Now it was very early seen that all we know of the chalk is the whiteness, friability, etc., all we know of the wood is the combustibility and fibrous structure.  A group of attributes is what each substance here is known-as, they form its sole cash-value for our actual experience.  The substance is in every case revealed through them; if we were cut off from them we should never suspect its existence; and if God should keep sending them to us in an unchanged order, miraculously annihilating at a certain moment the substance that supported them, we never could detect the moment, for our experiences themselves would be unaltered.  Nominalists accordingly adopt the opinion that substance is a spurious idea due to our inveterate human trick of turning names into things.  Phenomena come in groups—­the chalk-group, the wood-group, etc.—­and each group gets its name.  The name we then treat as in a way supporting the group of phenomena.  The low thermometer to-day, for instance, is supposed to come from something called the ‘climate.’  Climate is really only the name for a certain group of days, but it is treated as if it lay behind the day, and in general we place the name, as if it were a being, behind the facts it is the name of.  But the phenomenal properties of things, nominalists say, surely do not really inhere in names, and if not in names then they do not inhere in anything.  They ADhere, or COhere, rather, with each other, and the notion of a substance inaccessible to us, which we think accounts for such cohesion by supporting it, as cement might support pieces of mosaic, must be abandoned.  The fact of the bare cohesion itself is all that the notion of the substance signifies.  Behind that fact is nothing.

Scholasticism has taken the notion of substance from common sense and made it very technical and articulate.  Few things would seem to have fewer pragmatic consequences for us than substances, cut off as we are from every contact with them.  Yet in one case scholasticism has proved the importance of the substance-idea by treating it pragmatically.  I refer to certain disputes about the mystery of the Eucharist.  Substance here would appear to have momentous pragmatic value.  Since the accidents of the wafer don’t change in the Lord’s supper, and yet it has become the very body of Christ, it must be that the change is in the substance solely.  The bread-substance must have been withdrawn, and the divine substance substituted miraculously without altering the immediate sensible properties.  But tho these don’t alter, a tremendous difference has been made, no less a one than this, that we who take the sacrament, now feed upon the very substance of divinity.  The substance-notion breaks into life, then, with tremendous effect, if once you allow that substances can separate from their accidents, and exchange these latter.

This is the only pragmatic application of the substance-idea with which I am acquainted; and it is obvious that it will only be treated seriously by those who already believe in the ’real presence’ on independent grounds.