Book II from an 1882 reprint, both by Longmans.

The tables of contents have been changed to refer to paragraphs instead of pages, as was done by R.L. Nettleship in his edition of Green's _Philosophical Works_. The paragraph numbers are the same as in the originals, and as in Nettleship's edition.

The Notes which were printed in the margins of the originals have been placed as captions above the relevant paragraphs.

Green’s footnotes have been placed below the paragraphs to which they relate. Because this book does not contain Hume’s text, where Green cites Hume by page number, a reference to the relevant section has been added in square brackets. Greek phrases are translated in footnotes marked "Tr."

PREFACE.

In this edition we have sought to avoid the inconveniences which are apt to attend commentaries on philosophical writers, by the plan of putting together, in the form of continuous introductions, such explanation and criticism as we had to offer, and confining the footnotes almost entirely to references, which have been carefully distinguished from Hume’s own notes. For the introductions to the first and second volumes Mr. Green alone is responsible. The introduction to the third is the work of Mr. Grose, who also has undertaken the revision of Hume’s text.

Throughout the introductions to Volumes I. and II., except where the contrary is stated, ‘Hume’ must be understood to mean Hume as represented by the ‘Treatise on Human Nature.’ In taking this as intrinsically the best representation of his philosophy, we may be thought to have overlooked the well-known advertisement which (in an edition posthumously published) he prefixed to the volume containing his ‘Inquiries concerning the Human Understanding and the Principles of Morals.’ In it, after stating that the volume, is mainly a reproduction of what he had previously published in the ‘Treatise,’ he expresses a hope that ‘some negligences in his former reasoning, and more in the expression,’ have been corrected, and desires ‘that the following Pieces may alone be regarded as containing his philosophical sentiments and principles.’ Was not Hume himself then, it may be asked, the best judge of what was an adequate expression of his thoughts, and is there not an unbecoming assurance in disregarding such a voice from his tomb?

Our answer is that if we had been treating of Hume as a great literary character, or exhibiting the history of his individual mind, due account must have been taken of it. Such, however, has not been the object which, in the Introductions to Volumes I. and II., we have presented to ourselves, (See Introd. to Vol. I. § 4.) Our concern has been with him as the exponent of a philosophical system, and therefore specially with that statement of his system which alone purports to be complete, and which was written when philosophy was still his chief interest, without alloy from the disappointment of literary ambition. Anyone who will be at the pains to read the ‘Inquiries’ alongside of the original ‘Treatise’ will find that their only essential difference from it is in the way of omission. They consist in the main of excerpts from the ‘Treatise,’ re-written in a lighter style, and with the more difficult parts of it left out. It is not that the difficulties which logically arise out of Hume’s system are met, but that the passages which most obviously suggest them have disappeared without anything to take their place. Thus in the ‘Inquiry concerning the Human Understanding’ there is nothing whatever corresponding to Parts II. and IV. of the first Book of the ‘Treatise.’ The effect of this omission on a hasty reader is, no doubt, a feeling of great relief. Common-sense is no longer actively repelled by a doctrine which seems to undermine the real world, and can more easily put a construction on the account of the law of causation, which remains, compatible with the ‘objective validity’ of the law--such a construction as in fact forms the basis of Mr. Mill’s Logic. How inconsistent this construction is with the principles from which Hume started, and which he never gave up; how impossible it would be to anyone who had assimilated his system as a whole; how close is the organic connection between all the parts of this as he originally conceived it--we must trust to the following introductions to show. (See, in particular, Introd. to Vol. I. §§ 301 and 321.)

The only discussion in the ‘Inquiry concerning Human Understanding,’ to which nothing in his earlier publication corresponds, is that on Miracles. On the relation in which this stands to his general theory some remarks will be found in the Introduction to Vol. I. (§ 324, note). The chief variations, other than in the way of omission, between the later redaction of his ethical doctrine and the earlier, are noticed in the Introduction to Vol. II. (§§ 31, 43, and 46, and notes).

SUMMARY OF THE CONTENTS

of the

GENERAL INTRODUCTION TO VOL. I

1. How the history of philosophy should be studied.

2. Hume the last great English philosopher.

3. Kant his true successor.

4. Distinction between literary history and the history of philosophical systems.

5. Object of the present enquiry.

6. Locke’s problem and method.

7. His notion of the ‘thinking thing’.

8. This he will passively observe.

9. Is such observation possible?

10. Why it seems so.

11. Locke’s account of origin of ideas.

12. Its ambiguities _(a)_ In regard to sensation.

13. _(b)_ In regard to ideas of reflection.

14. What is the ‘tablet’ impressed?

15. Does the mind make impressions on itself?

16. Source of these difficulties. The ‘simple’ idea, as Locke describes it, is a complex idea of substance and relation.

17. How this contradiction is disguised.

18. Locke’s way of interchanging ‘idea’ and ‘quality’ and its effects.

19. Primary and secondary qualities of bodies.

20. ‘Simple idea’ represented as involving a theory of its own cause.

21. Phrases in which this is implied.

22. Feeling and felt thing confused.

23. The simple idea as ‘ectype’ other than mere sensation.

24. It involves a judgment in which mind and thing are distinguished.

25. And is equivalent to what he afterwards calls ‘knowledge of identity’. Only as such can it be named.

26. The same implied in calling it an idea of an object.

27. made _for_, not _by_, us, and therefore according to Locke really existent.

28. What did he mean by this?

30. Existence as the mere presence of a feeling.

31. Existence as reality.

32. By confusion of these two meanings, reality and its conditions are represented as given in simple feeling.

33. Yet reality involves complex ideas which are made by the mind.

34. Such are substance and relation which must be found in every object of knowledge.

35. Abstract idea of substance and complex ideas of particular sorts of substance.

36. The abstract idea according to Locke at once precedes and follows the complex.

37. Reference of ideas to nature or God, the same as reference to substance.

38. But it is explicitly to substance that Locke makes them refer themselves.

39. In the process by which we are supposed to arrive at complex ideas of substances the beginning is the same as the end.

40. Doctrine of abstraction inconsistent with doctrine of complex ideas.

41. The confusion covered by use of ‘particulars’.

42. Locke’s account of abstract general ideas.

43. ‘Things not general.’

44. Generality an invention of the mind.

45. The result is, that the feeling of each moment is alone real.

46. How Locke avoids this result.

47. The ‘particular’ was to him the individual qualified by general relations.

48. This is the real thing from which abstraction is supposed to start.

49. Yet, according to the doctrine of relation, a creation of thought.

50. Summary of the above contradictions.

51. They cannot be overcome without violence to Locke’s fundamental principles.

52. As real existence, the simple idea carries with it ‘invented’ relation of cause.

53. Correlativity of cause and substance.

54. How do we know that ideas correspond to reality of things? Locke’s answer.

55. It assumes that simple ideas are consciously referred to things that cause them.

56. Lively ideas real, because they must be effects of things.

57. Present sensation gives knowledge of existence.

58. Reasons why its testimony must be trusted.

59. How does this account fit Locke’s definition of knowledge?

60. Locke’s account of the testimony of sense renders his question as to its veracity superfluous.

61. Confirmations of the testimony turn upon the distinction between ‘impression’ and ‘idea’.

62. They depend on language which pre-supposes the ascription of sensation to an outward cause.

63. This ascription means the clothing of sensation with invented relations.

64. What is meant by restricting the testimony of sense to _present_ existence?

65. Such restriction, if maintained, would render the testimony unmeaning.

66. But it is not maintained: the testimony is to operation of permanent identical things.

67. Locke’s treatment of relations of cause and identity.

68. That from which he derives idea of cause pre-supposes it.

69. Rationale of this ‘petitio principii’.

70. Relation of cause has to be put into sensitive experience in order to be got from it.

71. Origin of the idea of identity according to Locke.

72. Relation of identity not to be distinguished from idea of it.

73. This ‘invented’ relation forms the ‘very being of things’.

74. Locke fails to distinguish between identity and mere unity.

75. Feelings are the real, and do not admit of identity. How then can identity be real?

76. Yet it is from reality that the idea of it is derived.

77. Transition to Locke’s doctrine of essence.

78. This repeats the inconsistency found in his doctrine of substance.

79. Plan to be followed.

80. What Locke understood by essence.

81. Only to nominal essences that general propositions relate, _i.e._ only to abstract ideas having no real existence.

82. An abstract idea may be a simple one.

83. How then is science of nature possible?

84. No ‘uniformities of phenomena’ can be known.

85. Locke not aware of the full effect of his own doctrine ...

86. ... which is to make the real an abstract residuum of consciousness.

87. Ground of distinction between actual sensation and ideas in the mind is itself a thing of the mind.

88. Two meanings of real essence.

89. According to one, it is a collection of ideas as qualities of a thing:

90. ... about real essence in this sense there may be general knowledge.

91. But such real essence a creature of thought.

92. Hence another view of real essence as unknown qualities of unknown body.

93. How Locke mixes up these two meanings in ambiguity about body.

94. Body as ‘parcel of matter’ without essence.

95. In this sense body is the mere individuum.

96. Body as qualified by circumstances of time and place.

97. Such body Locke held to be subject of ‘primary qualities’: but are these compatible with particularity in time?

98. How Locke avoids this question.

99. Body and its qualities supposed to be outside consciousness.

100. How can primary qualities be outside consciousness, and yet knowable?

101. Locke answers that they copy themselves in ideas--Berkeley’s rejoinder. Locke gets out of the difficulty by his doctrine of solidity.

102. In which he equivocates between body as unknown opposite of mind and body as a ‘nominal essence’.

103. Rationale of these contradictions.

104. What knowledge can feeling, even as referred to a ‘solid’ body, convey?

105. Only the knowledge that something is, not _what_ it is.

106. How it is that the real essence of things, according to Locke, perishes with them, yet is immutable.

107. Only about qualities of matter, as distinct from matter itself, that Locke feels any difficulty.

108. These, as knowable, must be our ideas, and therefore not a ‘real essence’.

109. Are the ‘primary qualities’ then, a ‘nominal essence’?

110. According to Locke’s account they are relations, and thus inventions of the mind.

111. Body is the complex in which they are found. Do we derive the idea of body from primary qualities, or the primary qualities from idea of body?

112. Mathematical ideas, though ideas of ‘primary qualities of body,’ have ‘barely an ideal existence’.

113. Summary view of Locke’s difficulties in regard to the real.

114. Why they do not trouble him more.

115. They re-appear in his doctrine of propositions.

116. The knowledge expressed by a proposition, though certain, may not be real ...

117. ... when the knowledge concerns substances. In this case general truth must be merely verbal. Mathematical truths, since they concern not substances, may be both general and real.

118. Significance of this doctrine.

119. Fatal to the notion that mathematical truths, though general, are got from experience:

120. ... and to received views of natural science: but Locke not so clear about this.

121. Ambiguity as to real essence causes like ambiguity as to science of nature. Particular experiment cannot afford general knowledge.

122. What knowledge it can afford, according to Locke.

123. Not the knowledge which is now supposed to be got by induction. Yet more than Locke was entitled to suppose it could give.

124. With Locke mathematical truths, though ideal, true also of nature.

125. Two lines of thought in Locke, between which a follower would have to choose.

126. Transition to doctrine of God and the soul.

127. Thinking substance--source of the same ideas as outer substance.

128. Of which substance is perception the effect?

129. That which is the source of substantiation cannot be itself a substance.

130. To get rid of the inner source of ideas in favour of the outer would be false to Locke.

131. The mind, which Locke opposes to matter, perpetually shifting.

132. Two ways out of such difficulties. ‘Matter’ and ‘mind’ have the same source in self-consciousness.

133. Difficulties in the way of ascribing reality to substance as matter, re-appear in regard to substance as mind.

134. We think not always, yet thought constitutes the self.

135. Locke neither disguises these contradictions, nor attempts to overcome them.

136. Is the idea of God possible to a consciousness given in time?

137. Locke’s account of this idea.

138. ‘Infinity,’ according to Locke’s account of it, only applicable to God, if God has parts.

139. Can it be applied to him ‘figuratively’ in virtue of the indefinite number of His acts?

140. An act, finite in its nature, remains so, however often repeated.

141. God only infinite in a sense in which time is _not_ infinite, and which Locke could not recognize

142. --the same sense in which the self is infinite.

143. How do I know my own real existence?--Locke’s answer.

144. It cannot be known consistently with Locke’s doctrine of real existence.

145. But he ignores this in treating of the self.

146. Sense in which the self is truly real.

147. Locke’s proof of the real existence of God. There must have been something from eternity to cause what now is.

148. How ‘eternity’ must be understood if this argument is to be valid:

149. ... and how ‘cause’.

150. The world which is to prove an eternal God must be itself eternal.

151. But will the God, whose existence is so proven, be a thinking being?

152. Yes, according to the true notion of the relation between thought and matter.

153. Locke’s antinomies--Hume takes one side of them as true.

154. Hume’s scepticism fatal to his own premises. This derived from Berkeley.

155. Berkeley’s religious interest in making Locke consistent.

156. What is meant by relation of mind and matter?

157. Confusions involved in Locke’s materialism.

158. Two ways of dealing with it. Berkeley chooses the most obvious.

159. His account of the relation between visible and tangible extension. We do not see bodies without the mind ...

160. ... nor yet feel them. The ‘esse’ of body is the ‘percipi’.

170. What then becomes of distinction between reality and fancy?

171. The real = ideas that God causes.

172. Is it then a succession of feelings?

173. Berkeley goes wrong from confusion between thought and feeling.

174. Which, if idea = feeling, does away with space and body.

175. He does not even retain them as ‘abstract ideas’.

176. On the same principle all permanent relations should disappear.

177. By making colour = relations of coloured points, Berkeley represents relation as seen.

178. Still he admits that space is constituted by a succession of feelings.

179. If so, it is not space at all; but Berkeley thinks it is only not ‘pure’ space. _Space_ and _pure_ space stand or fall together.

180. Berkeley disposes of space for fear of limiting God.

181. How he deals with possibility of general knowledge.

182. His theory of universals ...

183. ... of value, as implying that universality of ideas lies in relation.

184. But he fancies that each idea has a positive nature apart from relation.

185. Traces of progress in his idealism.

186. His way of dealing with physical truths.

187. If they imply permanent relations, his theory properly excludes them. He supposes a divine decree that one feeling shall follow another.

188. Locke had explained reality by relation of ideas to outward body. Liveliness in the idea evidence of this relation.

189. Berkeley retains this notion, only substituting ‘God’ for ‘body’.

190. Not regarding the world as a system of intelligible relations, he could not regard God as the subject of it.

191. His view of the soul as ‘naturally immortal’.

192. Endless succession of feelings is not immortality in true sense. Berkeley’s doctrine of matter fatal to a true spiritualism:

193. ... as well as to a true Theism. His inference to God from necessity of a power to produce ideas;

194. ... a necessity which Hume does not see. A different turn should have been given to his idealism, if it was to serve his purpose.

195. Hume’s mission. His account of impressions and ideas. Ideas are fainter impressions.

196. ‘Ideas’ that cannot be so represented must be explained as mere words.

197. Hume, taken strictly, leaves no distinction between impressions of reflection and of sensation.

198. Locke’s theory of sensation disappears. Physiology won’t answer the question that Locke asked.

199. Those who think it will don’t understand the question.

200. Hume’s psychology will not answer it either.

201. It only seems to do so by assuming the ‘fiction’ it has to account for; by assuming that impression represents a real world.

202. So the ‘Positivist’ juggles with ‘phenomena’.

203. Essential difference, however, between Hume and the ‘Positivist’.

204. He adopts Berkeley’s doctrine of ideas, but without Berkeley’s saving suppositions,

205. ... in regard to ‘spirit’,

206. ... in regard to relations. His account of these.

207. It corresponds to Locke’s account of the sorts of agreement between ideas.

208. Could Hume consistently admit idea of relation at all?

210. Only in regard to identity and causation that he sees any difficulty. These he treats as fictions resulting from ‘natural relations’ of ideas: _i.e._ from resemblance and contiguity.

212. Is resemblance then an impression?

213. Distinction between resembling feelings and idea of resemblance.

214. Substances = collections of ideas.

215. How can ideas ‘in flux’ be collected?

216. Are there general ideas? Berkeley said, ‘yes and no’.

217. Hume ‘no’ simply. How he accounts for the appearance of there being such.

219. His account implies that ‘ideas’ are conceptions, not feelings.

220. He virtually yields the point in regard to the _predicate_ of propositions.

221. As to the subject, he equivocates between singleness of feeling and individuality of conception.

222. Result is a theory which admits predication, but only as singular.

223. All propositions restricted in same way as Locke’s propositions about real existence.

224. The question, how the _singular_ proposition is possible, the vital one.

225. Not relations of resemblance only, but those of quantity also, treated by Hume as feelings.

226. He draws the line between certainty and probability at the same point as Locke; but is more definite as to probability,

227. ... and does not admit opposition of mathematical to physical certainty--here following Berkeley.

228. His criticisms of the doctrine of primary qualities.

229. It will not do to oppose bodies to our feeling when only feeling can give idea of body.

230. Locke’s shuffle of ‘body,’ ‘solidity,’ and ‘touch,’ fairly exposed.

231. True rationale of Locke’s doctrine.

232. With Hume ‘body’ logically disappears. What then?

233. Can space survive body? Hume derives idea of it from sight and feeling. Significance with him of such derivation.

234. It means, in effect, that colour and space are the same, and that feeling may be extended.

235. The parts of space are parts of a perception.

236. Yet the parts of space are co-existent not successive.

237. Hume cannot make space a ‘perception’ without being false to his own account of perception;

238. ... as appears if we put ‘feeling’ for ‘perception’ in the passages in question.

239. To make sense of them, we must take perception to mean perceived thing,

240. ... which it can only mean as the result of certain ‘fictions’.

241. If felt thing is no more than feeling, how can it have qualities?

242. The thing will have ceased before the quality begins to be.

243. Hume equivocates by putting ‘coloured points’ for colour.

245. Can a ‘disposition of coloured points’ be an impression?

246. The points must be themselves impressions, and therefore not co-existent.

247. A ‘compound impression’ excluded by Hume’s doctrine of time.

248. The fact that colours mix, not to the purpose.

249. How Hume avoids appearance of identifying space with colour, and accounts for the abstraction of space.

250. In so doing, he implies that space is a relation, and a relation which is not a possible impression.

251. No logical alternative between identifying space with colour, and admitting an idea not copied from an impression.

252. In his account of the idea as _abstract_, Hume really introduces distinction between feeling and conception;

253. ... yet avoids appearance of doing so, by treating ‘consideration’ of the relations of a felt thing as if it were itself the feeling.

254. Summary of contradictions in his account of extension.

255. He gives no account of quantity as such.

256. His account of the relation between Time and Number.

257. What does it come to?

258. Unites alone really exist: number a ‘fictitious denomination’. Yet ‘unites’ and ‘number’ are correlative; and the supposed fiction unaccountable.

259. Idea of time even more unaccountable on Hume’s principles.

260. His ostensible explanation of it.

261. It turns upon equivocation between feeling and conception of relations between felt things.

262. He fails to assign any impression or compound of impressions from which idea of time is copied.

263. How can he adjust the exact sciences to his theory of space and time?

264. In order to seem to do so, he must get rid of ‘Infinite Divisibility’.

265. Quantity made up of impressions, and there must be a least possible impression.

266. Yet it is admitted that there is an idea of number not made up of impressions. A finite division into impressions no more possible than an infinite one.

267. In Hume’s instances it is not really a feeling, but a conceived thing, that appears as finitely divisible.

268. Upon true notion of quantity infinite divisibility follows of course.

269. What are the ultimate elements of extension? If not extended, what are they?

270. Colours or coloured points? What is the difference?

271. True way of dealing with the question.

272. ‘If the point were divisible, it would be no termination of a line.’ Answer to this.

273. What becomes of the exactness of mathematics according to Hume?

274. The universal propositions of geometry either untrue or unmeaning.

275. Distinction between Hume’s doctrine and that of the hypothetical nature of mathematics.

276. The admission that no relations of quantity are data of sense removes difficulty as to general propositions about them.

277. Hume does virtually admit this in regard to numbers.

278. With Hume idea of vacuum impossible, but logically not more so than that of space.

279. How it is that we talk as if we had idea of vacuum according to Hume.

280. His explanation implies that we have an idea virtually the same.

281. By a like device that he is able to explain the appearance of our having such ideas as Causation and Identity.

283. Knowledge of relation in way of Identity and Causation excluded by Locke’s definition of knowledge.

284. Inference a transition from an object perceived or remembered to one that is not so.

285. Relation of cause and effect the same as this transition.

286. Yet seems other than this. How this appearance is to be explained.

287. Inference, resting on supposition of necessary connection, to be explained before that connection.

288. Account of the inference given by Locke and Clarke rejected.

289. Three points to be explained in the inference according to Hume.

290. _a_. The original impression from which the transition is made _b_. The transition to inferred idea

291. _c_. The qualities of this idea.

292. It results that necessary connection is an impression of reflection, _i.e._, a propensity to the transition described.

293. The transition not to anything beyond sense.

294. Nor determined by any objective relation.

295. Definitions of cause: _a_. As a ‘philosophical’ relation.

296. Is Hume entitled to retain ‘philosophical’ relations as distinct from ‘natural’?

297. Examination of Hume’s language about them.

298. Philosophical relation consists in a comparison, but no comparison between cause and effect.

299. The comparison is between present and past experience of succession of objects.

300. Observation of succession already goes beyond sense.

301. As also does the ‘observation concerning identity,’ which the comparison involves.

302. Identity of objects an unavoidable crux for Hume. His account of it.

303. Properly with him it is a fiction, in the sense that we have no such idea. Yet he implies that we have such idea, in saying that we mistake something else for it.

304. Succession of like feelings mistaken for an identical object: but the feelings, as described, are already such objects.

305. Fiction of identity thus implied as source of the propensity which is to account for it.

306. With Hume continued existence of perceptions a fiction different from their identity. Can perceptions exist when not perceived?

307. Existence of objects, distinct from perceptions, a further fiction still.

308. Are these several ‘fictions’ really different from each other?

309. Are they not all involved in the simplest perception?

310. Yet they are not possible ideas, because copied from no impressions.

311. Comparison of present experience with past, which yields relation of cause and effect, pre-supposes judgment of identity;

312. ... without which there could be no recognition of an object as one observed before.

313. Hume makes conceptions of identity and cause each come before the other. Their true correlativity.

314. Hume quite right in saying that we do not go _more_ beyond sense in reasoning than in perception.

315. How his doctrine might have been developed. Its actual outcome.

316. No philosophical relation admissible with Hume that is not derived from a natural one.

317. Examination of his account of cause and effect as ‘natural relation’.

318. Double meaning of natural relation. How Hume turns it to account.

319. If an effect is merely a constantly observed sequence, how can an event be an effect the first time it is observed? Hume evades this question;

320. Still, he is a long way off the Inductive Logic, which supposes an objective sequence.

321. Can the principle of uniformity of nature be derived from sequence of feelings?

322. With Hume the only uniformity is in expectation, as determined by habit; but strength of such expectation must vary indefinitely.

323. It could not serve the same purpose as the conception of uniformity of nature.

324. Hume changes the meaning of this expectation by his account of the ‘remembrance’ which determines it. Bearing of his doctrine of necessary connexion upon his argument against miracles. This remembrance, as he describes it, supposes conception of a system of nature.

326. This explains his occasional inconsistent ascription of an objective character to causation.

327. Reality of remembered ‘system’ transferred to ‘system of judgment’.

328. Reality of the former ‘system’ other than vivacity of impressions.

329. It is constituted by relations, which are not impressions at all; and in this lies explanation of the inference from it to ‘system of judgment’.

330. Not seeing this, Hume has to explain inference to latter system as something forced upon us by habit.

331. But if so, ‘system of judgment’ must consist of feelings constantly experienced;

332. ... which only differ from remembered feelings inasmuch as their liveliness has faded. But how can it have faded, if they have been constantly repeated?

333. Inference then can give no new knowledge.

334. Nor does this merely mean that it cannot constitute new phenomena, while it can prove relations, previously unknown, between phenomena. Such a distinction inadmissible with Hume.

335. His distinction of probability of causes from that of chances might seem to imply conception of nature, as determining inference.

336. But this distinction he only professes to adopt in order to explain it away.

337. Laws of nature are unqualified habits of expectation.

338. Experience, according to his account of it, cannot be a parent of knowledge.

339. His attitude towards doctrine of thinking substance.

340. As to Immateriality of the Soul, he plays off Locke and Berkeley against each other, and proves Berkeley a Spinozist.

341. Causality of spirit treated in the same way.

342. Disposes of ‘personal’ identity by showing contradictions in Locke’s account of it.

343. Yet can only account for it as a ‘fiction’ by supposing ideas which with him are impossible.

344. In origin this ‘fiction’ the same as that of ‘Body’.

345. Possibility of such fictitious ideas implies refutation of Hume’s doctrine.

SUMMARY OF THE CONTENTS

of the

GENERAL INTRODUCTION TO VOL. II.

1. Hume’s doctrine of morals parallel to his doctrine of nature.

2. Its relation to Locke: Locke’s account of freedom, will, and desire.

3. Two questions: Does man always act from the strongest motive? and, What constitutes his motive? The latter the important question. Distinction between desires that are, and those that are not, determined by the conception of self.

