Hume’s rejection of substance is apparently complete and absolute, and is so interpreted by many of his disciples. But a thorough-going phenomenism is in reality impossible; no philosophers have ever succeeded in thinking out an intelligible theory of things without the concepts of “matter,” and “spirit,” and “things,” and the “Ego” or “Self,” however they may have tried to dispense with them; and these are concepts of substances. Hence there are those who doubt that Hume was serious in his elaborate reasoning away of substances. The fact is that Hume “reasoned away” substance only in the sense of an unknowable substratum of phenomena, and not in the sense of a something that exists in itself.(229) So far from denying the existence of entities that exist in themselves, he seems to have multiplied these beyond the wildest dreams of all previous philosophers _by substantializing accidents_.(230) What he does call into doubt is the capacity of the human mind to attain to a knowledge of the specific natures of such entities; and even here the arguments of phenomenism strike the false Cartesian theory of knowledge, rather than the sober and moderate teachings of scholasticism regarding the nature and limitations of our knowledge of substances. 62. THE SCHOLASTIC VIEW OF OUR KNOWLEDGE IN REGARD TO THE EXISTENCE AND NATURE OF SUBSTANCES.—What, then, are these latter teachings? That we have a direct, intellectual insight into the specific essence or nature of a corporeal substance such as gold, similar to our insight into the abstract essence of a triangle? By no means; Locke was quite right in rejecting the Cartesian claim to intuitions which were supposed to yield up all knowledge of things by “mathematical,” _i.e._ deductive, _a priori_ reasoning. The scholastic teaching is briefly as follows:—