Book IV. chap. xi. sec. 1.) The memory of such impression, however

faithful, will still only report a _past_ reality. It will itself be merely ‘an idea in the mind.’ Neither it nor its relation to any present sensation result from the immediate impact of body, and in consequence neither ‘really exists.’ All that can be known, then, of the real, in other words, the whole real essence of body, as it is for us, reduces itself to that which can at any moment be ‘revealed’ in a single sensation apart from all relation to past sensations; and this, as we have seen, is nothing at all.

[1] Cf. Book III. chap. vi. sec. 6: ‘As to the real essences of substances, we only suppose their being, without precisely knowing what they are.’ The appearance of the qualification ‘precisely,’ as we shall see below, marks an oscillation from the view, according to which ‘real essence’ is the negation of the knowable to the view according to which our knowledge of it is merely inadequate.

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

106. Thus that reduction of reality to that of which nothing can be said, which follows from its identification with particularity in time, follows equally from its identification with the resistance of body, or (which comes to the same) from the notion of an ‘outer sense’ being its organ; since it is only that which _now_ resists, not a general possibility of resistance nor a relation between the resistances of different times, that can be regarded as outside the mind. In Locke’s language, it is only a particular parcel of matter that can be so regarded. Of such a parcel, as he rightly says, it is absurd to ask what is its essence, for it can have none at all. (See above, paragraph 94.) As real, it has no quality save that of being a body or of being now touched--a quality, which as all things real have it and have none other, cannot be a _differentia_ of it. When we consider that this quality may be regarded equally as immutable and as changing from moment to moment, we shall see the ground of Locke’s contradiction of himself in speaking of the real thing sometimes as indestructible, sometimes as in continual dissolution. ‘The real constitutions of things begin and perish with them.’ (Book III. chap. iii. sec. 19.) That is, the thing at one moment makes an impact on the sensitive tablet--in the fact that it does so lie at once its existence and its essence--but the next moment the impact is over, and with it thing and essence, _as real_, have disappeared. Another impact, and thus another thing, has taken its place. But of this the real essence is just the same as that of the previous thing, namely, that it may be touched, or is solid, or a body, or a parcel of matter; nor can this essence be really lost, since than it there is no other reality, all difference of essence, as Locke expressly says, [1] being constituted by abstract ideas and the work of the mind. It follows that _real_ change is impossible. A parcel of matter at one time is a parcel of matter at all times. Thus we have only to forget that the relation of continuity between the parcels, not being an idea caused by impact, should properly fall to the unreal--though only on the same principle as should that of distinctness between the times--and we find the real in a continuity of matter, unchangeable because it has no qualities to change. It may seem strange that when this notion of the formless continuity of the real being gets the better of Locke, a man should be the real being which he takes as his instance. ‘Nothing I have is essential to me. An accident or disease may very much alter my colour or shape; a fever or fall may take away my reason or memory, or both; and an apoplexy leave neither sense nor understanding, no, nor life.’ (Book III. chap. vi. sec. 4.) But as the sequel shows, the man or the ‘I’ is here considered simply as ‘a particular corporeal being,’ _i.e._ as the ‘parcel of matter’ which alone (according to the doctrine of reality now in view) can be the real in man, and upon which all qualities are ‘superinductions of the mind.’ [2]

[1] Book III. chap. vi. sec. 4: ‘Take but away the abstract ideas by which we sort individuals, and then the thought of anything essential to any of them instantly vanishes.’

[2] See a few lines below the passage quoted: ‘So that if it be asked, whether it be essential to me, or any other particular corporeal being, to have reason? I say, no; no more than it is essential to this white thing I write on to have words in it.’

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

107. We may now discern the precise point where the qualm as to clothing reality with such superinductions commonly returns upon Locke. The conversion of feeling into body felt and of the particular time of the feeling into an individuality of the body, and, further, the fusion of the individual bodies, manifold as the times of sensation, into one continued body, he passes without scruple. So long as these are all the traces of mental fiction which ‘matter,’ or ‘body,’ or ‘nature’ bears upon it, he regards it undoubtingly as the pure ‘privation’ of whatever belongs to the mind. But so soon as cognisable qualities, forming an essence, come to be ascribed to body, the reflection arises that these qualities are on our side ideas, and that so far as they are permanent or continuous they are not ideas of the sort which can alone represent body as the ‘real’ opposite of mind; they are not the result of momentary impact; they are not ‘actually present sensations.’ Suppose them, however, to have no permanence--suppose their reality to be confined to the fleeting ‘now’--and they are no qualities, no essence, at all. There is then for us no _real_ essence of body or nature; what we call so is a creation of the mind.

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

108. This implies the degradation of the ‘primary qualities of body’ from the position which they hold in the Second Book of the Essay, as the real, _par excellence_, to that of a nominal essence. In the Second Book, just as the complex of ideas, received and to be received from a substance, is taken for the real thing without disturbance from the antithesis between reality and ‘ideas in the mind,’ so the primary qualities of body are taken not only as real, but as the sources of all other reality. Body, the real thing, copying itself upon the mind in an idea of sensation (that of solidity), carries with it from reality into the mind those qualities which ‘the mind finds inseparable from it,’ with all their modes. ‘A piece of manna of a sensible bulk is able to produce in us the idea of a round or square figure, and, by being removed from one place to another, the idea of motion. This idea of motion represents it, as it really is in the manna, moving; a circle or square are the same, whether in idea or existence, in the mind or in the manna; and this both motion and figure are really in the manna, whether we take notice of them or no.’ (Book II. chap. viii. sec. 18.) To the unsophisticated man, taking for granted that the ‘sensible bulk’ of the manna is a ‘real essence,’ this statement will raise no difficulties. But when he has learnt from Locke himself that the ‘sensible bulk,’ so far as we can think and speak of it, must consist in the ideas which it is said to produce, the question as to the real existence of these must arise. It turns out that they ‘really exist,’ so far as they represent the impact of a body copying itself in actually present sensation, and that from their reality, accordingly, must be excluded all qualities that accrue to the present sensation from its relation to the past. Can the ‘primary qualities’ escape this exclusion?

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

109. To obtain a direct and compendious answer to this question from Locke’s own mouth is not easy, owing to the want of adjustment between the several passages where he treats of the primary qualities. They are originally enumerated as the ‘bulk, figure, number, situation, and motion or rest of the solid parts of bodies’ (Book II. chap. viii. sec. 23), and, as we have seen, are treated as all involved in that idea of solidity which is given in the sensation of touch. We have no further account of them till we come to the chapters on ‘simple modes of space and duration’ (Book II. chaps. xiii. &c.), which are introduced by the remark, that in the previous part of the book simple ideas have been treated ‘rather in the way that they come into the mind than as distinguished from others more compounded.’ As the simple idea, according to Locke, is that which comes first into the mind, the two ways of treatment ought to coincide; but there follows an explanation of the simple modes in question, of which to a critical reader the plain result is that the idea of body, which, according to the imaginary theory of ‘the way that it came into the mind’ is simple and equivalent to the sensation of touch, turns out to be a complex of relations of which the simplest is called space.

