Chapter 63
Matter and material things; body, substance and the physical stuff of the world.
171 passages · 53 principal · Covers the 49 volumes of primary texts
Matter is the name these books give to the physical stuff of the world: whatever has body, takes up room, resists the hand, has weight, and goes through change without simply vanishing. It is a great idea for the Harvard Classics because nearly every other inquiry passes through it. The Stoic emperor uses it to measure the vanity of gold and purple. The theologian must say whether God found it or made it. The natural philosopher weighs it in the balance and follows it through flame and vapour. The metaphysician asks whether, behind the things we see and touch, there is any such thing at all. The questions run from what matter is, to how it stands toward form and its maker, to whether it can move or think of itself, and finally to whether it exists. They do not end in agreement.
The first difficulty is definition, and the authors give no single answer. Rousseau’s vicar calls matter whatever he perceives outside himself acting on his senses, with bodies as portions of it, and he thinks the quarrels of idealists and materialists empty1. Faraday, lecturing to young people, is equally plain: matter is anything one can lay hold of2. Philosophers tried to name an essence. Voltaire reports that Descartes made extension alone constitute matter, while Newton added solidity3. Newton’s gravitation, acting in proportion to quantity of matter4, seemed to him a new property of matter altogether5. Pascal counts impenetrability among matter’s properties and ties a thing’s identity at one time to identity of its matter6. Kelvin treats mass and inertia, the resistance to being set moving or stopped, as properties independent of the kind of substance7,8. Hobbes lists the names by which body is signified: living, sensible, hot, cold, moved9.
Alongside these definitions runs a confession of ignorance. Pascal says the dogmatists cannot tell what the body is made of10. Voltaire presses the point hardest. The schools declare that matter cannot think while admitting they do not know what matter is, and Locke counsels confessing that ignorance11. Bodies are so porous that we cannot be sure a single solid cubic inch exists12. Infinite divisibility is a truth both demonstrated and incomprehensible13, and Burke finds that divisibility, with the minute organized animals it reveals, a source of amazement14. Even Dante, travelling through the moon, wonders how body can enter body15.
Older than any definition is the sense that one stuff underlies all things. Marcus Aurelius sees universal nature moulding the common substance like wax into horse, tree and man, each for a little while16, and that substance divided among bodies of various qualities17. He uses the thought to cure desire. Gold, purple and marble are base matter, water, dust, blood and filth, changing one into another18, and one should examine the matter of a thing and see that nothing else is there19. Yet he also holds that he is composed of the formal and the material, and that neither perishes into non-existence20. The material simply returns to the substance of the whole, the formal to universal reason21. Milton’s Raphael speaks of one first matter given various forms and refined toward spirit as it draws nearer God22. Emerson finds star, sand, fire, tree and man one stuff with the same properties23. Jonson’s alchemist turns the doctrine into patter, tracing gold’s remote matter to moist exhalation and viscous earth24.
The scientists of the nineteenth century gave this ancient unity an experimental form, above all as conservation through change. Faraday shows that ice, water and steam are the same matter holding different amounts of power2,25. Marble and the gas driven from it keep their weight, so that matter changes form but never loses its gravitation26. He holds that the battery adds no matter to the water it decomposes27, that decomposed water remains the same material in gaseous form28, and that charcoal and diamond are one substance differing in cohesion29, solids being particles held by mutual attraction30. His candle lectures ask where the candle goes when it burns without trace31. The answer comes through experiment: wax becomes vapour and condenses again32,33, a great bulk of invisible matter rises from the flame34, iron gains weight by taking something from steam35, and air itself is a weighty material thing36.
The science also narrowed the domain of matter. Helmholtz concludes that heat is not a substance but the motion of the smallest particles of bodies37. Kelvin, by contrast, enlarged it. He was confident of the reality of the luminiferous ether38 and conceived it as an elastic solid, like jelly or shoemakers’ wax, through which planets nonetheless move freely39. It was millions of times less dense than air yet rigid enough to vibrate40, and he left open whether it has weight41. Geikie reads the land as matter worked over by time: compacted worn particles and organic remains42, molten material forced up from beneath43, and rock recrystallised under pressure44. Darwin notes hard inorganic substances re-formed from dead organic matter in shapes that mimic shell and plant45.
The unity of matter raises the question of form. For the Stoics, as Long explains, Zeno and Antoninus distinguished formless matter, which is acted upon, from the reason that acts. Matter is eternal, and God gives it form without creating it46. The poets keep the picture of unformed stuff awaiting shape, as when Milton’s creation begins with matter “unformed and void”47. Schiller carries the polarity into the human being. Sensuousness supplies matter that personality forms48, the matter of activity exists only as it changes while personality abides49, and the artist destroys matter by form because substance restricts the mind50. Yet beauty shows that matter and form, finite and infinite, need not exclude each other51.
The Christian authors could not accept an eternal matter alongside God. Augustine, in his perplexity over evil, considers whether God made the world from an evil matter he left unconverted52. Raleigh denies preexistent matter outright. Matter cannot be its own cause or fit itself to God’s purpose53, and infinite power needs no prepared stuff to make a finite world54. Descartes adds that corporeal things depend on God and could not subsist a moment without him55, and Milton says all created things, spiritual ones included, need sustaining56. The ancient question has turned into a modern doctrine of total dependence.