4. Effect of this conception on the objects of human desire.

5. Objects so constituted Locke should consistently exclude: But he finds room for them by treating every desire for an object, of which the attainment gives pleasure, as a desire for pleasure.

6. Confusion covered by calling ‘happiness’ the general object of desire.

7. ‘Greatest sum of pleasure’ and ‘Pleasure in general’ unmeaning expressions.

8. In what sense of happiness is it true that it ‘is really just as it appears?’ In what sense that it is every one’s object?

9. No real object of human desire can ever be just as it appears.

10. Can Locke consistently allow the distinction between true happiness and false? Or responsibility?

11. Objections to the Utilitarian answer to these questions.

12. According to Locke present pleasures may be compared with future, and desire suspended till comparison has been made.

13. What is meant by ‘present’ and ‘future’ pleasure? By the supposed comparison Locke ought only to have meant the competition of pleasures equally present in imagination:

14.... and this could give no ground for responsibility. In order to do so, it must be understood as implying determination by conception of self.

15. Locke finds moral freedom in necessity of pursuing happiness.

16. If an action is moved by desire for an object, Locke asks no questions about origin of the object. But what is to be said of actions, which we only do because we ought?

17. Their object is pleasure, but pleasure given not by nature but by law.

18. Conformity to law not the moral good, but a means to it.

19. Hume has to derive from ‘impressions’ the objects which Locke took for granted.

20. Questions which he found at issue, _a_. Is virtue interested? _b_. What is conscience?

21. Hobbes’ answer to first question.

22. Counter-doctrine of Shaftesbury. Vice is selfishness; but no clear account of selfishness.

23. Confusion in his notions of self-good and public good; Is all living for pleasure, or only too much of it, selfish?

24. What have Butler and Hutcheson to say about it? Chiefly that affections terminate upon their objects; but this does not exclude the view that all desire is for pleasure.

25. Of moral goodness Butler’s account circular. Hutcheson’s inconsistent with his doctrine that reason gives no end.

26. Source of the moral judgment: received notion of reason incompatible with true view. Shaftesbury’s doctrine of rational affection; spoilt by doctrine of ‘moral sense’.

27. Consequences of the latter.

28. Is an act done for ‘virtue’s sake’ done for pleasure of moral sense?

29. Hume excludes every object of desire but pleasure.

30. His account of ‘direct passions’: all desire is for pleasure.

31. Yet he admits ‘passions’ which produce pleasure, but proceed not from it.

32. Desire for objects, as he understands it, excluded by his theory of impressions and ideas.

33. Pride determined by reference to self.

34. This means that it takes its character from that which is not a possible ‘impression’.

35. Hume’s attempt to represent idea of self as derived from impression.

36. Another device is to suggest a physiological account of pride.

37. Fallacy of this: it does not tell us what pride is to the subject of it.

38. Account of love involves the same difficulties; and a further one as to nature of sympathy.

39. Hume’s account of sympathy.

40. It implies a self-consciousness not reducible to impressions.

41. Ambiguity in his account of benevolence: it is a desire and therefore has pleasure for its object. What pleasure?

42. Pleasure of sympathy with the pleasure of another.

43. All ‘passions’ equally interested or disinterested. Confusion arises from use of ‘passion’ alike for desire and emotion. Of this Hume avails himself in his account of active pity.

44. Explanation of apparent conflict between reason and passion.

45. A ‘reasonable’ desire means one that excites little emotion. Enumeration of possible motives.

46. If pleasure sole motive, what is the distinction of self-love? Its opposition to disinterested desires, as commonly understood, disappears. It is desire for pleasure in general.

47. How Hume gives meaning to this otherwise unmeaning definition. ‘Interest,’ like other motives described, implies determination by reason.

48. Thus Hume, having degraded morality for the sake of consistency, after all is not consistent.

49. If all good is pleasure, what is moral good? Ambiguity in Locke’s view.

50. Development of it by Clarke, which breaks down for want of true view of reason.

51. With Hume, moral good is pleasure excited in a particular way, viz.; in the spectator of the ‘good’ act and by the view of its tendency to produce pleasure.

53. Moral sense is thus sympathy with pleasure qualified by consideration of general tendencies.

54. In order to account for the facts it has to become sympathy with unfelt feelings.

55. Can the distinction between the ‘moral’ and ‘natural’ be maintained by Hume? What is ‘artificial virtue’?

56. No ground for such distinction in relation between motive and act.

57. Motive to artificial virtues.

58. How artificial virtues become moral.

59. Interest and sympathy account for all obligations civil and moral.

60. What is meant by an action which ought to be done.

61. Sense of morality no motive: when it seems so the motive is really pride.

62. Distinction between virtuous and vicious motive does not exist for person moved.

63. ‘Consciousness of sin’ disappears.

64. Only respectability remains: and even this not consistently accounted for.

GENERAL INTRODUCTION TO VOL. I.

How the history of philosophy should be studied.

1. There is a view of the history of mankind, by this time familiarised to Englishmen, which detaches from the chaos of events a connected series of ruling actions and beliefs--the achievement of great men and great epochs, and assigns to these in a special sense the term ‘historical.’ According to this theory--which indeed, if there is to be a theory of History at all, alone gives the needful simplification--the mass of nations must be regarded as left in swamps and shallows outside the main stream of human development. They have either never come within the reach of the hopes and institutions which make history a progress instead of a cycle, or they have stiffened these into a dead body of ceremony and caste, or at some great epoch they have failed to discern the sign of the times and rejected the counsel of God against themselves. Thus permanently or for generations, with no principle of motion but unsatisfied want, without the assimilative ideas which from the strife of passions elicit moral results, they have trodden the old round of war, trade, and faction, adding nothing to the spiritual heritage of man. It would seem that the historian need not trouble himself with them, except so far as relation to them determines the activity of the progressive nations.

Hume the last great English philosopher.

2. A corresponding theory may with some confidence be applied to simplify the history of philosophical opinion. The common plan of seeking this history in compendia of the systems of philosophical writers, taken in the gross or with no discrimination except in regard to time and popularity, is mainly to blame for the common notion that metaphysical enquiry is an endless process of threshing old straw. Such enquiry is really progressive, and has a real history, but it is a history represented by a few great names. At rare epochs there appear men, or sets of men, with the true speculative impulse to begin at the beginning and go to the end, and with the faculty of discerning the true point of departure which previous speculation has fixed for them. The intervals are occupied by commentators and exponents of the last true philosopher, if it has been his mission to construct; if it has been sceptical, by writers who cannot understand the fatal question that he has asked, and thus still dig in the old vein which he had exhausted, and of which his final dilemma had shown the bottom. Such an interval was that which in the growth of continental philosophy followed on the epoch of Leibnitz; an interval of academic exposition or formulation, in which the system, that had been to the master an incomplete enquiry, became in the hands of his disciples a one-sided dogmatism. In the line of speculation more distinctively English, a like _régime_ of ‘strenua inertia’ has prevailed since the time of Hume. In the manner of its unprofitableness, indeed, it has differed from the Wolfian period in Germany, just as the disinterested scepticism of Hume differed from the system-making for purposes of edification to which Leibnitz applied himself. It has been unprofitable, because its representatives have persisted in philosophising upon principles which Hume had pursued to their legitimate issue and had shown, not as their enemy but as their advocate, to render all philosophy futile. Adopting the premises and method of Locke, he cleared them of all illogical adaptations to popular belief, and experimented with them on the body of professed knowledge, as one only could do who had neither any twist of vice nor any bias for doing good, but was a philosopher because he could not help it.

Kant his true successor.

3. As the result of the experiment, the method, which began with professing to explain knowledge, showed knowledge to be impossible. Hume himself was perfectly cognisant of this result, but his successors in England and Scotland would seem so far to have been unable to look it in the face. They have either thrust their heads again into the bush of uncriticised belief, or they have gone on elaborating Hume’s doctrine of association, in apparent forgetfulness of Hume’s own proof of its insufficiency to account for an intelligent, as opposed to a merely instinctive or habitual, experience. An enquiry, however, so thorough and passionless as the ‘Treatise of Human Nature,’ could not be in vain; and if no English athlete had strength to carry on the torch, it was transferred to a more vigorous line in Germany. It awoke Kant, as he used to say, from his ‘dogmatic slumber,’ to put him into that state of mind by some called wonder, by others doubt, in which all true philosophy begins. This state, with less ambiguity of terms, may be described as that of freedom from presuppositions. It was because Kant, reading Hume with the eyes of Leibnitz and Leibnitz with the eyes of Hume, was able to a great extent to rid himself of the presuppositions of both, that he started that new method of philosophy which, as elaborated by Hegel, claims to set man free from the artificial impotence of his own false logic, and thus qualify him for a complete interpretation of his own achievement in knowledge and morality. Thus the ‘Treatise of Human Nature’ and the ‘Critic of Pure Reason,’ taken together, form the real bridge between the old world of philosophy and the new. They are the essential ‘Propaedeutik,’ without which no one is a qualified student of modern philosophy. The close correspondence between the two works becomes more apparent the more each is studied. It is such as to give a strong presumption that Kant had studied Hume’s doctrine in its original and complete expression, and not merely as it was made easy in the ‘Essays.’ The one with full and reasoned articulation asks the question, which the other with equal fulness seeks to answer. It is probably because the question in its complete statement has been so little studied among us, that the intellectual necessity of the Kantian answer has been so little appreciated. To trace the origin and bring out the points of the question, in order to the exhibition of that necessity, will be the object of the following treatise. To do this thoroughly, indeed, would carry us back through Hobbes to Bacon. But as present limits do not allow of so long a journey, we must be content with showing Hume’s direct filiation to Locke, who, indeed, sufficiently gathered up the results of the ‘empirical’ philosophy of his predecessors.

Distinction between literary history and the history of philosophical systems.

4. Such a task is very different from an ordinary undertaking in literary history, and requires different treatment. To the historian of literature a philosopher is interesting, if at all, on account of the personal qualities which make a great writer, and have a permanent effect on letters and general culture. Locke and Hume undoubtedly had these qualities and produced such an effect--an effect in Locke’s case more intense upon the immediately following generations, but in Hume’s more remarkable as having reappeared after near a century of apparent forgetfulness. Each, indeed, like every true philosopher, was the mouth-piece of a certain system of thought determined for him by the stage at which he found the dialectic movement that constitutes the progress of philosophy, but each gave to this system the stamp of that personal power which persuades men. Their mode of expression had none of that academic or ‘ex cathedra’ character, which has made German philosophy almost a foreign literature in the country of its birth. They wrote as citizens and men of the world, anxious (in no bad sense) for effect; and even when their conclusions were remote from popular belief, still presented them in the flesh and blood of current terms used in the current senses. It is not, however, in their human individuality and its effects upon literature, but as the vehicles of a system of thought, that it is proposed here to treat them; and this purpose will best be fulfilled if we follow the line of their speculation without divergence into literary criticism or history, without remarks either on the peculiarities of their genius or on any of the secondary influences which affected their writings or arose out of them. For a method of this sort, it would seem, there is some need among us. We have been learning of late to know much more about philosophers, but it is possible for knowledge about philosophers to flourish inversely as the knowledge of philosophy. The revived interest which is noticeable in the history of philosophy may be an indication either of philosophical vigour or of philosophical decay. In those whom intellectual indolence, or a misunderstood and disavowed metaphysic, has landed in scepticism there often survives a curiosity about the literary history of philosophy, and the writings which this curiosity produces tend further to spread the notion that philosophy is a matter about which there has been much guessing by great intellects, but no definite truth is to be attained. It is otherwise with those who see in philosophy a progressive effort towards a fully-articulated conception of the world as rational. To them its past history is of interest as representing steps in this progress which have already been taken for us, and which, if we will make them our own, carry us so far on our way towards the freedom of perfect understanding; while to ignore them is not to return to the simplicity of a pre-philosopic age, but to condemn ourselves to grope in the maze of ‘cultivated opinion,’ itself the confused result of those past systems of thought which we will not trouble ourselves to think out.

Object of the present enquiry.

5. The value of that system of thought, which found its clearest expression in Hume, lies in its being an effort to think to their logical issue certain notions which since then have become commonplaces with educated Englishmen, but which, for that reason, we must detach ourselves from popular controversy to appreciate rightly. We are familiar enough with these in the form to which adaptation to the needs of plausibility has gradually reduced them, but because we do not think them out with the consistency of their original exponents, we miss their true value. They do not carry us, as they will do if we restore their original significance, by an intellectual necessity to those truer notions which, in fact, have been their sequel in the development of philosophy, but have not yet found their way into the ‘culture’ of our time. An attempt to restore their value, however, if this be the right view of its nature, cannot but seem at first sight invidious. It will seem as if, while we talk of their value, we were impertinently trying to ‘pull them to pieces.’ But those who understand the difference between philosophical failures, which are so because they are anachronisms, and those which in their failure have brought out a new truth and compelled a step forward in the progress of thought, will understand that a process, which looks like pulling a great philosopher to pieces, may be the true way of showing reverence for his greatness. It is a Pharisaical way of building the sepulchres of philosophers to profess their doctrine or extol their genius without making their spirit our own. The genius of Locke and Hume was their readiness to follow the lead of Ideas: their spirit was the spirit of Rationalism--the spirit which, however baffled and forced into inconsistent admissions, is still governed by the faith that all things may ultimately be understood. We best do reverence to their genius, we most truly appropriate their spirit, in so exploring the difficulties to which their enquiry led, as to find in them the suggestion of a theory which may help us to walk firmly where they stumbled and fell.

Locke’s problem and method.

6. About Locke, as about every other philosopher, the essential questions are, What was his problem, and what was his method? Locke, as a man of business, gives us the answers at starting. His problem was the origin of ‘ideas’ in the individual man, and their connection as constituting knowledge: his method that of simply ‘looking into his own understanding and seeing how it wrought.’ These answers commend themselves to common sense, and still form the text of popular psychology. If its confidence in their value, as explained by Locke, is at all beginning to be shaken, this is not because, according to a strict logical development, they issued in Hume’s unanswered scepticism, which was too subtle for popular effect, but because they are now open to a rougher battery from the physiologists. Our concern at present is merely to show their precise meaning, and the difficulties which according to this meaning they involve.

His notion of the ‘thinking thing’.

7. There are two propositions on which Locke is constantly insisting: one, that the object of his investigation is _his own_ mind; the other, that his attitude towards this object is that of mere observation. He speaks of his own mind, it is to be noticed, just as he might of his own body. It meant something born with, and dependent on, the particular animal organism that first saw the light at Wrington on a particular day in 1632. It was as exclusive of other minds as his body of other bodies, and he could only infer a resemblance between them and it. With all his animosity to the coarse spiritualism of the doctrine of innate ideas, he was the victim of the same notion which gave that doctrine its falsehood and grotesqueness. He, just as much as the untutored Cartesian, regarded the ‘minds’ of different men as so many different things; and his refutation of the objectionable hypothesis proceeds wholly from this view. Whether the mind is put complete into the body, or is born and grows with it; whether it has certain characters stamped upon it to begin with, or receives all its ideas through the senses; whether it is simple and therefore indiscerptible, or compound and therefore perishable--all these questions to Locke, as to his opponents, concern a multitude of ‘thinking things’ in him and them, merely individual, but happening to be pretty much alike.

This he will passively observe.

8. This ‘thinking thing,’ then, as he finds it in himself, the philosopher, according to Locke, has merely and passively to observe, in order to understand the nature of knowledge. ‘I could look into nobody’s understanding but my own to see how it wrought,’ he says, but ‘I think the intellectual faculties are made and operate alike in most men. But if it should happen not to be so, I can only make it my humble request, in my own name and in the name of those that are of my size, who find their minds work, reason, and know in the same low way that mine does, that the men of a more happy genius will show us the way of their nobler flights.’ (Second Letter to Bishop of Worcester.) As will appear in the sequel, it is from this imaginary method of ascertaining the origin and nature of knowledge by passive observation of what goes on in one’s own mind that the embarrassments of Locke’s system flow. It was the function of Hume to exhibit the radical flaw in his master’s method by following it with more than his master’s rigour.

Is such observation possible?

9. As an observation of the ‘thinking thing,’ the ‘philosophy of mind’ seems to assume the character of a natural science, and thus at once acquires definiteness, and if not certainty, at least plausibility. To deny the possibility of such observation, in any proper sense of the word, is for most men to tamper with the unquestioned heritage of all educated intelligence. Hence the unpalatability of a consistent Positivism; hence, too, on the other side, the general conviction that the Hegelian reduction of Psychology to Metaphysics is either an intellectual juggle, or a wilful return of the philosophy, which psychologists had washed, to the mire of scholasticism. It is the more important to ascertain what the observation in question precisely means. What observes, and what is observed? According to Locke (and empirical psychology has never substantially varied the answer) the matter to be observed consists for each man firstly in certain impressions of his own individual mind, by which this mind from being a mere blank has become furnished--by which, in other words, his mind has become actually a mind; and, secondly, in certain operations, which the mind, thus constituted, performs upon the materials which constitute it. The observer, all the while, is the constituted mind itself. The question at once arises, how the developed man can observe in himself (and it is only to himself, according to Locke, that he can look) that primitive state in which his mind was a ‘tabula rasa.’ In the first place, that only can be observed which is present; and the state in question to the supposed observer is past. If it be replied that it is recalled by memory, there is the farther objection that memory only recalls what has been previously known, and how is a man’s own primitive consciousness, as yet void of the content which is supposed to come to it through impressions, originally known to him? How can the ‘tabula rasa’ be cognisant of itself?

Why it seems so.

10. The cover under which this difficulty was hidden from Locke, as from popular psychologists ever since, consists in the implicit assumption of certain ideas, either as possessed by or acting upon the mind in the supposed primitive state, which are yet held to be arrived at by a gradual process of comparison, abstraction, and generalisation. This assumption, which renders the whole system resting upon the interrogation of consciousness a paralogism, is yet the condition of its apparent possibility. It is only as already charged with a content which is yet (and for the individual, truly) maintained to be the gradual acquisition of experience, that the primitive consciousness has any answer to give to its interrogator.

Locke’s account of origin of ideas.

11. Let us consider the passage where Locke sums up his theory of the ‘original of our ideas.’ (Book II. chap. i. sec. 23, 24.) ‘Since there appear not to be any ideas in the mind, before the senses have conveyed any in, I conceive that ideas in the understanding are coeval with sensation; which is such an impression, made in some part of the body, as produces some perception in the understanding. It is about these impressions made on our senses by outward objects, that the mind seems first to employ itself in such operations as we call perception, remembering, consideration, reasoning, &c. In time the mind comes to reflect on its own operations about the ideas got by sensation, and thereby stores itself with a new set of ideas, which I call ideas of reflection. These impressions that are made on our senses by outward objects, that are extrinsical to the mind; and its own operations, proceeding from powers intrinsical and proper to itself, which, when reflected on by itself, become also objects of its contemplation, are, as I have said, the original of all knowledge.’

Its ambiguities _(a)_ In regard to sensation.

12. Can we from this passage elicit a distinct account of the beginning of intelligence? In the first place it consists in an ‘idea,’ and an idea is elsewhere (Introduction, sec. 8) stated to be ‘whatsoever is the object of the understanding, when a man thinks.’ But the primary idea is an ‘idea of sensation.’ Does this mean that the primary idea _is_ a sensation, or is a distinction to be made between the sensation and the idea thereof? The passage before us would seem to imply such a distinction. Looking merely to it, we should probably say that by _sensation_ Locke meant ‘an impression or motion in some part of the body;’ by the _idea of sensation_ ‘a perception in the understanding,’ which this impression produces. The account of perception itself gives a different result. (Book II. chap. ix. sec. 3.) ‘Whatever impressions are made on the outward parts, if they are not taken notice of within, there is no perception. Fire may burn our bodies with no other effect than it does a billet, unless the motion be continued to the brain, and there the _sense_ of heat or _idea_ of pain be produced in the mind, wherein consists actual _perception_.’ Here sensation is identified at once with the idea and with perception, as opposed to the impression on the bodily organs. [1] To confound the confusion still farther, in a passage immediately preceding the above, ‘Perception,’ here identified with the idea of sensation, has been distinguished from it, as ‘exercised about it.’ ‘Perception, as it is the first faculty of the mind exercised about our ideas, so it is the first and simplest idea we have from reflection.’ Taking Locke at his word, then, we find the beginning of intelligence to consist in having an idea of sensation. This idea, however, we perceive, and to perceive is to have an idea; _i.e._ to have an idea of an idea of sensation. But of perception again we have a simple or primitive idea. Therefore the beginning of intelligence consists in having an idea of an idea of an idea of sensation.

[1] Cf. Book II. chap. xix. sec. 1. ‘The _perception_, which actually accompanies and is annexed to any impression on the body, made by an external object, being distinct from all other modifications of thinking, furnishes the mind with a distinct idea which we call _sensation_; which is, as it were, the actual entrance of any idea into the understanding by the senses.’

_(b)_ In regard to ideas of reflection.

13. By insisting on Locke’s account of the relation between the ideas of sensation and those of reflection we might be brought to a different but not more luminous conclusion. In the passages quoted above, where this relation is most fully spoken of, it appears that the latter are essentially sequent to those of sensation. ‘_In time_ the mind comes to reflect on its own operations, about the ideas got by sensation, and thereby stores itself with a new set of ideas, which I call ideas of reflection.’ Of these only two are primary and original (Book II. c. xxi. sec. 73), viz. motivity or power of moving, with which we are not at present concerned, and perceptivity or power of perception. But according to Locke, as we have seen, there cannot be any, the simplest, idea of sensation without perception. If, then, the _idea_ of perception is only given later and upon reflection, we must suppose perception to take place without any idea of it. But with Locke to have an idea and to perceive are equivalent terms. We must thus conclude that the beginning of knowledge is an unperceived perception, which is against his express statement elsewhere (Book II. c. xxvii. sec. 9), that it is ‘impossible for any one to perceive without perceiving that he does perceive.’

What is the ‘tablet’ impressed?

14. Meanwhile a perpetual equivocation is kept up between a supposed impression on the ‘outward parts,’ and a supposed impression on the ‘tablet of the mind.’ It is not the impression upon, or a motion in, the outward parts, as Locke admits, that constitutes the idea of sensation. It is not an agitation in the tympanum of the ear, or a picture on the retina of the eye, that we are conscious of when we see a sight or hear a sound. [1] The motion or impression, however, has only, as he seems to suppose, to be ‘continued to the brain,’ and it becomes an idea of sensation. Notwithstanding the rough line of distinction between soul and body, which he draws elsewhere, his theory was practically governed by the supposition of a cerebral something, in which, as in a third equivocal tablet, the imaginary mental and bodily tablets are blended. If, however, the idea of sensation, as an object of the understanding when a man thinks, differs absolutely from ‘a motion of the outward parts,’ it does so no less absolutely, however language and metaphor may disguise the difference, from such motion as ‘continued to the brain.’ An instructed man, doubtless, may come to think about a motion in his brain, as about a motion of the earth round the sun, but to speak of such motion as an idea of sensation or an immediate object of intelligent sense, is to confuse between the object of consciousness and a possible physical theory of the conditions of that consciousness. It is only, however, by such an equivocation that any idea, according to Locke’s account of the idea, can be described as an ‘impression’ at all, or that the representation of the mind as a tablet, whether born blank or with characters stamped on it, has even an apparent meaning. A metaphor, interpreted as a fact, becomes the basis of his philosophical system.

[1] Cf. Locke’s own statement (Book III. c. iv. sec. 10). ‘The cause of any sensation, and the sensation itself, in all the simple ideas of one sense, are two ideas; and two ideas so different and distant one from another, that no two can be more so.’

Does the mind make impressions on itself?

15. As applied to the ideas of reflection, indeed, the metaphor loses even its plausibility. In its application to the ideas of sensation it gains popular acceptance from the ready confusion of thought and matter in the imaginary cerebral tablet, and the supposition of actual impact upon this by ‘outward things.’ But in the case of ideas of reflection, it is the mind that at once gives and takes the impression. It must be supposed, that is, to make impressions on itself. There is the further difficulty that as perception is necessary in order to give an _idea_ of sensation, the impress of perception must be taken by the mind in its earliest receptivity; or, in other words, it must impress itself while still a blank, still void of any ‘furniture’ wherewith to make the impression. There is no escape from this result unless we suppose perception to precede the idea of it by some interval of time, which lands us, as we have seen, in the counter difficulty of supposing an unperceived perception. Locke disguises the difficulty from himself and his reader by constantly shifting both the receptive subject and the impressive matter. We find the ‘tablet’ perpetually receding. First it is the ‘outward part’ or bodily organ. Then it is the brain, to which the impression received by the outward part must somehow be continued, in order to produce sensation. Then it is the perceptive mind, which takes an impression of the sensation or has an idea of it. Finally, it is the reflective mind, upon which in turn the perceptive mind makes impressions. But the hasty reader, when he is told that the mind is passively impressed with ideas of reflection, is apt to forget that the matter which thus impresses it is, according to Locke’s showing, simply its perceptive, _i.e._ its passive, self.

Source of these difficulties. The ‘simple’ idea, as Locke describes it, is a complex idea of substance and relation.