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

110. To know what space itself is, ‘we are sent to our senses’ of sight and touch. It is ‘as needless to go to prove that men perceive by their sight a distance between bodies of different colours, or between the parts of the same body, as that they see colours themselves; nor is it less obvious that they can do so in the dark by feeling and touch.’ (Book II. chap. xiii. sec. 2.) Space being thus explained by reference to distance, and distance _between bodies_, it might be supposed that distance and body were simpler ideas. In the next paragraph, however, distance is itself explained to be a mode of space. It is ‘space considered barely in length between any two beings,’ and is distinguished _(a)_ from ‘capacity’ or ‘space considered in length, breadth, and thickness;’ _(b)_ from ‘figure, which is nothing but the relation which the parts of the termination of extension, or circumscribed space, have among themselves;’ _(c)_ from ‘place, which is the relation of distance between anything and any two or more points which are considered as keeping the same distance one with another, and so as at rest.’ It is then shown at large (Book II. chap. xiii. sec. 11), as against the Cartesians, that extension, which is ‘space in whatsoever manner considered,’ is a ‘distinct idea from body.’ The ground of the distinction plainly lies in the greater complexity of the idea of body. Throughout the definition just given ‘space’ is presupposed as the simpler idea of which capacity, figure, and place are severally modifications; and these again, as ‘primary qualities,’ though with a slight difference of designation, [1] are not only all declared inseparable from body, but are involved in it under a further modification as ‘_qualities of its solid parts_’ _i.e._, of parts so related to each other that each will change its place sooner than admit another into it. (Book II. chap. iv. sec. 2, and chap. viii. sec. 23.) Yet, though body is thus a complex of relations--all, according to Locke’s doctrine of relation, inventions of the mind--and though it must be proportionately remote from the simple idea which ‘comes first into the mind,’ yet, on the other hand, it is in body, as an object previously given, that these relations are said to be found, and found by the senses. (Book II. chap. xiii. secs. 2, 27.) [2]

[1] In the enumeration of primary qualities, ‘capacity’ is represented by ‘bulk,’ ‘place’ by ‘situation.’

[2] In the second of the passages referred to, it will be seen that ‘matter’ is used interchangeably with ‘body.’

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?

111. It will readily be seen that ‘body’ here is a mode of the idea of substance, and, like it, [1] appears in two inconsistent positions as at once the beginning and the end of the process of knowledge--as on the one hand that in which ideas are found and from which they are abstracted, and on the other hand that which results from their complication. As the attempt either to treat particular qualities as given and substance as an abstraction gradually made, or conversely to treat the ‘thing’ as given, and relations as gradually superinduced, necessarily fails for the simple reason that substance and relations each presuppose the other, so body presupposes the primary qualities as so many relations which form its essence or make it what it is, while these again presuppose body as the matter which they determine, It is because Locke substitutes for this intellectual order of mutual presupposition a succession of sensations in time, that he finds himself in the confusion we have noticed--now giving the priority to sensations in which the idea of body is supposed to be conveyed, and from it deriving the ideas of the primary qualities, now giving it to these ideas themselves, and deriving the idea of body from their complication. This is just such a contradiction as it would be to put to-day before yesterday. _We_ may escape it by the consideration that in the case before us it is not a succession of sensations in time that we have to do with at all; that ‘the real’ is an intellectual order, or mind, in which every element, being correlative to every other, at once presupposes and is presupposed by every other; but that this order communicates itself to us piecemeal, in a process of which the first condition on our part is the conception that there _is_ an order, or something related to something else; and that thus the conception of qualified substance, which in its definite articulation is the end of all our knowledge, is yet in another form, that may be called indifferently either abstract or confused, [2] its beginning. This way of escape, however, was not open to Locke, because with him it was the condition of reality in the idea of the body and its qualities that they should be ‘actually present sensations.’ The priority then of body to the relations of extension, distance, &c., as of that in which these relations are found, must, if body and extension are to be more than nominal essences, be a priority of sensations in time. But, on the other hand, the priority of the idea of space to the ideas of its several modes, and of these again to the idea of body, as of the simpler to the more complex, must no less than the other, if the ideas in question are to be real, be one in time. Locke’s contradiction, then, is that of supposing that of two sensations each is actually present, of two impacts on the sensitive tablet each is actually made, before the other.

[1] See above, paragraph 39.

[2] ‘Indifferently either abstract or confused,’ because of the conception that is most confused the least can be said; and it is thus most abstract.

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

112. From such a contradiction, even though he was not distinctly aware of it, he could not but seek a way of escape, From his point of view two ways might at first sight seem to be open--the priority in sensitive experience, and with it reality, might be assigned exclusively either to the idea of body or to that of space. To whichever of the two it is assigned, the other must become a nominal essence. If it is the idea of body that is conveyed to the mind directly from without through sensation, then it must be by a process in the mind that the spatial relations are abstracted from it; and conversely, if it is the latter that are given in sensation, it must be by a mental operation of compounding that the idea of body is obtained from them. Now, according to Locke’s fundamental notion, that the reality of an idea depends upon its being in consciousness a copy _through impact_ of that which is not in consciousness, any attempt to retain it in the idea of space while sacrificing it in that of body would be obviously self-destructive. Nor, however we might re-write his account of the relations of space as ‘found in bodies,’ could we avoid speaking of them as relations of some sort; and if relations, then derived from the ‘mind’s carrying its view from one thing to another,’ and not ‘actually present sensations.’ We shall not, then, be surprised to find Locke tending to the other alternative, and gradually forgetting his assertion that ‘a circle or a square are the same whether in idea or in existence,’ and his elaborate maintenance of the ‘real existence’ of a vacuum, _i.e._, extension without body. (Book II. chap. xiii. secs. 21 and the following, and xvii. 4.) In the Fourth Book it is body alone that has real existence, an existence revealed by actually present sensation, while all mathematical ideas, the ideas of the circle and the square, have ‘barely an ideal existence’ (Book IV. chap. iv. sec. 6); and this means nothing else than the reduction of the primary qualities of body to a nominal essence. Our ideas of them are general (Book IV. chap. iii. sec. 24), or merely in the mind. ‘There is no individual parcel of matter, to which any of these qualities are so annexed as to be essential to it or inseparable from it.’ (Book III. chap. vi. sec. 6.) How should there be, when the ‘individual parcel’ means that which copies itself by impact in the present sensation, while the qualities in question are relations which cannot be so copied? Yet, except as attaching to such a parcel, they have no ‘real existence;’ and, conversely, the ‘body,’ from which they _are_ inseparable, not being an individual parcel of matter in the above sense, must itself be unreal and belong merely to the mind. The ‘body’ which is real has for us no qualities, and that reference to it of the ‘actually present sensation’ by which such sensation is distinguished from other feeling, is a reference to something of which nothing can be said. It is a reference which cannot be stated in any proposition _really_ true; and the difference which it constitutes between ‘bare vision’ and the feeling to which reality corresponds, must be either itself unreal or unintelligible.

