _substance_.
Substances have been divided into complete and incomplete, finite and infinite. But it is to be remembered that these are merely divisions of being. Substance is properly divided into matter and spirit, or that which is extended and that which thinks.
"The foundation principle of substance is that law of the human mind by which every quality or mode of being is referred to a substance," or the consciousness of a cause for every effect. "In everything which we perceive or can imagine as existing, we distinguish two parts, qualities variable and multiplied; and a being one and identical; and these two are so united in thought that we can not separate them in our intelligence, nor think of qualities without a _substance_." So it is a self-evident or first truth, that there is a subjective or inner man which thinks, reflects and reasons, for memory recalls to us the many modes of our mind; its many qualities and conditions. What variety of mental conditions have we not experienced? These are all so many evidences of an internal _substance_ that we call spirit. That spirit is to be distinguished from thought as cause is from effect is evident; and also from matter lying in the accident or quality of body, is certain, from the fact of its being subject to such rapid and instantaneous changes of condition. Amidst all the different modes, qualities, or accidents of mind, we believe ourselves to be the same individual being; and this conviction is the result of that law of thought which always associates qualities with things.