Matter, a substance which is extensive, solid, divisible, moveable, and transitory, the first principle of all things in nature, and which by its different arrangements and combinations, forms all bodies. See Body.

Aristotle established three principles of things, matter , form, and privation. The Cartesians have rejected the last one; others reject the last two.

We know several properties of Matter; we can analyze its divisibility, its solidity, etc. See Divisibility.

But what is its essence, or where do we locate its properties? This is what is yet to be discovered. Aristotle defined matter , as that which is nec quid , nec quantum , nec quale , [neither anything, nor any amount, nor of any kind,] nor anything determinate, which is what led many of his disciples to think, that matter doesn’t exist at all. [1] See Body .

The Cartesians take extension to be the essence of matter ; they hold that as the properties of which we have just made mention are the only ones essential to matter , it must be that some of them constitute its essence; and as extension is conceived before all the others, and as it is this without which we cannot conceive any other, they have concluded that extension forms the essence of matter ; but this is hardly an exact conclusion: because following this principle, the existence of matter , as Dr. Clarke has said, would have more right than all the others to constitute its essence; [2] existence or the τὸ existere being conceived before all the properties, and even before extension.

Thus since the word extension seems to give birth to an idea more general than that of matter ; it seems that we could more reasonably call the essence of matter , that impenetrable solidity which is essential to all matter , and from which all properties of matter evidently derive. See Essence, Extension, Space, etc.

What is more, he adds, if extension were the essence of matter , and by consequence matter and space were but the same thing, it would follow that matter is infinite and eternal, that it is a necessary being, which can neither be created nor reduced to nothingness, which is absurd; moreover, it would seem — whether by the nature of gravity, by the movements of comets, by the vibrations of pendulums, etc. — that empty, non-resistant space is distinct from matter , and by extension that matter is not simply extension, but an extension which is solid and impenetrable, and endowed with the power of resistance. See Void, Extension.

Many ancient philosophers have supported the eternity of matter , from which they supposed everything had been formed, being unable to conceive that anything could have been formed from nothing. Plato claims that matter has always existed, and that it cooperated with God in the creation of all things, as a passive principle, or a type of auxiliary cause. See Eternity.

Matter and form, simple and foundational principles of all things, composed according to the ancients certain basic structures which they called elements , from the different combinations of which all things in nature were formed. See Element.

Dr. Woodward seems of an opinion not very far from this.  [3] He argues that particles of matter are originally and actually different from one to the other; that matter at the moment of its creation was divided into several orders or types of corpuscles, different from one another in substance, in gravity, in hardness, in flexibility, in shape, in size, etc., and that from the diverse compositions and combinations of these corpuscles, result all variations of bodies in color as much as in solidity, weight, taste, etc. But Mr. Newton would have it that all these differences result from the different arrangements of a common matter that he believes is homogeneous and uniform in all bodies.

To the properties of matter which have been understood hitherto, Mr. Newton has added a new one, that is to say that of attraction, which entails that each particle of matter is endowed with an attractive force, or a tendency toward every other particle, a force which is greater at the point of contact than anywhere else, and which diminishes so quickly, that it is no longer perceptible at a very short distance. It is from this principle that he derives the explanation of the cohesion of particles of bodies. See Cohesion. See also Attraction.

He observes that all bodies, and even light and all the most volatile particles of fluids, seem composed of solid particles; such that solidity can be regarded as a property of all matters , and at least that the solidity of matter is as essential to it as its impenetrability; for all bodies of which we know, are either solid in themselves, or capable of being solidified: and yet if composite bodies are thus as solid as we sometimes find them, and nonetheless are very porous, and composed of particles placed only one after the other, simple particles which are deprived of pores, and which have never been divided, are even more solid; what is more, such solid particles gathered in a heap, will barely touch one another, if only in a small number of points; and thus it would require much less force to separate them, than it would to break a solid corpuscle, whose particles everywhere touch with neither pores nor gaps which might diminish its cohesion. But these particles that are so solid being placed simply one after the other, and touching only at a few points, how, says Mr. Newton, would they adhere so strongly to one another without recourse to some cause, by which they would attract or press toward one another?