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

113. We have now pursued the antithesis between reality and the work of the mind along all the lines which Locke indicates, and find that it everywhere eludes us. The distinction, which only appeared incidentally in the doctrine of substance, between ‘the being and the idea thereof--between substance as ‘found’ and substance as that which ‘we accustom ourselves to suppose’--becomes definite and explicit as that between real and nominal essence, but it does so only that the essence, which is merely real, may disappear. Whether we suppose it the quality of a mere sensation, as such, or of mere body, as such, we find that we are unawares defining it by relations which are themselves the work of the mind, and that after abstraction of these nothing remains to give the antithesis to the work of the mind any meaning. Meanwhile the attitude of thought, when it has cleared the antithesis of disguise, but has not yet found that each of the opposites derives itself from thought as much as the other, is so awkward and painful that an instinctive reluctance to make the clearance is not to be wondered at. Over against the world of knowledge, which is the work of the mind, stands a real world of which we can say nothing but that it is there, that it makes us aware of its presence in every sensation, while our interpretation of what it is, the system of relations which we read into it, is our own invention. The interpretation is not even to be called a shadow, for a shadow, however dim, still reflects the reality; it is an arbitrary fiction, and a fiction of which the possibility is as unaccountable as the inducement to make it. It is commonly presented as consisting in abstraction from the concrete. But the concrete, just so far as concrete, _i.e._, a complex world of relations, cannot be the real if the separation of the real from the work of the mind is to be maintained. It must itself be the work of the compounding mind, which must be supposed again in ‘abstraction’ to decompose what it has previously compounded. Now, it is of the essence of the doctrine in question that it denies all power of origination to the mind except in the way of compounding and abstracting given impressions. Its supposition is, that whatever precedes the work of composition and abstraction must be real [1] because the mind passively receives it: a supposition which, if the mind could originate, would not hold. How, then, does it come to pass that a ‘nominal essence,’ consisting of definite qualities, is constructed by a mind, which originates nothing, out of a ‘real’ matter, which, apart from such construction, has no qualities at all? And why, granted the construction, should the mind in ‘abstraction’ go through the Penelopean exercise of perpetually unweaving the web which it has just woven?

[1] ‘Simple ideas, since the mind can by no means make them to itself, must necessarily be the product of things operating on the mind.’ (Book IV. chap. v. sec. 4.)

Why they do not trouble him more.

114. It is Hume’s more logical version of Locke’s doctrine that first forces these questions to the front. In Locke himself they are kept back by inconsistencies, which we have already dwelt upon. For the real, absolutely void of intelligible qualities, because these are relative to the mind, he is perpetually substituting a real constituted by such qualities, only with a complexity which we cannot exhaust. By so doing, though at the cost of sacrificing the opposition between the real and the mental, he avoids the necessity of admitting that the system of the sciences is a mere language, well-or ill-constructed, but unaccountably and without reference to things. Finally, he so far forgets the opposition altogether as to find the reality of ‘moral and mathematical’ knowledge in their ‘bare ideality’ itself. (Book IV. chap. iv. sec. 6, &c.) Thus with him the divorce between knowledge and reality is never complete, and sometimes they appear in perfect fusion. A consideration of his doctrine of propositions will show finally how the case between them stands, as he left it.

They re-appear in his doctrine of propositions.

115. In the Fourth Book of the Essay the same ground has to be thrice traversed under the several titles of ‘knowledge,’ ‘truth,’ and ‘propositions.’ Knowledge being the perception of agreement or disagreement between ideas, the proposition is the putting together or separation of words, as the signs of ideas, in affirmative or negative sentences (Book IV. chap. v. sec. 5), and truth--the expression of certainty [1]--consists in the correspondence between the conjunction or separation of the signs and the agreement or disagreement of the ideas. (Book IV. chap. v. sec. 2.) Thus, the question between the real and the mental affects all these. Does this or that perception of agreement between ideas represent an agreement in real existence? Is its certainty a real certainty? Does such or such a proposition, being a correct expression of an agreement between ideas, also through this express an agreement between things? Is its truth real, or merely verbal?

[1] All knowledge is certain according to Locke (Cf. IV. chap. vi. sec. 13, ‘certainty is requisite to knowledge’), though the knowledge must be expressed before the term ‘certainty’ is naturally applied to it. (Book IV. chap. vi. sec. 3.) ‘Certainty of knowledge’ is thus a pleonastic phrase, which only seems not to be so because we conceive knowledge to have a relation to things which Locke’s definition denies it, and by ‘certainty,’ in distinction from this, understand its relation to the subject.

‘Certainty of truth’ is, in like manner, a pleonastic phrase, there being no difference between the definition of it (Book IV. chap. vi. sec. 3) and that of ‘truth’ simply, given in Book IV. chap. V. sec. 2.

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

116. To answer these questions, according to Locke, we must consider whether the knowledge, or the proposition which expresses it, concerns substances, _i.e._, ‘the co-existence of ideas in nature,’ on the one hand; or, on the other, either the properties of a mathematical figure or ‘moral ideas.’ If it is of the latter sort, the agreement of the ideas in the mind is itself their agreement in reality, since the ideas themselves are archetypes. (Book IV. chap. iv. secs. 6, 7.) It is only when the ideas are ectypes, as is the case when the proposition concerns substances, that the doubt arises whether the agreement between them represents an agreement in reality. The distinction made here virtually corresponds to that which appears in the chapters on the reality and adequacy of ideas in the Second Book, and again in those on ‘names’ in the Third. There the ‘complex ideas of modes and relation’ are pronounced necessarily real adequate and true, because, ‘being themselves archetypes, they cannot differ from their archetypes.’ (Book II. chap. XXX. sec. 4.) [1] With them are contrasted simple ideas and complex ideas of substances, which are alike ectypes, but with this difference from each other, that the simple ideas cannot but be faithful copies of their archetypes, while the ideas of substances cannot but be otherwise. (Book II. chap. xxxi. secs. 2, 11, &c.) Thus, ‘the names of simple ideas and substances, with the abstract ideas in the mind which they immediately signify, intimate also some real existence, from which was derived their original pattern. But the names of mixed modes terminate in the idea that is in the mind.’ (Book III. chap. iv. sec. 2.) ‘The names of simple ideas and modes,’ it is added, ‘signify always the real as well as nominal essence of their species’--a statement which, if it is to express Locke’s doctrine strictly, must be confined to names of simple ideas, while in respect of modes it should run, that ‘the nominal essence which the names of these signify is itself the real.’

[1] cf. Book II. chap. xxxi. sec. 3, and xxxii. sec. 17.

... 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.

