xii ACTIVITY AND SUBSTANCE 205 



MY aim in this essay is to throw out some suggestions for 

 a reconstruction of the conception of Substance which the 

 work of the sciences so sorely needs, but to which modern 

 philosophy, although Hume had cleared the ground by 

 showing the worthlessness of the old notion of substance, 1 

 has as yet contributed little of a really constructive char 

 acter. 2 This aim I hope to achieve by going back to 

 Aristotle and extricating from an unmerited obscurity the 

 Aristotelian ideal of Being, which seems to me to have 

 formulated the only useful and tenable conception of Sub 

 stantiality nearly 2300 years ago. I am aware that this 

 sounds incredible, and would be so, if that conception had 

 ever been properly understood. But this has never been 

 the case ; for reasons arising partly from the facility with 

 which appearances generate the vulgar notion of Substance 

 as the unchanging substratum of change, but also not 

 unconnected with the brevity of Aristotle s extant utter 

 ances on the subject. The worst of packing truth in a 

 nutshell is that, so bestowed, it cannot safely navigate the 

 stream of time and will at best float down it without notice. 

 My first task, therefore, will be to expound more fully 

 the Aristotelian conception of Energeia, to show how it 

 culminates in an activity which transcends change and 

 motion (evepjeia a/ai/T/o-ia?), and to remove the paradoxes 

 which this seems superficially to involve. I can then 

 proceed to show that this conception completely supersedes 

 the vulgar notion of Substance, that it alone is of service 

 in the sciences and competent to satisfy the intellectual 

 and emotional demands we must make upon our conception 

 of ultimate Being, and thereby not only removes a number 

 of misconceptions which have been a constant source of 

 trouble in science and philosophy, but goes far to relieve 

 philosophy from the opprobrium of terminating in incon 

 ceivable mysteries. 



1 I refer of course to his criticism of the Self in the Treatise, 



2 For, of course, the Kantian assertion that Substance is an a priori category 

 by which we recognize the permanent in change is unprofitable verbalism. It 

 explains neither the formation of the notion, i.e. how we come by this ideal, nor 

 its meaning^ i.e. what in concrete fact it is to persist through change, nor its 

 application, i.e. how we discern substances and discriminate them from things 

 which only seem so. 



