________________
6
energy which has been very accurately determined by modern Physics is there to demonstrate its falsehood. Substance for this reason has to be defined as a permanent subject of changing accidents or modes (See The Science of Thought," Footnote, page 11). The Imperial Dictionary defines it in the following words:
66
"In philosophy that which underlies or is the permanent subject or cause of all phenomena, whether material or spiritual; the subject which we imagine to underlie the attributes or qualities by which alone we are conscious of existences, that which exists independently and unchangeably, in contradistinction to accident, which denotes any of the changeable phenomena in substance, whether these phenomena are necessary or causal, in which latter case they are called accidents in a narrower sense. The relation of accident to substance is called the relation of inherence, and corresponds to the logical relation of subject and predicates, because the substance is the subject to which are assigned the qualities, states and relations as predicates; substance itself is the essence which is capable of these phenomena, and, in spite of these changes, remains the same. Substance is, with respect to the mind, a merely logical distinction from its attributes. We can never imagine it, but we are compelled to assume i'. We cannot conceive substance shorn of its attributes, because those attributes are the sole staple of our conceptions; but we must assume that substance is something different from its attributes. Substance is the unknown, unknowable subtratum on which rests all that we experience of the external world."
This is almost word for word the view of the Jaina Siddhanta, which defines substance as that which is
Jain Education International
For Private & Personal Use Only
www.jainelibrary.org
