The Category of Substance

The Category of Substance
Stephen Engstrom, University of Pittsburgh
Abstract
This paper considers a principal concept of metaphysics – the category of substance – as
it figures in Kant’s critical program of establishing metaphysics as a science. Like Leibniz,
Kant identifies metaphysical concepts through logical reflection on the form of cognitive
activity. He thus begins with general logic’s account of categorical judgment as an act of
subordinating predicate to subject. This categorical form is then considered in transcendental
logic with reference to the possibility of its real use. Transcendental reflection reveals that
the categorical form, in its potential for such use, constitutes the category of substance and
accident, representing a first real subject and a determination of its existence. But to qualify
for objective, scientific employment, metaphysics’ concepts must admit of real definitions,
which show their objects to be possible, and such possibility, pace Leibniz, can be established
only in relation to possible experience. Thus, relying on his doctrine of the schematism, Kant
shows the category to figure constitutively in experience, as the ground of the first law of
nature, that in all change substance persists.
From antiquity up to the time of the great speculative systems of the modern era, phi-
losophy marked off from its other areas of inquiry a primary field of study, under the
name of first philosophy, or metaphysics. This preeminent discipline was devoted to the
knowledge of first principles and aspired to be a science in its own right, ruling over
human knowledge as a whole and providing the foundation for all the other sciences.
Yet in fact metaphysics was chronically plagued by controversy and contention, and
ever since Kant’s famous critique of this putative science, philosophy has in the main
turned away from metaphysics in favor of other inquiries, focusing much of its atten-
tion on a succession of questions that have arisen in connection with developments
in the special sciences. Many factors have contributed to this turn, including the pro-
fuse and explosive growth of the special sciences themselves, which has made them
objects of emulation for philosophy. But to the extent that Kant’s criticism has played
a role in the eclipse of traditional metaphysics, we have reason to reconsider this out-
come. For Kant’s intention was never to do away with metaphysics, but rather to se-
cure, through critical reflection, the conditions under which it can establish itself as a
science.
Such reconsideration would be timely. Recent decades have seen signs of reawakening
interest in this field, yet the revival has occurred in relative ignorance of metaphysics’
troubled history. It may therefore serve us well, if we care to avoid retracing missteps
of the past, to recall that history, and in particular Kant’s critical reflections on how a
scientific metaphysics can be established. A full reconsideration would of course lie well
beyond the reach of these few pages. But a more limited investigation may still be of
use, for purposes of illustration. I shall take up one principal concept of metaphysics –
the category of substance – and consider it as it figures in Kant’s critical reconstitution
of traditional first philosophy as transcendental philosophy. When so considered, this
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236 Stephen Engstrom
concept can be recognized as the ground of a principle of knowledge, a principle that

constitutes the first law of nature.
1. Approaching the concept of substance
1.1 Demarcating the science of metaphysics

Kant shares the traditional metaphysician’s recognition that first philosophy, as a science
of the principles of knowledge, cannot be dependent on or beholden to any special
science. The concepts of metaphysics must be fundamental to all such sciences, being
already in play in absolutely all knowledge of things and hence even in the primordial,
prescientific use of the human cognitive capacity in common experience. This recognition
informs the approaches taken by the great metaphysicians of history. It can be seen for
instance in Aristotle’s respect for commonly accepted opinions in his investigation of
first principles, in Descartes’s decision to conduct his meditations on first philosophy
not in the jargon of the schools but in terms intelligible to ordinary men of good sense,
and in Leibniz’s conviction that we find the primitive concepts and truths of metaphysics
naturally within ourselves. 1
Kant is particularly scrupulous in this regard. His investigation of the possibility of
scientific metaphysics is to rest solely on reason, the capacity to know from principles. 2
The only science presupposed is logic, or more precisely what he calls pure general logic, a
merely formal science, constituting a canon for all use of the cognitive faculty. And while
he accepts the spirit of the traditional characterization of metaphysics as “the science
of the first principles of human knowledge”, he insists on a precise demarcation of this
science from other knowledge, delineating it as the system of pure material rational knowl-
edge from concepts: as a system, it differs from common, prescientific knowledge; as pure,
it contains no empirical knowledge; as material, it is distinguished from general logic;
and as knowledge from concepts rather than from the construction of concepts, it counts
as philosophical and is marked off from all mathematical and other technical knowl-
edge. 3 And he strictly adheres to the insight, emerging from his critical investigation, that
1 Descartes goes so far as to say that his principles, with the sole exception of the proposition relating to God’s
existence, “have been known for all time and indeed accepted as true and indubitable by everyone” (IXB 10, cf.
12–13 [I 184, 185]). (References to Descartes’s writings cite volume and page of AT, followed by parenthetical
reference to volume and page of CSM(K).) Similarly, but more circumspectly, Leibniz responds to Locke’s
criticism of the argument from universal consent by observing that while general acceptance cannot establish
the certainty of innate principles, it is still a sign that a principle has such a status, and that such principles are
known by all in the sense that, even if they are not always explicitly recognized, everyone uses them all the time
(NE 75–76).
2 See P 4:274.
3 See KrV A837-844 /B865-872, GMS 4:387–388. The quoted characterization of metaphysics is a formulation
offered by Kant (KrV A843 /B871), which reproduces verbatim the definition presented in § 1 of Baumgarten’s
Metaphysica, the textbook Kant used in his lectures on metaphysics (“Metaphysica est scientia primorum in
humana cognitione principiorum”). Baumgarten’s definition is in turn essentially the same as the characteri-
zation provided in Descartes’s Principles of Philosophy (IXB 16 [I 187], VIIIA 5 [I 193]), which is broadly similar
to the traditional Aristotelian conception. Aristotle spoke of first philosophy, or wisdom, as the knowledge of
first principles, and some of his descriptions suggest that it could be characterized as the science of the first

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The Category of Substance 237
metaphysical concepts can be certified as valid only for immanent use, in experience,
and only through an exhibition of them as conditions of its possibility.
1.2. Reflection and the concepts of metaphysics

It might at first be suspected that a putative science that confines itself to concepts already
at work in common experience would find itself hopelessly mired in a confused mass of
impressions and obscure opinions. But the fact that ordinary thought can be confused
and inarticulate does not preclude the possibility of explicating it through reflection
and analysis – that is, through a certain skilled attention, for which natural aptitude
and extensive practice may be required. Both Leibniz and Kant rely on such reflection,
and in carrying out their analysis both employ a modal criterion, namely necessity, to
distinguish from empirical representations certain concepts, which, originating in our
cognitive capacity, are suited to figure in the first principles of knowledge (NE 51, 83–84;
KrV B1-4).
According to Leibniz, it is through the thought of oneself that one comes by the concept
of substance, along with other concepts of metaphysics.
The thought of myself, who perceive sensible objects, and of my own action which results from
it, adds something to the objects of sense. To think of some color and to consider that I think of
it – these two thoughts are very different, just as much as color itself differs from the ego who
thinks of it. And since I conceive that there are other beings who also have the right to say ‘I’, or
for whom this can be said, it is by this that I conceive what is called substance in general. It is
the consideration of myself, also, which provides me with other concepts in metaphysics, such
as those of cause, effect, action, similarity, etc., and even those of logic and ethics. Thus it may
be said that there is nothing in the understanding which has not come from the senses, except
the understanding itself, or the one who understands. (On What is Independent of Sense and of
Matter [PPL 549])
What exactly Leibniz has in mind here is not immediately apparent, though it seems
reasonably clear that he means in part to be espousing a version of a traditional innatist
view, in opposition to empiricism. Yet Locke and other empiricists also speak of reflection
as one of the powers of the mind, and some care is needed to distinguish the reflection
Leibniz intends from what such empiricists have in view.
Locke assimilates reflection to sensation, classifying these powers as the two sources
of our simple ideas, which make up all the materials of our knowledge. In the case of re-
flection, the ideas acquired are of the mind’s own operations, beginning with perception,
and Locke says explicitly that these ideas, like those of sensation, are passively received
(An Essay Concerning Human Understanding [henceforth Essay] II.i.24-25, xii.1). Leibniz
demurs here, on two points. He is puzzled by Locke’s claim that in reflection’s reception
principles of knowledge (e. g. Metaphysics I.2, 982b2-4), though he never, so far as I know, called it the science
of the first principles of human knowledge. (References to Aristotle’s works normally cite book and chapter
numbers, followed by the standard Bekker page and line numbers.) Over the course of his investigation, he
further characterized metaphysics as concerned with being qua being and with substance. Kant’s demarcation
leaves open the possibility of a practical as well as a theoretical metaphysics. In their practical use, metaphysics’
categories concern, not the object of theoretical knowledge, but the subject of practical knowledge (the concept
of substance, for instance, grounds the concept of a person); but here I leave such use aside.