16. The real source of these embarrassments in Locke’s theory, it must be noted, lies in the attempt to make the individual consciousness give an answer to its interrogator as to the beginning of knowledge. The individual looking back on an imaginary earliest experience pronounces himself in that experience to have been simply sensitive and passive. But by this he means consciously sensitive _of something_ and consciously passive _in relation to something_. That is, he supposes the primitive experience to have involved consciousness of a self on the one hand and of a thing on the other, as well as of a relation between the two. In the ‘idea of sensation’ as Locke conceived it, such a consciousness is clearly implied, notwithstanding his confusion of terms. The idea is a perception, or consciousness _of a thing_, as opposed to a sensation proper or affection of the bodily organs. Of the perception, again, there is an idea, _i.e._ a consciousness by the man, in the perception, of himself in negative relation to the thing that is his object, and this consciousness (if we would make Locke consistent in excluding an unperceived perception) must be taken to go along with the perceptive act itself. No less than this indeed can be involved in any act that is to be the beginning of knowledge at all. It is the minimum of possible thought or intelligence, and the thinking man, looking for this beginning in the earliest experience of the individual human animal, must needs find it there. But this means no less than that he is finding there already the conceptions of substance and relation. Hence a double contradiction: firstly, a contradiction between the primariness of self-conscious cognisance of a thing, as the beginning of possible knowledge, on the one hand, and the primariness of animal sensation in the history of the individual man on the other; secondly, a contradiction between the primariness in knowledge of the ideas of substance and relation, and the seemingly gradual attainment of those ‘abstractions’ by the individual intellect. The former of these contradictions is blurred by Locke in the two main confusions which we have so far noticed: _(a)_ the confusion between sensation proper and perception, which is covered under the phrase ‘idea of sensation;’ a phrase which, if sensation means the first act of intelligence, is pleonastic, and if it means the ‘motion of the outward parts continued to the brain,’ is unmeaning; and _(b)_ the confusion between the physical affection of the brain and the act of the self-conscious subject, covered under the equivocal metaphor of impression. The latter contradiction, that concerning the ideas of substance and relation, has to be further considered.

How this contradiction is disguised.

17. It is not difficult to show that to have a simple idea, according to Locke’s account of it, means to have already the conception of substance and relation, which are yet according to him ‘complex and derived ideas,’ ‘the workmanship of the mind’ in opposition to its original material, the result of its action in opposition to what is given it as passive. The equivocation in terms under which this contradiction is generally covered is that between ‘idea’ and ‘quality.’ ‘Whatever the mind perceives in itself, or is the immediate object of perception, thought, or understanding, that I call _idea_; and the power to produce that idea I call quality of the subject wherein that power is. Thus a snowball having power to produce in us the ideas of white, cold, and round, the powers to produce these ideas in us, as they are in the snowball, I call qualities; and as they are sensations or perceptions in our understandings, I call them ideas; which ideas, if I speak of sometimes as in the things themselves, I would be understood to mean those qualities in the object which produce them in us.’ (Book II. chap. viii. sec. 8.)

Locke’s way of interchanging ‘idea’ and ‘quality’ and its effects.

18. An equivocation is not the less so because it is announced. It is just because Locke allows himself at his convenience to interchange the terms ‘idea’ and ‘quality’ that his doctrine is at once so plausible and so hollow. The essential question is whether the ‘simple idea,’ as the original of knowledge, is on the one hand a mere feeling, or on the other a thing or quality of a thing. This question is the crux of empirical psychology. Adopting the one alternative, we have to face the difficulty of the genesis of knowledge, as an apprehension of the real, out of mere feeling; adopting the other, we virtually endow the nascent intelligence with the conception of substance. By playing fast and loose with ‘idea’ and ‘quality,’ Locke disguised the dilemma from himself. Here again the metaphor of Impression did him yeoman’s service. The idea, or ‘immediate object of thought,’ being confused with the affection of the sensitive organs, and this again being accounted for as the result of actual impact, it was easy to represent the idea itself as caused by the action of an outward body on the ‘mental tablet.’ Thus Locke speaks of the ‘objects of our senses obtruding their particular ideas on our minds, whether we will or no.’ (Book II. chap. i. sec. 25.) This sentence holds in solution an assumption and two fallacies. The assumption (with which we have no further concern here) is the physical theory that matter affects the sensitive organs in the way of actual impact. Of the fallacies, one is the confusion between this affection and the idea of which it is the occasion to the individual; the other is the implication that this idea, as such, in its prime simplicity, recognises itself as the result of, and refers itself as a quality to, the matter supposed to cause it. This recognition and reference, it is clearly implied, are involved in the idea itself, not merely made by the philosopher theorising it. Otherwise the ‘obtrusion’ would be described as of a property or effect, not of an idea, which means, it must be remembered, the object of consciousness just as the object of consciousness. Of the same purport is the statement that ‘the mind is furnished with simple ideas as they are found in exterior things.’ (Book II. chap, xxiii. sec. 1.) It only requires a moment’s consideration, indeed, to see that the beginning of consciousness cannot be a physical theory, which, however true it may be and however natural it may have become to us, involves not only the complex conception of material impact, but the application of this to a case having no palpable likeness to it. But the ‘interrogator of consciousness’ finds in its primitive state just what he puts there, and thus Locke, with all his pains ‘to set his mind at a distance from itself,’ involuntarily supposes it, in the first element of intelligence, to ‘report’ that action of matter upon itself, which, as the result of a familiar theory--involving not merely the conceptions of substance, power, and relation, but special qualifications of these--it reports to the educated man.

Primary and secondary qualities of bodies.

19. This will appear more clearly upon an examination of his doctrine of ‘the ideas of primary and secondary qualities of bodies.’ The distinction between them he states as follows. The primary qualities of bodies are ‘the bulk, figure, number, situation, motion, and rest of their solid parts; these are in them, whether we perceive them or no; and when they are of that size that we can discover them, we have by these an idea of the thing as it is in itself.’ ... Thus ‘the ideas of primary qualities are resemblances of them, and their patterns do really exist in the bodies themselves. But the ideas produced in us by the secondary qualities have no resemblance of them at all. There is nothing like them existing in the bodies themselves. They are in the bodies, we denominate from them, only a power to produce these sensations in us; and what is sweet, blue, or warm in idea is but the certain bulk, figure, and motion of the insensible parts in the bodies themselves which we call so.’ This power is then explained to be of two sorts: _(a)_ ‘The power that is in any body, by reason of its insensible primary qualities, to operate after a peculiar manner on any of our senses, and thereby produce in us the different ideas of several colours, sounds, smells, tastes, &c. These are usually called sensible qualities, _(b)_ The power that is in any body, by reason of the particular constitution of its primary qualities, to make such a change in the bulk, figure, texture, and motion of another body, as to make it operate differently on our senses from what it did before. Thus the sun has a power to make wax white, and fire to make lead fluid. These are usually called powers.’ (Book II. chap. viii. sec. 15, 23.)

‘Simple idea’ represented as involving a theory of its own cause.

20. What we have here is a theory of the causes of simple ideas; but we shall find Locke constantly representing this theory as a simple idea itself, or the simple idea as involving this theory. By this unconscious device he is enabled readily to exhibit the genesis of knowledge out of ‘simple ideas,’ but it is at the cost of converting these into ‘creations of the mind,’ which with him are the antitheses of ‘facts’ or ‘reality.’ The process of conversion takes a different form as applied respectively to the ideas of primary and to those of secondary qualities. We propose to follow it in the latter application first.

Phrases in which this is implied.

21. The simple idea caused by a quality he calls the idea _of_ that quality. Under cover of this phrase, he not only identifies the idea of a primary quality with the quality itself of which he supposes it to be a copy, but he also habitually regards the idea of a secondary quality as the consciousness of a quality _of a thing_, though under warning that the quality as it is to consciousness is not as it is in the thing. This reservation rather adds to the confusion. There are in fact, according to Locke, as appears from his distinction between the ‘nominal’ and ‘real essence,’ two different things denoted by every common noun; the thing as it is in itself or in nature, and the thing as it is for consciousness. The former is the thing as constituted by a certain configuration of particles, which is only an object for the physical philosopher, and never fully cognisable even by him; [1] the latter is the thing as we see and hear and smell it. Now to a thing in this latter sense, according to Locke, such a simple idea as to the philosopher is one of a secondary quality (_i.e._ not a copy, but an effect, of something in a body), is already in the origin of knowledge referred as a quality, though without distinction of primary and secondary. He does not indeed state this in so many words. To have done so might have forced him to reconsider his doctrine of the mere passivity of the mind in respect of simple ideas. But it is implied in his constant use of such phrases as ‘reports of the senses,’ ‘inlet through the senses’--which have no meaning unless something is reported, something let in--and in the familiar comparison of the understanding to a ‘closet, wholly shut from light, with only some little opening left, to let in external visible resemblances, or ideas, of things without.’ (Book II. chap. xi. sec. 17.)

[1] This distinction is more fully treated below, paragraphs 88, &c.

Feeling and felt thing confused.

22. Phraseology of this kind, the standing heritage of the philosophy which seeks the origin of knowledge in sensation, assumes that the individual sensation is from the first consciously representative; that it is more than what it is simply in itself--fleeting, momentary, unnameable (because, while we name it, it has become another), and for the same reason unknowable, the very negation of knowability; that it shows the presence of something, whether this be a ‘body’ to which it is referred as a quality, or a mind of which it is a modification, or be ultimately reduced to the permanent conditions of its own possibility. This assumption for the present has merely to be pointed out; its legitimacy need not be discussed. Nor need we now discuss the attempts that have been made since Locke to show that mere sensations, dumb to begin with, may yet become articulate upon repetition and combination; which in fact endow them with a faculty of inference, and suppose that though primarily they report nothing beyond themselves, they yet somehow come to do so as an explanation of their own recurrence. The sensational theory in Locke is still, so to speak, unsophisticated. It is true that, in concert with that ‘thinking gentleman,’ Mr. Molyneux, he had satisfied himself that what we reckon simple ideas are often really inferences from such ideas which by habit have become instinctive; but his account of this habitual process presupposes the reference of sensation to a thing. ‘When we set before our eyes a round globe of any uniform colour, it is certain that the idea thereby imprinted in our mind is of a flat circle, variously shadowed with several degrees of light and brightness coming to our eyes. But we having by use been accustomed to perceive what kind of appearance convex bodies are wont to make in us, what alterations are made in the reflections of light by the difference of the sensible figures of bodies; the judgment presently, by an habitual custom, alters the appearances into their causes. So that from that which truly is variety of colour or shadow, collecting the figure, it makes it pass for a mark of figure, and frames to itself the perception of a convex figure, and an uniform colour.’ (Book II. chap. ix. sec. 8.) The theory here stated involves two assumptions, each inconsistent with the simplicity of the simple idea. _(a)_ The actual impression of the ‘plane variously coloured’ is supposed to pronounce itself to be of something outward. Once call the sensation an ‘impression,’ indeed, or call it anything, and this or an analogous substantiation of it is implied. It is only as thus reporting something ‘objective’ that the simple idea of the plane variously coloured gives anything to be corrected by the ‘perception of the kind of appearance convex bodies are wont to make in us,’ _i.e._ ‘of the alterations made in the reflections of light by the difference of the sensible figure of bodies.’ This perception, indeed, as described, is already itself just the instinctive judgment which has to be accounted for, and though this objection might be met by a better statement, yet no statement could serve Locke’s purpose which did not make assumption _(b)_ that sensations of light and colour--‘simple ideas of secondary qualities’--are in the very beginning of knowledge _appearances_, if not of _convex_ bodies, yet of bodies; if not of bodies, yet of something which they reveal, which remains there while they pass away.

The simple idea as ‘ectype’ other than mere sensation.

23. The same assumption is patent in Locke’s account of the distinction between ‘real and fantastic,’ ‘adequate and inadequate,’ ideas. This distinction rests upon that between the thing as archetype, and the idea as the corresponding ectype. Simple ideas he holds to be necessarily ‘real’ and ‘adequate,’ because necessarily answering to their archetypes. ‘Not that they are all of them images or representations of what does exist: ... whiteness and coldness are no more in snow than pain is: ... yet are they real ideas in us, whereby we distinguish the qualities that are really in things themselves. For these several appearances being designed to be the marks whereby we are to know and distinguish things which we have to do with, our ideas do as well serve us to that purpose, and are as real distinguishing characters, whether they be only constant effects, or else exact resemblances of something in the things themselves.’ (Book II. chap. xxx. sec. 2.) The simple idea, then, is a ‘mark’ or ‘distinguishing character,’ either as a copy or as an effect, of something other than itself. Only as thus regarded, does the distinction between real and fantastic possibly apply to it. So too with the distinction between true and false ideas. As Locke himself points out, the simple idea in itself is neither true nor false. It can become so only as ‘referred to something extraneous to it.’ (Book II. chap, xxxii. sec. 4.) For all that, he speaks of simple ideas as true and necessarily true, because ‘being barely such perceptions as God has fitted us to receive, and given power to external objects to produce in us by established laws and ways ... their truth consists in nothing else but in such appearances as are produced in us, and must be suitable to those powers He has placed in external objects, or else they could not be produced in us.’ (Book II. chap, xxxii. sec. 14.) Here again we are brought to the same point. The idea is an ‘appearance’ of something, necessarily true when it cannot seem to be the appearance of anything else than that of which it is the appearance. We thus come to the following dilemma. Either the simple idea is referred to a thing, as its pattern or its cause, or it cannot be regarded as either real or true. If it is still objected that it need not be so referred in the beginning of knowledge, though it comes to be so in the developed intelligence, the answer is the further question, how can that be knowledge even in its most elementary phase--the phase of the reception of simple ideas --which is not a capacity of distinction between real and apparent, between true and false? If its beginning is a mode of consciousness, such as mere sensation would be--which, because excluding all reference, excludes that reference of itself to something else without which there could be no consciousness of a distinction between an ‘is’ and an ‘is not,’ and therefore no true judgment at all--how can any repetition of such modes give such a judgment? [1]

[1] Cf. the ground of distinction between clearness and obscurity of ideas; (Book II. chap. xxix. sec. 2) ‘Our simple ideas are clear when they are such as the objects themselves, whence they are taken, did or might in a well-ordered sensation or perception, present them.’ As Locke always assumes that immediate consciousness can tell whether an idea is clear or not, it follows that immediate consciousness must tell of ‘the object itself, whence the idea is taken.’

It involves a judgment in which mind and thing are distinguished.

24. The fact is that the ‘simple idea’ with Locke, as the beginning of knowledge, is already, at its minimum, the judgment, ‘I have an idea different from other ideas, which I did not make for myself.’ His confusion of this judgment with sensation is merely the fundamental confusion, on which all empirical psychology rests, between two essentially distinct questions--one metaphysical, What is the simplest element of knowledge? the other physiological, What are the conditions in the individual human organism in virtue of which it becomes a vehicle of knowledge? Though he failed, however, to distinguish these questions, their difference made itself appear in a certain divergence between the second and fourth books of his Essay. So far we have limited our consideration to passages in the second book, in which he treats _eo nomine_ of ideas; of simple ideas as the original of knowledge, of complex ones as formed in its process. Here the physical theory is predominant. The beginning of knowledge is that without which the animal is incapable of it, viz. sensation regarded as an impression through ‘animal spirits’ on the brain. But it can only be so represented because sensation is identified with that which later psychology distinguished from it as Perception, and for which no physical theory can account. As we have seen, the whole theory of this (the second) book turns upon the supposition that the simple idea of sensation is in every case an idea of a sensible quality, and that it is so, not merely for us, considering it _ex parte post_, but consciously for the individual subject, which can mean nothing else than that it distinguishes itself from, and refers itself to, a thing. Locke himself, indeed, according to his plan of bringing in a ‘faculty of the mind’ whenever it is convenient, would perhaps rather have said that it is so distinguished and referred ‘by the mind.’ He considers the simple idea not, as it truly is, the mind itself in a certain relation, but a datum or material of the mind, upon which it performs certain operations as upon something other than itself, though all the while it is constituted, at least in its actuality, by this material. Between the reference of the simple idea to the thing, however, by itself and ‘by the mind,’ there is no essential difference. In either case the reference is inconsistent with the simplicity of the simple idea; and if the latter expression avoids the seeming awkwardness of ascribing activity to the idea, it yet ascribes it to the mind in that elementary stage in which, according to Locke, it is merely receptive.

And is equivalent to what he afterwards calls ‘knowledge of identity’. Only as such can it be named.

25. So much for the theory ‘of ideas.’ As if, however, in treating of ideas he had been treating of anything else than knowledge, he afterwards considers ‘knowledge’ in a book by itself (the fourth) under that title, and here the question as to the relation between idea and thing comes before him in a somewhat different shape. According to his well-known definition, knowledge is the perception of the agreement or disagreement of any of our ideas. The agreement or disagreement may be of four sorts. It may be in the way (1) of identity, (2) of relation, (3) of co-existence, (4) of real existence. In his account of the last sort of agreement, it may be remarked by the way, he departs at once and openly from his definition, making it an agreement, not of idea with idea, but of an idea with ‘actual real existence.’ The fatal but connatural wound in his system, which this inconsistency marks, will appear more fully below. For the present, our concern is for the adjustment of the definition of knowledge to the doctrine of the simple idea as the beginning of knowledge. According to the definition, it cannot be the simple idea, as such, that constitutes this beginning, but only the perception of agreement or disagreement between simple ideas. ‘There could be no room,’ says Locke distinctly, ‘for any positive knowledge at all, if we could not distinguish any relation between our ideas.’ (Book IV. chap. i. sec. 5.) Yet in the very context where he makes this statement, the perception of relation is put as a distinct kind of knowledge apart from others. In his account of the other kinds, however, he is faithful to his definition, and treats each as a perception (_i.e._ a judgment) of a relation in the way of agreement or disagreement. The primary knowledge is that of identity--the knowledge of an idea as identical with itself. ‘A man infallibly knows, as soon as ever he has them in his mind, that the ideas he calls _white_ and _round_, are the very ideas they are, and not other ideas which he calls _red_ and _square_.’ (Book IV. chap. i. sec. 4.) Now, as Hume afterwards pointed out, identity is not simple unity. It cannot be predicated of the ‘idea’ as merely single, but only as a manifold in singleness. To speak of an idea as the ‘same with itself’ is unmeaning unless it mean ‘same with itself _in its manifold appearances_’ _i.e._ unless the idea is distinguished, as an object existing continuously, from its present appearance. Thus ‘the infallible knowledge,’ which Locke describes in the above passage, consists in this, that on the occurrence of a certain ‘idea’ the man _recognises_ it as one, which at other times of its occurrence he has called ‘_white_.’ Such a ‘synthesis of recognition,’ however, expressed by the application of a common term, implies the reference of a present sensation to a permanent object of thought, in this case the object thought under the term ‘white,’ so that the sensation becomes an idea of that object. Were there no such objects, there would be no significant names, but only noises; and were the present sensation not so referred, it would not be named. It may be said indeed that the ‘permanent object of thought’ is merely the instinctive result of a series of past resembling sensations, and that the common name is merely the register of this result. But the question is thus merely thrown further back. Unless the single fleeting sensation was, to begin with, fixed and defined by relation to and distinction from something permanent--in other words, unless it ceased to be a mere sensation--how did it happen that other sensations were referred to it, as different cases of an identical phenomenon, to which the noise suggested by it might be applied as a sign?

The same implied in calling it an idea of an object.

26. This primary distinction and relation of the simple idea Locke implicitly acknowledges when he substitutes for the simple idea, as in the passage last quoted, the man’s knowledge that he has the idea; for such knowledge implies the distinction of the idea from its permanent conscious subject, and its determination by that negative relation. [1] Thus determined, it becomes itself a permanent object, or (which comes to the same) an idea _of an object_; a phrase which Locke at his convenience substitutes for the mere idea, whenever it is wanted for making his theory of knowledge square with knowledge itself. Once become such an object, it is a basis to which other sensations, like and unlike, may be referred as differentiating attributes. Its identity becomes a definite identity.

[1] Cf. the passage in Book II. chap. vii. sec. 7. ‘When ideas are in our minds, we consider them as being actually there.’ The mere ‘idea’ is in fact essentially different from the ‘consideration of it as actually there,’ as sensation is different from thought. The ‘consideration, &c.,’ really means the thought of the ‘idea’ (sensation) as determined by relation to the conscious subject.

Made _for_, not _by_, us, and therefore according to Locke really existent.

27. Upon analysis, then, of Locke’s account of the most elementary knowledge, the perception of identity or agreement of an idea with itself, we find that like the ‘simple idea,’ which he elsewhere makes the beginning of knowledge, it really means the reference of a sensation to a conception of a permanent object or subject, [1] either in such a judgment as ‘this is white’ (_sc._ a white thing), or in the more elementary one, ‘this is an object to me.’ In the latter form the judgment represents what Locke puts as the consciousness, ‘I have an idea,’ or as the ‘consideration that the idea is actually there;’ in the former it represents what he calls ‘the knowledge that the idea which I have in my mind and which I call white is the very idea it is, and not the idea which I call red.’ It is only because _referred_, as above, that the sensation is in Locke’s phraseology ‘a testimony’ or ‘report’ of something. As we said above, his notion of the beginning of knowledge is expressed not merely in the formula ‘I have an idea different from other ideas,’ but with the addition, ‘which I did not make for myself.’ [2] The simple idea is supposed to testify to something without that caused it, and it is this interpretation of it which makes it with him the ultimate criterion of reality. But unless it were at once distinguished from and referred to both a thing of which it is an effect and a subject of which it is an experience, it could not in the first place testify to anything, nor secondly to a thing as made for, not by, the subject. This brings us, however, upon Locke’s whole theory of ‘real existence,’ which requires fuller consideration.

[1] For a recognition by Locke of the correlativity of these (of which more will have to be said below) cf. Book II. chap. xxiii. sec. 15. ‘Whilst I know by seeing or hearing, &c., that there is some corporeal being without me, the object of that sensation, I do more certainly know that there is some spiritual being within me that sees and hears.’

[2] Cf. Book II. chap. xii. sec. 1.

What did he mean by this?

28. It is a theory, we must premise, which is nowhere explicitly stated. It has to be gathered chiefly from those passages of the second book in which he treats of ‘complex’ or ‘artificial’ ideas in distinction from simple ones, which are necessarily real, and from the discussion in the fourth book of the ‘extent’ and ‘reality’ of knowledge. We have, however, to begin with, in the enumeration of simple ideas, a mention of ‘existence,’ as one of those ‘received alike through all the ways of sensation and reflection.’ It is an idea ‘suggested to the understanding by every object without and every idea within. When ideas are in our minds, we consider them as being actually there, as well as we consider things to be actually without us; which is, that they exist, or have existence.’ (Book II. chap. vii. sec. 7.)

29. The two considerations here mentioned, of ‘ideas as actually in our minds,’ of ‘things as actually without us,’ are meant severally to represent the two ways of reflection and sensation, by which the idea of existence is supposed to be suggested. But sensation, according to Locke, is an organ of ‘ideas,’ just as much as reflection. Taking his doctrine strictly, there are no ‘objects’ but ‘ideas’ to suggest the idea of existence, whether by the way of sensation or by that of reflection, and no ideas that are not ‘in the mind.’ (Book II. chap. ix. sec. 3, &c.)

Existence as the mere presence of a feeling.

30. The designation of the idea of existence, then, as ‘suggested by every idea within,’ covers every possible suggestion. It can mean nothing else than that it is given in every act and mode of consciousness; that it is inseparable from feeling as such, being itself at the same time a distinct simple idea. This, we may remark by the way, involves the conclusion that every idea is composite, made up of whatever distinguishes it from other ideas together with the idea of existence. Of this idea of existence itself, however, it will be impossible to say anything distinctive; for, as it accompanies all possible objects of consciousness, there will be no cases where it is absent to be distinguished from those where it is present. Not merely will it be undefinable, as every simple idea is; it will be impossible ‘to send a man to his senses’ (according to Locke’s favourite subterfuge) in order to know what it is, since it is neither given in one sense as distinct from another, nor in all senses as distinct from any other modification of consciousness. Thus regarded, to treat it as a simple idea alongside of other simple ideas is a palpable contradiction. It is the mere ‘It is felt,’ the abstraction of consciousness, no more to be reckoned as one among other ideas than colour in general is to be co-ordinated with red, white, and blue. Whether I smell a rose in the summer or recall the smell in winter; whether I see a horse or a ghost, or imagine a centaur or think of gravitation or the philosopher’s stone--in every case alike the idea or ‘immediate object of the mind’ _exists_. Yet we find Locke distinguishing between real ideas, as those that ‘have a conformity with the existence of things,’ and fantastic ideas, as those which have no such conformity (Book II. chap. xxx. sec. 1); and again in the fourth book (chap. i. sec. 7, chap. iii. sec. 21, &c.) he makes the perception of the agreement of an idea with existence a special kind of knowledge, different from that of agreement of idea with idea; and having done so, raises the question whether we have such a knowledge of existence at all, and decides that our knowledge of it is very narrow.

Existence as reality.

