ceived as a unitary process at all, and hence not even as a flux. This determinate character of change is brought to the forefront by Hegel in his analysis of substance and accident. Substance advances beyond thinghood in two points. Firstly, the two aspects, essence and non-essential, are brought closer together, they are even identified; secondly, the accidents are thus conceived as not merely indifferent to one another, but as standing in a determinate relation and as forming a totality.
1. The unity of the thing and its properties is a loose one; the thing is the medium of the properties, and can often be deprived of one of them without loss of identity. A house may be painted a different colour and yet be the same house.[1] Substance, however, is its accidents; it appears in them and exists only in appearing. The word, substance, is sometimes used in an abstract and one-sided way as referring to a mere identity behind or beneath its attributes, a mere substrate. This interpretation Hegel considers to be inadequate.[2] He prefers to speak simply of essence when the object is so conceived, and to retain the word substance for the object, which is thought under the conception that is here analysed. The sense he rejects can be found as the guiding conception of certain would-be philosophical physicists. In the effort to penetrate to the nature of ‘matter’ the thinker sometimes forgets that in the appropriate category, viz. that of substance, the essence exists only in appearing. The accidents of substance are, of course, the subordinate and even the unessential aspects; but this is falsely taken when it is supposed that they can be brushed aside as non-existent or as subjective. Sometimes in the effort to think matter the investigator strips off each of its properties and functions as unessential and superficial. But unluckily at the end, instead of discovering what matter is, he finds in his hands a bare identity with no intelligible content—the mere emptiness of ultimate abstraction. Too often the thinker proclaims the bankruptcy not only of his special category but of reason as a whole. The inner nature of things, he says, is an inscrutable mystery, and no human wit can read the riddle which has baffled him. The mystery, however, is of his own making,