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of simple ideas the mind is “wholly passive”. 4 And he opposes Locke’s implicit suggestion
that reflection can have something passive as its object. Noting that perceptions can be
unconscious, Leibniz maintains that the proper object of reflection is not perception
generally, as Locke holds, but specifically thought: “thoughts are actions”, Leibniz states;
while “beasts have perception”, “they don’t necessarily have thought, that is, have reflec-
tion or anything which could be the object of it” (NE I.i.26, 86, NE II.ix.1, 134). Later, he
elaborates:
So ‘understanding’ in my sense is what in Latin is called intellectus, and the exercise of this faculty
is called ‘intellection’, which is a distinct perception combined with a faculty of reflection, which
the beasts do not have. Any perception which is combined with this faculty is a thought, and I do
not allow thought to beasts any more than I do understanding. So one can say that intellection
occurs when the thought is distinct. (NE II.xxi.5, 173)
Since Leibniz restricts the term ‘faculty’ to active powers, 5 his mention of “a faculty of
reflection” indicates that he supposes that the reflections in which we are conscious of
our thoughts are just as much actions as are those thoughts themselves.
The foregoing considerations do not entirely rule out the possibility that Leibniz holds
that the way in which the reflecting mind comes by its concept of substance is through an
immediate intellectual apprehension or “internal experience” of itself, a representation
of itself in which the representation of substance can be found, and from which it can be
extracted by analysis. 6 Such a position would be tantamount to a doctrine within tradi-
tional rational psychology, the ostensible science criticized in Kant’s Paralogisms of Pure
Reason. But since Leibniz conceives of substance not simply through the idea of inde-
pendent existence, as Descartes and Spinoza do, but in terms of a capacity to act, some of
what he says about reflection can be understood as at least suggestive of the thought that
the concept of substance is understood, not through the operation of a passive intellect,
but in an active self-consciousness internal to the mind’s own activity. Such a thought
4 NE II.i.25, 119. Leibniz’s puzzlement may stem at least in part from the thought that reflection involves the
mind’s act of turning its attention to its own operations, as Locke elsewhere acknowledges.
5 NE II.xxi.1, 169. As does Kant: ApH 7:140.
6 At NE I.iii.18, 105 Leibniz seems to suggest that our finding the idea of substance within ourselves is related to our
being substances: “It is my opinion that reflection enables us to find the idea of substance within ourselves, who
are substances” (at I.i.23, 85–86 a similar point is made regarding the idea of being). A more explicit expression
of this view seems to be discernible in the following fragment: “That we are not substances is contrary to
experience, since indeed we have no notion [notitiam] of substance except from the intimate experience of
ourselves when we perceive the I [to Ego], and on that basis we apply the term ‘substance’ to God himself and
other monads” (Grua 2.558; quoted in Jolley 1984, 123). In another similarly explicit passage, Leibniz writes, “It is
very true that our perceptions or ideas come either from the exterior senses, or from the internal sense, which
can be called reflection: but this reflection is not limited to just the operations of the mind, as is said [by Locke]
[. . .] it goes as far as the mind itself, and it is in perceiving [the mind] that we perceive substance” (NE 14; quoted
in Wilson 1999, 377). See also Discourse on Metaphysics § 27: “So the expressions which are in the soul, whether
conceived or not, can be called ideas, but those which are conceived or formed can be called notions or concepts.
But in whatever sense they are taken, it is always false to say that all of our notions come from the senses which
are called external; for the notions which I have of myself and of my thoughts, and, consequently, of being, of
substance, of action, of identity, and of many others, come from an internal experience” (PPL 321). There is
some indication that by ‘internal experience’ Leibniz has in mind the self-awareness described in Descartes’s
Second Meditation, for in his response to Locke he gives as an example of what is needed for the conception of
“the same thing” that we find in the notion of “pure subject in general” the recognition that “it is the same thing
which understands and wills, which imagines and reasons” (NE II.xxiii.2, 218, cf. IV.ii.1, 367).

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would anticipate Kant’s account, according to which the intellect understands itself in
such self-consciousness rather than through the receptivity of inner sense or through
the putative power of rational intuition invoked by the dogmatic metaphysician. When
Kant adopts Leibniz’s term apperception, he gives no sign that he means to depart from
Leibniz’s usage. And as we noted, both Kant and Leibniz regard our consciousness of ne-
cessity in our thought and knowledge as a mark by which the intellect’s contribution can
be distinguished. So there is some basis for surmise that a certain way of understanding
Leibniz’s suggestion that we have the concepts of metaphysics through reflection on our-
selves serves as an inspiration for the approach Kant takes in developing his account of
the categories. But before turning to Kant, a few further comments are in order regarding
the different approaches taken by Locke and Leibniz, since Kant cites these thinkers as
foils in articulating his own position.
1.3 Two perspectives on substance: Locke and Leibniz

In his account of how we come by the notion of substance, Locke states that when we
notice several simple ideas going constantly together, we presume them to be united
in one subject, accustoming ourselves to suppose a substratum wherein they subsist,
which we call substance. From this account he concludes that we have no distinct idea of
pure substance in general, but only a supposition of an unknown support of the qualities
that directly or indirectly produce ideas in us, qualities we speak of as its accidents. In
responding to this account, Leibniz denies that there is anything problematic in our
thought of substance: “we have no need”, he writes, “to ‘accustom’ ourselves to it or to
‘suppose’ it; for from the beginning we conceive several predicates in a single subject, and
that is all there is to these metaphorical words ‘support’ and ‘substratum’”. And he argues
that Locke’s conclusion that the idea of substance is “empty and sterile” is a creature of
Locke’s own implicit analysis, which has stripped away all of the attributes. 7
Underlying this disagreement, we can find a noteworthy difference in the vantage
points from which Locke and Leibniz consider the notion of substance. Locke’s perspec-
tive is reflected in his often-cited remark that if we are asked what is the subject in which
color or weight inheres, we will have nothing to say but the solid extended parts, and
if pressed to say what the solidity and extension inhere in, we will be in a position like
that of an Indian philosopher who, when subjected to a similar interrogation, answered
that the world rested on an elephant, which in turn stood on a giant tortoise, supported
by something, he knew not what. Leibniz, in contrast, says that from the beginning we
conceive several predicates in a single subject. Thus unlike Locke, who represents us as
first thinking of qualities that are implicated by the passivity of our reception of simple
ideas and then, out of a kind of need, supposing a substratum to support those qualities,
Leibniz draws our attention to the constitution of the act of predication, in which thought
of a subject is presupposed. So whereas Locke thinks of substance as the last subject of
inherence, something beyond the reach of our ideas, which we cannot know, Leibniz
thinks of it as the first subject of predication, something we must know insofar as we
7 NE II.xxiii.1-2, 217–218. For Locke’s account, see Essay II.xxiii.1-2.

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know anything at all. 8 This difference reflects the presence of two relations – one logical,
the other real – long recognized in traditional thinking about substance. According to
Aristotle’s account, substance in the primary sense is distinguished from and related to
both things that are predicable of it (predicates or attributes) and things that inhere in
it, or are in it but not as parts (accidents, modes, or affections). 9 In many cases one and
the same thing may bear both relations to substance, as whiteness does to this body, the
chalk I see on the table, but as Aristotle points out, these relations do not coincide. Ex-
tension, for example, is predicable of the chalk, but does not inhere in it; and something
may inhere in the chalk without being predicable of it, for instance its own individual
whiteness. Leibniz focuses on the first of these relations, Locke on the second.
This difference in perspective is rooted in a broader difference in approach. Locke is
attempting to show how, starting from experience, which provides, he says, “the materials
of Reason and Knowledge”, we can, without reliance on innate principles, acquire all the
knowledge we have. His point of departure for investigating how we come by the notion
of substance accordingly lies in the consideration of experience, which, as he conceives
of it, is characterized by the passivity of the mind’s reception of the ideas that make
up the materials of knowledge, which he identifies as its simple ideas. The passivity of
that reception points to active powers distinct from the ideas – certain “qualities”, as
Locke calls them – and substance is accordingly conceived as the supposed common
subject of inherence that supports and unites certain qualities that are first conceived
as the powers acting to produce such passively received simple ideas as are noticed to
go together in our experience. Since Locke includes among the powers whereby the
mind passively receives its simple ideas not only sensation but also reflection, he treats
sensation and reflection as on a par in this regard and does not consider any contribution
that might arise from a self-conscious act of the intellect. 10 Leibniz on the other hand
is interested in exhibiting the role in cognition that is played by ideas and principles
recognized in the intellect’s reflection on its own purely intelligible activity. He thus
understands reflection differently from Locke, as the intellect’s active power to conceive
its own ideas, and he accordingly maintains that “reflection enables us to find the idea
of substance within ourselves, who are substances”. 11 And since as we saw he holds the
concepts of logic as well as those of metaphysics to be provided by the consideration of
oneself, he likewise takes logic’s concept of a subject of predication to be understood
through self-consciousness or apperception. Thus in his remark that “from the beginning
we conceive several predicates in a single subject”, Leibniz foregrounds predication rather
than inherence, calling attention to a logical operation of the intellect, at once an action
and a logical relation.
8 This is not to say that Locke is unaware of the possibility of conceiving of substance as the first subject of
predication; he seems to hold that once the indistinct idea of substance in general has been framed, it can be
used in this way (see Essay II.xii.6).
9 Categories 2 and 5.
10 Locke does speak of a “reflex Act of Perception” (Essay II.xxvii.13), but since he holds that “the Mind is wholly
Passive in the reception of all its simple Ideas”, whether of sensation or of reflection (Essay II.xii.1; cf. II.i.25),
the “Act” that figures in a reflex act of perception is evidently the act of reflection (the mind’s turning of its
attention back onto itself), as distinct from the reception of a simple idea of reflection, in which the mind is
“wholly Passive”.
11 NE I.iii.18, 105; cf. I.i.23, 85: “intellectual ideas, or ideas of reflection, are drawn from our mind”.

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Leibniz acknowledges that Locke’s notion of “pure substance in general”, precisely on

account of the abstraction involved in framing it, must be empty of all specificity, contain-
ing merely the notion of a substratum (whether conceived as last subject of inherence or
as first subject of predication), which serves as “the same thing” to which several qualities
or attributes belong, the ground of their unity. But he nevertheless maintains that “this
conception of substance, for all its apparent thinness, is less empty and sterile than it is
thought to be. Several consequences arise from it; these are of the greatest importance
to philosophy” (NE II.xxiii.2, 218; cf. II.xiii.20). Although Leibniz does not here identify
the consequences he has in mind, we may surmise from what he says elsewhere that
he is thinking of consequences that will flow from a real definition. He clearly holds
that the logical concept of substance does not by itself amount to such a definition. In
explaining at one point what an individual substance is, he says, “It is of course true that
when a number of predicates are attributed to a single subject while this subject is not
attributed to any other, it is called an individual substance. But this is not enough, and
such a definition is merely nominal” (Discourse on Metaphysics § 8 [PPL 307]). Nominal
definitions, he holds, “contain only marks for discerning one thing from others” and
merely provide a property coextensive with the concept they define; real definitions, in
contrast, are ones “through which the possibility of the thing is ascertained” (Meditations
on Knowledge, Truth, and Ideas [PPL 293; cf. PPL 230–231, 319]). Leibniz’s thought, then,
appears to be that although the nominal definition, imperfectly registered in Locke’s
account, is a thin concept, logical reflection can reveal it to be purely intellectual, thereby
enabling further reflections which may lead to a real definition from which consequences
“of the greatest importance to philosophy” will flow. And this does appear to be the path
Leibniz follows. He holds that the concept of substance that we have from ourselves, when
properly analyzed and purified through the removal of limitations, yields the notion of an
absolutely perfect being, and if by such reflections a real definition of such an individual
can, as Leibniz supposes, be achieved – one that, by making evident the consistency of all
the perfections understood in this concept, shows such a substance to be possible – then
necessary existence too can be established, insofar as existence is one of those perfec-
tions, the perfection of possibility itself. Relying on this momentous conclusion, Leibniz
elaborates a metaphysical system of the created world, grounded in an account of divine
nature, on which divine will, in perfect accordance with unlimited divine understanding,
creates the most perfect world possible.
2. Immanent metaphysics: substance and the first law of nature