If matter is passive stuff, can it move itself? Descartes imagines matter first agitated into chaos and thereafter acting by established laws57. Pascal mocks the schools for saying that bodies fear the void and seek their centre, attributing to lifeless things passions that belong only to mind58,59. Hume finds that the sensible qualities of bodies, their solidity, extension and motion, reveal no power to produce anything60. Rousseau builds his theology on passivity. Matter’s natural state is rest61, it has no principle of activity62, and bodies communicate motion but cannot originate it63. If motion were essential to matter, matter could not be conceived at rest64, so the materialists’ self-active matter is refuted65. From the same premise he denies that passive matter could have produced living, sensible creatures66, and he prefers belief in a supreme being to systems of chance and atoms67. The suspicion that material causes fall short is much older. Plato’s Socrates calls explanation by bones, muscles, air and ether inadequate68. Even Hobbes, no friend to spirits, grants that the motion of matter produces nothing but motion69.
The sharpest form of the question concerns thought. Descartes holds that the mind depends on no material thing70 and that the soul cannot be educed from the power of matter71. For Pascal matter cannot conceivably know itself72, and all bodies together could not produce one thought, since body and mind belong to different orders73. Rousseau argues that extended, divisible matter cannot think74, and that the chemist will never find sensation at the bottom of his crucible75. Against all three Voltaire, following Locke, proposes that God may endow matter with sensation and thought76. Since we do not know what matter is, we cannot know what it is incapable of11. Hobbes describes the body in mechanical terms, the heart a spring, the nerves strings, the joints wheels77. Carlyle names materialism as one theory that restores the unity of man by making him body only78, and he sets Hope’s materialism, which distils matter into a semblance of divinity, against Schlegel, who evaporates matter into phenomenon79. Leigh Hunt observes that materialist and immaterialist alike feel the sun’s warmth the same way80.
Part of matter’s hold on belief, several authors suggest, lies in imagination rather than argument. Augustine’s Confessions record a long captivity of this kind. His mind ranged through corporeal forms and could conceive nothing spiritual81,82. He could think nothing real unless it were a mass of bodies83, and pictured spirit as a subtle body diffused through space84. He supposed God present in elephant and sparrow according to their size85. Had he been able to conceive a spiritual substance, he says, the strongholds of the Manichees would have fallen86,87. He still grants that bodies are more certain than fantasies of bodies, though they are not God88. Hobbes turns the observation against spirit itself. Immaterial substance cannot naturally enter the mind, and men conceived spirits as bodies89. Locke turns it the other way. Constant familiarity with sense makes matter crowd out belief in immaterial beings, so children should learn of spirit before they study bodies90, since a philosophy of bodies alone is defective91.
How should spirit regard the matter it inhabits? The Bhagavad-Gita teaches that the Soul works vital and mental functions upon matter92, that all life arises from the bond of matter and spirit, which strive against each other93, and that spirit wedded to moulded matter is bound to rebirth94. Milton’s angels have an essence soft and uncompounded, unlike cumbrous flesh founded on bones95. Pascal notes matter’s power to derange the soul’s functions96. Barbauld calls the body a base, encumbering weed and a worthless clod once life has fled97. Against this contempt Channing holds that matter was made for spirit and body for mind, so the material world should serve the soul and not bury it98; he even commends physical nature as a fit study for the working man99. Emerson urges us to make friends with matter, which the schools would teach us to despise, because the mind loves its old home100.
All these disputes assume that matter exists. Berkeley’s Three Dialogues deny it, at least as the philosophers understand it. Philonous rejects material substance, and Hylas thinks the denial absurd and contrary to common sense101. The argument proceeds by stripping matter of its qualities. A senseless substance cannot feel pain or great heat102,103. Sugar cannot be sweet nor wormwood bitter104. Sound in the air reduces to vibratory motion105. Hylas concedes the secondary qualities but insists that matter is untouched106. Philonous then shows that figure and extension cannot inhere in an unperceiving substance either107,108. Asked what the substratum is and how it supports accidents, Hylas has no idea of it109,110, and he confesses he was conceiving the inconceivable111. Hume reaches a similar terminus by another road. Matter stripped of both kinds of quality is annihilated into an unknown, inexplicable cause of perceptions112.
Hylas then retreats step by step. He offers matter as a subordinate cause113, then as God’s instrument114,115, then as the mere occasion of our ideas116,117. Each role is shown to be unintelligible, until matter is neither substance, accident, cause, instrument nor occasion118, an abstraction with every quality negated119. Philonous summarizes the descent from object and archetype to nothing120. Matter has no better claim to exist than a golden mountain121, and Hylas grants that it is impossible122. Berkeley also turns the scientists’ arguments back on them. Gravity proportional to sensible qualities proves no hidden substratum123, and an unthinking, will-less matter is itself the most inexplicable thing124.
The stakes, for Berkeley, are scepticism and atheism. Absolute material existence opens a gap between reality and appearance that ends in doubting every part of the universe125,126,127. It has supplied atheists with arguments, some of whom made matter co-eternal with God128. It obscures the plain sense of Moses on creation129,130 and entangles natural philosophy131. Yet he insists that sensible bodies are certain and real, existing in being perceived, with spirit their only substance132,133,134. Hylas ends willing to keep the word “matter” for sensible things so understood135.
Berkeley persuaded few of these authors. Emerson treats his theory as a curiosity of English thought136. Faraday weighed matter in a balance without troubling over its substratum. Rousseau thought the whole dispute empty1. Three questions remain open across these books: whether matter is passive or contains its own powers, whether thought can belong to it, and whether “matter” names a substance or only the order of what we perceive.
Introductory essay written by Claude Opus 5.5 from the outline and the notes on every passage below; quotations are checked against this edition.
See also: Hypothesis 5c · Science 3a · Physics 5b · Geology 3a
See also: Cause 4a
See also: Quality 3d · Pleasure and Pain 1d · Sense 3e · Mind 4b
See also: Definition 4b · Cause 4c · Sense 3b
See also: World 2c · Knowledge 5b · Sense 3b