IN WHAT MANNER THE IDEA OF SUBSTANCE MAY BE APPLIED TO GOD. 95. In the idea of substance as formed from the beings around us and from the testimony of our consciousness we find the relation to changes which occur in it as their subject or recipient. But we have before remarked that besides this relation there is a negation of inherence in another as the modifications are inherent in the substance; this negation implies a perfection which exempts it from the necessity of inherence to which the changeable and transitory beings which we call accidents or modifications are subject. As we are ignorant of the intrinsic essence of substances, we do not know what this perfection is; yet we cannot doubt that it exists in the very nature of the subject, and is independent of the modifications which transform it. If then the essence of the substance must consist in any thing, it must be in this perfection of which we have a knowledge, but not an intuitive cognition. When therefore substance is defined in relation to accidents, _quod substat accidentibus_, it is rather defined by the manner in which it is presented to us than by what it is in itself. 96. Hence, of the two definitions usually received in the schools: _Ens per se subsistens_, a being subsisting by itself, and, _id quod substat accidentibus_, the subject of accidents; the first is the more correct, because it comes nearer the expression of what it is in itself. Although we know finite substances only inasmuch as revealed by accidents, and even our own mind knows itself only in its acts, reason tells us that in order to be known things must exist, and in order that our mind may find in them something permanent, it is necessary that this something should be in them. Our knowledge does not produce its objects; in order to be known they must exist. 97. These reflections manifest the possibility of the existence of a substance not subject to accidents or change of any kind; and that this substance not only does not lose the character of substance by being immutable, but possesses it in a much more perfect degree. The perfection of substance is not in its changes but in what is permanent in it, not in having a succession of modifications inherent in it, but in existing in such a manner as not to need to inhere in another. The substance which should possess this permanence, this perfection enabling it to exist by itself, and at the same time should have no modification, should experience no change, would be infinitely superior to all other substances. This substance is God. 98. Now it is easy to answer the question whether when applied to God the idea of substance is understood in the same sense as when applied to creatures; or, to speak in the terms of the schools, whether it is taken univocally or analogously.