Russell (1961: 572):
The conception of substance, which is fundamental in the philosophies of Descartes, Spinoza and Leibniz, is derived from the logical category of subject and predicate. Some words can be either subjects or predicates; e.g. I can say 'the sky is blue' and 'blue is a colour'. Other words — of which proper names are the most obvious instances — can never occur as predicates, but only as subjects, or as one of the terms of a relation. Such words are held to designate substances. … Every true proposition is either general, like 'all men are mortal', in which case it states that one predicate implies another, or particular, like 'Socrates is mortal', in which case the predicate is contained in the subject, and the quality denoted by the predicate is part of the notion of the substance denoted by the subject. Whatever happen to Socrates can be asserted in a sentence in which 'Socrates' is the subject and the words describing the happening in question are the predicate. All these predicates put together make up the 'notion' of Socrates. All belong to him necessarily, in this sense, that a substance of which they could not truly asserted would not be Socrates, but some one else.
Blogger Comments:
Through the lens of Systemic Functional Linguistics, a 'substance' corresponds to a phenomenon that can carry an Attribute, but not be attributed to a Carrier. That is, it can be a member of a class, but not a class of which there are members. The 'logical category of subject and predicate' would appear to treat even 'happenings' as intensive attributive relations; i.e. as elaboration (logical) and class membership (experiential).
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