Like Leibniz, Kant proceeds from nominal to real definitions in treating the categories
of metaphysics, framing his nominal definitions in purely logical terms. 12 Kant’s path
differs from Leibniz’s, however, in that his adherence to a mode of reflection consistent
12 Some caution is in order in speaking of Kant as dealing in definitions. Kant emphasizes that a chief respect
in which reason’s use in philosophy differs from its use in mathematics is that only the latter science can
provide definitions strictly so called. Because philosophy deals with concepts that are given a priori, it cannot
ensure with apodeictic certainty the completeness required for a definition: “strictly speaking, no a priori given
concept can be defined, for example substance, cause, [. . .]” (KrV A728 /B756). Recognizing the long tradition
of philosophical usage, however, Kant allows that we may speak of definitions in philosophy, provided that the

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with the possibility of a scientific metaphysics requires not only a starting point in the
intellectual self-consciousness of logical reflection, but also an understanding of reality
and of real definition consistent with the limits of possible experience. Remaining within
the ambit of our self-conscious cognitive activity, Kant’s reflection leads directly from
logic to an immanent metaphysics. Through a radically internal, hylomorphic analysis of
human, discursive knowledge, he is able to show that such knowledge, though dependent
for its actuality on affection by an independently existing object, is nevertheless self-
determining and hence so related to its object that the object must conform to it. 13
He can thus move from a logical to a real definition by relying, not on a speculative
doctrine of an infinite, intuiting intellect whose knowledge creates – or is absolutely
productive of – the objects it knows, 14 but rather on an account of our finite, discursive
intellect as a faculty whose knowledge constitutes – or is productive in respect of the form
of – the independently existing objects it can know. This distinction between finite and
infinite knowledge brings with it a corresponding distinction between their objects, in
that according as an object does or does not exist through the knowledge of it – according,
that is, as the knowledge of it and the ground or cause of its existence are identical or
distinct – it is either a thing in itself (noumenon) or an appearance (phenomenon). 15
Following this “Copernican” path, Kant develops his account of substance by first
articulating the logical concept of it, derived from the form of a categorical judgment.
From there he advances, in a second step, to an account of how this concept can generate
a sensible representation – a “schema” – of its object as the permanence of the real in
time, putting himself in a position to frame a real definition. He can then, in a third step,
prove a priori the possibility of the object of the resulting “realized” concept by showing,
in his first “Analogy of Experience”, that the use of this concept is a formal condition of
the possibility of the experience of objective change, a condition that constitutes the first
principle of all knowledge of contingent things (things that come to be and pass away)
and thereby also, in accordance with the Copernican way of thinking, the first and highest
explanations offered under this name are not confused with the strictly so-called definitions of mathematics.
Mathematical definitions, he says, are synthetically established constructions of originally made concepts, and
as such they make the concepts they define; philosophical definitions, in contrast, are established analytically
through dissection, the completeness of which is never apodeictically certain, and they are accordingly merely
expositions of given concepts, serving only to explain or to elucidate them, or to make them distinct (A370 /
B758, L § 104). Partly with an eye to this difference, Kant declines to present definitions of the pure categories,
but he does not deny that he possesses them (A82-83 /B108-109; cf. A241), and from his various discussions of
individual categories it is usually possible to derive at least a rough idea of what he would have included had
he offered nominal definitions; real definitions are touched on in the first and third chapters of the Analytic of
Principles. (For the case of the category of substance, see esp. A147 /B186, A242-243/B300-301.)
13 Limitations of space preclude detailed consideration here of this “Copernican” account of cognition’s relation
to its object; I offer a fuller treatment in Engstrom 2017.

14 KrV B72; cf. B138-139. In Leibniz’s striking comparison, “all the other substances depend on God as our thoughts
emanate from our substance” (Discourse on Metaphysics § 32 [PPL 324]).

15 This distinction is, as Kant says, transcendental rather than empirical. It is therefore not to be confused with
the distinction between thing in itself and appearance as ordinarily understood. Although the objects of our
discursive knowledge are phenomena, this does not prevent us from distinguishing these objects themselves,
that is, the objects knowable in experience, from the appearance of them in bare perception (i. e. sense-
perception: Wahrnehmung) (see KrV A45-46 /B62-63). The appearance apprehended in bare perception is a
mere appearing and as such may change with change of position, condition, or perceiver, while the object itself
(the phenomenon) remains the same for oneself and for everyone.

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law of nature, namely that in all change among appearances, substance, as permanent,
persists. In what follows, I consider these steps in order.
2.1 From the form of categorical judgment to the category of substance

As we noted, both Leibniz and Kant hold that we come by the concept of substance
through reflection. Though our consideration of Leibniz’s understanding of reflection left
important questions unresolved, we can characterize reflection in Kant’s understanding
of it as the attending, in conscious activity, to that same activity and in the first instance to
what, marked out by its necessity, belongs to the activity’s form. 16 The reflection carried
out in logic, as Kant conceives of it, concerns the conscious activity of thinking and
knowing, seeking to expound wholly a priori the form of knowledge. Since this form,
considered as potentiality, constitutes the faculty of knowledge, or the understanding
(including reason), logic is “a self-knowledge of understanding and of reason”; in this self-
knowledge, the understanding is expounded first “solely according to form” in general
logic and then “in respect of its material use” in transcendental logic. 17
Here two points should be noted at the outset, as they inform the self-knowledge
articulated in logical reflection and so furnish context for thinking about the categories.
One concerns knowledge in general, the other is specific to our theoretical knowledge.
First, we recognize that knowledge is not a process or event, but a self-conscious activi-
ty constituted by a certain unity of consciousness: not merely the unity of thought, which
may be arbitrary, but a self-consciously determinate and hence self-sustaining unity, lying
in a self-agreement grounded in the at least implicit understanding that knowledge must
agree with knowledge. So far as this activity understands itself to be material knowledge,
or knowledge that – unlike the formal self-knowledge articulated in logical reflection – is
a conscious representation of objects, or of things that can exist, or have actuality outside
the knowledge of them, it necessarily understands itself to be in agreement with its ob-
jects, in that it is in such conscious representation itself that the latter are first conceived
and understood. And since material knowledge, as knowledge, understands itself to be
in self-sustaining agreement with itself, it understands its agreement with its objects to
be nonaccidental, and the objects to be essentially knowable. From this understanding
it can be seen that those objects must agree with one another. For however much more
they may contain than is represented in a given subject’s actual knowledge of them, they
are nevertheless, as knowable things, nothing but what the complete knowledge of them
would represent them as being. Knowledge thus includes originally and from its own
self-understanding a representation of its objects – knowables – as in thoroughgoing
agreement.
Second, we also recognize that insofar as our material knowledge is theoretical, or in
other words knowledge of reality, or of objects that exist independently of that knowl-
16 In reflection, then, consciousness can become explicitly conscious of itself. Although Kant does not characterize
reflection in exactly the terms used here, reflection must be constituted as here described if it is to be, as Kant
holds it to be, the birthplace of the generality of representation that constitutes the form of a concept (see
L §§ 5–6, KrV A260 /B316).
17 L 9:14. Kant correspondingly distinguishes two types of reflection, logical and transcendental (KrV A260-263 /
B316-319). It is to be noted here that the self-knowledge figuring in logical reflection is not merely of one
individual subject, but of the understanding itself, shared by all.

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edge, it is limited. 18 Such objects can be the theoretically knowable objects they are only
insofar as we stand in a certain passive relation to them by possessing, in our capacity
to know, a receptivity through which they can, by modifying our consciousness, affect
us in a way that enables us to come to know them. Hence our knowledge, so far as it
is acquired in this way, comes to be, and so stands between complete ignorance and
complete, unlimited knowledge. Yet the self-consciously self-sustaining character of this
knowledge entails that it cannot be a mere effect of objects upon us, but must rather be
the self-conscious actualization of a spontaneous capacity, the faculty of knowledge. Our
knowledge, then, is finite, being dependent for its actuality on affection by its objects, yet
grounded in a spontaneous capacity, through which it begins in an understanding of its
objects as knowable though not already actually known. It is thus discursive, springing
from concepts, or general and hence partial representations. As knowledge from con-
cepts, it constitutes a kind of development, 19 in which the concept or knowledge of an
object through which we understand it as knowable is enlarged, or grows, in that further
concepts are combined with it, or integrated into it, in acts of synthesis carried out by the
understanding to secure and to extend the determinate unity of knowledge.
Logic reflects on the form of this discursive cognitive activity with a view to articu-
lating the understanding’s function of securing the unity of knowledge in the face of
the diversity of representation that knowledge contains through its dependence for its
actualization on affection by the object. The function by which this discursive unity is
secured is judgment, a synthesis, or combination, of conceptual representations. Now
as I just mentioned, we know in advance that knowledge secures its own unity and that
its object must therefore have unity as well, so we can anticipate, as Kant does, that the
system of basic forms of judgment expounded in logic will provide a “guiding thread” for
identifying the fundamental functions that secure this unity and thereby furnish the basic
concepts of the object of knowledge, concepts that Kant refers to as “pure concepts of the
understanding” and in honor of Aristotle calls “categories”. The function that grounds the
category of substance lies – as we have here to explain – in judgment’s most basic form,
that of categorical judgment, a combination of two concepts. This combination can be
variously modified, for instance in respect of quantity as universal, particular, or singular,
and in respect of quality as affirmative, negative, or infinite. But we may for now leave
the modifications aside and focus directly on the relation between the concepts in the
primary, affirmative case.
As is indicated by his talk of forms of judgment, Kant relies on a hylomorphic analysis
of judgment and knowledge. Such an analysis is suited to the discursive character of theo-
retical knowledge as the work of a cognitive capacity that is spontaneous yet dependent
for its exercise on enabling conditions of receptivity. In the Jäsche Logic it is stated that
every judgment has both matter, which lies in the representations combined or related
in it, and form, or the determination of how they are united in one consciousness; it is
also stated that in a categorical judgment the matter comprises the two aforementioned
18 There is another species of material knowledge, one with which we are not here concerned, namely practical
knowledge, whose object – the good – depends on such knowledge for its existence.
19 I am thinking here of material in contrast to merely formal (L § 37n1) development (Entwickelung) (cf. L § 36n1,
where a similar distinction is drawn with respect to the augmentation of knowledge).