31. How are such a distinction and such a question to be reconciled with the attribution of existence to every idea? The answer of course will be, that when he speaks of ideas as not conforming to existence, and makes knowledge or the agreement of ideas with each other something different from their agreement with existence, he means and generally says ‘real actual existence,’ or the ‘existence of _things_,’ _i.e._ an existence, whatever it be, which is opposed to mere existence in consciousness. Doubtless he so means, but this implies that upon mere consciousness, or the simple presence of ideas, there has supervened a distinction, which has to be accounted for, of ideas from things which they represent on the one hand, and from a mind of which they are affections on the other. Even in the passage first quoted (Book II. chap. vii. sec. 7), where existence is ascribed to every idea, on looking closely we find this distinction obtruding itself, though without explicit acknowledgment. In the very same breath, so to speak, in which the idea of existence is said to be suggested by every idea, it is further described as being either of two considerations--either the consideration of an idea as actually in our mind, or of a thing as actually without us. Such considerations at once imply the supervention of that distinction between ‘mind’ and ‘thing,’ which gives a wholly new meaning to ‘existence.’ They are not, in truth, as Locke supposed, two separate considerations, one or other of which, as the case may be, is interchangeable with the ‘idea of existence.’ One is correlative with the other, and neither is the same as simple feeling. Considered as actually in the mind, the feeling is distinguished from the mind as an affection from the subject thereof, and just in virtue of this distinction is referred to a thing as the cause of the affection, or becomes representative of a thing. But for such consideration there would for us, if the doctrine of ideas means anything, be no ‘thing without us’ at all. To ‘consider things as actually without us’ is to consider them as causes of the ideas in our mind, and this is to have an idea of existence quite different from mere consciousness. It is to have an idea of it which at once suggests the question whether the existence is real or apparent; in other words, whether the thing, to which an affection of the mind is referred as its cause, is really its cause or no.

By confusion of these two meanings, reality and its conditions are represented as given in simple feeling.

32. Between these two meanings of existence--its meaning as interchangeable with simple consciousness, and its meaning as reality--Locke failed to distinguish. Just as, having announced ‘ideas’ to be the sole ‘materials of knowledge,’ he allows himself at his convenience to put ‘things’ in the place of ideas; so having identified existence with momentary consciousness or the simple idea, he substitutes for existence in this sense _reality_, and in consequence finds reality given solely in the simple idea. Thus when the conceptions of cause or substance, or relations of any kind, come under view, since these cannot be represented as given in momentary consciousness, they have to be pronounced not to exist, and since existence is reality, to be unreal or ‘fictions of the mind.’ But without these unreal relations there could be no knowledge, and if they are not given in the elements of knowledge, it is difficult to see how they are introduced, or to avoid the appearance of constructing knowledge out of the unknown. Given in the elements of knowledge, however, they cannot be, if these are simple ideas or momentary recurrences of the ‘it is felt.’ But by help of Locke’s equivocation between the two meanings of existence, they can be covertly introduced as the real. Existence is given in the simple idea, existence equals the real, therefore the real is given in the simple idea. But think or speak of the real as we will, we find that it exhibits itself as substance, as cause, and as related; _i.e._ according to Locke as a ‘complex’ or ‘invented’ or ‘superinduced’ idea.

Yet reality involves complex ideas which are made by the mind.

33. In the second book of his Essay, which treats of ideas, he makes the grand distinction between ‘the simple ideas which are all from things themselves, and of which the mind can have no more or other than what are suggested to it,’ and the ‘complex ideas which are the workmanship of the mind.’ (Book II. chap. xii.) In his account of the latter there are some curious cross-divisions, but he finally enumerates them as ideas either of _modes_, _substances_, or _relations_. The character of these ideas he then proceeds to explain in the order given, one after the other, and as if each were independent of the rest; though according to his own statement the idea of mode presupposes that of substance, and the idea of substance involves that of relation. ‘Modes I call such complex ideas, which, however compounded, contain not in them the supposition of subsisting by themselves, but are considered as dependencies on, or affections of, substances; such are the ideas signified by the words ‘triangle,’ ‘gratitude,’ ‘murder,’ &c. Of these there are two sorts. First, there are some which are only variations or different combinations of the same simple idea without the mixture of any other--as a dozen, or score--which are nothing but the ideas of so many distinct units added together; and these I call simple modes, as being contained within the bounds of one simple idea. Secondly, there are others compounded of simple ideas of several kinds, put together to make one complex one; e. g. beauty, ... and these I call _mixed modes_.’ (Book II. chap. xii. secs. 4, 5.) So soon as he comes to speak more in detail of simple modes, he falls into apparent contradiction with his doctrine that, as complex ideas, they are the mere workmanship of the mind. All particular sounds and colours are simple modes of the simple ideas of sound and colour. (Book II. chap, xviii. sees. 3, 4.) Again, the ideas of figure, place, distance, as of all particular figures, places, and distances, are simple modes of the simple idea of space. (Book II. chap, xiii.) To maintain, however, that the ideas of space, sound, or colour _in general_ (as simple ideas) were taken from things themselves, while those of _particular_ spaces, sounds, and colours (as complex ideas) were ‘made by the mind,’ was for Locke impossible. Thus in the very next chapter after that in which he has opposed all complex ideas, those of simple modes included, as made by the mind to all simple ones as taken from things themselves, he speaks of simple modes ‘either _as found in things existing_, or as made by the mind within itself.’ (Book II. chap. xiii. sec. 1.) It was not for Locke to get over this confusion by denying the antithesis between that which the mind ‘makes’ and that which it ‘takes from existing things’ and for the present we must leave it as it stands. We must further note that a mode being considered ‘as an affection of a substance,’ space must be to the particular spaces which are its simple modes, as a substance to its modifications. So too colour to particular colours, &c., &c. But the idea of a substance is a complex idea ‘framed by the mind.’ Therefore the idea of space--at any rate such an idea as we have of it when we think of distances, places, or figures, and when else do we think of it at all?--must be a complex and artificial idea. But according to Locke the idea of space is emphatically a simple idea, given immediately _both_ by sight and touch, concerning which if a man enquire, he ‘sends him to his senses.’ (Book II. chap, v.)

Such are substance and relation which must be found in every object of knowledge.

34. These contradictions are not avoidable blunders, due to carelessness or want of a clear head in the individual writer, ‘The complex idea of substance’ will not be exorcised; the mind will show its workmanship in the very elements of knowledge towards which its relation seems most passive--in the ‘existing things’ which are the conditions of its experience no less than in the individual’s conscious reaction upon them. The interrogator of the individual consciousness seeks to know that consciousness, and just for that reason must find in it at every stage those formal conceptions, such as substance and cause, without which there can be no object of knowledge at all. He thus substantiates sensation, while he thinks that he merely observes it, and calls it a sensible thing. Sensations, thus unconsciously transformed, are for him the real, the actually existent. Whatever is not given by immediate sense, outer or inner, he reckons a mere ‘thing of the mind.’ The ideas of substance and relation, then, not being given by sense, must in his eyes be things of the mind, in distinction from, really existent things. But speech bewrayeth him. He cannot state anything that he knows save in terms which imply that substance and relation are in the things known; and hence an inevitable obtrusion of ‘things of the mind’ in the place of real existence, just where the opposition between them is being insisted on. Again, as a man seems to observe consciousness in himself and others, it has nothing that it has not received. It is a blank to begin with, but passive of that which is without, and through its passivity it becomes informed. If the ‘mind,’ then, means this or that individual consciousness, the things of the mind must be gradually developed from an original passivity. On the other hand, let anyone try to know this original passive consciousness, and in it, as in every other known object-matter, he must find these things of the mind, substance and relations. If nature is the object, he must find them in nature; if his own self-consciousness, he must find them in that consciousness. But while nature knows not what is in herself, self-consciousness, it would seem, _ex vi termini_, does know. Therefore not merely substance and relation must be found in the original consciousness, but the knowledge, the ideas, of them.

Abstract idea of substance and complex ideas of particular sorts of substance.

35. As we follow Locke’s treatment of these ideas more in detail, we shall find the logical see-saw, here accounted for, appearing with scarcely a disguise. His account of the origin of the ‘complex ideas of substances’ is as follows. ‘The mind being furnished with a great number of the simple ideas, conveyed in by the senses, as they are found in exterior things, or by reflection on its own operations, takes notice also that a certain number of these simple ideas go constantly together; which being presumed to belong to one thing, and words being suited to common apprehensions and made use of for quick despatch, are called, so united in one subject, by one name; which by inadvertency we are apt afterwards to talk of and consider as one simple idea, which indeed is a complication of many ideas together; because, as I have said, not imagining how these simple ideas can subsist by themselves, we accustom ourselves to suppose some _substratum_, wherein they do subsist, and from which they do result; which therefore we call _substance_.’ (Book II. chap, xxiii. sec. 1.) In the controversy with Stillingfleet, which arose out of this chapter, Locke was constrained further to distinguish (as he certainly did not do in the original text) between the ‘ideas of distinct substances, such as man, horse,’ and the ‘general idea of substance.’ It is to ideas of the former sort that he must be taken to refer in the above passage, when he speaks of them as formed by ‘complication of many ideas together,’ and these alone are _complex_ in the strict sense. The _general_ idea of substance on the other hand, which like all general ideas (according to Locke) is made by abstraction, means the idea of a ‘substratum which we accustom ourselves to suppose’ as that wherein the complicated ideas ‘do subsist, and from which they do result.’ This, however, he regards as itself one, ‘the first and chief,’ among the ideas which make up any of the ‘distinct substances.’ (Book II. chap. xii. sec. 6.) Nor is he faithful to the distinction between the general and the complex. In one passage of the first letter to Stillingfleet, he distinctly speaks of the _general_ idea of substance as a ‘_complex_ idea made up of the idea of something plus that of relation to qualities.’ [1] Notwithstanding this confusion of terms, however, he no doubt had before him what seemed a clear distinction between the ‘abstract general idea’ of substance, as such, _i.e._ of ‘something related as a support to accidents,’ but which does not include ideas of any particular accidents, and the composite idea of a substance, made up of a multitude of simple ideas plus that of the something related to them as a support. We shall find each of these ideas, according to Locke’s statement, presupposing the other.

[1] Upon a reference to the chapter on ‘complex ideas’ (Book II. chap, xii.), it will appear that the term is used in a stricter and a looser sense. In the looser sense it is not confined to _compound_ ideas, but in opposition to simple ones includes those of relation and even ‘abstract general ideas.’ When Locke thinks of the _general_ idea of substance apart from the complication of accidents referred to it, he opposes it to the complex idea, according to the stricter sense of that term. On the other hand, when he thinks of it as ‘made up’ of the idea of _something_ plus that of relation to qualities (as if there could be an idea of something apart from such relation), it seems to him to have two elements, and therefore to be complex.

The abstract idea according to Locke at once precedes and follows the complex.

36. In the passage above quoted, our aptness to consider a complication of simple ideas, which we notice to go constantly together, as one simple idea, is accounted for as the result of a presumption that they belong to one thing. This presumption is again described in the words that ‘we accustom ourselves to suppose some substratum, wherein they do subsist, and from which they do result; which therefore we call substance.’ Here it is implied that the idea of substance, _i.e._ ‘the general idea of something related as a support to accidents,’ is one gradually formed upon observation of the regular coincidence of certain simple ideas. In the sequel (sec. 3 of the same chapter I. xxiii.) we are told that such an idea--‘an obscure and relative idea of substance in general--being thus made, we come to have the ideas of particular sorts of substances by collecting such combinations of simple ideas as are, by experience and observation of men’s senses, taken notice of to exist together.’ Thus a _general_ idea of substance having been formed by one gradual process, ideas of particular sorts of substances are formed by another and later one. But then the very same ‘collection of such combinations of simple ideas as are taken notice of to exist together,’ which (according to sec. 3) constitutes the later process and follows upon the formation of the _general_ idea of substance, has been previously described as preceding and conditioning that formation. It is the complication of simple ideas, noticed to go constantly together, that (according to sec. 1) leads to the ‘idea of substance in general.’ To this see-saw between the process preceding and that following the formation of the idea in question must be added the difficulty, that Locke’s account makes the general idea precede the particular, which is against the whole tenor of his doctrine of abstraction as an operation whereby ‘the mind makes the particular ideas, received from particular objects, to become general.’ (Book II. chap. xi. sec. 9.)

Reference of ideas to nature or God, the same as reference to substance.

37. It may be said perhaps that Locke’s self-contradiction in this regard is more apparent than real; that the two processes of combining simple ideas are essentially different, just because in the later process they are combined by a conscious act of the mind as accidents of a ‘something,’ of which the _general_ idea has been previously formed, whereas in the earlier one they are merely presented together ‘by nature,’ and, _ex hypothesi_, though they gradually suggest, do not carry with them any reference to a ‘substratum.’ But upon this we must remark that the presentation of ideas ‘by nature’ or ‘by God,’ though a mode of speech of which Locke in his account of the origin of knowledge freely avails himself, means nothing else than their relation to a ‘substratum,’ if not ‘wherein they do subsist,’ yet ‘from which they do result.’ If then it is for consciousness that ideas are presented together by nature, they already carry with them that reference to a substratum which is supposed gradually to result from their concurrence. If it is not for consciousness that they are so presented, if they do not _severally_ carry with them a reference to ‘something,’ how is it they come to do so in the gross? If a single sensation of heat is not referred to a hot thing, why should it be so referred on the thousandth recurrence? Because perhaps, recurring constantly in the same relations, it compels the inference of permanent antecedents? But the ‘same relations’ mean relations to the same things, and the observation of these relations presupposes just that conception of _the thing_ which it is sought to account for,

But it is explicitly to substance that Locke makes them refer themselves.

38. We are estopped, however, from any such explanation of Locke as would suggest these ulterior questions by his explicit statement that ‘all simple ideas, all sensible qualities, carry with them a supposition of a substratum to exist in, and of a substance wherein they inhere.’ The vindication of himself against the pathetic complaint of Stillingfleet, that he had ‘almost discarded substance out of the reasonable part of the world,’ in which this statement occurs, was certainly not needed. Already in the original text the simple ideas, of which the association suggests the idea of substance, are such as ‘the mind finds in exterior things or by reflection on its own operations.’ But to find them in an exterior thing is to find them in a substance, a ‘something it knows not what,’ regarded as outward, just as to find them by reflection on its own operations, as its own, is to find them in such a substance regarded as inward. The process then by which, according to Locke, the general idea of substance is arrived at, presupposes this idea just as much as the process, by which ideas of particular sorts of substances are got, presupposes it, and the distinction between the two processes, as he puts it, disappears.

In the process by which we are supposed to arrive at complex ideas of substances the beginning is the same as the end.

39. The same paralogism appears under a slightly altered form when it is stated (in the first letter to Stillingfleet) that the idea of substance as the ‘general indetermined idea of _something_ is by the abstraction of the mind derived from the simple ideas of sensation and reflection.’ Now ‘abstraction’ with Locke means the ‘separation of an idea from all other ideas that accompany it in its real existence.’ (Book II. chap. xii. sec. 1.) It is clear then that it is impossible to abstract an idea which is not _there_, in real existence, to be abstracted. Accordingly, if the ‘general idea of something’ is derived by abstraction from simple ideas of sensation and reflection, it must be originally given with these ideas, or it would not afterwards be separated from them. Conversely they must carry this idea with them, and cannot be simple ideas at all, but compound ones, each made up of ‘the general idea of something or being,’ and of an accident which this something supports. How then does the general idea of substance or ‘something,’ _as derived_, differ from the idea of ‘something,’ as given in the original ideas of sensation and reflection from which the supposed process of abstraction starts? What can be said of the one that cannot be said of the other? If the derived general idea is of something related to qualities, what, according to Locke, are the original ideas but those of qualities related to something? It is true that the general idea is of something, of which nothing further is known, related to qualities in general, not to any particular qualities. But the ‘simple idea’ in like manner can only be of an indeterminate quality, for in order to any determination of it, the idea must be put together with another idea, and so cease to be simple; and the ‘something,’ to which it is referred, must for the same reason be a purely indeterminate something. If, in order to avoid concluding that Locke thus unwittingly identified the abstract general idea of substance with any simple idea, we say that the simple idea, because not abstract, is not indeterminate but of a real quality, defined by manifold relations, we fall upon the new difficulty that, if so, not only does the simple idea become manifoldly complex, but just such an ‘idea of a particular sort of substance’ as, according to Locke, is derived from the derived idea of substance in general. As an idea of a quality, it is also necessarily an idea of a correlative ‘something;’ and if it is an idea of a quality in its reality, _i.e._ as determined by various relations, it must be an idea of a variously qualified something, _i.e._ of a particular substance. Then not merely the middle of the twofold process by which we are supposed to get at ‘complex ideas of substances’--_i.e._ the _abstract_ something; but its end--_i.e._ the _particular_ something--turns out to be the same as its beginning.

Doctrine of abstraction inconsistent with doctrine of complex ideas.

40. The fact is, that in making the general idea of substance precede particular ideas of sorts of substances (as he certainly however confusedly does, in the 23rd chapter of the Second Book, [1] as well as by implication in his doctrine of modes. Book II. chap. xii. sec. 4), Locke stumbled upon a truth which he was not aware of, and which will not fit into his ordinary doctrine of general ideas: the truth that knowledge is a process from the more abstract to the more concrete, not the reverse, as is commonly supposed, and as Locke’s definition of abstraction implies. Throughout his prolix discussion of ‘substance’ and ‘essence’ we find two opposite notions perpetually cross each other: one that knowledge begins with the simple idea, the other that it begins with the real thing as particularized by manifold relations. According to the former notion, simple ideas being given, void of relation, as the real, the mind of its own act proceeds to bring them into relation and compound them: according to the latter, a thing of various properties (_i.e._ relations [2]) being given as the real, the mind proceeds to separate these from each other. According to the one notion the intellectual process, as one of complication, ends just where, according to the other notion, as one of abstraction, it began.

[1] See above, paragraph 35.

[2] Cf. Book II. chap, xxiii. sec. 37. Most of the simple ideas that make up our complex ideas of substances are only powers ... _e.g._ the greater part of the ideas which make up our complex idea of gold ... are nothing else _but so many relations to other substances_.’

The confusion covered by use of ‘particulars’.

41. The chief verbal equivocation, under which Locke disguises the confusion of these two notions, is to be found in the use of the word ‘particular,’ which is sometimes used for the mere individual having no community with anything else, sometimes for the thing qualified by relation to a multitude of other things. The simple idea or sensation; the ‘something’ which the simple idea is supposed to ‘report,’ and which Locke at his pleasure identifies with it; the complex idea; and the thing as the collection of the properties which the simple idea ‘reports,’ all are merged by Locke under the one term ‘particulars.’ As the only consistency in his use of the term seems to lie in its opposition to ‘generals,’ we naturally turn to the passage where this opposition is spoken of most at large.

Locke’s account of abstract general ideas.

42. ‘General and universal belong not to the real existence of things, but are the inventions and creatures of the understanding, made by it for its own use, and concern only signs, whether words or ideas. Words are general when used for signs of general ideas, and so are applicable indifferently to many particular things; and ideas are general, when they are set up as the representatives of many particular things; but universality belongs not to things themselves, which are all of them particular in their existence, even those words and ideas which in their signification are general. When therefore we quit particulars, the generals that rest are only creatures of our own making, their general nature being nothing but the capacity they are put into by the understanding, of signifying or representing many particulars. For the signification they have is nothing but a relation that by the mind of man is added to them. ... The sorting of things under names is the workmanship of the understanding, taking occasion from the similitude it observes among them to make abstract general ideas, and set them up in the mind, with names annexed to them, as patterns or forms (for in that sense the word form has a very proper signification), to which as particular things are found to agree, so they come to be of that species, have that denomination, or are put into that classis. For when we say this is a man, that a horse; this justice, that cruelty, what do we else but rank things under different specific names, as agreeing to those abstract ideas, of which we have made those names the signs? And what are the essences of those species, set out and marked by names, but those abstract ideas in the mind; which are, as it were, the bonds between particular things that exist, and the names they are to be ranked under?’ (Book III. chap. iii. secs. 11 and 13.)

‘Things not general.’

43. In the first of these remarkable passages we begin with the familiar opposition between ideas as ‘the creatures of the mind’ and real things. Ideas, and the words which express them, may be general, but things cannot. ‘They are all of them particular in their existence.’ Then the ideas and words themselves appear as things, and as such ‘in their existence’ can only be particular. It is only in its signification, _i.e._ in its relation to other ideas which it represents, that an idea, particular itself, becomes general, and this relation does not belong to the ‘existence’ of the idea or to the idea in itself, but ‘by the mind of man is added to it.’ The relation being thus a fictitious addition to reality, ‘general and universal are mere inventions and creatures of the understanding.’ The next passage, in spite of the warning that all ideas are particular in their existence, still speaks of general ideas, but only as ‘set up in the mind.’ To these ‘particular things existing are found to agree,’ and the agreement is expressed in such judgments as ‘this is a man, that a horse; this is justice, that cruelty;’ the ‘this’ and ‘that’ representing ‘particular existing things,’ ‘horse’ and ‘cruelty’ abstract general ideas to which these are found to agree.

Generality an invention of the mind.

44. One antithesis is certainly maintained throughout these passages--that between ‘real existence which is always particular, and the workmanship of the mind,’ which ‘invents’ generality. Real existence, however, is ascribed _(a)_ to things themselves, _(b)_ to words and ideas, even those which become of general signification, _(c)_ to mixed modes, for in the proposition ‘this is justice,’ the ‘this’ must represent a mixed mode. (Cf. II. xii. 5.) The characteristic of the ‘really existent,’ which distinguishes it from the workmanship of the mind, would seem to be mere individuality, exclusive of all relation. The simple ‘this’ and ‘that,’ apart from the relation expressed in the judgment, being mere individuals, are really existent; and conversely, ideas, which in themselves have real existence, when a relation, in virtue of which they become significant, has been ‘added to them by the mind,’ become ‘inventions of the understanding.’ This consists with the express statement in the chapter on ‘relation’ (II. xxv. 8), that it is ‘not contained in the existence of things, but is something extraneous and superinduced.’ Thus generality, as a relation between any one of a multitude of _single_ (not necessarily _simple_) ideas, _e.g._ single ideas of horses, and all the rest--a relation which belongs not to any one of them singly--is superinduced by the understanding upon their _real_, _i.e._ their _single_ existence. Apart from this relation, it would seem, or in their mere singleness, even ideas of mixed modes, _e.g._ _this act_ of justice, may have real existence.

The result is, that the feeling of each moment is alone real.

45. The result of Locke’s statement, thus examined, clearly is that real existence belongs to the present momentary act of consciousness, and to that alone. Ascribed as it is to the ‘thing itself,’ to the idea which, _as general_, has it not, and to the mixed mode, it is in each case the momentary presence to consciousness that constitutes it. To a thing itself, as distinct from the presentation to consciousness, it cannot belong, for such a ‘thing’ means that which remains identical with itself under manifold appearances, and both identity and appearance imply relation, _i.e._ ‘an invention of the mind.’ As little can it belong to the _content_ of any idea, since this is in all cases constituted by relation to other ideas. Thus if I judge ‘this is sweet,’ the real existence lies in the simple ‘this,’ in the mere form of presentation at an individual _now_, not in the relation of this to other flavours which constitutes the determinate sweetness, or to a sweetness at other times tasted. If I judge ‘this is a horse,’ a present vision really exists, but not so its relation to other sensations of sight or touch, closely precedent or sequent, which make up the ‘total impression;’ much less its relation to other like impressions thought of, in consideration of which a common name is applied to it. If, again, I judge ‘this is an act of justice,’ the present thought of the act, as present, really exists; not so those relations of the act which either make it just, or make me apply the name to it. It is true that according to this doctrine the ‘really existent’ is the unmeaning, and that any statement about it is impossible. We cannot judge of it without bringing it into relation, in which it ceases to be what in its mere singleness it is, and thus loses its reality, overlaid by the ‘invention of the understanding.’ Nay, if we say that it is the mere ‘this’ or ‘that,’ as such--the simple ‘here’ and ‘now’--the very ‘this,’ in being mentioned or judged of, becomes related to other things which we have called ‘this,’ and the ‘now’ to other ‘nows.’ Thus each acquires a generality, and with it becomes fictitious. As Plato long ago taught--though the lesson seems to require to be taught anew to each generation of philosophers--a consistent sensationalism must be speechless. Locke, himself, in one of the passages quoted, implicitly admits this by indicating that only through relations or in their generality are ideas ‘significant.’

How Locke avoids this result.

46. He was not the man, however, to become speechless out of sheer consistency. He has a redundancy of terms and tropes for disguising from himself and his reader the real import of his doctrine. In the latter part of the passage quoted we find that the relation or community between ideas, which the understanding invents, is occasioned by a ‘similitude which it observes among things.’ The general idea having been thus invented, ‘things are found to agree with it’--as is natural since they suggested it. Hereupon we are forced to ask how, if all relation is superinduced upon real existence by the understanding, an _observed_ relation of similitude among things can occasion the superinduction; and again how it happens, if all generality of ideas is a fiction of the mind, that ‘things are found to agree with general ideas.’ How can the real existence called ‘this’ or ‘that,’ which only really exists so far as nothing can be said of it but that it is ‘this’ or ‘that,’ agree with anything whatever? Agreement implies some content, some determination by properties, _i.e._ by relations, in the things agreeing, whereas the really existent excludes relation. How then can it agree with the abstract general idea, the import of which, according to Locke’s own showing, depends solely on relation?

