61. THE PHENOMENIST ATTACK ON THE TRADITIONAL DOCTRINE OF SUBSTANCE.—Passing now to the question of the existence and nature of substances, and their relation to accidents, we shall find evidences of misunderstandings to which many philosophical errors may be ascribed at least in part. It is a fairly common contention that the distinction between substance and accident is really a groundless distinction; that we have experience merely of transient events or happenings, internal and external, with relations of coexistence or sequence between them; that it is an illusion to suppose, underlying these, an inert, abiding basis called “substance”; that this can be at best but a useless name for each of the collections of external and internal appearances which make up our total experience of the outer world and of our own minds. This is the general position of _phenomenists_. “What do you know of substance,” they ask us, “except that it is an indeterminate and unknown something underlying phenomena? And even if you could prove its existence, what would it avail you, since in its nature it is, and must remain, unknown? No doubt the mind naturally supposes this ‘something’ underlying phenomena; but it is a mere mental fiction the reality of which cannot be proved, and the nature of which is admitted, even by some who believe in its real existence, to be unknowable.” Now there can be no doubt about the supreme importance of this question: all parties are pretty generally agreed that on the real or fictitious character of substance the very existence of genuine metaphysics in the traditional sense depends. And at first sight the possibility of such a controversy as the present one seems very strange. “Is it credible,” asks Mercier,(225) “that thinkers of the first order, like Hume, Mill, Spencer, Kant, Wundt, Paulsen, Littré, Taine, should have failed to recognize the substantial character of things, and of the _Ego_ or Self? Must they not have seen that they were placing themselves in open revolt against sound common sense? And on the other hand is it likely that the genius of Aristotle could have been duped by the naïve illusion which phenomenists must logically ascribe to him? Or that all those sincere and earnest teachers who adopted and preserved in scholastic philosophy for centuries the peripatetic distinction between substance and accidents should have been all utterly astray in interpreting an elementary fact of common sense?” There must have been misunderstandings, possibly on both sides, and much waste of argument in refuting chimeras. Let us endeavour to find out what they are and how they gradually arose.