117. But though the distinction between different kinds of knowledge in regard to reality cannot but rest on the same principle as that drawn between different kinds of ideas in the same regard, it is to be noticed that in the doctrine of the Fourth Book ‘knowledge concerning substances,’ in contrast with that in which ‘our thoughts terminate in the abstract ideas,’ has by itself to cover the ground which, in the Second and Third Book, simple ideas and complex ideas of substances cover together. This is to be explained by the observation, already set forth at large, [1] that the simple idea has in Locke’s Fourth Book become explicitly what in the previous books it was implicitly, not a feeling proper, but the conscious reference of a feeling to a thing or substance. Only because it is thus converted, as we have seen, can it constitute the beginning of a knowledge which is not a simple idea but a conscious relation between ideas, or have (what yet it must have if it can be expressed in a proposition) that capacity of being true or false, which implies ‘the reference by the mind of an idea to something extraneous to it.’ (Book II. chap, xxxii. sec. 4.) Thus, what is said of the ‘simple idea’ in the Second and Third Books, is in the Fourth transferred to one form of knowledge concerning substances, to that, namely, which consists in ‘particular experiment and observation,’ and is expressed in singular propositions, such as ‘this is yellow,’ ‘this gold is now solved in aqua regia.’ Such knowledge cannot but be real, the proposition which expresses it cannot but have _real_ certainty, because it is the effect of a ‘body actually operating upon us’ (Book IV. chap. xi. sec. 1), just as the simple idea is an ectype directly made by an archetype. It is otherwise with complex ideas of substances and with general knowledge or propositions about them. A group of ideas, each of which, when first produced by a ‘body,’ has been real, when retained in the mind as representing the body, becomes unreal. The complex idea of gold is only a nominal essence or the signification of a name; the qualities which compose it are merely ideas in the mind, and that general truth which consists in a correct statement of the relation between one of them and another or the whole--_e.g._, ‘gold is soluble in aqua regia’--holds merely for the mind; [2] but it is not therefore to be classed with those other mental truths, which constitute mathematical and moral knowledge, and which, just because ‘merely ideal,’ are therefore real. Its merely mental character renders it in Locke’s language a ‘trifling proposition,’ but does not therefore save it from being _really_ untrue. It is a ‘trifling proposition,’ for, unless solubility in aqua regia is included in the complex idea which the sound ‘gold’ stands for, the proposition which asserts it of gold is not certain, not a truth at all. If it is so included, then the proposition is but ‘playing with sounds.’ It may serve to remind an opponent of a definition which he has made but is forgetting, but ‘carries no knowledge with it but of the signification of a word, however certain it be.’ (Book IV. chap. viii. secs. 5 & 9.) Yet there is a real gold, outside the mind, of which the complex idea of gold in the mind must needs try to be a copy, though the conditions of real existence are such that no ‘complex idea in the mind’ can possibly be a copy of it. Thus the verbal truth, which general propositions concerning substances express, is under a perpetual doom of being really untrue. The exemption of mathematical and moral knowledge from this doom remains an unexplained mercy. Because merely mental, such knowledge is real--there being no reality for it to _mis_represent--and yet not trifling. The proposition that ‘the external angle of all triangles is bigger than either of the opposite internal angles,’ has that general certainty which is never to be found but in our ideas, yet ‘conveys instructive real knowledge,’ the predicate being ‘a necessary consequence of precise complex idea’ which forms the subject, yet ‘not contained in it.’ (Book IV. chap. viii. sec. 8.) [3] The same might be said apparently, according to Locke’s judgment (though he is not so explicit about this), of a proposition in morals, such as ‘God is to be feared and obeyed by man.’ (Book IV. chap. xi. sec. 13.) [4] But how are such propositions, at once abstract and real, general and instructive, to be accounted for? There is no ‘workmanship of the mind’ recognised by Locke but that which consists in compounding and abstracting (_i.e._, separating) ideas of which ‘it cannot originate one.’ The ‘abstract ideas’ of mathematics, the ‘mixed modes’ of morals, just as much as the ideas of substances, must be derived by such mental artifice from a material given in simple feeling, and ‘real’ because so given. Yet, while this derivation renders ideas of substances unreal in contrast with their real ‘originals,’ and general propositions about them ‘trifling,’ because, while ‘intimating an existence,’ they tell nothing about it, on the other hand it actually constitutes the reality of moral and mathematical ideas. Their relation to an original disappears; they are themselves archetypes, from which the mind, by its own act, can elicit other ideas not already involved in the meaning of their names. But this can only mean that the mind has some other function than that of uniting what it has ‘found’ in separation, and separating again what it has thus united--that it can itself originate.

[1] See above, paragraph 25.

[2] Book IV. chap. xi. sec. 13, xii. 9, &c.

[3] Just as according to Kant such a proposition expresses a judgment ‘synthetical,’ yet ‘á-priori.’

[4] Cf. Book IV. chap. iii. sec. 18, and Book III. chap, xi. sec. 16.

Significance of this doctrine.

118. A genius of such native force as Locke’s could not be applied to philosophy without determining the lines of future speculation, even though to itself they remained obscure. He stumbles upon truths when he is not looking for them, and the inconsistencies or accidents of his system are its most valuable part. Thus, in a certain sense, he may claim the authorship at once of the popular empiricism of the modern world, and of its refutation. He fixed the prime article of its creed, that thought has nothing to do with the constitution of facts, but only with the representation of them by signs and the rehearsal to itself of what its signs have signified--in brief, that its function is merely the analytical judgment; yet his admissions about mathematical knowledge rendered inevitable the Kantian question, ‘How are synthetic judgments á-priori possible?’--which was to lead to the recognition of thought as constituting the objective world, and thus to get rid of the antithesis between thought and reality. In his separation of the datum of experience from the work of thought he was merely following the Syllogistic Logic, which really assigns no work to the thought, whose office it professes to magnify, but the analysis of given ideas. Taking the work as that Logic conceived it (and as it must be conceived if the separation is to be maintained) he showed--conclusively as against Scholasticism-- the ‘trifling’ character of the necessary and universal truths with which it dealt. Experience, the manifestation of the real, regarded as a series of events which to us are sensations, can only yield propositions singular as the events, and having a truth like them contingent. By consequence, necessity and universality of connection can only be found in what the mind does for itself, without reference to reality, when it analyses the complex idea which it retains as the memorandum of its past single experiences; _i.e._, in a relation between ideas or propositions of which one explicitly includes the other. Upon this relation syllogistic reasoning rests, and, except so far as it may be of use for convicting an opponent (or oneself) of inconsistency, it has nothing to say against such nominalism as the above. Hence, with those followers of Locke who have been most faithful to their master, it has remained the standing rule to make the generality of a truth consist in its being analytical of the meaning of a name, and its necessity in its being included in one previously conceded. Yet if such were the true account of the generality and necessity of mathematical propositions, their truth according to Locke’s explicit statement would be ‘verbal and trifling,’ not, as it is, ‘real and instructive.’

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

119. The point of this, the most obvious, contradiction inherent in Locke’s empiricism, is more or less striking according to the fidelity with which the notion of matter-of-fact, or of the reality that is not of the mind, proper to that system, is adhered to. When the popular Logic derived from Locke has so far forgotten the pit whence it was digged as to hold that propositions of a certainty at once real and general can be derived from experience, and to speak without question of ‘general matters-of-fact’ in a sense which to Locke almost, to Hume altogether, would have been a contradiction in terms, it naturally finds no disturbance in regarding mathematical certainty as different not in kind, but only in degree, from that of any other ‘generalisation from experience.’ Not aware that the distinction of mathematical from empirical generality is the condition upon which, according to Locke, the former escapes condemnation as ‘trifling,’ it does not see any need for distinguishing the sources from which the two are derived, and hence goes on asserting against imaginary or insignificant opponents that mathematical truth is derived from ‘experience;’ which, if ‘experience’ be so changed from what Locke understood by it as to yield general propositions concerning matters-of-fact of other than analytical purport, no one need care to deny. That it can yield such propositions is, doubtless, the supposition of the physical sciences; nor, we must repeat, is it the _correctness_ of this supposition that is in question, but the validity, upon its admission, of that antithesis between experience and the work of thought, which is the ‘be-all and end-all’ of the popular Logic.

