Synopsis
Imagine a smooth, solid glass sphere four inches in diameter in your right hand. It's mostly transparent but tinted blue. Imagine another tinted red in your left hand. From of old, many have said each of those spheres is a bundle of the substratum 'matter', and each is a separate thing because it is not stuck either to the other globe or to your hand or to any other bundle of matter.They then contrasted each globe's internal characteristics with its substratum. The latter, they said, can avoid annihilation without being stuck to something else. The former cannot. For example, the blue globe does not have to cohere to the red globe or to your hand in order for its matter to avoid disappearing. Shatter either globe, and, instantly, its spherical shape vanishes.Say some substratum can avoid annihilation without being bonded to some other substratum, and you call it substantial. Say it can't, and you call it insubstantial.Say all substrata are substantial, and there's only one way to explain the relationship between the glass globes you see and their ultimate sub-atomic particles. You must say each globe's ultimate particles are its only matter, since only they fit the definition of 'substantial'. That makes it impossible to account for the internal characteristics we sense in the globes. For, those characteristics are wholly unlike the ones found in what you have proclaimed the only pieces of matter in the globes. But, if the internal characteristics sensed are not the internal characteristics of the only matter you acknowledge, then of what are they the internal characteristics? Nothing?! So many have despairingly concluded.Say some substrata are insubstantial, and you'll describe that relationship very differently. You'll say each globe's matter is something, repeatedly produced by, cohering to, and filling the gaps between, those ultimate particles. It's then easy to explain the globe's sensible characteristics. For, you've introduced a new kind of matter which may
About the Author
Born April 13, 1936, in New Orleans, Louisiana, the author graduated from Jesuit high school, in New Orleans, in 1953. A single fruitless semester studying music at Loyola University of the South in New Orleans was followed by almost two years of floundering in a sea of confusion, and the author then joined the U. S. Air Force on Dec. 7, 1955. Honorably discharged in April of 1960, the author underwent another two and a half years of floundering so severe, he came extremely close to a mental breakdown. In desperation, he gave away everything he owned and, for thirteen years, took to the life of a wandering hermit. In search of as much time and energy as possible for inner reflection upon self, God, and the nature and purpose of reality, he criss-crossed the United States on foot four times. At first, he lived off of whatever food and clothing he could beg; but, after learning how to live on a dollar a day or less, he turned to working at various monasteries in the winter time in exchange for the two to three hundred dollars required to feed and to clothe himself during the next spring, summer, and fall of walking. The monasteries also provided access to libraries in which he could read, and extract notes from, the great writings of the Catholic Church. In the course of that thirteen-year odyssey, there was a four year period during which he refused to speak to anyone (except on very rare occasions) and communicated only by means of written notes.In August of 1975, the author's father lost his mind, and the author's siblings insisted he was the only one in the family with the time and ability to tend to their father in his hour of need. Thus, after thirteen years, the author's preferred lifestyle came to an end. Dire poverty then gave way to economic independence, and total seclusion gave way to what little privacy can be enjoyed by bachelors who prefer to avoid partying and to stay home and - as much as possible - to bury themselves in as much reading and writing as
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