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concepts, designated as subject and predicate, whereas the form, or determination of

their relation, lies in the copula. 20
This analysis might give the impression that the two concepts, as the materials com-
bined, are to that extent on a par in the roles they play in the judgment. And it is indeed
true that every concept, in virtue of its form as a general representation, is in itself suited
to serve either as predicate or as subject. But as is already indicated by logicians’ em-
ployment of distinct terms to designate these concepts, these roles are different; to speak
of a subject or a predicate is to speak of a concept in a certain use. A familiar sign of
the difference is that the operation of simple conversion, when applied to a universal
affirmative or a particular negative judgment, does not yield an equivalent judgment.
Although the concepts combined in the judgment all bodies are divisible contain nothing
in their form as general representations that prevents their roles from being reversed
(all divisibles are bodies), such an operation can constitute a valid inference only under
a restriction of quantity (some divisibles are bodies), and as a result the iteration of the
operation (some bodies are divisible) will not return us to the original judgment. 21 The
function of the copula is not, so to speak, commutative.
We can take a step toward clarifying the asymmetry by noting further hints and indi-
cations in the texts. It is stated in the Logic that in a categorical judgment the predicate is
subordinated to the subject, and in the Critique Kant contrasts subject with “mere predi-
cate” and ascribes a “logical precedence” to a subject that is not also a predicate. 22 These
20 L § 18, § 24; cf. KrV A266 /B322. In logical contexts, Kant standardly employs ‘subject’ and ‘predicate’ to refer to
the concepts in use in a categorical judgment, but on occasion, particularly in contexts where the category of
substance is in play, he will employ these terms to refer to what is thought through the subject and predicate
concepts in such use (e. g. at A147 /B186-187, B233, A205 /B250). I shall allow myself a similar freedom, while
seeking to ensure that the intended sense is always clear (for instance by speaking of a real as opposed to a
logical subject).
21 Cf. KrV B128–129, L §§ 51–53.
22 L § 23, KrV B129, A242-243 /B300-301 (see also L § 60, where the condition of the objective unity of consciousness
of the manifold of cognition in a categorical judgment is identified as “subject of the inherence of marks”). Two
comments: (i) The statement in L § 23 that in a categorical judgment the predicate is subordinated (untergeord-
net) to the subject might seem to conflict with the account of judgment set out in the metaphysical deduction,
where Kant says, “All judgments are accordingly functions of unity among our representations, where instead of
an immediate representation a higher representation, which comprehends this and others under itself [unter
sich begreift], is employed for the knowledge of the object” (A69 /B94). In this statement, Kant appears to be
suggesting that in every affirmative categorical judgment (negative judgments have only a secondary status and
are not here under consideration: cf. B149) the predicate is related to representations contained under it. And
while he does not here speak explicitly of subordination, he did speak of an ordering of diverse representations
under a common one (unter [. . .] ordnen) in his earlier characterization of function (A68 /B93), and we find
‘subordination’ (Subordination) used in other places (e. g. L § 29n). Because in all such cases the subordination
is a matter of the predicate’s containment in another representation, which it therefore contains under itself,
such subordination might be called “subordination in content”, or “analytic subordination”, a relation pertain-
ing to concepts in themselves, independently of their use in judgment. Despite initial appearances, however,
the metaphysical deduction’s account of judgment in terms of such subordination is not in conflict with the
characterization in L § 23 of categorical judgment in terms of the subordination of predicate to subject. As will
be explained in what follows, the subordination mentioned in § 23 pertains to the use of the concepts serving
as subject and predicate and might accordingly be called “subordination in use”, or “synthetic subordination”
(if ‘synthetic’ is understood broadly, as signifying the synthesis grounding not only synthetic but even analytic
judgments; cf. B131n). Thus categorical judgments involve not only an analytic subordination of representations
to the predicate, but also a synthetic subordination of the predicate to the subject. (For discussion of Kant’s

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remarks suggest a certain priority of the subject to the predicate in judgment and knowl-
edge. Such priority comports with the foregoing characterization of discursive knowledge
as lying in a development of concepts, and it fits with our reflective understanding of
categorical judgment as containing two moments:
(1) the use of a concept as subject, to think of an object, bringing into use an under-
standing of what it is; and
(2) the use (together with [1], in a single act) of a concept as predicate, to assert – or
to think in the determinate, self-sustaining way that constitutes an act of knowl-
edge – something in respect of the object thought of in (1).
These are moments, not stages in a process; their order is not a succession in time. The
first provides a ground for the second, a condition of its possibility; whereas the second
is not reciprocally a condition of the possibility of the first. A categorical judgment can
accordingly be regarded as lying, strictly speaking, in the assertion of what is thought
through the use of the concept serving as predicate, 23 for in that assertion the use of the
concept serving as subject is consciously presupposed. 24 The judgment is therefore an
act in which another act, namely the use of the concept serving as subject, is contained,
as the inner condition enabling the assertion of what is thought through the use of the
concept figuring as predicate. 25 The second moment, which constitutes the judgment, is
thus an act that lies in a development of the act serving as its ground.
This order is integral to categorical judgment in general, whether synthetic or analytic.
In a synthetic judgment, the use of the one concept as predicate is conditioned by the
use of the other as subject. Although the concept divisible can be used independently of
the concept body, its use in all bodies are divisible is dependent on and hence subordinate
account of judgment in terms of subordination to the predicate, see Longuenesse 1998, 86–90. Longuenesse
notes that L § 23 is concerned with subordination in a sense other than that of subordination to the predicate,
and although she does not explore it in detail, she describes it as “subordination of the assertion to its condition”
(1998, 93–94), drawing on language employed in the Logic’s characterization of the major premise of a syllogism
(L § 58n, § 60). If I have understood her, this description is in agreement with the idea of synthetic subordination
that I will be spelling out here.) (ii) The subordination of predicate to subject differs from the subordination of
consequent to ground in a hypothetical judgment (L § 23); while a predicate is no less dependent on its subject
than is a consequent on its ground, it does not constitute a separate judgment in its own right. (Cf. A414 /B441,
where Kant similarly distinguishes the subordination of accident to substance from subordination in the strict
and proper sense, which is found in the relation of effect to cause.)
23 See KrV A322 /B378, where “predicate” is glossed as “assertion in general”. Kant does not explicitly mark the
now familiar distinction between predication and assertion (Geach 1965), but by distinguishing modalities of
judgment he is able to accommodate non-assertoric predication, for instance in compound judgments (A74-76 /
B99-101).
24 Similarly, Kant identifies a syllogism with its conclusion: a syllogism is “a judgment by means of the subsumption
of its condition under a universal rule (major premise)” (KrV A307 /B364; cf. L § 56).
25 This two-moment explication of the subordination of predicate to subject may call to mind Frege’s analysis of a
singular proposition into two heterogeneous parts – a proper name (or singular term), which is grammatically
complete, and the remainder, a predicate, which is grammatically incomplete, needing supplementation by a
proper name to yield a proposition (Frege 1891, 17–18); see also Strawson 1959, chaps. 5–6, esp. pp. 137–153, 186–
189. But despite the similarity, the moments of an act of judgment are not to be assimilated to the components
of a Fregean proposition. It may seem, for instance, that, like the Fregean analysis, the two-moment explication
dispenses with the copula, but in fact the copula figures in the two moments as the judgment’s principle of
unity, though it will not be fully explicit until we advance from the present account, which belongs to general
logic, to the analysis of synthetic judgment available in transcendental logic.

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to the latter’s use. Were no concept used as subject, no assertion would be possible; and
were a different concept used (e. g. space), a different use of divisible would be entailed. In
the case of an analytic judgment, such as all bodies are extended, the same points hold. 26
But there is of course an important difference between the cases, which is at least im-
plicitly understood in the act of categorical judgment. Where the concept used as subject
already contains the concept employed as predicate, it cannot be determined, or en-
larged, through the predication; where there is no such containment, the determination
of the concept (in its use as subject of the judgment) 27 is possible. In both cases the sub-
ject concept is developed, but in the one case the development is only formal, consisting
in clarification and articulation, while in the other it is material, lying in determination
and growth. This difference implies that in the latter case but not the former the predica-
tion depends for its possibility on more than the use of the subject concept. Whereas the
possibility of the predication constituting the analytic judgment all bodies are extended is
contained wholly within the use of the subject, the corresponding possibility in the case
of the synthetic judgment all bodies are divisible consciously depends not only on the use
of the subject but also on a further condition, lying outside it. We may call it a material
condition, since the dependence is conscious.
Hence while the subordination of the predicate to the subject that constitutes the
categorical form of judgment does not, just as such, depend on a material condition, it
does depend on such a condition if the judgment is synthetic. Synthetic judgment thus
constitutes the material use of the form, or logical function, of categorical judgment;
and in theoretical knowledge strictly so called, such use is equally its real use, or use in
knowledge of the real, of what exists independently of that knowledge. 28 This brings us
to the category of substance. For as will be further explained below, the logical form in
26 Cf. KrV B131n. I am thinking here of analytic judgments as standardly characterized (A6-7 /B10-11). I leave to the
side other forms, such as particular judgments in which the subject is contained in the predicate (cf. L § 21n5), for
instance some extended things are bodies, which, though synthetic according to the standard characterization,
is obtainable analytically, by conversion per accidens, from the analytic judgment all bodies are extended.
27 I add this qualification in view of the difference between a concept considered in its use as subject of a judgment
and a concept considered in abstraction from such use. Considered in the latter way, a concept is fixed; consid-
ered in the former, as a concept of an object, it can be determined and enlarged through synthetic judgments
in the growth of knowledge, as happens in an advance from a nominal to a real definition. This difference is of
course idle in the case of analytic judgments.
28 Again, I leave aside the practical material use of the logical function. And I say “theoretical knowledge strictly
so called” because I am also leaving aside such theoretical use as figures in mathematics. In pure mathematics,
according to Kant’s account of it, the use of this function, though material, does not count as a real, theoretical
use in the strict and primary sense. For the material condition on which its employment depends in mathematics
does not include sensation, or the affection of consciousness by independently existing objects, but lies merely
in space and time as original, formal intuitions, which rest solely on the unity of consciousness and the forms of
human sensibility (thus, as Kant observes, while the figures studied in pure geometry count as objects within
this science, they are absolutely speaking only the forms of objects of full-fledged theoretical knowledge);
mathematical knowledge nevertheless counts as theoretical in a broad sense in that, owing to the relation its
possibility bears to the possibility of theoretical knowledge in the strict sense, it is necessarily applicable to
the objects of such knowledge (cf. KrV B146-148, A223-224 /B271). Our concern here is not with mathematical
knowledge but with theoretical knowledge that is philosophical and in particular metaphysical, where the
material and the real use of the categorical form coincide.