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

120. Locke, as we have seen, after all the encroachments made unawares by thought within the limits of that experience which he opposes to it--or, to put it conversely, after all that he allows ‘nature’ to take without acknowledgment from ‘mind’--is still so far faithful to the opposition as to ‘suspect a science of nature to be impossible.’ This suspicion, which is but a hesitating expression of the doctrine that general propositions concerning substances are merely verbal, is the exact counterpart of the doctrine pronounced without hesitation that mathematical truths, being at once real and general, do not concern nature at all. Real knowledge concerning nature being given by single impressions of bodies at single times operating upon us, and by consequence being expressible only in singular propositions, any reality which general propositions state must belong merely to the mind, and a mind which can originate a reality other than nature’s cannot be a passive receptacle of natural impressions. Locke admits the real generality of mathematical truths, but does not face its consequences. Hume, seeing the difficulty, will not admit the real generality. The modern Logic, founded on Locke, believing in the possibility of propositions at once real and general concerning nature. does not see the difficulty at all. It reckons mathematical to be the same in kind with natural knowledge, each alike being real notwithstanding its generality; not aware that by so doing, instead of getting rid, as it fancies, of the originative function of thought in respect of mathematical knowledge, it only necessitates the supposition of its being originative in respect of the knowledge of nature as well.

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

121. It may find some excuse for itself in the hesitation with which Locke pronounces the impossibility of real generality in the knowledge of nature--an hesitation which necessarily results from the ambiguities, already noticed, in his doctrine of real and nominal essence. So far as the opposition between the nominal and real essences of substances is maintained in its absoluteness, as that between every possible collection of ideas on the one side, and something wholly apart from thought on the other, this impossibility follows of necessity. But so far as the notion is admitted of the nominal essence being in some way, however inadequately, representative of the real, there is an opening, however indefinite, for general propositions concerning the latter. On the one hand we have the express statement that ‘universal propositions, of whose truth and falsehood we can have certain knowledge, concern not existence’ (Book IV. chap. ix. sec. 1). They are founded only on the ‘relations and habitudes of abstract ideas’ (Book IV. chap xii. sec. 7); and since it is the proper operation of the mind in abstraction to consider an idea under no other existence but what it has in the understanding, they represent no knowledge of _real_ existence at all (Book IV. chap. ix. sec. 1). Here Locke is consistently following his doctrine that the ‘particularity in time,’ of which abstraction is made when we consider ideas as in the understanding, is what specially distinguishes the real; which thus can only be represented by ‘actually present sensation.’ It properly results from this doctrine that the proposition representing particular experiment and observation is only true of real existence so long as the sensation, in which the experiment consists, continues present. Not only is the possibility excluded of such experiment yielding a certainty which shall be general as well as real, but the particular proposition itself can only be _really_ true so far as the qualities, whose co-existence it asserts, are present sensations. The former of these limitations to real truth we find Locke generally recognising, and consequently suspecting a science of nature to be impossible; but the latter, which would be fatal to the supposition of there being a real nature at all, even when he carries furthest the reduction of reality to present feeling, he virtually ignores. On the other hand, there keeps appearing the notion that, inasmuch as the combination of ideas which make up the nominal essence of a substance is taken from a combination in nature or reality, whenever the connexion between any of these is necessary, it warrants a proposition _universally_ true in virtue of the necessary connexion between the ideas, and _really_ true in virtue of the ideas being taken from reality. According to this notion, though ‘the certainty of universal propositions concerning substances is very narrow and scanty,’ it is yet possible (Book IV. chap. vi. sec. 13). It is not recognised as involving that contradiction which it must involve if the antithesis between reality and ideas in the mind is absolutely adhered to. Nay, inasmuch as certain ideas of primary qualities, _e.g._ those of solidity and of the receiving or communicating motion upon impulse, are necessarily connected, it is supposed actually to exist (Book IV. chap iii. sec. 14). It is only because, as a matter of fact, our knowledge of the relation between secondary qualities and primary is so limited that it cannot be carried further. That they are related as effects and causes, it would seem, we know; and that the ‘causes work steadily, and effects constantly flow from them,’ we know also; but ‘their connexions and dependencies are not discoverable in our ideas’ (Book IV. chap. iii. sec. 29). That, if discoverable in our ideas, just because there discovered, the connexion would not be a real co-existence, Locke never expressly says. He does not so clearly articulate the antithesis between relations of ideas and matters of fact. If he had done so, he must also have excluded from real existence those abstract ideas of body which constitute the scanty knowledge of it that according to him we do possess (Book IV. chap. iii. sec. 24). He is more disposed to sigh for discoveries that would make physics capable of the same general certainty as mathematics, than to purge the former of those mathematical propositions--really true only because having no reference to reality--which to him formed the only scientific element in them.

What knowledge it can afford, according to Locke.

122. The ambiguity of his position will become clearer if we resort to his favourite ‘instances in gold.’ The proposition, ‘all gold is soluble in aqua regia,’ is certainly true, if such solubility is included in the complex idea which the word ‘gold’ stands for, and if such inclusion is all that the proposition purports to state. It is equally certain and equally trifling with the proposition, ‘a centaur is four-footed.’ But, in fact, as a proposition concerning substance, it purports to state more than this, viz. that a ‘body whose complex idea is made up of yellow, very weighty, ductile, fusible, and fixed,’ is always soluble in aqua regia. In other words, it states the invariable co-existence in a body of the complex idea, ‘solubility in aqua regia,’ with the group of ideas indicated by ‘gold.’ Thus understood--as instructive or synthetical--it has not the certainty which would belong to it if it were ‘trifling,’ or analytical, ‘since we can never, from the consideration of the ideas themselves, with certainty affirm’ their co-existence (Book IV. chap. vi. sec 9). If we see the solution actually going on, or can recall the sight of it by memory, we can affirm its co-existence with the ideas in question in that ‘bare instance;’ and thus, on the principle that ‘whatever ideas have once been united in nature may be so united again’ (Book IV. chap. iv. sec. 12), infer a capacity of co-existence between the ideas, but that is all. ‘Constant observation may assist our judgments in guessing’ an invariable actual co-existence (Book IV. chap. viii. sec. 9); but beyond guessing we cannot get. If our instructive proposition concerning co-existence is to be general it must remain problematical. It is otherwise with mathematical propositions. ‘If the three angles of a triangle were once equal to two right angles, it is certain that they always will be so;’ but only because such a proposition concerns merely ‘the habitudes and relations of ideas.’ ‘If the perception that the same ideas will eternally have the same habitudes and relations be not a sufficient ground of knowledge, there could be no knowledge of general propositions in mathematics; for no mathematical demonstration could be other than particular: and when a man had demonstrated any proposition concerning one triangle and circle, his knowledge would not reach beyond that particular diagram’ (Book IV. chap. i. sec. 9).

