in common language, is a word of the same import with body, and denotes that which is tangible, visible, and extended; but amongst philosophers it signifies that substance of which all bodies are composed, and in this sense it is synonymous with element.

It is only by the senses that we have any communication with the external world; but the immediate objects of sense philosophers have in general agreed to term qualities, which they conceive as inhering in something that is called their subject or substratum. It is this substratum of sensible qualities which, in the language of philosophy, is denominated matter; so that matter is not that which we immediately see or handle, but the concealed subject or support of visible and tangible qualities. What the moderns term qualities, was by Aristotle and his followers called form; but, as far as the two doctrines are intelligible, there appears to be no essential difference between them. From the moderns we learn that body consists of matter and qualities; and the Peripatetics taught the same thing when they said that body is composed of matter and form.

How philosophers were led to analyse body into matter and form, or, to use modern language, into matter and qualities; what kind of existence they attributed to each; and whether matter must be conceived as self-existent or created; these are questions which will be considered afterwards. (See Metaphysics.) It is sufficient here to have defined the term.