  We may use Nishida’s own terms to explain his second concern, the way that objects ordinarily function in judgments.  In what Nishida alternatively called the logic of objects or subjective logic, objects of consciousness are made the grammatical subject of propositions or judgments, and are specified by predicating properties of the  subject. Eventually a subject is reached that cannot itself be predicated of anything else, recalling Aristotle’s hypokeimenon or individual substance that can be subject but never predicate. Even when modern epistemology eschewed or at least modified Aristotle’s notion of substance as a substrate for contingent properties, it appealed to substrates in the sense that they define the primary subject of a judgment, that is, the judgment’s topic and grammatical subject.  Similar to phenomenologists, Nishida wanted to account for the consciousness that posits such substances and underlies the subject of a judgment. Essays in From That Which Acts to That Which Sees (1927) and subsequent works invert Aristotle’s notion of the hypokeimenon and propose that consciousness is the “transcendental predicate” that can never be a subject; in other words consciousness in act can never be made an object of consciousness that could become a grammatical subject.  Nishida is aware of the paradox of such formulations that would make consciousness the subject of sentences that describe it, and he sometimes resorts to explicitly paradoxical descriptions such as “seeing without a seer” and “seeing the form of the formless, hearing the voice of the voiceless.” But he again also uses the straightforward metaphor, the “field of consciousness,” to indicate its non-subjective and non-objectifiable character. Consciousness cannot be grasped as the property of an individual substance nor as anything like a substance or underlying substrate itself. It functions as the field that is the opening of world and self.