This author also observes that the smallest particles can be tied to one another by the strongest attraction, and composites of larger particles with a lesser force [ vertu] , and that many of these can by their cohesion compose even larger particles, the force of which is always diminishing, and thus successively until the progression terminates in the largest particles, upon which depend the operations of chemistry and the colors of natural bodies, and which by their cohesion, compose bodies of a perceptible size. If the body is compact, and bends and yields internally to pressure, such that it returns promptly to its original shape, it is therefore elastic. See Elastic. If the particles can be displaced, but do not restore themselves, it is thus malleable, or pliant; if they move easily among themselves, if they are of a volume susceptible to being agitated by heat, and if the heat is strong enough to maintain their agitation, the body will be a fluid; and if it has a further ability to attach itself to other bodies, it will be humid: the drops of all fluids, according to Mr. Newton, take a round shape due to the mutual attraction of their particles, just as it happens that the earth and the sea that surrounds it are a globe; on this, see Cohesion. Fluid particles which are not attached very strongly to one another, and which are small enough to be susceptible to these agitations which hold liquors in a state of fluidity, are the easiest to separate and rarefy into vapors; that is to say, according to the language of chemists, that they are volatile, that it requires only a light heat to rarefy them, and a mild chill to condense them; but larger particles, which are by consequence less susceptible to agitation, and which cling to one another by a stronger attraction, cannot be separated except by a much stronger heat, or perhaps not at all without the aid of a chemical reaction [ fermentation ];  [4] it is these last two types of bodies that chemists call fixed . Mr. Newton notes also that all things considered, it is possible that God at the moment of creation, formed matter into solid, massive, hard, impenetrable, moveable particles of appropriate size, shape, and dimensions, in a word, with properties most suitable to the end for which he formed them; that these primitive particles being solid, are incomparably harder than any porous body composed of them; that they are identical to a point, that they can neither wear nor break, there being no ordinary force capable of dividing that which God made undivided at the moment of creation. Insofar as the particles continue to be whole, they may compose bodies of a same structure and texture. But if they come to wear or break, the nature of the bodies they compose would necessarily change. A water and an earth composed of particles worn with time, and of fragments of these particles, would not be of the same nature as water and earth composed of whole particles, such as they were at the moment of creation; and as a consequence in order for the universe to persist as it is, the changes of bodily things must depend only upon the different separations, the novel associations, and the diverse movements of permanent particles; and if composite bodies can break, this cannot happen in the middle of a solid particle, but in the places where solid particles join in touching at a small number of points.

Mr. Newton holds also that these particles possess not only the force of inertia, and the passive laws of movement which naturally follow, but also that they are moved by certain active principles, such as that of attraction, or that which causes the chemical reaction [ fermentation ] and cohesion of bodies; and one must not envisage these as occult qualities that we suppose result from the specific forms of things; but as general laws of nature, by which these things themselves have been formed. In fact, the phenomena reveal to us the truth, even though the causes have not yet been discovered. See Fermentation, Gravitation, Elasticity, Hardness, Fluidity, Salt (Chemistry), Acid, etc.

Hobbes, Spinoza, etc. argue that all beings in the universe are material, and that all their differences come only from their different modifications, their different movements, etc. Thus they imagine that matter that is extremely subtle, and agitated by a very quick movement, can think. See in the article Soul, the refutation of this opinion. On the existence of matter , see the articles Body and Existence, Chambers . [5]

Notes

1. See Aristotle, Metaphysics, book vii, pt. 3, for the passage from which this quote is drawn.

2. Samuel Clarke (1675 - 1729), English philosopher and Anglican clergyman. Clarke publicly opposed the theory that thought was an emergent property of matter, notably in a public debate with Anthony Collins from 1707 to 1708. See Clarke, Collins, Correspondence , Ed. Uzgalis, 2011.

3. John Woodward (1665 - 1728), English physician, naturalist, and geologist.

4. Fermentation was understood in 18th-century chemistry to refer to any process of chemical change in a substance induced by contact with another substance. It encompasses the more contemporary concepts of catalyst, reactant, and reagent. See article “Ferment ou Levain.” Fermentation appears also to have sometimes referred to any process of chemical change at all in a substance, including changes induced by heat (i.e. without any reagent). See Voltaire, Essai sur la nature de feu et de sa propagation [Essay o n the Nature of Fire and its Propagation ] ; and Willis, Of Fermentation. See also “Fermentation” in Littré, Dictionnaire , 1873 vol. 2, which distinguishes between these two meanings.

5. The reference is to Ephraim Chambers, Cyclopedia, or, an Universal Dictionary of Arts and Sciences.