It is certainly true that a chemical change is one in which a new substance with new properties are formed. The key word in this definition is "formed". And certainly at the heart of chemical change is the formation of a new substance. Chemical changes are constantly occurring in my body. But the conclusion: "Therefore I am constantly becoming a new substance," does not follow. If this was true, it would not be possible to say that I am becoming a new substance. "I" is the subject, and the subject of the change is always that which endures or remains the same throughout the change. How can I say: "I am becoming a new substance", and at the end of that chemical change say: "I am a different substance"? My words testify against me. If I am becoming a new substance, and a few moments later I maintain that I am no longer the same substance, then who is this "I" that has endured? The "I" is me. Therefore I have not changed substantially. If I were changing continually, I'd never know it, because I would never live long enough to know it. I couldn't possibly witness it, because it is me who am becoming a new substance, and "I" am no longer around to know it or tell about it.[1]

That is why I am not reducible to my parts. My parts are a part of me. In other words, my parts are not the substance. The chemical changes that occur in me have me, my substance, as their end. I am continually changing other substances into this one substance that is me, a living and human kind of being. The only time I will change substantially is on the day I die. This will be a change from a living, unified substance to a non-living multiplicity of elements.

The material substance has parts, that is, the substance is extended or spread out. It is quantity that gives us parts outside of parts. But quantity is not primary. Substance is really prior to quantity, prior to the arrangement of parts outside one another. The human substance as a whole does not change, but its parts are constantly changing. But these parts are not the substance itself, but parts of the substance. If they were the substance itself, the substance would not be one substance, but many substances. By the human person is one substance, not many. There are many parts of the one substance, but these parts are unified into one living organism. The parts can change (quantitative changes, growth, nutrition, etc.), but the substance is the subject of those changes. The substance is a subject. Quantity does not stand on its own, in other words, quantity is not substance or being per se (as it was for Descartes). Quantity is a different mode of being than substance. Substance is being per se, while quantity is in esse, or accidental, that is, "inhering in". It is a thing that is quantified. It is a thing that has parts. Only by virtue of quantity is a substance subject to measurement. But in itself, substance is not measurable. It does not hide behind the quantity, so to speak, as Pierce misunderstood substance. It is not something that you can look for by pealing an onion, for example, and discovering that all you get are parts. Substance is intelligible. Your pet cat is not a multiplicity of chemicals and a bundle of perceptions, but a substance that has parts and has color. And so the above problem is rooted in a confusion between parts and substance.

Physicist Rudy Rucker is aware of the difficulties involved in identifying parts with substance when he writes:

"A human body changes most of its atoms every few years. Daily one eats and inhales billions of new atoms, daily one excretes, sheds, and breaths out billions of old ones. Physically, my present body has almost nothing in common with the body I had twenty years ago. Since I feel that I am still the same person, it must be that "I" am something other than the collection of atoms making up my body. "I" am not so much my atoms as I am the pattern in which my atoms are arranged."[2]

"Feedback", which takes place in the living organism, is ordered toward homeostasis. This is the overall direction of the chemical changes. There is a constant balancing act in the living organism. The chemical changes are ordered or directed towards unity, and because of that the living organism is a unity. And it is not a unity by virtue of the parts, for the parts are multiple, and what is multiple is not actually one in so far as it is multiple, but only potentially one. A multiplicity is actually unified by one principle-a unifying principle. And wherever we find unity, we find form. To unify is to form, and to form is to unify. The living organism is unified or formed. The parts are unified. The parts have a common end, namely the unity and integrity of the whole organism. All the parts share in the "knowledge" of the common end - which is the integrity of the one organism. Of course, there is no literal knowledge. But they all are determined to that common end (just as the knowledge of the plan enables each soldier to determine himself toward the common end; for it is the Commander-in-Chief who relates the plan of action down the ranks through the Generals and to the Lieutenants, etc.). This unifying principle is the substance's form - which is why the definition of chemical change above includes the word "form": a chemical change is defined as a "change in which new substances with new properties are formed. " When a substance is changed, it is transformed, that is, something within it has acquired a new form. Matter is really the ultimate subject of a chemical change. Matter is that which has the form. The substance of Oxygen is a matter and form composite (potency and act composite). In the change to Carbon Dioxide, Oxygen has been transformed into "Carbon Dioxide", just as sperm and ovum have changed (ceased to be what they are) and have transformed into a substantial unit, and this substantial unit will change again only at death, whenever that may occur.

So quantity does not order like a final cause, and neither does it operate as an efficient cause. Quantity is not a nature, and has neither tendencies nor an inner principle. It is the substance that is responsible for what the parts are. Quantity is responsible for the fact that there are parts, one outside the other. As Smith points out: "Quantity does not explain the "content" that is in the parts; it is only their distribution into an estate of distinctness, dimensionality, and distance"[3] Quantity is a disposition, not a cause. Quantity does not give us an intimate knowledge of the reality which the parts disperse. It is the activity of the substance that does that. And since quantity is only intelligible in reference to a "thing", and since a thing is only intelligible as a certain kind of thing, it is the form that determines the content of the quantity, that is, the content of the parts, i.e. the finger, the tongue, the liver, the DNA, etc.

And so it is the substance that remains the same throughout all the accidental (chemical) changes that take place on a daily basis. Quantity is an accident. A change in quantity is an accidental change. And since quantity gives us parts outside of parts, a change in the parts is an accidental change.

Notes

¹"In biology there is no doubt that, by our own internal experience of being alive, we get a knowledge that can never be furnished by a test tube or a microscope. Even though this initial knowledge is vague and general, it is a fundamental knowledge that is never surrendered. It is sometimes argued that the microbiologist will crack the secrets of life when he gets further knowledge of entities like the virus, a tiny parasite that outside its host seems to have only mineral properties but inside the host is associated with a process like reproduction. But as the biologist's knowledge increases, what criterion will he use to determine whether the virus in question is alive? It will be the knowledge of life as self-motion, experienced in himself and inother living things of his immediate environment." V. E. Smith. Science and Philosophy, 222.

²The Fourth Dimension: A Guided Tour of the Higher Universes (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1984) 145-146.

³Philosophical Physics, 409.

Copyright © 1998 by Douglas P. McManaman
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