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

123. To a reader, fresh from our popular treatises on Logic, such language would probably at first present no difficulty. He would merely lament that Locke, as a successor of Bacon, was not better acquainted with the ‘Inductive methods,’ and thus did not understand how an observation of co-existence in the bare instance, if the instance be of the right sort, may warrant a universal affirmation. Or he may take the other side, and regard Locke’s restriction upon general certainty as conveying, not any doubt as to the validity of the inference from an observed case to all cases where the conditions are ascertainably the same, but a true sense of the difficulty of ascertaining in any other case that the conditions are the same. On looking closer, however, he will see that, so far from Locke’s doctrine legitimately allowing of such an adaptation to the exigencies of science, it is inconsistent with itself in admitting the reality of most of the conditions in the case supposed to be observed, and thus in allowing the real truth even of the singular proposition. This purports to state, according to Locke’s terminology, that certain ‘ideas’ do now or did once co-exist in a body. But the ideas, thus stated to co-exist, according to Locke’s doctrine that real existence is only testified to by actual present sensation, differ from each other as that which _really_ exists from that which does not. In the particular experiment of gold being solved in aqua regia, from the complex idea of solubility an indefinite deduction would have to be made for qualification by ideas retained in the understanding before we could reach the present sensation; and not only so, but the group of ideas indicated by ‘gold,’ to whose co-existence with solubility the experiment is said to testify, as Locke himself says, form merely a nominal essence, while the body to which we ascribe this essence is something which we ‘accustom ourselves to suppose,’ not any ‘parcel of matter’ having a real existence in nature. [1] In asserting the co-existence of the ideas forming such a nominal essence with the actual sensation supposed to be given in the experiment, we change the meaning of ‘existence,’ between the beginning and end of the assertion, from that according to which all ideas exist to that according to which existence has no ‘connexion with any other of our ideas but those of ourselves and God,’ but is testified to by present sensation. [2] This paralogism escapes Locke just as his equivocal use of the term ‘idea’ escapes him. The distinction, fixed in Hume’s terminology as that between impression and idea, forces itself upon him, as we have seen, in the Fourth book of the Essay, where the whole doctrine of real existence turns upon it, but alongside of it survives the notion that ideas, though ‘in the mind’ and forming a nominal essence, are yet, if rightly taken from things, ectypes of reality. Thus he does not see that the co-existence of ideas, to which the particular experiment, as he describes it, testifies, is nothing else than the co-existence of an event with a conception--of that which is in a particular time, and (according to him) only for that reason real, with that which is not in time at all but is an unreal abstraction of the mind’s making. [3] The reality given in the actual sensation cannot, as a matter of fact, be discovered to have a necessary connexion with the ideas that form the nominal essence, and therefore cannot be asserted universally to co-exist with them; but with better faculties, he thinks, the discovery might be made (Book IV. chap. iii. sec. 16). It does not to him imply such a contradiction as it must have done if he had steadily kept in view his doctrine that of particular (_i.e._ real) existence our ‘knowledge’ is not properly knowledge at all, but simply sensation--such a contradiction as was to Hume involved in the notion of deducing a matter of fact.

[1] See above, paragraphs 35, 94, &c.

[2] See above, paragraph 30 and the following.

[3] See above, paragraphs 45, 80, 85, 97.

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

124. It results that those followers of Locke, who hold the distinction between propositions of mathematical certainty and those concerning real existence to be one rather of degree than of kind, though they have the express words of their master against them, can find much in his way of thinking on their side. This, however, does not mean that he in any case drops the antithesis between matters of fact and relations of ideas in favour of matters of fact, so as to admit that mathematical propositions concern matters of fact, but that he sometimes drops it in favour of relations of ideas, so as to represent real existence as consisting in such relations. If the matter of fact, or real existence, is to be found only in the event constituted or reported by present feeling, such a relation of ideas, by no manner of means reducible to an event, as the mathematical proposition states, can have no sort of connection with it. But if real existence is such that the relations of ideas, called primary qualities of matter, constitute it, and the qualities included in our nominal essences are its copies or effects, then, as on the one side our complex ideas of substances only fail of reality through want of fulness, or through mistakes in the process by which they are ‘taken from things,’ so, on the other side, the mental truth of mathematical propositions need only fail to be real because the ideas, whose relations they state, are considered in abstraction from conditions which qualify them in real existence. ‘If it is true of the idea of a triangle that its three angles equal two right ones, it is true also of a triangle, wherever it really exists’ (Book IV. chap. iv. sec. 6). There is, then, no incompatibility between the idea and real existence. Mathematical ideas might fairly be reckoned, like those of substances, to be taken from real existence; but though, like these, inadequate to its complexity, to be saved from the necessary infirmities which attach to ideas of substances because not considered as so taken, but merely as in the mind. There is language about mathematics in Locke that may be interpreted in this direction, though his most explicit statements are on the other side. It is not our business to adjust them, but merely to point out the opposite tendencies between which a clear-sighted operator on the material given by Locke would find that he had to choose.

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

125. On the one hand there is the identification of real existence with the momentary sensible event. This view, of which the proper result is the exclusion of predication concerning real existence altogether, appears in Locke’s restriction of such predication to the singular proposition, and in his converse assertion that propositions of mathematical certainty ‘concern not existence’ (Book IV. chap. iv. sec. 8). The embarrassment resulting from such a doctrine is that it leads round to the admission of the originativeness of thought and of the reality of its originations, with the denial of which it starts. [1] It leads Locke himself along a track, which his later followers scarcely seem to have noticed, when he treats the ‘never enough to be admired discoveries of Mr. Newton’ as having to do merely with the relations of ideas in distinction from things, and looks for a true extension of knowledge--neither in syllogism which can yield no instructive, nor in experiment which can yield no general, certainty--but only in a further process of ‘singling out and laying in order intermediate ideas,’ which are ‘real as well as nominal essences of their species,’ because they have no reference to archetypes elsewhere than in the mind (Book IV. chap. vii. sec. 11, and Book IV. chap. xii. sec. 7). On the other hand there is the notion that ideas, without distinction between ‘actual sensation’ and ‘idea in the mind,’ are taken from permanent things, and are real if correctly so taken. From this it results that propositions, universally true as representing a necessary relation between ideas of primary qualities, are true also of real existence; and that an extension of such real certainty through the discovery of a necessary connexion between ideas of primary and those of secondary qualities, though scarcely to be hoped for, has no inherent impossibility. It is this notion, again, that unwittingly gives even that limited significance to the particular experiment which Locke assigns to it, as indicating a co-existence between ideas present as sensations and those which can only be regarded as in the mind. Nor is it the intrinsic import so much as the expression of this notion that is altered when Locke substitutes an order of nature for substance as that in which the ideas co-exist. In his Fourth Book he so far departs from the doctrine implied in his chapters on the reality and adequacy of ideas and on the names of substances, as to treat the notion of several single subjects in which ideas co-exist (which he still holds to be the proper notion of substances), as a fiction of thought. There are no such single subjects. What we deem so are really ‘retainers to other parts of nature.’ ‘Their observable qualities, actions, and powers are owing to something without them; and there is not so complete and perfect a part that we know of nature, which does not owe the being it has, and the excellencies of it, to its neighbours’ (Book IV. chap. vi. sec. 11). As thus conceived of, the ‘objective order’ which our experience represents is doubtless other than that collection of fixed separate ‘things,’ implied in the language about substances which Locke found in vogue, but it remains an objective order still--an order of ‘qualities, actions, and powers’ which no multitude of sensible events could constitute, but apart from which no sensible event could have such significance as to render even a singular proposition of real truth possible.

[1] See above, paragraph 117, sub. fin.

Transition to doctrine of God and the soul.

