On the Necessity of a Substance

I shall prove that the existence of a substance is necessary, as we cannot define something to be, yet provide no reason for doing so.
By substance I mean that which exists in and of itself, and hence it is conceived through itself and not through anything else.
We argue for such, because we would not know of anything if it were not through this substance, and hence nothing would exist to our minds. We can say something exists, however reductionist the attitude - with absolute certainty. And thus a substance exists.

Note that I do not make mention of what this substance is, if it is singular or plural, and what its attribute would be. I would leave this to the reader to question for the time being, as I will be returning to this subject in depth.

A necessary question must be asked: what exists of the essence of the substance apart from the essence itself? If the essence is what we defined to be the attribute then clearly the two are equal. And what exists of substance aside from what the intellect perceives?

A thought experiment we can use is to think of a substance with no properties, while there is an important metaphysical distinction between properties and attributes some materialization of abstract thought can aid us in this setting. So I challenge the reader to think of a substance with no attribute (which he/she can take to be the properties for the purpose of this argument). This is not possible, so the attribute is the sole essence and existence of a substance.

We can then tackle the case of the immaterial substances. If they are immaterial then they must be mental, in that they are perceived by the intellect but have no concrete existence in the material world. Clearly in this case the attribute is the essence.

I present my view that the attribute is contained as knowledge. This is to say that the fundamental essence of substance is in what the mind conceives it to be. I should hope to develop this viewpoint further in the future.