The ‘particular’ was to him the individual qualified by general relations.

47. Such questions did not occur to Locke, because while asserting the mere individuality of things existent, and the simplicity of all ideas as _given_, _i.e._ as real, he never fully recognised the meaning of his own assertion. Under the shelter of the ambiguous ‘particular’ he could at any time substitute for the _mere_ individual the _determinate_ individual, or individual qualified by community with other things; just as, again, under covering of the ‘simple idea’ he could substitute for the mere momentary consciousness the perception of a definite thing. Thus when he speaks of the judgment ‘this is gold’ as expressing the agreement of a real (_i.e._ individual) thing with a general idea, he thinks of ‘this’ a& already having, apart from the judgment, the determination which it first receives in the judgment. He thinks of it, in other words, not as the mere ‘perishing’ sensation [1] or individual void of relation, but as a sensation symbolical of other possibilities of sensation which, as so many relations of a _thing_ to us or to other things, are connoted by the common noun ‘gold.’ It thus ‘agrees’ with the abstract idea or conception of qualities, _i.e._ because it is already the ‘creature of the understanding,’ determined by relations which constitute a generality and community between it and other things. Such a notion of the really existent thing--wholly inconsistent with his doctrine of relation and of the general--Locke has before him when he speaks of general ideas as formed by abstraction of certain qualities from real things, or of certain ideas from other ideas that accompany them in real existence. ‘When some one first lit on a parcel of that sort of substance we denote by the word _gold_, ... its peculiar colour, perhaps, and weight were the first he abstracted from it, to make the complex idea of that species ... another perhaps added to these the ideas of fusibility and fixedness ... another its ductility and solubility in aqua regia. These, or part of these, put together, usually make the complex idea in men’s minds of that sort of body we call _gold_.’ (Book II. chap. xxxi. sec. 9.) Here the supposition is that a thing, multitudinously qualified, is given apart from any action of the understanding, which then proceeds to act in the way of successively detaching (‘abstracting’) these qualities and recombining them as the idea of a species. Such a recombination, indeed, would seem but wasted labour. The qualities are assumed to be already found by the understanding and found as in a thing; otherwise the understanding could not abstract them from it. Why should it then painfully put together in imperfect combination what has been previously given to it complete? Of the complex idea which results from the work of abstraction, nothing can be said but a small part of what is predicable of the known thing which the possibility of such abstraction presupposes.

[1] ‘All impressions are perishing existences.’--Hume. See below, paragraph 208.

This is the real thing from which abstraction is supposed to start.

48. ‘The complex idea of a species,’ spoken of in the passage last quoted, corresponds to what, in Locke’s theory of substance, is called the ‘idea of a particular sort of substance.’ In considering that theory we saw that, according to his account, the beginning of the process by which the ‘abstract idea of substance’ was formed, was either that abstract idea itself, the mere ‘something,’ or by a double contradiction the ‘complex idea of a particular sort of substance’ which yet we only come to have _after_ the abstract idea has been formed. In the passage now before us there is no direct mention of the abstraction of the ‘substratum,’ as such, but only of the quality, and hence there is no ambiguity about the paralogism. It is not a mere ‘something’ that the man ‘lights upon,’ and thus it is not this that holds the place at once of the given and the derived but a something having manifold qualities to be abstracted. In other words, it is the ‘idea of a particular sort of substance’ that he starts from, and it is just this again to which as a ‘complex idea of a species,’ his understanding is supposed gradually to lead him. The understanding, indeed, according to Locke, is never adequate to nature, and accordingly the qualities abstracted and recombined in the complex idea always fall vastly short of the fulness of those given in the real thing; or as he states it in terms of the multiplication table (Book II. chap. xxxi. sec. 10), ‘some who have examined this species more accurately could, I believe, enumerate ten times as many properties in gold, all of them as inseparable from its internal constitution, as its colour or weight; and it is probable if any one knew all the properties that are by divers men known of this metal, there would an hundred times as many ideas go to the complex idea of gold, as any one man has yet in his; and yet perhaps that would not be the thousandth part of what is to be discovered in it.’ These two million properties, and upwards, which await abstraction in gold, are all, it must be noted, according to Locke’s statement elsewhere (Book II. chap xxiii. sec. 37), ‘nothing but so many relations to other substances.’ It is just on account of these multitudinous relations of the real thing that the understanding is inadequate to its comprehension. Yet according to Locke’s doctrine of relation these must all be themselves ‘superinductions of the mind,’ and the greater the fulness which they constitute, the further is the distance from the _mere_ individuality which elsewhere, in contrast with the fictitiousness of ‘generals,’ appears as the equivalent of real existence.

Yet, according to the doctrine of relation, a creation of thought.

49. The real thing and the creation of the understanding thus change places. That which is given to the understanding as the real, which it finds and does not make, is not now the bare atom upon which relations have to be artificially superinduced. Nor is it the mere present feeling, which has ‘by the mind of man’ to be made ‘significant,’ or representative of past experience. It is itself an inexhaustible complex of relations, whether they are considered as subsisting between it and other things, or between the sensations which it is ‘fitted to produce in us.’ These are the real, which is thus a system, a community; and if the ‘general,’ as Locke says, is that which ‘has the capacity of representing many particulars,’ the real thing itself is general, for it represents--nay, is constituted by--the manifold particular feelings which, mediately or immediately, it excites in us. On the other hand, the invention of the understanding, instead of giving ‘significance’ or content to the mere individuality of the real, as it does according to Locke’s theory of ‘generals,’ now appears as detaching fragments from the fulness of the real to recombine them in an ‘abstract essence’ of its own. Instead of adding complexity to the simple, it subtracts from the complex.

Summary of the above contradictions.

50. To gather up, then, the lines of contradiction which traverse Locke’s doctrine of real existence as it appears in his account of general and complex ideas:--The idea of substance is an abstract general idea, not given directly in sensation or reflection, but ‘invented by the understanding,’ as by consequence must be ideas of particular sorts of substances which presuppose the abstract idea. On the other hand, the ideas of sensation and reflection, from which the idea of substance is abstracted, and to which as _real_ it as an _invention_ is opposed, are ideas of ‘something,’ and are only real as representative of something. But this idea of something = the idea of substance. Therefore the idea of substance is the presupposition, and the condition of the reality, of the very ideas from which it is said to be derived. Again, if the general idea of substance is got by abstraction, it must be originally given in conjunction with the ideas of sensation or reflection from which it is afterwards abstracted, _i.e._ separated. But in such conjunction it constitutes the ideas of particular sorts of substances. Therefore these latter ideas, which yet we ‘come to have’ after the general idea of substance, form the prior experience from which this general idea is abstracted. Further, this original experience, from which abstraction starts, being of ‘sorts of substances,’ and these sorts being constituted by relations, it follows that relation is given in the original experience. But that which is so given is ‘real existence’ in opposition to the invention of the understanding. Therefore these relations, and the community which they constitute, really exist. On the other hand, mere individuals alone really exist, while relations between them are superinduced by the mind. Once more, the simple idea given in sensation or reflection, as it is made _for_ not _by_ us, has or results from real existence, whereas general and complex ideas are the workmanship of the mind. But this workmanship consists in the abstraction of ideas from each other, and from that to which they are related as qualities. It thus presupposes at once the general idea of ‘something’ or substance, and the complex idea of qualities of the something. Therefore it must be general and complex ideas that are real, as made for and not by us, and that afford the inventive understanding its material. Yet if so--if they are _given_--why make them over again by abstraction and recomplication?

They cannot be overcome without violence to Locke’s fundamental principles.

51. We may get over the last difficulty, indeed, by distinguishing between the complex and confused, between abstraction and analysis. We may say that what is originally given in experience is the confused, which to us is simple, or in other words has no definite content, because, till it has been analysed, nothing can be said of it, though in itself it is infinitely complex; that thus the process, which Locke roughly calls abstraction, and which, as he describes it, consists merely in taking grains from the big heap that is given in order to make a little heap of one’s own, is yet, rightly understood, the true process of knowledge--a process which may be said at once to begin with the complex and to end with it, to take from the concrete and to constitute it, because it begins with that which is in itself the fulness of reality, but which only becomes so for us as it is gradually spelt out by our analysis. To put the case thus, however, is not to correct Locke’s statement, but wholly to change his doctrine. It renders futile his easy method of ‘sending a man to his senses’ for the discovery of reality, and destroys the supposition that the elements of knowledge can be ascertained by the interrogation of the individual consciousness. Such consciousness can tell nothing of its own beginning, if of this beginning, as of the purely indefinite, nothing can be said; if it only becomes defined through relations, which in its state of primitive potentiality are not actually in it. The senses again, so far from being, in that mere passivity which Locke ascribes to them, organs of ready-made reality, can have nothing to tell, if it is only through the active processes of ‘discerning, comparing, and compounding,’ that they acquire a definite content. But to admit this is nothing else than, in order to avoid a contradiction of which Locke was not aware, to efface just that characteristic of his doctrine which commends it to ‘common sense’--the supposition, namely, that the simple datum of sense, as it is for sense or in its mere individuality, is the real, in opposition to the ‘invention of the mind.’ That this supposition is to make the real the unmeaning, the empty, of which nothing can be said, he did not see because, under an unconscious delusion of words, even while asserting that the names of simple ideas are undefinable (Book III. chap. iv. sec. 4), which means that nothing can be said of such ideas, and while admitting that the processes of discerning, comparing, and compounding ideas, which mean nothing else than the bringing them into relation [1] or the superinduction upon them of fictions of the mind, are necessary to constitute even the beginnings of knowledge, he yet allows himself to invest the simple idea, as the real, with those definite qualities which can only accrue to it, according to his showing, from the ‘inventive’ action of the understanding.

[1] Locke only states this explicitly of comparison, ‘an operation of the mind about its ideas, upon which depends all that large tribe of ideas, comprehended under relation.’ (Book II. chap. xi. sec. 4.) It is clear, however, that the same remark must apply to the ‘discernment of ideas,’ which is strictly correlative to comparison, and to their composition, which means that they are brought into relation as constituents of a whole.

That these three processes are necessary to constitute the beginnings of knowledge, according to Locke, appears from Book II. chap. xi. sec. 15, taken in connection with what precedes in that chapter.

As real existence, the simple idea carries with it ‘invented’ relation of cause.

52. Thus invested, it is already substance or symbolical of substance, not a mere feeling but a felt thing, recognised either under that minimum of qualification which enables us merely to say that it is ‘something,’ or (in Locke’s language) abstract substance, or under the greater complication of qualities which constitutes a ‘particular sort of substance’--gold, horse, water, &c. Real existence thus means substance. It is not the simple idea or sensation by itself that is real, but this idea as caused by a thing. It is the thing that is primarily the real; the idea only secondarily so, because it results from a power in the thing. As we have seen, Locke’s doctrine of the necessary adequacy, reality, and truth of the simple idea turns upon the supposition that it is, and announces itself as, an ‘ectype’ of an ‘archetype.’ But there is not a different archetype to each sensation; if there were, in ‘reporting’ it the sensation would do no more than report itself. It is the supposed single cause of manifold different sensations or simple ideas, to which a single name is applied. ‘If sugar produce in us the ideas which we call whiteness and sweetness, we are sure there is a power in sugar to produce those ideas in our minds. ... And so each sensation answering the power that operates on any of our senses, the idea so produced is a real idea (and not a fiction of the mind, which has no power to produce any single idea), and cannot but be adequate ... and so all simple ideas are adequate.’ (Book II. chap. xxxi. sec. 2.) The sugar, which is here the ‘archetype’ and the source of reality in the idea, is just what Locke elsewhere calls ‘a particular sort of substance,’ as the ‘something’ from which a certain set of sensations result, and in which, as sensible qualities, they inhere. Strictly speaking, however, according to Locke, that which inheres in the thing is not the quality, as it is to us, but a power to produce it. (Book II. chap. viii. sec. 28, and c. xxiii. 37.)

Correlativity of cause and substance.

53. In calling a sensation or idea the product of a power, substance is presupposed just as much as in calling it a sensible quality; only that with Locke ‘quality’ conveyed the notion of inherence in the substance, power that of relation to an effect not _in_ the substance itself. ‘Secondary qualities are nothing but the powers which _substances_ have to produce several ideas in us by our senses, which ideas are not in the things themselves, otherwise than as anything is in its cause.’ (Book II. chap, xxiii. sec. 9.) ‘Most of the simple ideas, that make up our complex ideas of substances, are only powers ... or relations to other substances (or, as he explains elsewhere, ‘relations to our perceptions,’ [1]), and are not really in the substance considered barely in itself.’ (Book II. chap, xxiii. sec. 37, and xxxi. 8.) That this implies the inclusion of the idea of cause in that of substance, appears from Locke’s statement that ‘whatever is considered by us to operate to the producing any particular simple idea which did not before exist, hath thereby in our minds the relation of a cause.’ (Book II. chap. xxvi. sec. 1.) Thus to be conscious of the reality of a simple idea, as that which is not made by the subject of the idea, but results from a power in a thing, is to have the idea of substance as cause. This latter idea must be the condition of the consciousness of reality. If the consciousness of reality is implied in the beginning of knowledge, so must the correlative ideas be of cause and substance.

[1] Book II. chap. xxi. sec. 3.

How do we know that ideas correspond to reality of things? Locke’s answer.

54. On examining Locke’s second rehearsal of his theory in the fourth book of the Essay--that ‘On Knowledge’--we are led to this result quite as inevitably as in the book ‘On Ideas.’ He has a special chapter on the ‘reality of human knowledge,’ where he puts the problem thus:--‘It is evident the mind knows not things immediately, but only by the intervention of the ideas it has of them. Our knowledge therefore is real only so far as there is a conformity between our ideas and the reality of things. But what shall be here the criterion? How shall the mind, when it perceives nothing but its own ideas, know that they agree with things themselves?’ (Book IV. chap. iv. sec. 3.) It knows this, he proceeds to show, in the case of simple ideas, because ‘since the mind can by no means make them to itself, they must be the product of things operating on the mind in a natural way. ... Simple ideas are not fictions of our fancies, but the natural and regular productions of things without us, really operating upon us; and so carry with them all the conformity which is intended, or which our state requires, for they represent to us things under those appearances which they are fitted to produce in us; whereby we are enabled to distinguish the sorts of particular substances,’ &c. &c. (Book IV. chap. iv. sec. 4.) The whole force of this passage depends on the notion that simple ideas are already to the subject of them not his own making, but the product of a thing, which in its relation to these ideas is a ‘particular sort of substance.’ It is the reception of such ideas, so related, that Locke calls ‘sensitive knowledge of particular existence,’ or a ‘perception of the mind, employed about the particular existence of finite beings without us.’ (Book IV. chap. ii. sec. 14.) This, however, he distinguishes from two other ‘degrees of knowledge or certainty,’ ‘intuition’ and ‘demonstration,’ of which the former is attained when the agreement or disagreement of two ideas is perceived immediately, the latter when it is perceived mediately through the intervention of certain other agreements or disagreements (less or more), each of which must in turn be perceived immediately. Demonstration, being thus really but a series of intuitions, carries the same certainty as intuition, only it is a certainty which it requires more or less pains and attention to apprehend. (Book IV. chap. ii. sec. 4.) Of the ‘other perception of the mind, employed about the particular existence of finite beings without us,’ which ‘passes under the name of knowledge,’ he explains that although ‘going beyond bare probability, it reaches not perfectly to either of the foregoing degrees of certainty.’ ‘There can be nothing more certain,’ he proceeds, ‘than that the idea we receive from an external object is in our minds; this is intuitive knowledge. But whether there be anything more than barely that idea in our minds, whether we can thence certainly infer the existence of anything without us which corresponds to that idea, is that whereof some men think there may be a question made; because men may have such ideas in their minds, when no such thing exists, no such object affects their senses.’ (Book IV. chap. ii. sec. 14.)

It assumes that simple ideas are consciously referred to things that cause them.

55. It is clear that here in his very statement of the question Locke begs the answer. If the intuitive certainty is that ‘the idea we _receive from an external object_ is in our minds,’ [1] how is it possible to doubt whether such an object exists and affects our senses? This impossibility of speaking of the simple idea, except as received from an object, may account for Locke’s apparent inconsistency in finding the assurance of the reality of knowledge (under the phrase ‘evidence of the senses’) just in that ‘perception’ which reaches not to intuitive or demonstrative certainty, and only ‘passes under the name of knowledge.’ In the passage just quoted he shows that he is cognizant of the distinction between the simple idea and the perception of an existence corresponding to it, and in consequence distinguishes this perception from proper intuition, but in the very statement of the distinction it eludes him. The simple idea, as he speaks of it, becomes itself, as consciously ‘received from an external object,’ the perception of existence; just as we have previously seen it become the judgment of identity or perception of the ‘agreement of an idea with itself,’ which is his first kind of knowledge.

[1] I do not now raise the question, What are here the ideas, which must be immediately perceived to agree or disagree in order to make it a case of ‘intuitive certainty’ or knowledge according to Locke’s definition. See below, paragraphs 59, 101, and 147.

Lively ideas real, because they must be effects of things.

56. In short, with Locke the simple idea, the perception of existence corresponding to the idea, and the judgment of identity, are absolutely merged, and in mutual involution, sometimes under one designation, sometimes under another, are alike presented as the beginning of knowledge. As occasion requires, each does duty for the other. Thus, if the ‘reality of knowledge’ be in question, the simple idea, which is given, is treated as involving the perception of existence, and the reality is established. If in turn this perception is distinguished from the simple idea, and it is asked whether the correspondence between idea and existence is properly matter of knowledge, the simple idea has only to be treated as involving the judgment of identity, which again involves that of existence, and the question is answered. So in the context under consideration (Book IV. chap. ii. sec. 14), after raising the question as to the existence of a thing corresponding to the idea, he answers it by the counter question, ‘whether anyone is not invincibly conscious to himself of a different perception, when he looks on the sun by day, and thinks on it by night; when he actually tastes wormwood, or smells a rose, or only thinks on that savour or odour? We as plainly find the difference there is between any idea revived in our minds by our own memory, and actually coming into our minds by our senses, as we do between any two distinct ideas.’ The force of the above lies in its appeal to the perception of identity, or--to apply the language in which Locke describes this perception--the knowledge that the idea which a man calls the smell of a rose is the very idea it is. [1] The mere difference in liveliness between the present and the recalled idea, which, as Berkeley and Hume rightly maintained, is the only difference between them as mere ideas, cannot by itself constitute the difference between the knowledge of the presence of a thing answering to the idea and the knowledge of its absence. It can only do this if the more lively idea is _identified_ with past lively ideas as a representation of one and the same thing which ‘agrees with itself’ in contrast to the multiplicity of the sensations, its signs. Only in virtue of this identification can either the liveliness of the idea show that the thing--the sun or the rose--is there, or the want of liveliness that it is not, for without it there would be no thing to be there or not to be there. It is because this identification is what Locke understands by the first sort of perception of agreement between ideas, and because he virtually finds this perception again in the simple idea, that the simple idea is to him the index of reality. But if so, the idea in its primitive simplicity is the sign of a thing that is ever the same in the same relations, and we find the ‘workmanship of the mind,’ its inventions of substance, cause, and relation, in the very rudiments of knowledge.

[1] See above, paragraph 25.

Present sensation gives knowledge of existence.

57. With that curious tendency to reduplication, which is one of his characteristics, Locke, after devoting a chapter to the ‘reality of human knowledge,’ of which the salient passage as to simple ideas has been already quoted, has another upon our ‘knowledge of existence.’ Here again it is the sensitive knowledge of things actually present to our senses, which with him is merely a synonym for the simple idea, that is the prime criterion. (Book IV. chap. iii. secs. 5 and 2, and chap. ii. sec. 2.) After speaking of the knowledge of our own being and of the existence of a God (about which more will be said below), he proceeds, ‘No particular man can know the existence of any other being, but only when, by actually operating upon him, it makes itself perceived by him. For the having the idea of anything in our mind no more proves the existence of that thing, than the picture of a man evidences his being in the world, or the visions of a dream make thereby a true history. It is therefore the actual receiving of ideas from without, that gives us notice of the existence of other things, and makes us know that something doth exist at that time without us, which causes that idea in us, though perhaps we neither know nor consider how it does it; for it takes not from the certainty of our senses and the ideas we receive by them, that we know not the manner wherein they are produced; _e.g._ whilst I write this, I have, by the paper affecting my eyes, that idea produced in my mind, which, whatever object causes, I call _white_; by which I know that the quality or accident (_i.e._ whose appearance before my eyes always causes that idea) doth really exist, and hath a being without me. And of this the greatest assurance. I can possibly have, and to which my faculties can attain, is the testimony of my eyes, which are the proper and sole judges of this thing, whose testimony I have reason to rely on, as so certain, that I can no more doubt whilst I write this, that I see white and black, and that something really exists that causes that sensation in me, than that I write and move my hand.’ (Book IV. chap. xi. secs. 1, 2.)

Reasons why its testimony must be trusted.

58. Reasons are afterwards given for the assurance that the ‘perceptions’ in question are produced in us by ‘exterior causes affecting our senses.’ The first _(a)_ is, that ‘those that want the organs of any sense never can have the ideas belonging to that sense produced in their mind.’ The next _(b)_, that whereas ‘if I turn my eyes at noon toward the sun, I cannot avoid the ideas which the light or the sun then produces in me;’ on the other hand, ‘when my eyes are shut or windows fast, as I can at pleasure recall to my mind the ideas of light or the sun, which former sensations had lodged in my memory, so I can at pleasure lay them by.’ Again _(c)_, ‘many of those ideas are produced in us with pain which afterwards we remember without the least offence. Thus the pain of heat or cold, when the idea of it is revived in our minds, gives us no disturbance; which, when felt, was very troublesome, and is again, when actually repeated; which is occasioned by the disorder the external object causes in our body, when applied to it.’ Finally (d), ‘our senses in many cases bear witness to the truth of each other’s report, concerning the existence of sensible things without us. He that sees a fire may, if he doubt whether it be anything more than a bare fancy, feel it too.’ Then comes the conclusion, dangerously qualified: ‘When our senses do actually convey into our understandings any idea, we cannot but be satisfied that there doth something at that time really exist without us, which doth affect our senses, and by them give notice of itself to our apprehensive faculties, and actually produce that idea which we then perceive; and we cannot so far distrust their testimony as to doubt that such collections of simple ideas, as we have observed by our senses to be united together, actually exist together. But this knowledge extends as far as the present testimony of our senses, employed about particular objects, that do then affect them, and no farther. For if I saw such a collection of simple ideas as is wont to be called man, existing together one minute since, and am now alone; I cannot be certain that the same man exists now, since there is no necessary connexion of his existence a minute since with his existence now. By a thousand ways he may cease to be, since I had the testimony of my senses for his existence.’ (Book IV. chap. xi. sec. 9.)

How does this account fit Locke’s definition of knowledge?

59. Upon the ‘knowledge of the existence of things,’ thus established, it has to be remarked in the first place that, after all, according to Locke’s explicit statement, it is not properly knowledge. It is ‘an assurance that deserves the name of knowledge’ (Book IV. chap. ii. sec. 14, and xi. sec. 3), yet being neither itself an intuition of agreement between ideas, nor resoluble into a series of such intuitions, the definition of knowledge excludes it. Only if existence were itself an ‘idea,’ would the consciousness of the agreement of the idea with it be a case of knowledge; but to make existence an idea is to make the whole question about the agreement of ideas, as such, with existence, as such, unmeaning. To seek escape from this dilemma by calling the consciousness of the agreement in question an ‘assurance’ instead of knowledge is a mere verbal subterfuge. There can be no assurance of agreement between an idea and that which is no object of consciousness at all. If, however, existence is an object of consciousness, it can, according to Locke, be nothing but an idea, and the question as to the _assurance_ of agreement is no less unmeaning than the question as to the _knowledge_ of it. The raising of the question in fact, as Locke puts it, implies the impossibility of answering it. It cannot be raised with any significance, unless existence is external to and other than an idea. It cannot be answered unless existence is, or is given in, an object of consciousness, _i.e._ an idea.

Locke’s account of the testimony of sense renders his question as to its veracity superfluous.

60. As usual, Locke disguises this difficulty from himself, because in answering the question he alters it. The question, _as he asks it_, is whether, given the idea, we can have posterior assurance of something else corresponding to it. The question, _as he answers it_, is whether the idea includes the consciousness of a real thing as a constituent; and the answer consists in the simple assertion, variously repeated, that it does. It is clear, however, that this answer to the latter question does not answer, but renders unmeaning, the question as it is originally asked. If, according to Locke’s own showing, there is nowhere for anything to be found by us but in our ‘ideas’ or our consciousness--if the _thing_ is given in and with the idea, so that the idea is merely the thing _ex parte nostrâ_--then to ask if the idea agrees with the thing is as futile as to ask whether hearing agrees with sound, or the voice with the words it utters. That the thing is so given is implied throughout Locke’s statement of the ‘assurance we have of the existence of material beings,’ as well as of the confirmations of this assurance. If the ‘idea which I call white’ means the knowledge that ‘the property or accident (_i.e._ whose appearance before my eyes always causes that idea) doth really exist and hath a being without me,’ then consciousness of existence--outward, permanent, substantive, and causative existence--is involved in the idea, and no ulterior question of agreement between idea and existence can properly arise. But unless the simple idea is so interpreted, the senses have no testimony to give. If it is so interpreted, no extraneous ‘reason to rely upon the testimony’ can be discovered, for such reason can only be a repetition of the testimony itself.