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its potential for material and real use constitutes a category, one of the understanding’s
original “concepts of an object in general”. 29
Before we turn to the category of substance, however, we need to revisit our initial
consideration of the categorical judgment, in which we distinguished two moments, first
a use of the concept serving as subject, second the assertion constituting the judgment.
Because in that consideration it was necessary to abstract from the difference between
synthetic and analytic judgment, the material condition just mentioned was ignored. To
articulate the moments integral to the real use of the categorical form, we must advance
from logical to transcendental reflection, taking into account not only the general form
of categorical judgment, but also the understanding’s conscious reliance on that material
condition in the synthetic judgment in which the real use of the categorical form consists.
Judgment of this sort understands itself to be theoretical knowledge, knowledge of
an independently existing object. Since such knowledge is of an object, it consists in
representation, or in the exercise of a capacity to know that is a capacity to represent.
And since the object of this knowledge exists independently of the knowledge of it, this
capacity to represent must possess a receptivity through which the object, by modifying
consciousness, can affect the subject in a way that enables knowledge. This knowledge-
enabling affection is registered in immediate representations of objects – intuitions –
that are marked by consciousness of their dependence on affection from without and
as such count as empirical intuitions, intuitions figuring in perception. Representations
thus dependent on affection belong to the receptivity – or, to use the more familiar
traditional designation, the sensibility – of the judging subject’s capacity to know, and as
such they provide the material condition on which judgment that understands itself to
be theoretical knowledge consciously relies.
In transcendental reflection, these sensible representations are considered only in their
general character, as understood in the consciousness integral to all theoretical knowl-
edge. Such knowledge has two aspects, in that as knowledge it is constituted by unity of
consciousness, yet as theoretical it is of independently existing objects. It accordingly
involves an at least implicit recognition of two corresponding aspects in the sensible
representations that constitute its material condition, aspects that render them suited to
enable such knowledge. On the one hand, these intuitions have a common form, in that
they are all modifications of a common receptivity belonging to a single capacity to know
and so allow of being ordered together in accordance with the synthetic unity requisite
for any representation of theoretical cognition’s object. Thus the spontaneity of that same
capacity – the spontaneity that, in its discursive exercise, constitutes a capacity to think
and to judge – is able to determine sensible representation in respect of the latter’s form
through synthetic activity in accordance with its unity of consciousness and thereby to
secure synthetic unity in sensible representation itself. According to Kant’s well-known
account, this form is two-fold, in that human sensibility, being divided into outer and
inner sense, allows its representations to be ordered respectively in space and in time.
On the other hand, intuitions also have matter to the extent that they are empirical, or
marked by consciousness that includes awareness of their dependence on affection from
without, or on sensation. This empirical consciousness constitutes perception, and it
29 KrV B128; the categories are explicitly identified with the functions of judgment at B143, P 4:324.

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makes possible the spontaneous representation, in judgment, of something real, existing

independently of cognition’s own conscious activity.
In short, then, the material use of the categorical form consciously relies on intuition,
or sensible representation, and insofar as it is also a real use, constituting theoretical
knowledge strictly so called, the intuition on which it relies is empirical, or sensation-
involving. Now insofar as such knowledge relies on this sensible condition, the predicate
figuring in it can be – and indeed is – understood to be external to (not contained in)
the subject, and on account of the consciousness of this externality the real use of the
categorical form must include not just two moments but three, in that the final moment
is conditioned by two acts, not one. The first two moments are preparatory and constitute
the materials – first the subject and then the predicate – and the third secures and extends
the synthetic unity of theoretical knowledge in a single act comprising both a positing
use of the subject and a determining use of its predicate. We thus have
(i) the use of a concept S – an understanding of what (an) S is – as subject for a
possible synthetic judgment, a use constituting the possibility of positing S (e. g.
in the recognition, through perception, of this S);
(ii) the use of a concept P (external to S) – in a comparison with S as used in (i) – as
predicate for a possible synthetic judgment, that is, for a possible determining of
S (in its use as the judgment’s subject); and
(iii) the assertion (the use of the copula, or categorical form), lying in the joint actu-
alization of (i) and (ii) (i. e. their joint use in a single act, the actual judgment),
constituting the determination of S (in its use as subject) through the use of P
and thereby the determinate representation of the posited S as P.
The moments are presented here in their order of dependence: the second on the first,
the third on the second. 30 In addition, the first and the second each depend on their own
distinct sensible conditions, which enable respectively the use of the subject and the
use of the predicate; these conditions lie in intuition so far as the judgment constitutes
material knowledge, or knowledge of an object, and in empirical intuition so far as it
constitutes knowledge of reality, or of an existing object. 31
A few points about these moments bear noting, on account of their relevance to the
discussion to follow. First (re [i]), since the representation used in the act of positing is
a concept, or general representation, it is of course understood to be determinable, but
its generality is equally recognized as allowing the positing to be modified in respect of
30 If we bear in mind that the first moment presupposes a concept (an understanding), we can partially express
the dependencies figuring in these moments by saying that understanding what S is grounds the possibility of
supposing that S is, which grounds in turn the possibility of determining how S is.
31 In accordance with the two aspects of these sensible conditions – formal (intuition) and material (sensation) –
two grades can be distinguished in the act of sensibly conditioned positing. The first is problematic affirmation
under conditions of schematization in intuition (e. g. the constructions of concepts in pure mathematics); the
second is assertoric affirmation under conditions of empirical (i. e. sensation-involving) intuition in perception.
The first is requisite for knowledge of an object (e. g. a line in space: KrV B137-138), the second for knowl-
edge of an independently existing object (e. g. a house: B162). Similarly, the subject of material knowledge can
be determined in two ways: either a priori, with reliance solely on the form of sensible representation, or a
posteriori, with reliance also on the matter; in the latter case, Kant speaks also of the determination of the
existence of the subject, and I shall do the same in what follows.

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quantity, making possible quantitatively diverse positing uses of the concept: singular,
plural, universal. Second (re [ii]), the use of a predicate for a possible determination
of the subject rests on consciousness of the predicate as external to the subject and
hence contains no thought of the predicate as excluding the possibility of other, opposing
determinations of the subject in different sensible conditions, a possibility that in turn
grounds the possibility of negative and infinite judgments, in addition to affirmative.
Finally (re [iii]), the analysis makes apparent that in the real use of the form of categorical
judgment the copula has an existential as well as a predicative function. 32 It is also
apparent that the order of (i) and (ii) is retained in their joint actualization in (iii), and
that the previously noted hylomorphic character of general logic’s analysis of categorical
judgment is preserved, in that (i) and (ii) constitute the matter for (iii), and in their joint
actualization in (iii) they constitute its informed matter.
From this analysis it can be seen that in the real use of the categorical form, the act of
subordinating the predicate to the subject constitutes a representation in which what is
thought through the subject and what is thought through the predicate are conceived as
so ordered that while the former does not depend for its possibility on the latter, the latter
depends for its possibility both on the former, as its internal condition (or as the real of
whose existence it is a determination), and also on a further condition, lying outside it. In
conformity with the order in the acts figuring in the judgment there is an order in what
the judgment represents, a relation involving a real subject and a determination of its
existence. Thus,
(a) just as the positing of the subject is prior to the predication that determines it,
so the existence of a real subject is prior to a determination of its existence;
(b) just as the predication depends on the positing of the subject it determines, so a
real determination depends on the existence of a real subject; and
(c) just as the predication depends also on some condition in sensibility outside the
positing of the subject, so a determination of a thing’s existence depends also
on some condition in reality outside the existence of the real subject, namely
on something indeterminately represented through the sensible condition on
which the predication is conscious of itself as also depending.
It is not difficult to see that the above-described relation between a real subject and a
determination of its existence that is represented in the real use of the categorical form
is the very relation represented through Kant’s category of substance and its correlative
concept of accident. There are however two points that call for comment. The first con-
cerns an apparent discrepancy. In the table of categories, the concepts of substance and
32 It should be remembered that our concern here, as was stated, is with the primary, affirmative case. But the
point holds even where the judgment is universal. Preserving the insight expounded in the traditional logic
of Aristotle, Kant locates existential import not in the singular and particular as opposed to the universal
function of judgment, but in the affirmative as opposed to the negative. It also bears noting that the positing
mentioned in (i) is not a free-standing pure existential judgment. Pure existential judgments (S is, S exists)
are always derived from affirmative categorical judgments, in which posited subjects are determined. In our
initial consideration of categorical judgment, the existential function of the copula was ignored because general
logic, expounding the understanding not “in respect of its material use” but “solely according to form” (L 9:14),
“abstracts [. . .] from all relation of knowledge to the object, and considers only the logical form in the relation
of cognitions to one another” (KrV A55 /B79).