126. It remains to inquire how, with Locke, the ideas of self and God escape subjection to those solvents of reality which, with more or less of consistency and consciousness, he applied to the conceptions on which the science of nature rests. Such an enquiry forms the natural transition to the next stage in the history of his philosophy. It was Berkeley’s practical interest in these ideas that held him back from a development of his master’s principles, in which he would have anticipated Hume, and finally brought him to attach that other meaning to the ‘new way of ideas’ faintly adumbrated in the later sections of his ‘Siris,’ which gives to Reason the functions that Locke had assigned to Sense.

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

127. The dominant notion of the self in Locke is that of the inward substance, or ‘substratum of ideas,’ co-ordinate with the outward, ‘wherein they do subsist, and from which they do result.’ ‘Sensation convinces that there are solid extended substances, and reflection that there are thinking ones’ (Book II. chap, xxiii. sec. 29). We have already seen how, without disturbance from his doctrine of the fictitiousness of universals, he treats the simple idea as carrying with it the distinction of outward and inward, or relations severally to a ‘thing’ and to a ‘mind.’ It reports itself ambiguously as a quality of each of these separate substances. It is now, or was to begin with, the result of an outward thing ‘actually operating upon us;’ for ‘of simple ideas the mind cannot make one to itself:’ on the other hand, it is a ‘perception,’ and perception is an ‘operation of the mind.’ In other words it is at once a modification of the mind by something of which it is consciously not conscious, and a modification of the mind by itself--the two sources of one and the same modification being each determined only as the contradictory of the other. Thus, when we come to probe the familiar metaphors under which Locke describes Reflection, as a ‘fountain of ideas’ other than sensation, we find that the confusions which we have already explored in dealing with the ideas of sensation recur under added circumstances of embarrassment. Not only does the simple idea of reflection, like that of sensation, turn out to be already complicated in its simplicity with the superinduced ideas of cause and relation, but the causal substance in question turns out to be one which, from being actually nothing, becomes something by acting upon itself; while all the time the result of this action is indistinguishable from that ascribed to the opposite, the external, cause.

Of which substance is perception the effect?

128. To a reader to whom Locke’s language has always seemed to be--as indeed it is--simply that of common sense and life, in writing the above we shall seem to be creating a difficulty where none is to be found. Let us turn, then, to one of the less prolix passages, in which the distinction between the two sources of ideas is expressed: ‘External objects furnish the mind with the ideas of sensible qualities, which are all those different perceptions they produce in us; and the mind furnishes the understanding with ideas of its own operations’ (Book II. chap. i. sec. 5). We have seen already that with Locke perception and idea are equivalent terms. It only needs further to be pointed out that no distinction can be maintained between his usage of ‘mind’ and of ‘understanding,’ [1] and that the simple ideas of the mind’s own operations are those of perception and power, which must be given in and with every idea of a sensible quality.’ [2] Avoiding synonyms, then, and recalling the results of our examination of the terms involved in the first clause of the passage before us, we may re-write the whole thus: ‘Creations of the mind, which yet are external to it, produce in it those perceptions of their qualities which they do produce; and the mind produces in itself the perception of these, its own, perceptions.’

[1] As becomes apparent on examination of such passages, as Book II. chap. i. sec. 1, sub. fin.; and Book II. chap. i. sec. 23.

[2] See above, paragraphs 11, 12, 16.

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

129. This attempt to present Locke’s doctrine of the relation between the mind and the world, as it would be without phraseological disguises, must not be ascribed to any polemical interest in making a great writer seem to talk nonsense, The greatest writer must fall into confusions when he brings under the conceptions of cause and substance the self-conscious thought which is their source; and nothing else than this is involved in Locke’s avowed enterprise of knowing that which renders knowledge possible as he might know any other object. The enterprise naturally falls into two parts, corresponding to that distinction of subject and object which self-consciousness involves. Hitherto we have been dealing with it on the objective side--with the attempt to know knowledge as a result of experience received through the senses--and have found the supposed source of thought already charged with its creations; with the relations of inner and outer, of substance and attribute, of cause and effect, of appearance and reality. The supposed ‘outward’ turns out to have its outwardness constituted by thought, and thus to be inward. The ‘outer sense’ is only an outer sense at all so far as feelings, by themselves neither outward nor inward, are by the mind referred to a thing or cause which ‘the mind supposes;’ and only thus have its reports a prerogative of reality over the ‘fantasies,’ supposed merely of the mind. Meanwhile, unable to ignore the subjective side of self-consciousness, Locke has to put an inward experience as a separate, but co-ordinate, source of knowledge alongside of the outer. But this inward experience, simply as a succession of feelings, does not differ from the outer: it only so differs as referred to that very ‘thinking thing,’ called the mind, which by its supposition of causal substance has converted feeling into an experience of an outer thing. ‘Mind’ thus, by the relations which it ‘invents,’ constitutes both the inner and outer, and yet is treated as itself the inner ‘substratum which it accustoms itself to suppose.’ It thus becomes the creature of its own suppositions. Nor is this all. This, indeed, is no more than the fate which it must suffer at the hands of every philosopher who, in Kantian language, brings the source of the Categories under the Categories. But with Locke the constitution of the outer world by mental supposition, however uniformly implied, is always ignored; and thus mind, as the inward substance, is not only the creature of its own suppositions, but stands over against a real existence, of which the reality is held to consist just in its being the opposite of all such suppositions: while, after all, the effect of these mutually exclusive causes is one and the same experience, one and the same system of sequent and co-existent ideas.

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

130. Is it then a case of _joint_-effect? Do the outer and inner substances combine, like mechanical forces, to produce the psychical result? Against such a supposition a follower of Locke would find not only the language of his master, with whom perception appears _indifferently_ as the result of the outer or inner cause, but the inherent impossibility of analysing the effect into separate elements. The ‘Law of Parsimony,’ then, will dictate to him that one or other of the causes must be dispensed with; nor, so long as he takes Locke’s identification of the outward with the real for granted, will he have much doubt as to which of the two must go. To get rid of the causality of mind, however, though it might not be untrue to the tendency of Locke, would be to lose sight of his essential merit as a formulator of what everyone thinks, which is that, at whatever cost of confusion or contradiction, he at least formulates it fully. In him the ‘Dialectic,’ which popular belief implicitly involves, goes on under our eyes. If the primacy of self-conscious thought is never recognized, if it remains the victim of its own misunderstood creations, there is at least no attempt to disguise the unrest which attaches to it in this self-imposed subjection.

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

131. We have already noticed how the inner ‘tablet,’ on which the outer thing is supposed to act, is with Locke perpetually receding. [1] It is first the brain, to which the ‘motion of the outward parts’ must be continued in order to constitute sensation (Book II. chap. ix. sec. 3). Then perception is distinguished from sensation, and the brain itself, as the subject of sensation, becomes the outward in contrast with the understanding as the subject of perception. [2] Then perception, from being simply a reception, is converted into an ‘operation,’ and thus into an efficient of ideas. The ‘understanding’ itself, as perceptive, is now the outward which makes on the ‘mind,’ as the inner ‘tablet,’ that impression of its own operation in perception which is called an idea of reflection. [3] Nor does the regressive process--the process of finding a mind within the mind--stop here, though the distinction of inner and outer is not any further so explicitly employed in it. From mind, as receptive of, and operative about, ideas, _i.e._ consciousness, is distinguished mind as the ‘substance within us’ of which consciousness is an ‘operation’ that it sometimes exercises, sometimes (_e.g._ when it sleeps) does not (Book II. chap. i. secs. 10-12); and from this thinking substance again is distinguished the man who ‘finds it in himself and carries it about with him in a coach or on horseback (Book II. chap, xxiii. sec. 20)--the person, ‘consisting of soul and body,’ who is prone to sleep and in sound sleep is unconscious, but whose personal identity strangely consists in sameness of consciousness, sameness of an occasional operation of part of himself. [3]

[1] See above, paragraph 14.

