Within the depth-psychology and philosophical corpus, ‘Substance’ occupies a contested ontological position that ranges from Plotinus’s hierarchical metaphysics of Intellectual Substance as primary being, through Stoic accounts of material substrate in constant flux, to Aurobindo’s vision of Matter as a form of Spirit-substance, and onward into alchemical usage where the prima materia functions as the one transformative substance underlying all psychological projection. Plotinus insists that true Substance belongs essentially to itself and is never merely predicated of another — a criterion that condemns sensible bodies to the lower register of Becoming rather than Being. The Stoics, by contrast, treat substance as the material substratum whose very impermanence defines identity problems around growth and destruction. Aurobindo dissolves the antinomy by positing a gradation from gross material substance through vital and mental substance to pure Spirit, where differentiation finally ceases. Jung’s alchemical psychology recovers the archaic sense: the alchemists’ ‘one substance’ — aqua mercurialis, prima materia — is the projected content of the unconscious cast onto matter. A secondary, clinical register in the corpus deploys ‘substance’ in its pharmacological sense, denoting the objects of addiction and dependence that serve as organizing categories for trauma-treatment frameworks. These two registers — the metaphysical and the clinical — rarely intersect, yet both illuminate the corpus’s persistent concern with what underlies transformation.
Substance is that which belongs essentially to itself, or, in so far as it is a part of the differentiated object, serves only to complete the Composite.
Plotinus defines Substance through self-belonging and non-predication, sharply distinguishing it from accidental attributes that depend on an external substrate.
, The Six Enneads, 270thesis
Intellectual Substance would be Substance in the first degree, the others being substances by derivation and in a lower degree.
Plotinus establishes a hierarchy in which Intellectual Substance alone is primary, all sensible or derivative substances possessing being only by participation and at a lower grade.
, The Six Enneads, 270thesis
Substance [Real Being] requires no more than these five constituents; but when we have to turn to the lower sphere, we find other principles giving rise no longer to Substance (as such) but to quantitative Substance and qualitative.
Plotinus distinguishes pure Real Being, constituted by five primary genera, from the derived quantitative and qualitative substances of the sensible world.
, The Six Enneads, 270thesis
It is, we shall agree, only by analogy that the nature manifested in bodies is designated as Substance, and by no means because such terms as Substance or Being tally with the notion of bodies in flux; the proper term would be Becoming.
Plotinus argues that bodily nature earns the name ‘Substance’ only analogically, its true character being Becoming rather than Being.
, The Six Enneads, 270thesis
Force is only the action of one sole-existing Conscious-Being, its results can be nothing else but forms of that Conscious-Being; Substance or Matter, then, is only a form of Spirit.
Aurobindo collapses the matter-spirit dualism by identifying physical Substance as a condensed form of universal Conscious-Force, not an independent ontological category.
, The Life Divine, 1939thesis
Spirit itself is pure substance of being presenting itself as an object no longer to physical, vital or mental sense, but to a light of a pure spiritual perceptive knowledge.
Aurobindo traces a descending series of substances — material, vital, mental, spiritual — each presenting itself to a correspondingly subtler mode of knowing, with pure Spirit as the ground that exceeds all differentiation.
, The Life Divine, 1939supporting
Between gross substance and pure spirit substance this must be the fundamental antinomy. In Matter Chit or Conscious-Force masses itself more and more to resist and stand out against other masses of the same Conscious-Force.
Aurobindo frames the opposition between gross Matter and pure Spirit-substance as a fundamental antinomy within a single continuum of Conscious-Force.
, The Life Divine, 1939supporting
For what the Stoics call a ‘substance’, i.e. a material substrate, any alteration can constitute a change of identity.
Long and Sedley clarify the Stoic technical sense of substance as bare material substrate, whose identity is destroyed by any alteration, in contrast to the enduring ‘peculiarly qualified’ individual.
, The Hellenistic Philosophers, 1987supporting
all particular substances are in flux and motion, releasing some things from themselves and receiving others which reach them from elsewhere; the numbers or quantities which these are added to or subtracted from do not remain the same.
The Stoics, following Epicharmus, hold that material substances are perpetually in flux, so that numerical accretion or diminution transforms rather than enlarges a substrate.
, The Hellenistic Philosophers, 1987supporting
two peculiarly qualified individuals occupy one substance, and that the same substance which houses one peculiarly qualified individual, on the arrival of a second, receives and keeps both alike.
The Stoic paradox of co-location holds that a single material substance can simultaneously contain multiple peculiarly qualified individuals, a position Plutarch finds self-contradictory.
, The Hellenistic Philosophers, 1987supporting
by whatever names the philosophers have called their stone they always mean and refer to this one substance, i.e., to the water from which everything originates and in which everything is contained, which rules everything.
Jung identifies the alchemical prima materia as the singular substance behind all the Stone’s varied names, understanding it psychologically as the unconscious projected into matter.
, Psychology and Alchemy, 1944thesis
The Being of the Sensible resembles the white in not originating in itself. It must therefore be regarded as dependent for its being upon the Authentic Being.
Plotinus argues that sensible substance derives its being entirely from Authentic Being, just as white depends on the Form of Whiteness, precluding any self-subsistence for the material order.
, The Six Enneads, 270supporting
they operate at different levels of being and by organizing a different kind of ‘substance.’ Without entering into the discussion of difficult points of ‘occult’ cosmogony.
Rudhyar employs ‘substance’ in a hierarchical cosmological sense to distinguish the media through which race-self and individual-self respectively operate across levels of being.
, The Astrology of Personality: A Re-formulation of Astrological Concepts and Ideals in Terms of Contemporary Psychology and Philosophy, 1936supporting
Substance, SHIH: real, solid, full; results, fruits, essence; honest, sincere. The ideogram: string of coins under a roof, riches in possessions.
The I Ching glossary defines Substance through its ideogrammatic root as solidity, essence, and tangible results — a semantic field that bears comparison with the Aristotelian substrate.
, I Ching: The Classic Chinese Oracle of Change, 1994aside
the work on one’s own individual psychic condition is of essential importance to the Opus, and this throws a new light on the previously referred to quotation concerning the separation of body and soul.
Von Franz, glossing Zosimos, shows that alchemical material transformation is simultaneously an inner psychic event, reinforcing Jung’s reading of substance-work as psychological projection.
, Psyche and Matter, 2014aside