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accident are expressed by the terms ‘subsistence’ and ‘inherence’. Although ‘inherence’
correctly serves to indicate that the dependence of an accident on its subject differs from
that of an effect on its cause, the term was commonly employed, as Kant later observes,
to ascribe a special existence to accidents; yet such an ascription is precluded by what is
represented in a synthetic categorical judgment, in that the predication is just a deter-
mination of the positing of the subject, representing how the posited subject’s existence
is determined. Kant immediately goes on to add, however, that certain misconceptions
arise from ascribing existence to an accident and advises that it is more precise and cor-
rect to characterize the accident, not as an existent in its own right, but as “the way in
which the existence of a substance is positively determined”. 33
Second, the foregoing characterization of what is represented in the real use of the
categorical form may seem to leave open whether the use of a concept as subject includes
the thought of a first subject, a subject not itself predicable of any other. But closer
consideration of the first moment in the real use of the categorical form will reveal
the involvement of that thought. That moment, as I said, lies in the use of a concept
S as subject for a possible synthetic judgment, a use beginning in an understanding of
what (an) S is. Now insofar as this concept is to serve as subject of a judgment of the
categorical form in its real use, it must include the original concept of an object – the
first understanding of an object, as knowable – in its first theoretical application as the
concept of the real, or what exists independently of the knowledge of it. The diverse
concepts actually used as subjects in the synthetic judgments that constitute the real
use of the categorical form will also, of course, contain further determinations making
up their specific content. But all differences among the subject concepts will consist
in this, that certain determinations present in one will be absent in another. Hence no
such determinations are requisites that must be contained in a concept if it is to serve as
subject of such a categorical judgment. On the contrary, the containment of each such
determination in any such concept is constituted by a synthetic judgment, in which that
determination is predicated in respect of some prior concept serving as subject. Every
such synthetic categorical judgment therefore contains, as its absolute inner condition, a
concept free of all determinations, without which the first moment in the real use of the
categorical form would not be possible at all. This common concept is thus the first inner
ground of the possibility of the real use of the categorical form, and it therefore belongs to
that form in its potential for such use. And since this first concept of a subject involves an
at least implicit consciousness of itself as such, it is also, through that self-consciousness,
the concept of a first subject.
33 KrV A80 /B106, A186-187/B229-230; cf. Ak 29:769–770. The root misconception that Kant appears to have in
mind is the thought that accidents, notwithstanding their dependence on substance, are existents in their own
right and as such things whose dependence might be transferred from one substance to another. One notable
instance of this error is the doctrine that motion is communicated by transfer; as Kant elsewhere observes,
this doctrine, if taken literally, infringes the principle “accidentia non migrant e substantiis in substantias”
(MAN 4:550). Another instance, which infringes the same principle, is the Scholastic notion of sensible (and
intentional) species (cf. P § 9), which was generally rejected by the modern philosophers (see e. g. Descartes’s
Optics Discourse One [VI 85 (I 153)], his Principles I.64 [VIIIA 31 (I 215)], Leibniz’s Monadology § 7 [PPL 643],
and § 84 of his fifth letter to Clarke [PPL 710]). If the analysis set out above is correct, this principle – an old
Scholastic maxim (cf. Ak 29:769) – is grounded in the form of categorical judgment in its real use.

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This common concept is the category of substance, the concept of a first subject, a
subject of predicates that is not itself a predicate. Though like every other concept it is a
general representation, it is not in the first instance a representation of a general object,
such as a genus. As the concept of a theoretically knowable object, it is the representation
of an individual, in that the object of theoretical knowledge is understood from the start to
be representable in concreto, in empirical intuition, and moreover to be just as it would be
represented to be in the complete knowledge of it and as such determinate in all respects,
a subject of all the predicates that would be represented as determining its existence in
that complete knowledge. 34 Yet this concept, being basic to the knowledge of all that
exists, is nevertheless a representation that is not only general but universal and so not
a concept that can be used as a predicate in any synthetic, determining judgment. In
sum, then, since the concept is the original representation of an individual, the subject
it represents has no generality and so is not predicable in any sense at all, not even
analytically (and hence is Aristotelian primary substance, or individual substance), and
the concept itself, on account of its universality, can be predicated only analytically, never
as a determination (and hence, when used in abstracto, constitutes the original concept
of an Aristotelian secondary substance).
2.2 From the pure category to its schema

Although the categorical form of judgment in its potential for material use constitutes,
under the name of the category of substance, theoretical cognition’s original concept of
an object, it is a merely formal, logical representation, universal in application and empty
of determinate content. It is thus not surprising that, although metaphysicians inquiring
into the first principles of knowledge may, in their analysis, focus their attention on the
object represented through this concept and seek to “consider it naked”, as Descartes said,
Locke and many other philosophers regard pure substance considered in isolation from
all accidents as an “unknown support”, of which we are “perfectly ignorant”. Kant too,
referring to substance so considered as “the substantial”, or “the substratum”, observes
that what is thus represented is not as such any knowable thing; for it is conceived as
what would remain after removal of all determinations, yet determinations are precisely
what would be predicated of it in the synthetic judgments in which any knowledge of
it would consist. 35 In this observation, Kant echoes the point we saw Leibniz make in
explaining the inevitability of the “apparent thinness” of Locke’s notion of pure substance
in general.
34 Cf. KrV A571-572 /B599-600. To say that this concept is the representation of an individual is not to say that it is
a singular representation. Like any other concept, it is general. Only when used in conjunction with singular
representation (sensible intuition) can it be used to pick out one individual. (I here use ‘individual’ in a merely
logical sense, a sense that distinguishes an individual from any genus or species, but neither entails nor precludes
either divisibility or multiplicity.)
35 P 4:333, KrV A414 /B441; cf. NE II.xxiii.2, 218. The thought of the substantial as what would remain after actual
removal of all determinations confusedly reifies what is represented in using a concept in abstracto, violating
the principle that every object of theoretical knowledge is determinate in all respects. No substance depends
on any of its accidents, but it hardly follows that a substance could have no accidents at all. The “removal” of an
accident is always its replacement by another. The confusion is aggravated by the misconception noted earlier,
that accidents exist in their own right.

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Yet while neither Leibniz nor Kant accepts Locke’s denial that we have any distinct
idea of substance in general, they recognize that his skepticism reflects a genuine insight.
Whether substance is regarded as the last subject of inherence or as the first subject of
predication, there is no disputing that it is not to be found in the immediate objects of per-
ception, or in what Kant terms “appearances”, objects of empirical intuition consciously
represented prior to determination by categories. 36 Because the category of substance
originates in a self-conscious act of spontaneity, a mere form of combination of concepts
in categorical judgment, which is not derived from any affection of receptivity, 37 it is
exercised in every material use of that form and hence – insofar as this form is basic – in
every material use of all other forms as well. In all theoretical knowledge, then, substance
is at least implicitly understood to be an object necessarily thought and hence thought
as necessary in all such knowledge in every cognizing subject. Every perception, on the
other hand, is contingent, depending for its actuality on present sensation. And since
sensation is the effect of an object on the consciousness of an individual subject, neither
sensation nor the perception depending on it is ever common to diverse subjects or di-
verse occasions. Appearances, therefore, as immediate objects of perception, are likewise
contingent and likewise tied to subject and situation. Not being objects of representations
that can be shared by diverse and differently situated cognizing subjects, they are not
themselves objects of theoretical knowledge at all.
If, therefore, as all parties agree, what the concept of substance represents cannot be
found in the immediate object of perception, it is incumbent on metaphysicians such as
Leibniz and Kant, who recognize that this concept originates in the understanding, to
provide an account of how this first logical subject can represent anything real. And if the
metaphysics is to be immanent, the account must be informed by the further recogni-
tion that the objects of theoretical knowledge must be knowable in experience, in that,
sensation being the necessary material condition of knowledge of independently existing
things, it is only through perception and experience that knowledge of reality is possible.
To certify this category as eligible for use in theoretical knowledge, then, it is necessary
to show that what it represents is possible, knowable in experience, notwithstanding the
impossibility of finding it in the objects of perception. To do this would be to arrive at
a real definition, or to establish what Kant refers to as the concept’s real possibility, the
possibility of the object it represents. 38
In metaphysics, however, the question of real possibility must be handled differently
from the ways in which it is addressed in the special sciences, whether technical or
empirical. To establish a concept’s real possibility in a technical science, it suffices to
show constructibility. In Euclidean geometry, for instance, as both Leibniz and Kant point
out, possibility is established by making evident – either by a genetic definition or by
36 “The undetermined object of an empirical intuition is called appearance” (KrV A20 /B34); perception lies in the
empirical – i. e. sensation-involving – consciousness of such an object (B207). Appearance in the sense here
intended is what I referred to earlier as appearance in the empirical sense (i. e. mere appearance in contrast to
phenomenon, or in other words the appearing of an object of experience in contrast to the object itself). I call it
an immediate object to indicate that it has no being outside the perception.
37 As concepts belonging to metaphysics rather than to mathematics, the categories are, in respect of their content,
given, but they are given a priori, not empirically; their content accordingly originates in a pure self-conscious
act of synthesis, not from any affection of receptivity (cf. L §§ 4–5).
38 Or in other words its “objective reality”, or relation to an object. Cf. KrV A240-242 /B300.