Confirmations of the testimony turn upon the distinction between ‘impression’ and ‘idea’.

61. This becomes clearer upon a view of the confirmations of the testimony, as Locke gives them. They all, we may remark by the way, presuppose a distinction between the simple idea as originally represented and the same as recalled or revived. This distinction, fixed by the verbal one between ‘impression’ and ‘idea,’ we shall find constantly maintained and all-important in Hume’s system; but in Locke, though upon it (as we shall see) rests his distinction between real and nominal essence and his confinement of general knowledge to the latter, it seems only to turn up as an afterthought. In the account of the reality and adequacy of ideas it does not appear at all. There the distinction is merely between the simple idea, as such, and the complex, as such, without any further discrimination of the simple idea as originally produced from the same as recalled. So, too, in the opening account of the reception of simple ideas (Book II. chap. xii. sec. 1), ‘Perception,’ ‘Retention,’ and ‘Discerning’ are all reckoned together as alike forms of the _passivity_ of the mind, in contrast with its activity in combination and abstraction, though retention and discerning have been previously described in terms which imply activity. In the ‘confirmations’ before us, however, the distinction between the originally produced and the revived is essential.

They depend on language which presupposes the ascription of sensation to an outward cause.

62. The first turns upon the impossibility of producing an idea _de novo_ without the action of sensitive organs; the two next upon the difference between the idea as produced through these organs and the like idea as revived at the will of the individual. It is hence inferred that the idea as originally produced is the work of a thing, which must exist _in rerum naturâ_, and by way of a fourth ‘confirmation’ the man who doubts this in the case of one sensation is invited to try it in another. If, on seeing a fire, he thinks it ‘bare fancy,’ _i.e._ doubts whether his idea is caused by a thing, let him put his hand into it. This last ‘confirmation’ need not be further noticed here, since the operation of a producing thing is as certain or as doubtful for one sensation as for another. [1] Two certainties are not more sure than one, nor can two doubts make a certainty. The other ‘confirmations’ alike lie in the words ‘product’ and ‘organ.’ A man has a certain ‘idea:’ afterwards he has another like it, but differing in liveliness and in the accompanying pleasure or pain. If he already has, or if the ideas severally bring with them, the idea of a producing outward thing to which parts of his body are organs, on the one hand, and of a self ‘having power’ on the other, then the liveliness, and the accompanying pleasure or pain, may become indications of the action of the thing, as their absence may be so of the action of the man’s self; but not otherwise. Locke throughout, in speaking of the simple ideas as produced or recalled, implies that they carry with them the consciousness of a cause, either an outward thing or the self, and only by so doing can he find in them the needful ‘confirmations’ of the ‘testimony of the senses.’ This testimony is confirmed just because it distinguishes of itself between the work of ‘nature,’ which is real, and the work of the man, which is a fiction. In other words, the confirmation is nothing else than the testimony itself--a testimony which, as we have seen, since it supposes consciousness, as such, to be consciousness _of a thing_, eliminates by anticipation the question as to the agreement of consciousness with things, as with the extraneous.

[1] To feel the object, in the sense of touching it, had a special significance for Locke, since touch with him was the primary ‘revelation’ of body, as the solid. More will be said of this when we come to consider his doctrine of ‘real essence,’ as constituted by primary qualities of body. See below, paragraph 101.

This ascription means the clothing of sensation with invented relations.

63. The distinction between the real and the fantastic, according to the passages under consideration, thus depends upon that between the work of nature and the work of man. It is the confusion between the two works that renders the fantastic possible, while it is the consciousness of the distinction that sets us upon correcting it. Where all is the work of man and professes to be no more, as in the case of ‘mixed modes,’ there is no room for the fantastic (Book II. chap. xxx. sec. 4, and Book IV. chap. iv. sec. 7); and where there is ever so much of the fantastic, it would not be so for us, unless we were conscious of a ‘work of nature,’ to which to oppose it. But on looking a little closer we find that to be conscious of an idea as the work of nature, in opposition to the work of man, is to be conscious of it under relations which, according to Locke, are the inventions of man. It is nothing else than to be conscious of it as the result of ‘something having power to produce it’ (Book II. chap. xxxi. sec. 2), _i.e._ of a substance, to which it is related as a quality. ‘Nature’ is just the ‘something we know not what,’ which is substance according to the ‘_abstract_ idea’ thereof. Producing ideas, it exercises powers, as it essentially belongs to substance to do, according to our _complex_ idea of it. (Book II. chap, xxiii. secs. 9, 10.) But substance, according to Locke, whether as abstract or complex idea, is the ‘workmanship of the mind,’ and power, as a relation (Book II. chap. xxi. sec. 3, and chap. xxv. sec. 8), ‘is not contained in the real existence of things.’ Again, the idea of substance, as a source of power, is the same as the idea of cause. ‘Whatever is considered by us to operate to the producing any particular simple idea, which did not before exist, hath thereby in our minds the relation of a cause.’ (Book II. chap. xxvi. sec. 1.) But the idea of cause is not one ‘that the mind has of things as they are in themselves,’ but one that it gets by its own act in ‘bringing things to, and setting them by, one another.’ (Book II. chap. xxv. sec. 1.) Thus it is with the very ideas, which are the workmanship of man, that the simple idea has to be clothed upon, in order to ‘testify’ to its being real, _i.e._ (in Locke’s sense) not the work of man.

What is meant by restricting the testimony of sense to _present_ existence?

64. Thus invested, the simple idea has clearly lost its simplicity. It is not the momentary, isolated consciousness, but the representation of a thing determined by relations to other things in an order of nature, and causing an infinite series of resembling sensations to which a common name is applied. Thus in all the instances of sensuous testimony mentioned in the chapter before us, it is not really a simple sensation that is spoken of, but a sensation referred to a thing--not a mere smell, or taste, or sight, or feeling, but the smell of a rose, the taste of a pine-apple, the sight of the sun, the feeling of fire. (Book IV. chap. xi. secs. 4-7.) Immediately afterwards, however, reverting or attempting to revert to his strict doctrine of the mere individuality of the simple idea, he says that the testimony of the senses is a ‘present testimony employed about particular objects, that do then affect them,’ and that sensitive knowledge extends no farther than such testimony. This statement, taken by itself, is ambiguous. Does it mean that sensation testifies to the momentary presence to the individual of a continuous existence, or is the existence itself as momentary as its presence to sense? The instance that follows does not remove the doubt. ‘If I saw such a collection of simple ideas as is wont to be called _man_, existing together one minute since, and am now alone; I cannot be certain that the same man exists now, since there is no necessary connection of his existence a minute since with his existence now.’ (Book IV. chap. xi. sec. 9.) At first sight, these words might seem to decide that the existence is merely coincident with the presence of the sensation--a decision fatal to the distinction between the real and fantastic, since, if the thing is only present with the sensation, there can be no combination of qualities in reality other than the momentary coincidence of sensations in us. Memory or imagination, indeed, might recall these in a different order from that in which they originally occurred; but, if this original order had no being after the occurrence, there could be no ground for contrasting it with the order of reproduction as the real with the merely apparent.

Such restriction, if maintained, would render the testimony unmeaning.

65. In the very sentence, however, where Locke restricts the testimony of sensation to existence present along with it, he uses language inconsistent with this restriction. The particular existence which he instances as ‘testified to’ is that of ‘such a collection of simple ideas as is wont to be called man.’ But these ideas can only be present in succession. (See Book II. chap. vii. sec. 9, and chap. xiv. sec. 3.) Even the surface of the man’s body can only be taken in by successive acts of vision; and, more obviously, the states of consciousness in which his qualities of motion and action are presented occupy separate times. If then sensation only testifies to an existence present along with it, how can it testify to the co-existence (say) of an erect attitude, of which I have a present sight, with the risibility which I saw a minute ago? How can the ‘collection of ideas wont to be called man,’ _as co-existing_, be formed at all? and, if it cannot, how can the present existence of an object so-called be testified to by sense any more than the past? The same doctrine, which is fatal to the supposition of ‘a necessary connexion between the man’s existence a minute since and his existence now,’ is in fact fatal to the supposition of his existence as a complex of qualities at all. It does not merely mean that, for anything we know, the man may have died. Of course he may, and yet there may be continuity of existence according to natural laws, though not one for which we have the testimony of present sense, between the living body and the dead. What Locke had in his mind was the notion that, as existence is testified to only by present sensation, and each sensation is merely individual and momentary, there could be no testimony to the continued existence of anything. He could not, however, do such violence to the actual fabric of knowledge as would have been implied in the logical development of this doctrine, and thus he allowed himself to speak of sense as testifying to the co-existence of sensible qualities in a thing, though the individual sensation could only testify to the presence of one at a time, and could never testify to their _nexus_ in a common cause at all. This testimony to co-existence in a present thing once admitted, he naturally allowed himself in the further assumption that the testimony, on its recurrence, is a testimony to the same co-existence and the same thing. The existence of the same man (he evidently supposes), to which sensation testified an hour ago, may be testified to by a like sensation now. This means that resemblance of sensation becomes identity of a thing--that like sensations occurring at different times are interpreted as representing the same thing, which continuously exists, though not testified to by sense, between the times.

But it is not maintained: the testimony is to operation of permanent identical things.

66. In short, as we have seen the simple idea of sensation emerge from Locke’s inquiry as to the beginning of knowledge transformed into the judgment, ‘I have an idea different from other ideas which I did not make for myself,’ so now from the inquiry as to the correspondence between knowledge and reality it emerges as the consciousness of a thing now acting upon me, which has continued to exist since it acted on me before, and in which, as in a common cause, have existed together powers to affect me which have never affected me together. If in the one form the operation of thought in sense, the ‘creation of the understanding’ within the simple idea, is only latent or potential, in the other it is actual and explicit. The relations of substance and quality, of cause and effect, and of identity--all ‘inventions of the mind’--are necessarily involved in the immediate, spontaneous testimony of passive sense.

Locke’s treatment of relations of cause and identity.

67. It will be noticed that it is upon the first of these, the relation of substance and quality, that our examination of Locke’s Essay has so far chiefly gathered. In this it follows the course taken by Locke himself. Of the idea of substance, _eo nomine_, he treats at large: of cause and identity (apart from the special question of personal identity) he says little. So, too, the ‘report of the senses’ is commonly exhibited as announcing the sensible qualities of a thing rather than the agency of a cause or continuity of existence. The difference, of course, is mainly verbal. Sensible qualities being, as Locke constantly insists, nothing but ‘powers to operate on our senses’ directly or indirectly, the substance or thing, as the source of these, takes the character of a cause. Again, as the sensible quality is supposed to be one and the same in manifold separate cases of being felt, it has identity in contrast with the variety of these cases, even as the thing has, on its part, in contrast with the variety of its qualities. Something, however, remains to be said of Locke’s treatment of the ideas of cause and identity in the short passages where he treats of them expressly. Here, too, we shall find the same contrast between the given and the invented, tacitly contradicted by an account of the given in terms of the invented.

That from which he derives idea of cause pre-supposes it.

68. The relation of cause and effect, according to Locke’s general statement as to relation, must be something ‘not contained in the real existence of things, but extraneous and superinduced.’ (Book II. chap. xxv. sec. 8.) It is a ‘complex idea,’ not belonging to things as they are in themselves, which the mind makes by its own act. (Book II. chap xii. secs. 1, 7, and chap. xxv. sec. 1.) Its origin, however, is thus described:--‘In the notice that our senses take of the constant vicissitude of things, we cannot but observe that several particular, both qualities and substances, begin to exist; and that they receive this their existence from the due application and operation of some other being. From this observation we get our ideas of cause and effect. That which produces any simple or complex idea we denote by the general name cause; and that which is produced, effect. Thus, finding that in that substance which we call wax, fluidity, which is a simple idea that was not in it before, is constantly produced by the application of a certain degree of heat, we call the simple idea of heat, in relation to fluidity in wax, the cause of it, and fluidity the effect. So, also, finding that the substance, wood, which is a certain collection of simple ideas so-called, by the application of fire is turned into another substance called ashes, _i.e._ another complex idea, consisting of a collection of simple ideas, quite different from that complex idea which we call wood; we consider fire, in relation to ashes, as cause, and the ashes as effect.’ Here we find that the ‘given,’ upon which the relation of cause and effect is ‘superinduced’ or from which the ‘idea of it is got’ (to give Locke the benefit of both expressions), professedly, according to the first sentence of the passage quoted, involves the complex or derived idea of substance. The sentence, indeed, is a remarkable instance of the double refraction which arises from redundant phraseology. Our senses are supposed to ‘take notice of a constant vicissitude of things,’ or substances. Thereupon we observe, what is necessarily implied in this vicissitude, a beginning of existence in substances or their qualities, ‘received from the due application or operation of some other being.’ Thereupon we infer, what is simply another name for existence thus given and received, a relation of cause and effect. Thus not only does the _datum_ of the process of ‘invention’ in question, _i.e._ the observation of change in a thing, involve a _derived_ idea, but a derived idea which presupposes just this process of invention.

Rationale of this ‘petitio principii’.

69. Here again it is necessary to guard against the notion that Locke’s obvious _petitio principii_ might be avoided by a better statement without essential change in his doctrine of ideas. It is true that ‘a notice of the vicissitude of things’ includes that ‘invention of the understanding’ which it is supposed to suggest, but state the primary knowledge otherwise--reduce the vicissitude of things, as it ought to be reduced, in order to make Locke consistent, to the mere multiplicity of sensations--and the appearance of suggestion ceases. Change or ‘vicissitude’ is quite other than mere diversity. It is diversity relative to something which maintains an identity. This identity, which ulterior analysis may find in a ‘law of nature,’ Locke found in ‘things’ or ‘substances.’ By the same unconscious subreption, by which with him a sensible thing takes the place of sensation, ‘vicissitude of things’ takes the place of multiplicity of sensations, carrying with it the observation that the changed state of the thing is due to something else. The mere multiplicity of sensations could convey no such ‘observation,’ any more than the sight of counters in a row would convey the notion that one ‘received its existence’ from the other. Only so far as the manifold appearances are referred, as its vicissitudes, to something which remains one, does any need of accounting for their diverse existence, or in consequence any observation of its derivation ‘from some other being,’ arise. Locke, it is true, after stating that it is upon a notice of the vicissitude of things that the observation in question rests, goes on to speak as if an _origination_ of substances, which is just the opposite of their vicissitude, might be observed; and the second instance of production which he gives--that of ashes upon the burning of wood--seems intended for an instance of the production of a substance, as distinct from the production of a quality. He is here, however, as he often does, using the term ‘substance’ loosely, for ‘a certain collection of simple ideas,’ without reference to the ‘substratum wherein they do subsist,’ which he would have admitted to be ultimately the same for the wood and for the ashes. The conception, indeed, of such a substratum, whether vaguely as ‘nature,’ or more precisely as a ‘real constitution of insensible parts’ (Book III. chap. iii. secs. 18, &c.), governed all his speculation, and rendered to him what he here calls _substance_ virtually a _mode_, and its production properly a ‘vicissitude.’

Relation of cause has to be put into sensitive experience in order to be got from it.

70. We thus find that it is only so far as simple ideas are referred to things--only so far as each in turn, to use Locke’s instance, is regarded as an appearance ‘in a substance which was not in it before’--that our sensitive experience, the supposed _datum_ of knowledge, is an experience of the vicissitudes of things; and again, that only as an experience of such vicissitude does it furnish the ‘observation from which we get our ideas of cause and effect.’ But the reference of a sensation to a sensible thing means its reference to a cause. In other words, the invented relation of cause and effect must be found in the primary experience in order that it may be got from it. [1]

[1] Locke’s contradiction of himself in regard to this relation might be exhibited in a still more striking light by putting side by side with his account of it his account of the idea of power. The two are precisely similar, the idea of power being represented as got by a notice of the alteration of simple ideas in things without (Book II. chap. xxi. sec. 1), just as the idea of cause and effect is. Power, too, he expressly says, is a relation. Yet, although the idea of it, both as derived and as of a relation, ought to be complex, he reckons it a simple and original one, and by using it interchangeably with ‘sensible quality’ makes it a primary _datum_ of sense.

Origin of the idea of identity according to Locke.

71. The same holds of that other ‘product of the mind,’ the relation of identity. This ‘idea’ according to Locke, is formed when, ‘considering anything as existing at any determined time and place, we compare it with itself existing at another time.’ ‘In this consists identity,’ he adds, ‘when the ideas it is attributed to, vary not at all from what they were that moment wherein we consider their former existence, and to which we compare the present; for we never finding nor conceiving it possible that two things of the same kind should exist in the same place at the same time, we rightly conclude that whatever exists anywhere, at any time, excludes all of the same kind, and is there itself alone. When, therefore, we demand whether anything be the same or no? it refers always to something that existed such a time in such a place, which it was certain at that instant was the same with itself, and no other; from whence it follows that one thing cannot have two beginnings of existence, nor two things one beginning; it being impossible for two things of the same kind to be or exist in the same instant in the very same place, or one and the same thing in different places. That, therefore, that had one beginning, is the same thing; and that which had a different beginning in time and place from that is not the same, but diverse.’ He goes on to inquire about the _principium individuationis_, which he decides is ‘existence itself, which determines a being of any sort to a particular time and place, incommunicable to two beings of the same kind ... for being at that instant what it is and nothing else, it is the same, and so must continue as long as its existence is continued; for so long it will be the same, and no other.’ (Book II. chap, xxvii. secs. 1-3).

Relation of identity not to be distinguished from idea of it.

72. It is essential to bear in mind with regard to identity, as with regard to cause and effect, that no distinction according to Locke can legitimately be made between the relation and the idea of the relation. As to substance, it is true, he was driven in his controversy with Stillingfleet to distinguish between ‘the being and the idea thereof,’ but in dealing with relation he does not attempt any such violence to his proper system. Between the ‘idea’ as such and ‘being’ as such, his ‘new way of ideas,’ as Stillingfleet plaintively called it, left no fair room for distinction. In this indeed lay its permanent value for speculative thought. The distinction by which alone it could consistently seek to replace the old one, so as to meet the exigencies of language and knowledge, was that between simple ideas, as given and necessarily real, and the reproductions or combinations in which the mind may alter them. But since every relation implies a putting together of ideas, and is thus always, as Locke avows, a complex idea or the work of the mind, a distinction between its being and the idea thereof, in that sense of the distinction in which alone it can ever be consistently admitted by Locke, was clearly inadmissible. Thus in the passages before us the relation of identity is not explicitly treated as an original ‘being’ or ‘existence,’ It is an idea formed by the mind upon a certain ‘consideration of things’ being or existent. But on looking closely at Locke’s account, we find that it is only so far as it already belongs to, nay constitutes, the things, that it is formed upon consideration of them.

This ‘invented’ relation forms the ‘very being of things’.

73. When it is said that the idea of identity, or of any other relation, is formed upon consideration of things as existing in a certain way, this is naturally understood to mean--indeed, otherwise it is unmeaning--that the things are first _known_ as existing, and that afterwards the idea of the relation in question is formed. But according to Locke, as we have seen, [1] the first and simplest act of knowledge possible is the perception of identity between ideas. Either then the ‘things,’ upon consideration of which the idea of identity is formed, are not known at all, or the knowledge of them involves the very idea afterwards formed on consideration of them. Locke, having at whatever cost of self-contradiction to make his theory fit the exigencies of language, virtually adopts the latter alternative, though with an ambiguity of expression which makes a definite meaning difficult to elicit. We have, however, the positive statement to begin with, that the comparison in which the relation originates, is of a thing with itself as existing at another time. Again, the ‘ideas’ (used interchangeably with ‘things’), to which identity is attributed, ‘vary not at all from what they were at that moment wherein we consider their former existence.’ It is here clearly implied that ‘things’ or ‘ideas’ _exist_, _i.e._ are given to us in the spontaneous consciousness which we do not make, as each one and the same throughout a multiplicity of times. This, again, means that the relation of identity or sameness, _i.e._ unity of thing under multiplicity of appearance, belongs to or consists in the ‘very being’ of those given objects of consciousness, which are in Locke’s sense the real, and upon which according to him all relation is superinduced by an after-act of thought. So long as each such object ‘continues to exist,’ so long its ‘sameness with itself must continue,’ and this sameness is the complex idea, the relation, of identity. Just as before, following Locke’s lead, we found the simple idea, as the element of knowledge, become complex--a perceived identity of ideas; so now mere existence, the ‘very being of things’ (which with Locke is only another name for the simple idea), resolves itself into a relation, which it requires ‘consideration by the mind’ to constitute.

[1] See above, paragraph 25.

Locke fails to distinguish between identity and mere unity.

74. The process of self-contradiction, by which a ‘creation of the mind’ finds its way into the real or given, must also appear in a contradictory conception of the real itself. Kept pure of all that Locke reckons intellectual fiction, it can be nothing but a simple chaos of individual units: only by the superinduction of relation can there be sameness, or continuity of existence, in the minutest of these for successive moments. Locke presents it arbitrarily under the conception of mere individuality or of continuity, according as its distinction from the work of the mind, or its intelligible content, happens to be before him. A like see-saw in his account of the individuality and generality of ideas has already been noticed. [1] In his discussion of identity the contradiction is partly disguised by a confusion between mere unity on the one hand, and sameness or unity in difference, on the other. Thus, after starting with an account of identity as belonging to ideas which are the same _at different times_, he goes on to speak of a thing as the same with itself, _at a single instant_. So, too, by the _principium individuationis_, he understands ‘existence itself, which determines a being of any sort to a particular time and place.’ As it is clear from the context that by the _principium individuationis_ he meant the source of identity or sameness, it will follow that by ‘sameness’ he understood singleness of a thing in a single time and place. Whence then the plurality, without which ‘sameness’ is unmeaning? In fact, Locke, having excluded it in his definition, covertly brings it back again in his instance, which is that of ‘an atom, _i.e._ a continued body under one immutable superficies, existing in a determined time and place.’ This, ‘considered in any instant of its existence, is in that instant the same with itself.’ But it is so because--and, if we suppose the consideration of plurality of _times_ excluded, only because--it is a ‘_continued_’ body, which implies, though its place be determined, that it exists _in a plurality of parts of space_. Either this plurality, or that of instants of its existence, must be recognised in contrast with the unity of body, if this unity is to become ‘sameness with itself.’ In adding that not only at the supposed instant is the atom the same, but ‘so must continue as long as its existence continues,’ Locke shows that he really thought of the identical body under a plurality of times _ex parte post_, if not _ex parte ante_.

[1] See above, paragraphs 43, and the following.

Feelings are the real, and do not admit of identity. How then can identity be real?

75. But how is this continuity, or sameness of existence in plurality of times or spaces, compatible with the constitution of ‘real existence’ by mere _individua_? The difficulty is the same, according to Locke’s premisses, whether the simple ideas by themselves are taken for the real _individua_, or whether each is taken to represent a single separate thing. In his chapter on identity he expressly says that ‘things whose existence is in succession’ do not admit of identity. Such, he adds, are motion and thought; ‘because, each perishing the moment it begins, they cannot exist in different times or in different places as permanent beings can at different times exist in distant places.’ (Book I. chap, xxvii. sec. 2.) What he here calls ‘thought’ clearly includes the passive consciousness in which alone, according to his strict doctrine, reality is given. So elsewhere (Book II. chap. vii. sec. 9), in accounting for the ‘simple idea of succession,’ he says generally that ‘if we look immediately into ourselves we shall find our ideas always, whilst we have any thought, passing in train, one going and another coming, without intermission.’ [1] No statement of the ‘perpetual flux’ of ideas, as each having a separate beginning and end, and ending in the very moment when it begins, can be stronger than the above. If ‘ideas’ of any sort, according to this account of them, are to constitute real existence, no sameness can be found in reality. It must indeed be a relation ‘invented by the mind.’

[1] It is true that in this place Locke distinguishes between the ‘suggestion by our senses’ of the idea of succession, and that which passes in our ‘minds,’ by which it is ‘more constantly offered us.’ But since, according to him, the idea of sensation must be ‘produced in the mind’ if there is to be any either sensation or idea at all (Book II. chap, ix. secs. 3 and 4), the distinction between the ‘suggestion by our senses’ and what passes in our minds’ cannot be maintained.

Yet it is from reality that the idea of it is derived.

