In the first place, we remark, in vindication of this statement, that it is impossible that any substance could really exist without a subsistence. Because, as we have said, subsistence is the last complement of substance, and consequently without it the substance could not be actual, but would be a mere abstraction. That for which we contend in the proposition just laid down is, that it is not necessary that a substance should have a subsistence of its own, but that it may subsist of the subsistence of another. For it is evident that every being comprised within the sphere of the contingent and the finite may cease to be a whole by itself, and may contract with a nature foreign to itself a union so intimate and so strong as to depend on this foreign nature in all its functions and its states, and no longer to bear the attribution and solidarity of its actions and modifications. If, for instance, a hand detached from the whole body were to trace characters, this action would be attributed to it exclusively; it would be a subsistence, a whole by itself, and we should say, _That hand writes_. But if it should become a part of, and we should consider is as dependent on, a human nature and will, it would then lose the solidary attribution of the function of which it is the organ; and then we could no longer say, _That hand writes_; but, _That man writes_. A contingent substance may be deprived of the possession of its subsistence by a union with a substance even inferior in nature to itself. Because its superiority over this nature would not prevent its being dependent on it in its functions and in its states, as is the case with the human soul, which presides over the body, which produces in it continual changes, and which, in spite of the excellence which distinguishes it from the mass of matter which it animates, yet depends on the body in its most intimate situations, and finds itself bowed down by the continual evil which it suffers thereby. Hence is it that in man the possession of subsistence belongs neither to the soul nor to the body, and there is no other subsistence in him but the sum of the two natures of which he is composed, but the whole of the two extremes united together, and which is at the same time spirit and body, incorruptible and corruptible, the intelligent and the brute.