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a demonstration that relies exclusively on such definitions along with the recognized
axioms and postulates – that the concept in question can be constructed, that is, that
a figure satisfying the conditions it specifies can be generated a priori. 39 In the case of
empirical concepts, real possibility is established a posteriori, by identifying an instance
in experience. The concepts of metaphysics, in contrast, are necessary, being fundamental
to all theoretical knowledge. So the possibility of their objects cannot be established by
showing them to be objects of a possible or an actual experience; it can be established
only by showing their necessity in any experience at all.
This requirement may seem only to make all the more hopeless the prospect of secur-
ing a real definition of the category of substance. If substance cannot lie in the objects of
perception, it surely cannot lie in those objects necessarily. The sensible representation
of an appearance and the intellectual representation of substance are, as Kant puts it,
heterogeneous (KrV A137-138 /B176-177). A more auspicious prospect emerges, however,
if, bearing in mind the unity-securing function of the intellect, we notice in the very heter-
ogeneity of these representations an indication that they are complementary, figuring as
matter and form of a third thing, namely experience, or empirical knowledge. If matter
and form are understood along traditional lines, as they are by Kant, namely as the de-
terminable and its determination (KrV A266 /B322), then according to this hylomorphic
analysis, on which perceptions are the matter and the category is the form, experience
lies in determinate perception, or perception so far as it is categorially informed. Ex-
perience can accordingly be characterized as “the product of the understanding out of
materials of sensibility” and as “knowledge through connected perceptions”, 40 for what
the understanding’s form-giving function, carried out through the category, produces
is the determinate combination – the connection – of perceptions that constitutes the
unity of knowledge.
Spelling out this idea involves two steps. First, an account is needed of how the cate-
gory’s determination of sensible material can furnish a representation that enables an
advance from a nominal to a real definition of substance. Such a representation cannot of
course be of anything in the appearances, the objects of bare perception, for such objects
are undetermined by any category. But this does not rule out the possibility of a represen-
tation of something in the phenomena, the objects of experience. If, as Kant argues, there
is a condition to which the material of experience is recognized to be universally subject,
namely time, then thinking an object through the category and in accordance with the
39 In one of his many illustrations of the need for real definitions, Leibniz notes that we regard it as evident that a
figure described by the motion of a straight line in a plane about a fixed end is possible, but we might doubt
whether it is possible for there to be a curve such that, given any segment of it, the lines connecting any point
on the segment with the segment’s endpoints will always form the same angle. The two concepts represent the
same figure, a circle, but whereas the first is simply a genetic version of Euclid’s definition and his corresponding
postulate, Euclid demanded a demonstration in the case of the second. (See On Universal Synthesis and Analysis,
or the Art of Discovery and Judgment [PPL 230].)
40 P 4:316, KrV B161. It can also be characterized, in accordance with the Copernican way of thinking, as “knowl-
edge that determines an object through perceptions” (B218). Obviously the common contemporary tendency to
understand ‘perception’ and ‘experience’ (or ‘perceptual experience’) as near synonyms needs to be suspended
here, if we are to appreciate Kant’s distinction between Wahrnehmung (perceptio) and Erfahrung (cf. e. g.
P § 20), which is kindred to the traditional contrast between aisthēsis and empeiria. According to this dis-
tinction, experience is not bare perception, though as knowledge – namely empirical knowledge (empirisches
Erkenntnis) (B218) – it does count as objective perception (cf. A320 /B376).

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concept of that condition – and so thinking the object as phenomenon – can furnish
such a representation, a representation that can be incorporated into the category. In
his doctrine of the schematism of the categories, Kant identifies this representation as
that of the permanence of the real in time. Second, the distinctive modality of meta-
physical concepts – their necessity – means that showing the possibility of the object of
this representation – or, what comes to the same, showing that the representation, when
incorporated into the category, yields a real definition – must be a matter of showing the
representation to figure constitutively in experience, as a formal condition of its possibil-
ity, even in respect of its specific character as sensible (temporal). Kant addresses this
second task in his proof of the first law of nature, that in all change among appearances,
substance, as permanent, persists. The proof will be considered below (2.3), after a brief
discussion of the first step.
Perception is presupposed in experience as its material, in that the object of theoretical
knowledge, existing independently of the knowledge of it, must, if it is to be known, be
given and thereby appear to the subject: it must, through being present to the senses,
affect consciousness, and the affections must be apprehended in the perception, or em-
pirical consciousness, of an appearance – the appearing of the object – in intuition. Now
as this characterization of perception already makes apparent, perception too can be
analyzed hylomorphically. As empirical consciousness, perception depends outwardly
on a material condition, namely sensation, or the effect of an object on consciousness,
and inwardly on a formal condition, namely consciousness in its capacity to determine
sensibility – a passive power of representation – to represent an object in intuition. These
two conditions underlie respectively the diversity and the unity of that representation in
perception. Through the senses, diverse sensations are available to figure as material of a
single perception. But since sensibility is a passive power to represent, it is not itself the
source of the unity of its intuition. That unity can be secured only through sensibility’s
being affected by perception’s inward, formal condition of consciousness, which, as pure
activity, contains its unity originally within itself. The unity of empirical intuition is ac-
cordingly the work of a power of consciousness – under the name of the imagination (the
power to represent an object in intuition even without its presence) – to determine sen-
sibility inwardly in an act of combination, a “synthesis of apprehension”, which depends
in turn for its unity on the unity of consciousness that it expresses.
Kant argues, as we noted, that space and time are synthesis-enabling forms respec-
tively of outer and of inner sense, and we need now to incorporate this doctrine into the
foregoing analysis of perception. As forms of sensible representation, space and time are
not themselves objects perceived, but conditions according to which perceptible objects
are represented in the perception of them. Insofar as perception depends, materially, on
affections of consciousness from without, it represents objects in outer intuition, under
the form of space. But the representations of these appearances depend for their unity on
the imagination’s synthesis, an act through which sensibility is inwardly determined, and
such determination is represented in inner intuition, in accordance with the form of time.
Thus, the self-affecting synthesis of the imagination generates, on the occasion of affec-
tions of consciousness from without, perceptions of appearances in outer intuition, that
is, in space, and that self-affection yields inwardly-directed consciousness of those same
perceptions – or, what comes to the same, their immediate objects, the appearances – in
inner intuition, as successively ordered in time.

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Yet consciousness of succession among one’s perceptions no more constitutes experi-

ence – empirical knowledge of independently existing objects – than do the perceptions
themselves. Successively ordered perceptions furnish the material of experience, but
judgment and hence concepts are required in addition, in order to represent, through
perception, independently existing objects as ordered in time. For such representation,
inner intuition and its form are not enough; a concept of time – a representation of time
in general – is required, together with the concept of an object in general, articulated in
the categories. And the latter concept must incorporate the former into itself in an act of
self-determination, yielding the concept of an object of experience in general. Such an
object will be known under a determinate, discursively represented temporal form that
expresses, and so bears analogy with, intellectual form.
With these considerations in place, it is readily apparent that the category of substance
and its correlative concept of accident must determine themselves as concepts of objects
of experience respectively through the representation of the real so far as it is permanent
and through the representation of the real so far as it is changeable. For as we saw in the
foregoing explication of this category, the original concept of substance is the first use
of the concept of the real, prior to the representation of any determination – including
limitation – of its existence. The concept of an accident, in contrast, is just the represen-
tation of such a determination, and as such it includes consciousness of the possibility of
other, opposing determinations where conditions differ. Thus the former concept cannot
be expressed through a representation of temporal limitation, whereas the latter must be
(as will be further explained below). As can be seen, the schema of substance represents
in sensible terms the necessity thought through the category: as the representation of the
existence of the real through all time, it bears, in a sensibly conditioned way, the mark of
the a priori in its other guise, as universality (cf. KrV B3-4).
Kant remarks that the schemata “realize” the categories while also restricting their
application to objects of experience, or to phenomena; he thereby intimates what he
later says explicitly, namely that it is only insofar as the categories as nominally, logically
conceived – the pure categories, as he will go on to call them – incorporate their sche-
mata that they constitute full-fledged, really definable concepts. 41 The logical concepts
constitute their form, the schemata their content.
41 KrV A146 /B185-186, A240-243 /B300-301. Insofar as it is only through their being restricted to phenomena by
the incorporation of their schemata that the categories are “realized” and so rendered suitable for a real use
in theoretical knowledge, the unrestricted use that is made of them in traditional metaphysics, where they
are employed in conjunction with ideas of reason rather than with schemata, is illicit. In practical knowl-
edge, however, the categories allow of a legitimate unrestricted application in conjunction with reason’s ideas,
one in which they are not so much “realized” as “idealized,” or used as the original representations of the
good (though in such application they also work to realize themselves through making their object actual).
Thus, while the unrestricted use of the category of substance in traditional rational psychology is criticized as
transcendent in the Paralogisms of Pure Reason (in that the rational psychologist mistakes self-consciousness
for a purely intellectual theoretical knowledge of the cognizing subject as thing in itself), the unrestricted
use of this category in practical knowledge – a use that constitutes the concept of a person – is immanent
and legitimate (cf. KpV 5:16, 48, 66). Moreover, since the schema restricts this category’s use to knowledge
of “phenomenal substance” (KrV A146 /B186), which as the permanence of the real “is wholly a sum of mere
relations” (A265 /B321), it enables theoretical knowledge only of what, absolutely speaking, is but an analogue of
substance as originally conceived (A180-181 /B223-224). Thus while we find in the theoretical use of this concept
one traditional conception of substance, as matter, or permanent subject of change (whose movements are
effects of other substances acting on it), it is only through the category’s practical use, in which the concept of

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Further light can be thrown on this point by noting that in Aristotle too we find some
indication of it. Aristotle begins his treatment of the category of substance by setting out
the core logical idea of a subject of predicates that is not itself a predicate, the idea that
Leibniz and Kant articulate in their nominal definitions; but as his discussion proceeds
he draws attention to a further feature – an element that Kant holds to be needed for
the real definition – when he remarks that what is “most distinctive” of substance is that
it is capable of retaining its identity while receiving contraries, such as hot and cold. 42
This feature goes beyond the core logical notion, which includes no thought of the real
possibility of a contrariety of predicates in a subject. Aristotle’s characterization of this
feature does differ from Kant’s schema in that it makes no reference to time. But it is
clear that Kant too has this feature in view, for as he points out elsewhere, only with the
representation of time can we make comprehensible the possibility of a combination
of contradictorily opposed predicates in one and the same object. 43 It is the schema
of permanence, then, that enables comprehension of what Aristotle identifies as the
distinctive mark of substance, the capacity to receive contraries without loss of identity.
But to confirm that the incorporation of the representation of permanence into the
category of substance constitutes the latter’s realization, its real definition, it is necessary
to show the possibility of this concept’s object through showing its necessity in experi-
ence. To identify a schema that expresses in sensible terms the pure category’s thought
of necessity is not yet to show that the category, completed by its schema, is a necessary
condition of experience – and thereby of all theoretical knowledge – even in respect
of its sensible (temporal) character. As we shall next see, this necessity can be shown
by exhibiting the role the schematized concept plays in making possible experience of
change, a role that establishes its place in the first law of nature.
2.3 From the category of substance to the first law of nature

We have noted that perception is the material of experience, and that the unity of per-
ception’s empirical intuition is secured through sensibility’s being inwardly affected in
the synthesis of the imagination. In accordance with the sensible form under which such
inner affection is represented, the subject is immediately conscious of its perceptions
and their immediate objects, the appearances, as successively ordered in time. But this
an end is introduced through the idea of the good, that it can be employed to represent individual substances
as understood in the traditionally favored conception, namely as self-moving entelechies. Two stages in this
employment can be distinguished: a primary, practical application, in the representation of individual human
persons, and an extended, natural-teleological application, in the representation of organisms. But these further
uses lie outside the immediate concerns of immanent theoretical metaphysics.
42 Aristotle expresses the logical concept when he says, “it is because the primary substances are subjects for all
the other things and all the other things are predicated of them or are in them, that they are called substances
most of all” (Categories 5, 2b15-17, tr. Ackrill; cf. Metaphysics VII.3, 1028b36-29a2). He points out the other feature
when he later remarks, “It seems most distinctive of substance that what is numerically one and the same is
capable of receiving contraries” (Categories 5, 4a10-11, tr. Ackrill, modified).
43 Cf. KrV B48. This comprehensibility condition reflects the hylomorphic character of theoretical knowledge as
discursive. Such knowledge begins in experience, in which intellectual and sensible powers cooperate as form
and matter, and however abstract the intellectual representations may be that arise through reflective analysis,
their cognitive standing depends on the possibility of their use in that same original experience, without which
their relation to independently existing objects is lost.