76. This, it may be said, is just the conclusion that was wanted in order to make Locke’s doctrine of the particular relation of identity correspond with his general doctrine of the fictitiousness of relations. To complete the consistency, however, his whole account of the origin of the relation (or of the idea in which it consists) must be changed, since it supposes it to be derived from an observation of things or existence, which again is to suppose sameness to be in the things or to be real. This change made, philosophy would have to start anew with the problem of accounting for the origin of the fictitious idea. It would have to explain how it comes to pass that the mind, if its function consists solely in reproducing and combining given ideas, or again in ‘abstracting’ combined ideas from each other, should be able to invent a relation which is neither a given idea, nor a reproduction, combination, or abstract residuum of given ideas. This is the great problem which we shall find Hume attempting. Locke really never saw its necessity, because the dominion of language--a dominion which, as he did not recognise it, he had no need to account for--always, in spite of his assertion that simple ideas are the sole _data_ of consciousness, held him to the belief in another _datum_ of which ideas are the appearances, viz., a thing having identity, because the same with itself in the manifold times of its appearance. This _datum_, under various guises, but in each demonstrably, according to Locke’s showing, a ‘creation of thought,’ has met us in all the modes of his theory, as the condition of knowledge. As the ‘abstract idea’ of substance it renders ‘perishing’ ideas into qualities by which objects may be discerned. (Book II. chap. xi. sec. 1.) As the relative idea of cause, it makes them ‘affections’ to be accounted for. As the fiction of a universal, it is the condition of their mutual qualification as constituents of a whole. Finally, as the ‘superinduced’ relation of sameness, the direct negative of the perpetual beginning and ending of ‘ideas,’ it constitutes the ‘very being of things.’

Transition to Locke’s doctrine of essence.

77. ‘The very being of things,’ let it be noticed, according to what Locke reckoned their ‘real,’ as distinct from their ‘nominal,’ essence. The consideration of this distinction has been hitherto postponed; but the discussion of the relation of identity, as subsisting between the parts of a ‘continued body,’ brings us upon the doctrine of matter and its ‘primary qualities,’ which cannot be properly treated except in connection with the other doctrine (which Locke unhappily kept apart) of the two sorts of ‘essence.’ So far, it will be remembered, the ‘facts’ or _given_ ideas, which we have found him unawares converting into theories or ‘invented’ ideas, have been those of the ‘secondary qualities of body.’ [1] It is these which are united into things or substances, having been already ‘found in them:’ it is from these that we ‘infer’ the relation of cause and effect, because as ‘vicissitudes of things’ or ‘affections of sense’ they presuppose it: it is these again which, as ‘received from without,’ testify the present existence of something, because in being so received they are already interpreted as ‘appearances of something.’ That the ‘thing,’ by reference to which these ideas are judged to be ‘real,’ ‘adequate,’ and ‘true’--or, in other words, become elements of a knowledge--is yet itself according to Locke’s doctrine of substance and relation a ‘fiction of thought,’ has been sufficiently shown. That it is so no less according to his doctrine of essence will also appear. The question will then be, whether by the same showing the ideas of body, of the self, and of God, can be other than fictions, and the way will be cleared for Hume’s philosophic adventure of accounting for them as such.

[1] See above, paragraph 20.

This repeats the inconsistency found in his doctrine of substance.

78. In Locke’s doctrine of ‘ideas of substances,’ the ‘thing’ appeared in two inconsistent positions: on the one hand, as that in which they ‘are found;’ on the other, as that which results from their concretion, or which, such concretion having been made, we accustom ourselves to suppose as its basis. This inconsistency, latent to Locke himself in the theory of substance, comes to the surface in the theory of essence, where it is (as he thought) overcome, but in truth only made more definite, by a distinction of terms.

Plan to be followed.

79. This latter theory has so far become part and parcel of the ‘common sense’ of educated men, that it might seem scarcely to need restatement. It is generally regarded as completing the work, which Bacon had begun, of transferring philosophy from the scholastic bondage of words to the fruitful discipline of facts. In the process of transmission and popular adaptation, however, its true significance has been lost sight of, and it has been forgotten that to its original exponent implicitly--explicitly to his more logical disciple--though it did indeed distinguish effectively between things and the meaning of words, it was the analysis of the latter only, and not the understanding of things, that it left as the possible function of knowledge. It will be well, then, in what follows, first briefly to restate the theory in its general form; then to show how it conflicts with the actual knowledge which mankind supposes itself to have attained; and finally to exhibit at once the necessity of this conflict as a result of Locke’s governing ideas, and the ambiguities by which he disguised it from himself.

What Locke understood by essence.

80. The essence of a thing with Locke, in the only sense in which we can know or intelligibly speak of it, is the meaning of its name. This, again, is an ‘abstract or general idea,’ which means that it is an idea ‘separated from the circumstances of time and place, and any other ideas that may determine it to this or that particular existence. By this way of abstraction it is made capable of representing more individuals than one; each of which, having in it a conformity to that abstract idea, is (as we call it) of that sort.’ (Book III. chap. iii. sec. 6.) That which is given in immediate experience, as he proceeds to explain, is this or that ‘particular existence,’ Peter or James, Mary or Jane, such particular existence being already a complex idea. [1] That it should be so is indeed in direct contradiction to his doctrine of the primariness of the simple idea, but is necessary to his doctrine of abstraction. Some part of the complex idea (it is supposed)--less or more--we proceed to leave out. The minimum of subtraction would seem to be that of the ‘circumstances of time and place,’ in which the particular existence is given. This is the ‘separation of ideas,’ first made, and alone suffices to constitute an ‘abstract idea,’ even though, as is the case with the idea of the sun, there is only one ‘particular substance’ to agree with it. (Book III. chap. vi. sec. 1.) In proportion as the particular substances compared are more various, the subtraction of ideas is larger, but, be it less or more, the remainder is the abstract idea, to which a name--_e.g._ man--is annexed, and to which as a ‘species’ or ‘standard’ other particular existences, on being ‘found to agree with it,’ may be referred, so as to be called by the same name. These ideas then, ‘tied together by a name,’ form the essence of each particular existence, to which the same name is applied (Book III. chap. iii. secs. 12 and the following.) Such essence, however, according to Locke, is ‘nominal,’ not ‘real.’ It is a complex--fuller or emptier--of ideas in us, which, though it is a ‘uniting medium between a general name and particular beings,’ [2] in no way represents the qualities of the latter. These, consisting in an ‘internal constitution of insensible parts,’ form the ‘real essence’ of the particular beings; an essence, however, of which we can know nothing. (Book III. chap. vi. sec. 21, and ix. sec. 12.)

[1] Book III. chap, iii, sec. 7, at the end.

[2] Book III chap. iii. sec. 13.

Only to nominal essences that general propositions relate, _i.e._ only to abstract ideas having no real existence.

81. It is the formation of ‘nominal essences’ that renders general propositions possible. ‘General certainty,’ says Locke, ‘is never to be found but in our ideas. Whenever we go to seek it elsewhere in experiment or observation without us, our knowledge goes not beyond particulars. It is the contemplation of our own abstract ideas, that alone is able to afford us general knowledge.’ (Book IV. chap. vi. sec. 16.) ‘General knowledge,’ he says again, ‘lies only in our own thoughts.’ [1] This use of ‘our ideas’ and ‘our own thoughts’ as equivalent phrases, each antithetical to ‘real existence,’ tells the old tale of a deviation from ‘the new way of ideas’ into easier paths. According to this new way in its strictness, as we have sufficiently seen, there is nowhere for anything to be found but ‘in our ideas.’ It therefore in no way distinguishes general knowledge or certainty that it cannot be found elsewhere. Locke, however, having allowed himself in the supposition that simple ideas report a real existence, other than themselves, but to which they are related as ectype to archetype, tacitly proceeds to convert them into real existences, to which ideas in general, as mere thoughts of our own, may be opposed. Along with this conversion, there supervenes upon the original distinction between simple and complex ideas, which alone does duty in the Second Book of the Essay, another distinction, essential to Locke’s doctrine of the ‘reality’ of knowledge--that between the idea, whether simple or complex, as originally given in sensation, and the same as retained or reproduced in the mind. It is only in the former form that the idea, however simple, reports, and thus (with Locke) itself is, a real existence. Such real existence is a ‘particular’ existence, and our knowledge of it a ‘particular’ knowledge. In other words, according to the only consistent doctrine that we have been able to elicit from Locke, [2] ‘it is a knowledge which consists in a consciousness, upon occasion of a present sensation--say, a sensation of redness--that some object is present here and now causing the sensation; an object which, accordingly, must be ‘particular’ or transitory as the sensation. The ‘here and now,’ as in such a case they constitute the particularity of the object of consciousness, so also render it a real existence. Separate these (‘the circumstances of time and place’ [3]) from it, and it at once loses its real existence and becomes an ‘abstract idea,’ one of ‘our own thoughts,’ of which as ‘in the mind’ agreement or disagreement with some other abstract idea can be asserted in a general proposition; _e.g._ ‘red is not blue.’ (Book IV. chap. vii. sec. 4.) [4]

[1] Book IV. chap. vi. sec. 13, cf. Book IV. chap. iii. sec. 31.

[2] See above, paragraph 56.

[3] Book III. chap. iii. sec. 6.

[4] In case there should be any doubt as to Locke’s meaning in this passage, it may be well to compare Book IV. chap. ix. sec. 1. There he distinctly opposes the consideration of ideas in the understanding to the knowledge of real existence. Here (Book IV. chap. vii. sec. 4) he distinctly speaks of the proposition ‘red is not blue’ as expressing a consideration of ideas in the understanding. It follows that it is not a proposition as to real existence.

An abstract idea may be a simple one.

82. It is between simple ideas, it will be noticed, that a relation is here asserted, and in this respect the proposition differs from such an one as may be formed when simple ideas have been compounded into the nominal essence of a thing, and in which some one of these may be asserted of the thing, being already included within the meaning of its name; _e.g._ ‘a rose has leaves.’ But as expressing a relation between ideas ‘abstract’ or ‘in the mind,’ in distinction from present sensations received from without, the two sorts of proposition, according to the doctrine of Locke’s Fourth Book, stand on the same footing.’ [1] It is a nominal essence with which both alike are concerned, and on this depends the general certainty or self-evidence, by which they are distinguished from ‘experiment or observation without us.’ These can never ‘reach with certainty farther than the bare instance’ (Book IV. chap. vi. sec. 7): _i.e._, though the only channels by which we can reach real existence, they can never tell more than the presence of this or that sensation as caused by an unknown thing without, or the present disagreement of such present sensations with each other. As to the recurrence of such sensations, or any permanently real relation between them, they can tell us nothing. Nothing as to their recurrence, because, though in each case they show the presence of something causing the sensations, they show nothing of the real essence upon which their recurrence depends. [2] Nothing as to any permanently real relation between them, because, although the disagreement between ideas of blue and red, and the agreement between one idea of red and another, _as in the mind_, is self-evident, yet as thus in the mind they are not ‘actual sensations’ at all (Book IV. chap. xi. sec. 6), nor do they convey that ‘sensitive knowledge of particular existence,’ which is the only possible knowledge of it. (Book IV. chap. iii. sec. 21.) As actual sensations and indices of reality, they do indeed differ in this or that ‘bare instance,’ but can convey no certainty that the real thing or ‘parcel of matter’ (Book III. chap. iii. sec. 18), which now causes the sensation of (and thus _is_) red, may not at another time cause the sensation of (and thus _be_) blue.’ [3]

[1] Already in Book II. (chap. xxxi. sec. 12), the simple idea, as abstract, is spoken of as a nominal essence.

[2] Cf. Book IV. chap. vi. sec. 5. ‘If we could certainly know (which is impossible) where a real essence, which we know not, is--_e.g._ in what parcels of matter the real essence of gold is; yet could we not be sure, that this or that quality could with truth be affirmed of gold; since it is impossible for us to know that this or that quality or idea has a necessary connexion with a real essence, of which we have no idea at all.’

Several passages, of course, can be adduced from Locke which are inconsistent with the statement in the text: _e.g._ Book IV. chap. iv. sec. 12. ‘To make knowledge real concerning substances, the ideas must be taken from the real existence of things. Whatever simple ideas have been found to coexist in any substance, these we may with confidence join together again, and so make abstract ideas of substances. For whatever have once had an union in nature, may be united again.’ In all such passages, however, as will appear below, the strict opposition between the real and the mental is lost sight of, the ‘nature’ or ‘substance,’ in which ideas ‘have a union,’ or are ‘found to coexist,’ being a system of relations which, according to Locke, it requires a mind to constitute, and thus itself a ‘nominal essence.’

[3] Cf. Book IV. chap. iii. sec. 29; Book IV. chap. vi. sec. 14; Book IV. chap. xi. sec. 11.

How then is science of nature possible?

83. We thus come upon the crucial antithesis between relations of ideas and matters of fact, with the exclusion of general certainty as to the latter, which was to prove such a potent weapon of scepticism in the hands of Hume. Of its incompatibility with recognized science we can have no stronger sign than the fact that, after more than a century has elapsed since Locke’s premisses were pushed to their legitimate conclusion, the received system of logic among us is one which, while professing to accept Locke’s doctrine of essence, and with it the antithesis in question, throughout assumes the possibility of general propositions as to matters of fact, and seeks in their methodical discovery and proof that science of nature which Locke already ‘suspected’ to be impossible. (Book IV. chap. xii. sec. 10.)

No ‘uniformities of phenomena’ can be known.

84. That, so far as any inference from past to future uniformities is necessary to the science of nature, his doctrine does more than justify such ‘suspicion,’ is plain enough. Does it, however, leave room for so much as a knowledge of past uniformities of fact, in which the natural philosopher, accepting the doctrine, might probably seek refuge? At first sight, it might seem to do so. ‘As, when our senses are actually employed about any object, we do know that it does exist; so by our memory we may be assured that heretofore things that affected our senses have existed--and thus we have knowledge of the past existence of several things, whereof our senses having informed us, our memories still retain the ideas.’ (Book IV. chap. xi. sec. 11.) Let us see, however, how this knowledge is restricted. ‘Seeing water at this instant, it is an unquestionable truth to me that water doth exist; and remembering that I saw it yesterday, it will also be always true, and as long as my memory retains it, always an undoubted proposition to me, that water did exist the 18th of July, 1688; as it will also be equally true that a certain number of very fine colours did exist, which at the same time I saw on a bubble of that water; but being now quite out of sight both of the water and bubbles too, it is no more certainly known to me that the water doth now exist, than that the bubbles and colours therein do so; it being no more necessary that water should exist to-day because it existed yesterday, than that the colours or bubbles exist to-day because they existed yesterday.’ (_Ibid_.)

Locke not aware of the full effect of his own doctrine ...

85. The result is that though I may enumerate a multitude of past matters-of-fact about water, I cannot gather them up in any general statement about it as a real existence. So soon as I do so, I pass from water as a real existence to its ‘nominal essence,’ _i.e._, to the ideas retained in my mind and put together in a fictitious substance, to which I have annexed the name ‘water.’ If we proceed to apply this doctrine to the supposed past matters-of-fact themselves, we shall find these too attenuating themselves to nonentity. Subtract in every case from the ‘particular existence’ of which we have ‘sensitive knowledge’ the qualification by ideas which, as retained in the mind, do not testify to a present real existence, and what remains? There is a certainty, according to Locke (Book IV. chap. xi. sec. 11), not, indeed, that water exists to-day because it existed yesterday--this is only ‘probable’--but that it has, as a past matter-of-fact, at this time and that ‘continued long in existence,’ because this has been ‘observed;’ which must mean (Book IV. chap. ii. secs. 1, 5, and 9), because there has been a continued ‘actual sensation’ of it. ‘Water,’ however, is a complex idea of a substance, and of the elements of this complex idea those only which at any moment are given in ‘actual sensation’ may be accounted to ‘really exist.’ First, then, must disappear from reality the ‘something,’ that unknown substratum of ideas, of which the idea is emphatically ‘abstract.’ This gone, we naturally fall back upon a fact of co-existence between ideas, as being a reality, though the ‘thing’ be a fiction. But if this co-existence is to be real or to represent a reality, the ideas between which it obtains must be ‘actual sensations.’ These, whatever they may be, are at least opposed by Locke to ideas retained in the mind, which only form a nominal essence. But it is the association of such nominal essence, in the supposed observation of water, with the actual sensation that alone gives the latter a meaning. Set this aside as unreal, and the reality, which the sensation reveals, is at any rate one of which nothing can be said. It cannot be a relation between sensations, for such relation implies a consideration of them by the mind, whereby, according to Locke, they must cease to be ‘real existences.’ (Book II. chap. xxv. sec. 1.) It cannot even be a single sensation _as continuously observed_, for every present moment of such observation has at the next become a past, and thus the sensation observed in it has lost its ‘actuality,’ and cannot, _as a ‘real existence_,’ qualify the sensation observed in the next. Restrict the ‘real existence,’ in short, as Locke does, to an ‘actual present sensation,’ which can only be defined by opposition to an idea retained in the mind, and at every instant of its existence it has passed into the mind and thus ceased really to exist. Reality is in perpetual process of disappearing into the unreality of thought. No point can be fixed either in the flux of time or in the imaginary process from ‘without’ to ‘within’ the mind, on the one side of which can be placed ‘real existence,’ on the other the ‘mere idea.’ It is only because Locke unawares defines to himself the ‘actual sensation’ as representative of a real essence, of which, however, according to him, as itself unknown, the presence is merely inferred from the sensation, that the ‘actual sensation’ itself is saved from the limbo of nominal essence, to which ideas, as abstract or in the mind, are consigned. Only, again, so far as it is thus illogically saved, are we entitled to that distinction between ‘facts’ and ‘things of the mind,’ which Locke once for all fixed for English philosophy.

... which is to make the real an abstract residuum of consciousness.

86. By this time we are familiar with the difficulties which this antithesis has in store for a philosophy which yet admits that it is only in the mind or in relation to consciousness--in one word, as ‘ideas’--that facts are to be found at all, while by the ‘mind’ it understands an abstract generalization from the many minds which severally are born and grow, sleep and wake, with each of us. The antithesis itself, like every other form in which the impulse after true knowledge finds expression, implies a distinction between the seeming and the real; or between that which exists for the consciousness of the individual and that which really exists. But outside itself consciousness cannot get. It is there that the real must, at any rate, manifest itself, if it is to be found at all. Yet the original antithesis between the mind and its unknown opposite still prevails, and in consequence that alone which, though indeed in the mind, is yet given to it by no act of its own, is held to represent the real. This is the notion which dominates Locke. He strips from the formed content of consciousness all that the mind seems to have done for itself, and the abstract residuum, that of which the individual cannot help being conscious at each moment of his existence, is or ‘reports’ the real, in opposition to the mind’s creation. This is Feeling; or more strictly--since it exists, and whatever does so must exist as one in a number (Book II. chap. vii. sec. 7)--it is the multitude of single feelings, ‘each perishing the moment it begins’ (Book II. chap, xxvii. sec. 2), from which all the definiteness that comes of composition and relation must be supposed absent. Thus, in trying to get at what shall be the mere fact in detachment from mental accretions, Locke comes to what is still consciousness, but the merely indefinite in consciousness. He seeks the real and finds the void. Of the real as outside consciousness nothing can be said; and of that again within consciousness, which is supposed to represent it, nothing can be said.

Ground of distinction between actual sensation and ideas in the mind is itself a thing of the mind.

87. We have already seen how Locke, in his doctrine of secondary qualities of substances, practically gets over this difficulty; how he first projects out of the simple ideas, under relations which it requires a mind to constitute, a cognisable system of things, and then gives content and definiteness to the simple ideas in us by treating them as manifestations of this system of things. In the doctrine of propositions, the proper correlative to the reduction of the real to the present simple idea, as that of which we cannot get rid, would be the reduction of the ‘real proposition’ to the mere ‘it is now felt.’ If the matter-of-fact is to be that in consciousness which is independent of the ‘work of the mind’ in comparing and compounding, this is the only possible expression for it. It states the only possible ‘real essence,’ which yet is an essence of nothing, for any reference of it to a thing, if the thing is outside consciousness, is an impossibility; and if it is within consciousness, implies an ‘invention of the mind’ both in the creation of a thing, ‘always the same with itself,’ out of perishing feelings, and in the reference of the feelings to such a thing. Thus carried out, the antithesis between ‘fact’ and ‘creation of the mind’ becomes self-destructive, for, one feeling being as real as another, it leaves no room for that distinction between the real and fantastic, to the uncritical sense of which it owes its birth. To avoid this fusion of dream-land and the waking world, Locke avails himself of the distinction between the idea (_i.e._ feeling) as in the mind, which is not convertible with reality, and the idea as somewhere else, no one can say where--‘the actual sensation’--which is so convertible. The distinction, however, must either consist in degrees of liveliness, in which case there must be a corresponding infinity of degrees of reality or unreality, or else must presuppose a real existence from which the feeling, if ‘actual sensation,’ _is_--if merely ‘in the mind’ _is not_--derived. Such a real existence either is an object of consciousness, or is not. If it is not, no distinction between one kind of feeling and another can for consciousness be derived from it. If it is, then, granted the distinction between given feelings and creations of the mind, it must fall to the latter, and a ‘thing of the mind’ turns out to be the ground upon which ‘fact’ is opposed to ‘things of the mind.’

Two meanings of real essence.

88. It remains to exhibit briefly the disguises under which these inherent difficulties of his theory of essence appear in Locke. Throughout, instead of treating ‘essence’ altogether as a fiction of the mind--as it must be if feelings in simplicity and singleness are alone the real--he treats indeed as a merely ‘nominal essence’ every possible combination of ideas of which we can speak, but still supposes another essence which is ‘real.’ But a real essence of what? Clearly, according to his statements, of the same ‘thing’ of which the combination of ideas in the mind is the nominal essence. Indeed, there is no meaning in the antithesis unless the ‘something,’ of which the latter essence is so nominally, is that of which it is not so really. So says Locke, ‘the nominal essence of gold is that complex idea the word gold stands for; let it be, for instance, a body yellow, of a certain weight, malleable, fusible, and fixed. But the real essence is the constitution of the insensible parts _of that body_, on which those qualities and all the other properties of gold depend.’ (Book III. chap. vi. sec. 2.) Here the notion clearly is that of one and the same thing, of which we can only say that it is a ‘body,’ a certain complex of ideas--yellowness, fusibility, &c.--is the nominal, a certain constitution of insensible parts the real, essence. It is on the real essence, moreover, that the ideas which constitute the nominal depend. Yet while they are known, the real essence (as appears from the context) is wholly unknown. In this case, it would seem, the cause is not known from its effects.

According to one, it is a collection of ideas as qualities of a thing:

89. There are lurking here two opposite views of the relation between the nominal essence and the real thing. According to one view, which prevails in the later chapters of the Second Book and in certain passages of the third, the relation between them is that with which we have already become familiar in the doctrine of substance--that, namely, between ideas as in us and the same as in the thing. (Book II, chap. xxiii. secs. 9 and 10.) No distinction is made between the ‘idea in the mind’ and the ‘actual sensation.’ The ideas in the mind are also in the thing, and thus are called its qualities, though for the most part they are so only secondarily, _i.e._ as effects of other qualities, which, as copied directly in our ideas, are called primary, and relatively to these effects are called powers. These powers have yet innumerable effects to produce in us which they have not yet produced. (Book II. chap. xxxi. sec. 10.) Those which have been so far produced, being gathered up in a complex idea to which a name is annexed, form the ‘nominal essence’ of the thing. Some of them are of primary qualities, more are of secondary. The originals of the former, the powers to produce the latter, together with powers to produce an indefinite multitude more, will constitute the ‘real essence,’ which is thus ‘a standard made by nature,’ to which the nominal essence is opposed merely as the inadequate to the adequate. The ideas, that is to say, which are indicated by the name of a thing, have been really ‘found in it’ or ‘produced by it,’ but are only a part of those that remain to be found in it or produced by it. It is in this sense that Locke opposes the adequacy between nominal and real essence in the case of mixed modes to their perpetual inadequacy in the case of ideas of substances. The combination in the one case is artificially made, in the other is found and being perpetually enlarged. This he illustrates by imagining the processes which led Adam severally to the idea of the mixed mode ‘jealousy’ and that of the substance ‘gold.’ In the former process Adam ‘put ideas together only by his own imagination, not taken from the existence of anything ... the standard there was of his own making.’ In the latter, ‘he has a standard made by nature; and therefore being to represent that to himself by the idea he has of it, even when it is absent, he puts no simple idea into his complex one, but what he has the perception of from the thing itself. He takes care that his idea be conformable to this archetype.’ (Book III. chap. vi. secs. 46, 47.) ‘It is plain,’ however, ‘that the idea made after this fashion by this archetype will be always inadequate.’

... about real essence in this sense there may be general knowledge.

