| Such an analysis, indeed, executed with great particularity, may already be found in well-known works on this subject. |
| But I cannot at present refrain from making a few remarks on the empirical criterion of a substance, in so far as it seems to be more evident and more easily recognized through the conception of action than through that of the permanence of a phenomenon. |
| Where action (consequently activity and force) exists, substance also must exist, and in it alone must be sought the seat of that fruitful source of phenomena. |
| Very well. |
| But if we are called upon to explain what we mean by substance, and wish to avoid the vice of reasoning in a circle, the answer is by no means so easy. |
| How shall we conclude immediately from the action to the permanence of that which acts, this being nevertheless an essential and peculiar criterion of substance (phenomenon)? |
| But after what has been said above, the solution of this question becomes easy enough, although by the common mode of procedure--merely analysing our conceptions--it would be quite impossible. |
| The conception of action indicates the relation of the subject of causality to the effect. |
| Now because all effect consists in that which happens, therefore in the changeable, the last subject thereof is the permanent, as the substratum of all that changes, that is, substance. |
| For according to the principle of causality, actions are always the first ground of all change in phenomena and, consequently, cannot be a property of a subject which itself changes, because if this were the case, other actions and another subject would be necessary to determine this change. |
| From all this it results that action alone, as an empirical criterion, is a sufficient proof of the presence of substantiality, without any necessity on my part of endeavouring to discover the permanence of substance by a comparison. |
| Besides, by this mode of induction we could not attain to the completeness which the magnitude and strict universality of the conception requires. |
| For that the primary subject of the causality of all arising and passing away, all origin and extinction, cannot itself (in the sphere of phenomena) arise and pass away, is a sound and safe conclusion, a conclusion which leads us to the conception of empirical necessity and permanence in existence, and consequently to the conception of a substance as phenomenon. |
| When something happens, the mere fact of the occurrence, without regard to that which occurs, is an object requiring investigation. |
| The transition from the non-being of a state into the existence of it, supposing that this state contains no quality which previously existed in the phenomenon, is a fact of itself demanding inquiry. |
| Such an event, as has been shown in No. |
| A, does not concern substance (for substance does not thus originate), but its condition or state. |
| It is therefore only change, and not origin from nothing. |
| If this origin be regarded as the effect of a foreign cause, it is termed creation, which cannot be admitted as an event among phenomena, because the very possibility of it would annihilate the unity of experience. |
| If, however, I regard all things not as phenomena, but as things in themselves and objects of understanding alone, they, although substances, may be considered as dependent, in respect of their existence, on a foreign cause. |
| But this would require a very different meaning in the words, a meaning which could not apply to phenomena as objects of possible experience. |