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inward consciousness is of a subjective order of apprehension, the order of the states

of that consciousness itself. Experience, in contrast, as theoretical knowledge, is of in-
dependently existing objects and is shareable by diverse subjects. The representation
of objective order that constitutes experience therefore depends on more than the im-
mediate consciousness of order among perceptions secured through the imagination’s
synthesis. It must take place through an act of the faculty of knowledge, the understan-
ding, whereby through the use of a category the order among the perceived appearances –
or, more precisely, the order among the phenomena thought through the appearances –
is represented as determined. 44
Kant points out that while the order of perceptions and their appearances is successive,
it does not follow that in experience the cognized order of the phenomena represented
through those appearances is likewise successive. I may in experience recognize as si-
multaneous what I represent through the predicate hot and what I represent through the
predicate fluid, even though the appearance on which I rely in the use of fluid precedes
the appearance on which I rely in the use of hot. That the subjective order of percep-
tions’ appearances is successive does not by itself entail that the objective order of the
phenomena known in experience is successive.
But while many predicates differing in content are merely diverse, like hot and fluid,
others, as we noted, are not only diverse but opposed, for instance hot and cold, fluid
and solid. Such concepts cannot be predicated absolutely of one and the same thing. The
intellect requires that in the use of them as predicates the copula – the act of relating the
concepts serving as subject and predicate in the categorical judgment – be modified so
as to preserve the agreement requisite for the unity of knowledge. This can be done in
either of two ways, as the copula can be modified either in its first moment, the positing
of the subject, or in its second, the predication wherein that positing is determined. The
first way is through quantification, introducing diversity in the positing of the real; the
second is through qualification, limiting the predication. These modifications depend for
their comprehensibility on sensible conditions, namely the forms of sensible intuition:
diversity in the positing of the subject depends on space (this S here is hot; that one there
is cold), and limitation of predication depends on time (this S was fluid; now it is solid).
In experience, then, what is represented through a use of opposed predicates that relies
on successively perceived appearances must be ordered by reference either to different
places in space or to different positions in time. The first way of ordering constitutes
the experience of diversity of existing things; the second the experience of change. In
the former case, the represented order can be one of simultaneity, in the latter, only of
succession. This representation of order, however, cannot be merely arbitrary. For an
arbitrary representation lacks the determinacy requisite for knowledge. In experience,
therefore, the representation must be determinate. Now representations are determinate
only so far as they exclude the representations to which they are opposed. Since the two
modes of order in time – simultaneity and succession – are opposed, the determinate
representation constituting experience of objective succession must exclude represen-
44 We have already noted that a category is a form of judgment in its potential for material use, and since that
material use consists in the determination of materials provided by sensible intuition, the categories can be
characterized as “concepts of an object in general, through which its intuition is regarded as determined in
respect of one of the logical functions of judgment” (KrV B128).

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tation of simultaneity. But this requires that what is represented through the opposing
concepts not be predicated of diverse subjects, thought through diverse positings of the
real, occupying different places in space. The opposition must rather be regarded as to
be accommodated solely through qualification of predication, in which the concepts
are used with reference to different positions in time. For such accommodation to be
possible, however, the two concepts must be predicated of an identical subject, for op-
posing predicates in diverse subjects do not preclude simultaneity. And insofar as the
two predicates are referred to different positions in time, that identical subject must
exist continuously through time, in that without continuity there can be no identity.
This continuous existence is just the permanence of substance. Substance, as permanent,
is therefore presupposed in all experience of change. And since the representation of
simultaneity, the other mode of temporal order, implies no thought of coming to be or
passing away, the presupposition holds for all experience of the real in time.
The preceding argument may seem vulnerable to an objection that has often been
raised against Kant’s proof, namely that it fails to establish permanence in the strict sense
of the term: To show that experience of objective change presupposes something that
endures through the change is not to show that it presupposes something absolutely per-
manent, which neither comes to be nor passes away. 45 In this objection, however, some
crucial points are overlooked. As was noted, the original thought of the posited subject
precedes all determination of its existence, including any supposed limitation of the lat-
ter in time. So if knowledge of the subject as thus limited in existence is possible, it must
derive from experience. But that no experience could be the source of such knowledge
becomes apparent once we take into account the essential difference between change on
the one hand and an absolute beginning or ceasing to exist on the other. Change involves
real opposition, an opposition between real predicates, whereas absolute beginning or
ceasing includes only a logical opposition, between existence and non-existence. Now
experience, as we noted, depends materially on perception, and perception in turn on
sensation, as the effect on consciousness through which alone the real can be known.
So it is possible to have experience of change, but never possible to have experience of
absolute non-existence and so never possible to have experience of an absolute coming
to be or passing away. Absence of perception does not constitute perception of absence.
Inferring the absence of a thing from the absence of perception can be warranted if we
are concerned only with a relative coming to be or passing away, as in the case of things
of a specific kind, such as droplets of dew, where, having an empirically determinate
concept that specifies perceptible marks, we are equipped with a schema that enables us
to determine absence as well as presence in experience. But the concept of the real has
no schema beyond that of something in time that corresponds to sensation in general,
and this correspondence does not imply that existence entails actual sensation in all
conditions. Phenomena are appearances, but not mere appearances (mere appearings).
Only the possibility of sensation is entailed; absence of actual sensation in a particular
instance does not exclude that possibility. 46
45 See for example Strawson 1966, 128–131. The response to this objection that I offer here is similar in some
respects to that of Guyer 1987, 230–232.
46 The considerations advanced in this paragraph go beyond what is explicitly set out in Kant’s discussion in
the First Analogy, but they look no further than to his preceding proof of the principle of the Anticipations of

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When we think of nature along traditional lines as the complete object of physical
science, we think of the totality of objects knowable through experience and conceive of
them as things whose existence is determined according to law. The foregoing argument
has outlined the chief considerations that enter into the proof 47 of the first law of nature
so understood, a law that, as Kant notes, has always been implicitly presupposed by
ordinary human understanding as well as by the students of nature. 48 The proof shows
that all change (all coming to be and passing away) in objects of experience is nothing but
alteration, or succession of opposing determinations of what is permanent in those things.
And it is this permanent substratum, represented though the schematized category of
substance, that constitutes nature’s fundamental law, indeed the ground of the possibility
of all of nature’s laws and thereby of nature itself, in that these laws, being nothing but
the fixed ways in which objects knowable through experience are determined in their
existence, depend for their fixity – their permanence – on a permanent substratum in
those things. It is thus through the presupposition of substance in experience that law
secures its footing in the world, constituting it as an order of nature. 49
Bibliography
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Engstrom, S. 2017. Knowledge and Its Object. In: O’Shea, J. (ed.). Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason: A
Critical Guide. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Frege, G. 1891. Funktion und Begriff. Jena: Herman Pöhle.
Geach, P. T. 1965. Assertion. Philosophical Review 74, 449–465.
Guyer, P. 1987. Kant and the Claims of Knowledge. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Jolley, N. 1984. Leibniz and Locke. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Longuenesse, B. 1998. Kant and the Capacity to Judge. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Strawson, P. F. 1959. Individuals. London: Methuen.
Strawson, P. F. 1966. The Bounds of Sense. London: Methuen.
Wilson, M. D. 1999. Ideas and Mechanism. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Perception, on the strength of which he argues that “a proof of an empty space or an empty time can never be
derived from experience” (see KrV A172-173 /B214).
47 Although Kant calls his argument a proof, he emphasizes that since it is of a principle, not a theorem, it does
not and could not have the character of a demonstration. It does not attempt to derive the principle from any
higher knowledge, but shows that it is presupposed in experience and so makes possible the very thing – that
same experience – that serves as its own ground of proof (KrV A184-185 /B227-228; cf. A148-149 /B188, A736-737 /
B764-765).
48 KrV B227; cf. Aristotle, Metaphysics I.3, 983b6-18.
49 This paper was initially presented in 2016 at a workshop on Kant and Leibniz on substance at the University of
Illinois at Chicago, and short versions were read in 2018 at conferences at UCLA and Columbia. I am grateful to
the participants for helpful discussion, and I particularly thank Katherine Dunlop, Daniel Sutherland, and an
anonymous referee for their useful comments.

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The Category of Substance

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The Category of Substance

Stephen Engstrom, University of Pittsburgh

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concept can be recognized as the ground of a principle of knowledge, a principle that

1. Approaching the concept of substance

1.1 Demarcating the science of metaphysics

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1.2. Reflection and the concepts of metaphysics

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1.3 Two perspectives on substance: Locke and Leibniz

7 NE II.xxiii.1-2, 217–218. For Locke’s account, see Essay II.xxiii.1-2.

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Leibniz acknowledges that Locke’s notion of “pure substance in general”, precisely on

2. Immanent metaphysics: substance and the first law of nature

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to its object; I offer a fuller treatment in Engstrom 2017.

emanate from our substance” (Discourse on Metaphysics § 32 [PPL 324]).

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2.1 From the form of categorical judgment to the category of substance

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where a similar distinction is drawn with respect to the augmentation of knowledge).

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concepts, designated as subject and predicate, whereas the form, or determination of

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makes possible the spontaneous representation, in judgment, of something real, existing

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2.2 From the pure category to its schema

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Yet consciousness of succession among one’s perceptions no more constitutes experi-

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2.3 From the category of substance to the first law of nature

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inward consciousness is of a subjective order of apprehension, the order of the states

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