90. The nominal essence of a thing, then, according to this view, being no other than the ‘complex idea of a substance,’ is a copy of reality, just as the simple idea is. It is a picture or representation in the mind of a thing that does exist by ideas of those qualities that are discoverable in it.’ (Book II. chap. xxxi. secs. 6, 8.) It only differs from the simple idea (which is itself, as abstract, a nominal essence) [1] in respect of reality, because the latter is a copy or effect produced singly and involuntarily, whereas we may put ideas together, as if in a thing, which have never been so presented together, and, on the other hand, never can put together all that exist together. (Book II. chap. xxx. sec. 5, and xxxi. 10.) So far as Locke maintains this view, the difficulty about general propositions concerning real existence need not arise. A statement which affirmed of gold one of the qualities included in the complex idea of that substance, would not express merely an analysis of an idea in the mind, but would represent a relation of qualities in the existing thing from which the idea ‘has been taken.’ These qualities, as in the thing, doubtless would not be, as in us, feelings (or, as Locke should rather have said in more recent phraseology, possibilities of feeling), but powers to produce feeling, nor could any relation between these, as in the thing, be affirmed but such as had produced its copy or effect in actual experience. No coexistence of qualities could be truly affirmed, which had not been found; but, once found--being a coexistence of qualities and not simply a momentary coincidence of feelings--it could be affirmed as permanent in a general proposition. That a relation can be stated universally between ideas collected in the mind, no one denies, and if such collection ‘is taken from a combination of simple ideas _existing together constantly in things_’ (Book II. chap, xxxii. sec. 18), the statement will hold equally of such existence. Thus Locke contrasts mixed modes, which, for the most part, ‘being actions which perish in the birth, are not capable of a lasting duration,’ with ‘substances, which are the actors; and wherein the simple ideas that make up the complex ideas designed by the name have a lasting union.’ (Book III. chap. vi. sec. 42.)

[1] Book II. chap. xxxi. sec. 12.

But such real essence a creature of thought.

91. In such a doctrine Locke, starting whence he did, could not remain at rest. We need not here repeat what has been said of it above in the consideration of his doctrine of substance. Taken strictly, it implies that ‘real existence’ consists in a permanent relation of ideas, said to be of secondary qualities, to each other in dependence on other ideas, said to be of primary qualities. In other words, in order to constitute reality, it takes ideas out of that particularity in time and place, which is yet pronounced the condition of reality, to give them an ‘abstract generality’ which is fictitious, and then treats them as constituents of a system of which the ‘invented’ relations of cause and effect and of identity are the framework. In short, it brings reality wholly within the region of thought, distinguishing it from the system of complex ideas or nominal essences which constitute our knowledge, not as the unknown opposite of all possible thought, but only as the complete from the incomplete. To one who logically carried out this view, the ground of distinction between fact and fancy would have to be found in the relation between thought as ‘objective,’ or in the world, and thought as so far communicated to us. Here, however, it could scarcely be found by Locke, with whom ‘thought’ meant simply a faculty of the ‘thinking thing,’ called a ‘soul,’ which might ride in a coach with him from Oxford to London. (Book II. chap, xxiii. sec. 20.) Was the distinction then to disappear altogether?

Hence another view of real essence as unknown qualities of unknown body.

92. It is saved, though at the cost of abandoning the ‘new way of ideas,’ as it had been followed in the Second Book, by the transfer of real existence from the thing in which ideas are found, and whose qualities the complex of ideas in us, though inadequate, represents, to something called ‘body,’ necessarily unknown, because no ideas in us are in any way representative of it. To such an unknown body unknown qualities are supposed to belong under the designation ‘real essence.’ The subject of the nominal essence, just because its qualities, being matter of knowledge, are ideas in our minds, is a wholly different and a fictitious thing.

How Locke mixes up these two meanings in ambiguity about body.

93. This change of ground is of course not recognized by Locke himself. It is the perpetual crossing of the inconsistent doctrines that renders his ‘immortal Third Book’ a web of contradictions. As was said above, he constantly speaks as if the subject of the real essence were the same with that of the nominal, and never explicitly allows it to be different. The equivocation under which the difference is disguised lies in the use of the term ‘body.’ A ‘particular body’ is the subject both of the nominal and real essence ‘gold’ But ‘body,’ as that in which ‘ideas are found,’ and in which they permanently coexist according to a natural law, is one thing; ‘body,’ as the abstraction of the unknown, is quite another. It is body in the former sense that is the real thing when nominal essence (the complex of ideas in us) is treated as representative, though inadequately so, of the real thing; it is body in the latter sense that is the real thing when this is treated as wholly outside possible consciousness, and its essence as wholly unrepresented by possible ideas. By a jumble of the two meanings Locke obtains an amphibious entity which is at once independent of relation to ideas, as is body in the latter sense, and a source of ideas representative of it, as is body in the former sense--which thus carries with it that opposition to the mental which is supposed necessary to the real, while yet it seems to manifest itself in ideas. Meanwhile a third conception of the real keeps thrusting itself upon the other two--the view, namely, that body in both senses is a fiction of thought, and that the mere present feeling is alone the real.

Body as ‘parcel of matter’ without essence.

94. Where Locke is insisting on the opposition between the real essence and any essence that can be known, the former is generally ascribed either to a ‘particular being’ or to a ‘parcel of matter.’ The passage which brings the opposition into the strongest relief is perhaps the following:--‘I would ask any one, what is sufficient to make an essential difference in nature between any two particular beings, without any regard had to some abstract idea, which is looked upon as the essence and standard of a species? All such patterns and standards being quite laid aside, particular beings, considered barely in themselves, will be found to have all their qualities equally essential; and everything, in each individual, will be essential to it, or, which is more, nothing at all. For though it may be reasonable to ask whether obeying the magnet be essential to iron; yet I think it is very improper and insignificant to ask whether it be essential to the particular parcel of matter I cut my pen with, without considering it under the name _iron_, or as being of a certain species.’ (Book III. chap. vi. sec. 5.) [1] Here, it will be seen, the exclusion of the abstract idea from reality carries with it the exclusion of that ‘standard made by nature,’ which according to the passages already quoted, is the ‘thing itself from which the abstract idea is taken, and from which, if correctly taken, it derives reality. This exclusion, again, means nothing else than the disappearance from ‘nature’ (which with Locke is interchangeable with ‘reality’) of all essential difference. There remain, however, as the ‘real,’ ‘particular beings,’ or ‘individuals,’ or ‘parcels of matter.’ In each of these, ‘considered barely in itself, everything will be essential to it, or, which is more, nothing at all.’

[1] To the same purpose is a passage in Book III. chap. x. sec. 19, towards the end.

In this sense body is the mere individuum.

95. We have already seen, [1] that if by a ‘particular being’ is meant the mere _individuum_, as it would be upon abstraction of all relations which according to Locke are fictitious, and constitute a community or generality, it certainly can have no essential qualities, since it has no qualities at all. It is a something which equals nothing. The notion of this bare _individuum_ being the real is the ‘protoplasm’ of Locke’s philosophy to which, though he never quite recognized it himself, after the removal of a certain number of accretions we may always penetrate. It is so because his unacknowledged method of finding the real consisted in abstracting from the formed content of consciousness till he came to that which could not be got rid of. This is the momentarily present relation of subject and object, which, considered on the side of the object, gives the mere atom, and on the side of the subject, the mere ‘it is felt.’ Even in this ultimate abstraction the ‘fiction of thought’ still survives, for the atom is determined to its mere individuality by relation to other individuals, and the feeling is determined to the present moment or ‘the now’ by relation to other ‘nows.’

[1] See above, paragraph 45.

Body as qualified by circumstances of time and place.

96. To this ultimate abstraction, however, Locke, though constantly on the road to it, never quite penetrates. He is farthest from it--indeed, as far from it as possible--where he is most acceptable to common sense, as in his ordinary doctrine of abstraction, where the real, from which the process of abstraction is supposed to begin, is already the individual in the fullness of its qualities, James and John, this man or this gold. He is nearest to it when the only qualification of the ‘particular being,’ which has to be removed by thought in order to its losing its reality and becoming an abstract idea, is supposed to consist in ‘circumstances of time and place.’

Such body Locke held to be subject of ‘primary qualities’: but are these compatible with particularity in time?

97. It is of these circumstances, as the constituents of the real, that he is thinking in the passage last quoted. As qualified by ‘circumstances of place’ the real is a parcel of matter, and under this designation Locke thought of it as a subject of ‘primary qualities of body.’ [1] These, indeed, as he enumerates them, may be shown to imply relations going far beyond that of simple distinctness between atoms, and thus to involve much more of the creative action of thought; but we need be the less concerned for this usurpation on the part of the particular being, since that which he illegitimately conveys to it as derived from ‘circumstances of place,’ he virtually takes away from it again by limitation in time. The ‘particular being’ has indeed on the one hand a real essence, consisting of certain primary qualities, but on the other it has no continued identity. It is only real as present to feeling at this or that time. The particular being of one moment is not the particular being of the next. Thus the primary qualities which are a real essence, _i.e._ an essence of a particular being, at one moment, are not its real essence at the next, because, while they as represented in the mind remain the same, the ‘it,’ the particular being is different. An _immutable_ essence for that very reason cannot be real. The immutability can only lie in a relation between a certain abstract (_i.e._ unreal) idea and a certain sound. (Book III. chap. iii. sec. 19.) ‘The real constitution of things,’ on the other hand, ‘begin and perish with them. All things that exist are liable to change.’ (_Ibid_.) Locke, it is true (as is implied in the term _change_ [2]) never quite drops the notion of there being a real identity in some unknown background, but this makes no difference in the bearing of his doctrine upon the possibility of ‘real’ knowledge. It only means that for an indefinite particularity of ‘beings’ there is substituted one ‘being’ under an indefinite peculiarity of forms. Though the reality of the thing _in itself_ be immutable, yet its reality _for us_ is in perpetual flux. ‘In itself’ it is a substance without an essence, a ‘something we know not what’ without any ideas to ‘support;’ a ‘parcel of matter,’ indeed, but one in which no quality is really essential, because its real essence, consisting in its momentary presentation to sense, changes with the moments. [3]

[1] According to Locke’s ordinary usage of the terms, no distinction appears between ‘matter’ and ‘body.’ In Book III. chap. X. sec. 15, however, he distinguishes matter from body as the less determinate conception from the more. The one implies solidity merely, the other extension and figure also, so that we may talk of the ‘matter of bodies,’ but not of the ‘body of matters.’ But since solidity, according to Locke’s definition, involves the other ‘primary qualities,’ this distinction does not avail him much.

[2] See above, paragraph 69.

[3] Cf. Book III. chap. vi. sec. 4: ‘Take but away the abstract ideas by which we sort individuals and rank them under common names, and then the thought of anything essential to any of them instantly vanishes,’ &c.

How Locke avoids this question.

98. We have previously noticed [1] Locke’s pregnant remark, that ‘things whose existence is in succession’ do not admit of identity. (Book II. chap, xxvii. sec. 2.) So far, then, as the ‘real,’ in distinction from the ‘abstract,’ is constituted by particularity in time, or has its existence in succession, it excludes the relation of identity. ‘It perishes in every moment that it begins.’ Had Locke been master of this notion, instead of being irregularly mastered by it, he might have anticipated all that Hume had to say. As it is, even in passages such as those to which reference has just been made, where he follows its lead the farthest, he is still pulled up by inconsistent conceptions with which common sense, acting through common language, restrains the most adventurous philosophy. Thus, even from his illustration of the liability of all existence to change--‘that which was grass to-day is to-morrow the flesh of a sheep, and within a few days after will become part of a man’ [2]--we find that, just as he does not pursue the individualization of the real in space so far but that it still remains ‘a constitution of parts,’ so he does not pursue it in time so far but that a coexistence of real elements over a certain duration is possible. To a more thorough analysis, indeed, there is no alternative between finding reality in relations of thought, which, because relations of thought, are not in time and therefore are immutable, and submitting it to such subdivision of time as excludes all real coexistence because what is real, as present, at one moment is unreal, as past, at the next. This alternative could not present itself in its clearness to Locke, because, according to his method of interrogating consciousness, he inevitably found in its supposed beginning, which he identified with the real, those products of thought which he opposed to the real, and thus read into the simple feeling of the moment that which, if it were the simple feeling of the moment, it could not contain. Thus throughout the Second Book of the Essay the simple idea is supposed to represent either as copy or as effect a permanent reality, whether body or mind: and in the later books, even where the _representation_ of such reality in knowledge comes in question, its existence as constituted by ‘primary qualities of body’ is throughout assumed, though general propositions with regard to it are declared impossible. It is a feeling referred to body, or, in the language of subsequent psychology, a feeling of the _outward_ sense, [3] that Locke means by an ‘actual present sensation,’ and it is properly in virtue of this reference that such sensation is supposed to be, or to report, the real.

[1] See above, paragraph 75.

[2] Book III. chap. iii. sec. 10.

[3] For the germs of the distinction between outer and inner sense, see Locke’s Essay, Book II. chap. i. sec. 14: ‘This source of ideas (the perception of the operations of the mind) every man has wholly in himself; and though it be not sense, as having nothing to do with external objects, yet it is very like it, and might properly enough be called internal sense.’ For the notion of outer sense cf. Book II. chap. ix. sec. 6, where he is distinguishing the ideas of hunger and warmth, which he supposes children to receive in the womb from the ‘innate principles which some contend for.’ ‘These (the ideas of hunger and warmth) being the effects of sensation, are only from some affections of the body which happen to them there, and so depend on something exterior to the mind, not otherwise differing in their manner of production from other ideas derived from sense, but only in the precedency of time.’

Body and its qualities supposed to be outside consciousness.

99. According to the doctrine of primary qualities, as originally stated, the antithesis lies between body as it is in itself and body as it is for us, not between body as it is for us in ‘actual sensation,’ and body as it is for us according to ‘ideas in the mind.’ The primary qualities ‘are in bodies whether we perceive them or no.’ (Book II. chap. viii. sec. 23.) As he puts it elsewhere (Book II. chap. xxxi. sec. 2), it is just because ‘solidity and extension and the termination of it, figure, with motion and rest, whereof we have the ideas, would be really in the world as they are whether there were any sensible being to perceive them or no,’ that they are to be looked on as the _real_ modifications of matter. A change in them, unlike one in the secondary qualities, or such as is relative to sense, is a _real_ alteration _in body_. ‘Pound an almond, and the clear white colour will be altered into a dirty one, and the sweet taste into an oily one. What alteration can the beating of the pestle make in any body, but an alteration of the texture of it?’ (Book II. chap. viii. sec. 20.) It is implied then in the notion of the real as body that it should be outside consciousness. It is that which seems to remain when everything belonging to consciousness has been thought away. Yet it is brought within consciousness again by the supposition that it has qualities which copy themselves in our ideas and are ‘the exciting causes of all our various sensations from bodies.’ (Book II. chap. xxxi. sec. 3.) Again, however, the antithesis between the real and consciousness prevails, and the qualities of matter or body having been brought within the latter, are opposed to a ‘substance of body’--otherwise spoken of as ‘the nature, cause, or manner of producing the ideas of primary qualities’--which remains outside it, unknown and unknowable. (Book II. chap, xxiii. sec. 30, &c.)

How can primary qualities be outside consciousness, and yet knowable?

100. The doctrine of primary qualities was naturally the one upon which the criticism of Berkeley and Hume first fastened, as the most obvious aberration from the ‘new way of ideas.’ That the very notion of the senses as ‘reporting’ anything, under secondary no less than under primary qualities, implies the presence of ‘fictions of thought’ in the primitive consciousness, may become clear upon analysis; but it lies on the surface and is avowed by Locke himself (Book II. chap. viii. secs. 2, 7), that the conception of primary qualities is only possible upon distinction being made between ideas as in our minds, and the ‘nature of things existing without us,’ which cannot be given in the simple feeling itself. This admitted, the distinction might either be traced to the presence within intelligent consciousness of another factor than simple ideas, or be accounted for as a gradual ‘invention of the mind.’ In neither way, however, could Locke regard it and yet retain his distinction between fact and fancy, as resting upon that between the nature of things and the mind of man. The way of escape lay in a figure of speech, the figure of the wax or the mirror. ‘The ideas of primary qualities are resemblances of them.’ (Book II. chap, viii. sec. 15.) These qualities then may be treated, according to occasion, either as primitive data of consciousness, or as the essence of that which is the unknown opposite of consciousness--in the latter way when the antithesis between nature and mind is in view, in the former when nature has yet to be represented as knowable.

Locke answers that they copy themselves in ideas--Berkeley’s rejoinder. Locke gets out of the difficulty by his doctrine of solidity.

101. How, asked Berkeley, can an idea be like anything that is not an idea? Put the question in its proper strength--How can an idea be like that of which the sole and simple determination is just that it is not an idea (and such with Locke is body ‘in itself’ or as the real)--and it is clearly unanswerable. The process by which Locke was prevented from putting it to himself is not difficult to trace. ‘Body’ and ‘the solid’ are with him virtually convertible terms. Each indifferently holds the place of the substance, of which the primary qualities are so many determinations. [1] It is true that where solidity has to be defined, it is defined as an attribute of body, but conversely body itself is treated as a ‘texture of solid parts,’ _i.e._ as a mode of the solid. Body, in short, so soon as thought of, resolves itself into a relation of bodies, and the solid into a relation of solids, but Locke, by a shuffle of the two terms--representing body as a relation between solids and the solid as a relation between bodies--gains the appearance of explaining each in turn by relation to a simpler idea. Body, as the unknown, is revealed to us by the idea of solidity, which sense conveys to us; while solidity is explained by reference to the idea of body. The idea of solidity, we are told, is a simple idea which comes into the mind solely by the sense of touch. (Book II. chap. iii. sec. 1.) But no sooner has he thus identified it with an immediate feeling than, in disregard of his own doctrine, that ‘an idea which has no composition’ is undefinable (see Book III. chap. iv. sec. 7.), he converts it into a theory of the cause of that feeling. ‘It arises from the resistance which we find in body to the entrance of any other body into the place it possesses till it has left it;’ and he at once proceeds to treat it as the consciousness of such resistance. ‘Whether we move or rest, in what posture soever we are, we always feel something under us that supports us, and hinders our farther sinking downwards: and the bodies which we daily handle make us perceive that whilst they remain between them, they do by an insurmountable force hinder the approach of the parts of our hands that press them. That which then hinders the approach of two bodies, when they are moving one towards another, I call solidity.’ [2]

[1] See Book II. chap. viii. sec. 23: The primary ‘qualities that are in bodies, are the bulk, figure, number, situation, and motion or rest, _of their solid parts_.’ Cf. Book II. chap. xiii. sec. 11: ‘Solidity is so inseparable an idea from body, that upon that depends its filling of space, its contact, impulse, and communication of motion upon impulse.’

[2] Book II. chap. iv. sec 7.

In which he equivocates between body as unknown opposite of mind and body as a ‘nominal essence’.

102. Now ‘body’ in this theory is by no means outside consciousness. It is emphatically ‘in the mind,’ a ‘nominal essence,’ determined by the relation which the theory assigns to it, and which, like every relation according to Locke, is a ‘thing of the mind.’ This relation is that of outwardness to other bodies, and among these to the sensitive body through which we receive ‘ideas of sensation’--a body which, on its side, as determined by the relation, has its essence from the mind. It is, then, not as the unknown opposite of the mind, but as determined by an intelligible relation which the mind constitutes, and of which the members are each ‘nominal essences,’ that body is outward to the sensitive subject. But to Locke, substituting for body as a nominal essence body as the unknown thing in itself, and identifying the sensitive subject with the mind, outwardness in the above sense--an outwardness constituted by the mind--becomes outwardness to the mind of an unknown opposite of the mind. Solidity, then, and the properties which its definition involves (and it involves all the ‘primary qualities’), become something wholly alien to the mind, which ‘would exist without any sensible being to perceive them.’ As such, they do duty as a real essence, when the opposition of this to everything in the mind has to be asserted. Yet must they be in some sort ideas, for of these alone (as Locke fully admits) can we think and speak; and if ideas, in the mind. How is this contradiction to be overcome? By the notion that though not in or of the mind, they yet copy themselves upon it in virtue of an impulse in body, correlative to that resistance of which touch conveys the idea. (Book II. chap. viii. sec. 11). [1] This explanation, however, is derived from the equivocation between the two meanings of mind and body respectively. The problem to be explained is the relation between the mind and that which is only qualified as the negation of mind; and the explanation is found in a relation, only existing for the mind, between a sensitive and a non-sensitive body.

[1] Cf. also the passage from Book II. chap. xiii. sec. 11, quoted above, paragraph 101, note [1].

Rationale of these contradictions.

103. The case then stands as follows. All that Locke says of body as the real thing-in-itself, and of its qualities as the essence of such thing, comes according to his own showing of an action of the mind which he reckons the source of fictions. ‘Body in itself’ is a substratum of ideas which the mind ‘accustoms itself to suppose.’ It perpetually recedes, as what was at first a substance becomes in turn a complex of qualities for which a more remote substratum has to be supposed--a ‘substance of body,’ a productive cause of matter. But the substance, however remote, is determined by the qualities to which it is correlative, as the cause by its effects; and every one of these--whether the most primary, solidity, or those which ‘the mind finds inseparable from every particle of matter,’ _i.e._ from the ‘solid parts of a body,’ [1]--as defined by Locke, is a relation such as the mind, ‘bringing one thing to and setting it by another’ (Book II. chap. xxv. sec. 1), can alone constitute. To Locke, however, overcome by the necessity of intelligence, as gradually developing itself in each of us, to regard the intelligible world as there before it is known, the real must be something which would be what it is if thought were not. Strictly taken, this must mean that it is that of which nothing can be said, and some expression must be found by means of which it may do double duty as at once apart from consciousness and in it. This is done by converting ‘the primary qualities of body, though obviously complex ideas of relation, into simple feelings of touch,’ [2] and supposing the subject of this sensation to be related to its object as wax to the seal. If we suppose this relation, again, which is really within the mind and constituted by it, to be one between the mind itself, as passive, and the real, we obtain a ‘real’ which exists apart from the mind, yet copies itself upon it. The mind, then, so far as it takes such a copy, becomes an ‘outer sense,’ as to which it may be conveniently forgotten that it is a mode of mind at all. Thus every modification of it, as an ‘actual present sensation,’ comes to be opposed to every idea of memory or imagination, as that which is not of the mind to that which is; though there is no assignable difference between one and the other, except an indefinite one in degree of vivacity, that is not derived from the action of the mind in referring the one to an object, constituted by itself, to which it does not refer the other.

[1] Cf Book II. chap. viii. sec. 9. The primary qualities of body are ‘such as sense constantly finds in every particle of matter, which has bulk enough to be perceived, and the mind finds inseparable from every particle of matter, though less than to make itself singly be perceived by our senses.’

[2] I write advisedly ‘touch’ only, not ‘sight and touch,’ because, though Locke (Book II. chap, v.) speaks of the ideas of extension, figure, motion, and rest of bodies, as received both by sight and touch, these are all involved in the previous definition of solidity, of which the idea is ascribed to touch only.

What knowledge can feeling, even as referred to a ‘solid’ body, convey?

104. Let us now consider whether by this reference to body, feeling becomes any the more a source of general knowledge concerning matters of fact. As we have seen, if we identify the real with feeling simply, its distinction from ‘bare vision’ disappears. This difficulty it is sought to overcome by distinguishing feeling as merely in the mind from actually present sensation. But on reflection we find that sensation after all is feeling, and that one feeling is as much present as another, though present only to become at the next moment past, and thus, if it is the presence that is the condition of reality, unreal. The distinction then must lie in the _actuality_ of the sensation. But does not this actuality mean simply derivation from the real, _i.e._ derivation from the idea which has to be derived from it? If, in the spirit of Locke, we answer, ‘No, it means that the feeling belongs to the outer sense’; the rejoinder will be that this means either that it is a feeling of touch--and what should give the feeling of touch this singular privilege over other feelings of not being in the mind while they are in it?--or that it is a feeling referred to body, which still implies the presupposition of the real, only under the special relations of resistance and impulse. The latter alternative is the one which Locke virtually adopts, and in adopting it he makes the actuality, by which sensation is distinguished from ‘feelings in the mind,’ itself a creation of the mind. But though it is by an intellectual interpretation of the feeling of touch, not by the feeling itself, that there is given that idea of body, by reference to which actual sensation is distinguished from the mere idea, still with Locke the feeling of touch is necessary to the interpretation. Thus, supposing his notion to be carried out consistently, the actual present sensation, as reporting the real, must either be a feeling of touch, or, if of another sort, _e.g._, sight or hearing, must be referable to an object of touch. In other words, the real will exist for us so long only as it is touched, and ideas in us will constitute a real essence so long only as they may be referred to an object now touched. Let the object cease to be touched, and the ideas become a nominal essence in the mind, the knowledge which they constitute ceases to be real, and the proposition which expresses it ceases to concern matter of fact. Truth as to matters of fact or bodies, then, must be confined to singular propositions such as ‘this is touched now,’ ‘that was touched then;’ ‘what is touched now is bitter,’ ‘what was then touched was red.’ [1]

[1] Thus the conviction that an object seen is not ‘bare fancy,’ which is gained by ‘putting the hand to it’ (Book IV. chap. xi. sec. l7), as it conveys the idea of solidity, is properly, according to Locke’s doctrine, not one among other ‘confirmations of the testimony of the senses,’ but the source of all such testimony, as a testimony to the real, _i.e._ to body. See above, paragraph 62.

Only the knowledge that something is, not what it is.

105. All that is gained, then, by the conversion of the feeling of touch, pure and simple, into the idea of a body touched, is the supposition that _there is_ a real existence which does not come and go with the sensations. As to _what_ this existence is, as to its real essence, we can have no knowledge but such as is given in a present sensation. [1] Any essence of it, otherwise known, could only be a nominal essence, a relation of ideas in our minds: it would lack the condition in virtue of which alone a datum of consciousness can claim to be representative of reality, that of being an impression made by a body now operating upon us. (Book III. chap. v. sec. 2, and