[2] Book II., chap. i. sec. 23. ‘Sensation is such an impression made in some part of the body, as produces some perception in the understanding.’

[3] Locke speaks indifferently of the mind impressing the understanding, and of the understanding impressing the mind, with ideas of reflection, but as he specially defines ‘understanding’ as the ‘perceptive power’ (Book II. chap. xxi. sec. 25.), I have written as above.

[4] Cf. II. chap. i. secs. 11 and 14, with II. chap, xxvii. sec. 9. It is difficult to see what ingenuity could reconcile the doctrine stated in Book II. chap. xxvii. sec. 9, that personal identity is identity of consciousness, with the doctrine implied in Book II. chap. i. sec. 11, that the waking Socrates is the same person with Socrates asleep, _i.e._ (according to Locke) not conscious at all.

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

132. In the history of subsequent philosophy two typical methods have appeared of dealing with this chaos of antinomies. One, which we shall have to treat at large in writing of Hume, affects to dispose of both the outward and the inward synthesis--both of the unity of feelings in a subject matter and of their unity in a subject mind--as ‘fictions of thought.’ This method at once suggests the vital question whether a mind which thus invents has been effectively suppressed--whether, indeed, the theory can be so much as stated without a covert assumption of that which it claims to have destroyed. The other method, of which Kant is the parent, does not attempt to efface the apparent contradictions which beset the ‘relation between mind and matter;’ but regarding them as in a certain sense inevitable, traces them to their source in the application to the thinking Ego itself of conceptions, which it does indeed constitute in virtue of its presence to phenomena given under conditions of time, but under which for that very reason it cannot itself be known. It is in virtue of the presence of the self-conscious unit to the manifold of feeling, according to this doctrine, that the latter becomes an order of definite things, each external to the other; and it is only by a false inclusion within this order of that which constitutes it that the Ego itself becomes a ‘thinking thing’ with other things outside it. The result of such inclusion is that the real world, which it in the proper sense makes, becomes a reality external to it, yet apart from which it would not be actually anything. Thus with Locke, though the mind has a potential existence of its own, it is experience of ‘things without it’ that ‘furnishes’ it or makes it what it actually is. But the relation of such outer things to the mind cannot be spoken of without contradiction. If supposed outward as bodies, they have to be brought within consciousness as objects of sensation; if supposed outward as sensation, they have to be brought within consciousness--to find a home in the understanding--as ideas of sensation. Meanwhile the consideration returns that after all the ‘thinking thing’ contributes something to that which it thinks about; and, this once admitted, it is as impossible to limit its work on one side as that of the outer thing on the other. Each usurps the place of its opposite. Thus with Locke the understanding produces effects on itself, but the product is one and the same ‘perception’ otherwise treated as an effect of the outer world. One and the same self-consciousness, in short, [1] involving the correlation of subject and object, becomes the result of two separate ‘things,’ each exclusive of the other, into which the opposite poles of this relation have been converted--the extended thing or ‘body’ on the one side, and the thinking thing or ‘mind’ on the other.

[1] For the equivalence of perception with self-consciousness in Locke, see above, paragraph 24, et infra.

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

133. To each of these supposed ‘things’ thought transfers its own unity and self-containedness, and thereupon finds itself in new difficulties. These, so far as they concern the outward thing, have already been sufficiently noticed. We have seen how the single self-contained thing on the one hand attenuates itself to the bare atom, presented in a moment of time, which in its exclusiveness is actually nothing: [1] how, on the other, it spreads itself, as everything which for one moment we regard as independent turns out in the next to be a ‘retainer’ to something else, into a series that cannot be summed. [2] A like consequence follows when the individual man, conceiving of the thought, which is not mine but me, and which is no less the world without which I am not I, as a thinking thing within him, limited by the limitations of his animal nature, seeks in this thinking thing, exclusive of other things, that unity and self-containedness, which only belong to the universal ‘I.’ He finds that he ‘thinks not always;’ that during a fourth part of his time he neither thinks nor perceives at all; and that even in his waking hours his consciousness consists of a succession of separate feelings, whose recurrence he cannot command. [3] Thought being thus broken and dependent, substantiality is not to be found in it. It is next sought in the ‘thing’ of which thought is an occasional operation--a thing of which it may readily be admitted that its nature cannot be known (Book II. chap, xxiii. sec. 29, etc.), since it has no nature, being merely that which remains of the thinking thing upon abstraction of its sole determination. It is in principle nothing else than the supposed basis of sensible qualities remaining after these have been abstracted--the ‘parcel of matter’ which has no essence--with which accordingly Locke sometimes himself tends to identify it. [4] But meanwhile, behind this unknown substance, whether of spirit or of body, the self-consciousness, which has been treated as its occasional unessential operation, re-asserts itself as the self which claims both body and spirit, the immaterial no less than the material substance, as its own, and throughout whatever diversity in these maintains its own identity.

[1] See above, paragraph 94 and the following.

[2] See above, paragraph 125.

[3] Locke, Essay ii. chap. i. sec. 10, etc.

[4] See above, paragraph 106, near the end.

We think not always, yet thought constitutes the self.

134. Just, then, as Locke’s conception of outward reality grows under his hands into a conception of nature as a system of relations which breaks through the limitations of reality as constituted by mere _individua_, so it is with the self, as he conceived it. It is not a simple idea. It is not one of the train that is for ever passing, ‘one going and another coming,’ for it looks on this succession as that which it experiences, being itself the same throughout the successive differences (Book II. chap. vii. sec. 9, and chap. xxvii. sec. 9). As little can it be adjusted to any of the conditions of real ‘things,’ thinking or unthinking, which he ordinarily recognises. It has no ‘particularity in space and time.’ That which is past in ‘reality’ is to it present. It is ‘in its nature indifferent to any parcel of matter.’ It is the same with itself yesterday and to-day, here and there. That ‘with which its consciousness can join itself is one self with it,’ and it can so join itself with substances apart in space and remote in time (Book II. chap, xxvii. secs. 9, 13, 14, 17). For speaking of it as eternal, indeed, we could find no warrant in Locke. He does not so clearly distinguish it from the ‘thinking thing’ supposed to be within each man, that has ‘had its determinate time and place of beginning to exist, relation to which determines its identity so long as it exists’ (Book II. chap. xxvii. sec. 2). Hence he supposed an actual limit to the past which it could make present--a limit seemingly fixed for each man at the farthest by the date of his birth--though he talks vaguely of the possibility of its range being extended (Book II. chap. xxvii. sec. 16). In the discussion of personal identity, however, the distinction gradually forces itself upon him, and he at last expressly says (sec. 16), that if the same Socrates, sleeping and waking, do not partake of the same consciousness (as according to