n, is a splendid
example of the floundering of a mired logician.]

"So that if anyone will examine himself concerning his notion
of pure substance in general, he will find he has no other
idea of it at all, but only a supposition of he knows not
what support of such qualities, which are capable of producing
simple ideas in us, which qualities are commonly called
accidents.

"If anyone should be asked, what is the subject wherein colour
or weight inheres? he would have nothing to say but the
solid extended parts; and if he were demanded what is it that
solidity and extension inhere in? he would not be in much
better case than the Indian before mentioned, who, urging that
the world was supported by a great elephant, was asked what
the elephant rested on? to which his answer was, a great
tortoise. But being again pressed to know what gave support
to the broad-backed tortoise I replied, something, he knew not
what. And thus here, as in all other cases when we use
words without having clear and distinct ideas, we talk like
children, who, being questioned what such a thing is, readily
give this satisfactory answer, that it is something; which in
truth signifies no more when so used, either by children or
men, but that they know not what, and that the thing they
pretend to talk and know of is what they have no distinct idea
of at all, and are, so, perfectly ignorant of it and in the
dark. The idea, then, we have, to which we give the general
name substance, being nothing but the supposed but unknown
support of those qualities we find existing, which we imagine
cannot exist _sine re substante_, without something to support
them, we call that support _substantia_, which, according to
the true import of the word, is, in plain English, standing
under or upholding."[1]

[Footnote 1: Locke, "Human Understanding," Book II. chap, xiii. Sec. 2.]

I cannot but believe that the judgment of Locke is that which
Philosophy will accept as her final decision.

Suppose that a piano were conscious of sound, and of nothing else. It
would become acquainted with a system of nature entirely composed
of sounds, and the laws of nature would be the laws of melody and of
harmony. It might acquire endless ideas of likeness and unlikeness, of
succession, of similarity and dissimilarity, but it could attain to no
conception of sp