Nominalists
accordingly adopt the opinion that substance is a spurious idea due
to our inveterate human trick of turning names into things.
Phenomena come in groups--the chalk-group, the wood-group, etc.--and
each group gets its name. The name we then treat as in a way
supporting the group of phenomena. The low thermometer to-day, for
instance, is supposed to come from something called the 'climate.'
Climate is really only the name for a certain group of days, but it
is treated as if it lay BEHIND the day, and in general we place the
name, as if it were a being, behind the facts it is the name of. But
the phenomenal properties of things, nominalists say, surely do not
really inhere in names, and if not in names then they do not inhere
in anything. They ADhere, or COhere, rather, WITH EACH OTHER, and
the notion of a substance inaccessible to us, which we think
accounts for such cohesion by supporting it, as cement might support
pieces of mosaic, must be abandoned. The fact of the bare cohesion
itself is all that the notion of the substance signifies. Behind
that fact is nothing.
Scholasticism has taken the notion of substance from common sense
and made it very technical and articulate. Few things would seem to
have fewer pragmatic consequences for us than substances, cut off as
we are from every contact with them.
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