Book II. chap. i. sec. 11 he certainly does not), ‘Socrates sleeping

and waking is not the same person;’ whereas the ‘thinking thing’--the substance of which consciousness is a power sometimes exercised, sometimes not--is the same in the sleeping as in the waking Socrates. This is a pregnant admission, but it brings nothing to the birth in Locke himself. The inference which it suggests to his reader, that a self which does not slumber or sleep is not one which is born or dies, does not seem to have occurred to him. Taking for his method the imaginary process of ‘looking into his own breast,’ instead of the analysis of knowledge and morality, he could not find the eternal self which knowledge and morality pre-suppose, but only the contradiction of a person whose consciousness is not the same for two moments together, and often ceases altogether, but who yet, in virtue of an identity of this very consciousness, is the same in childhood and in old age.

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

135. Here as elsewhere we have to be thankful that the contradiction had not been brought home so strongly to Locke as to make him seek the suppression of either of its alternatives. He was aware neither of the burden which his philosophy tended to put upon the self which ‘can consider itself as itself in different times and places’--the burden of replacing the stable world, when ‘the new way of ideas’ should have resolved the outward thing into a succession of feelings--nor of the hopelessness of such a burden being borne by a ‘perishing’ consciousness, ‘of which no two parts exist together, but follow each other in succession.’ [1] When he ‘looked into himself,’ he found consciousness to consist in the succession of ideas, ‘one coming and another going:’ he also found that ‘consciousness alone makes what we call self,’ and that he was the same self at any different points in the succession. He noted the two ‘facts of consciousness’ at different stages of his enquiry, and was apparently not struck by their contradiction. He could describe them both, and whatever he could describe seemed to him to be explained. Hence they did not suggest to him any question either as to the nature of the observed object or as to the possibility of observing it, such as might have diverted philosophy from the method of self-observation. He left them side by side, and, far from disguising either, put alongside of them another fact--the presence among the perpetually perishing ideas of that of a consciousness identical with itself, not merely in different times and places, but in all times and places. Such an idea, under the designation of an eternal wise Being, he was ‘sure he had’ (Book II. chap. xvii. sec. 14).

[1] Cf. Book II. chap. xiv. sec. 32--‘by observing what passes in our minds, how our ideas there in train constantly some vanish and others begin to appear, we come by the idea of succession; and by observing a distance in the parts of this succession, we get the idea of duration’--with chap. xv. sec. 12. ‘Duration is the idea we have of perishing distance, of which no two parts exist together, but follow each other in succession.’

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

136. The remark will at once occur that the question concerning the relation between our consciousness, as in succession, and the idea of God, is essentially different from that concerning the relation between this consciousness and the self identical throughout it, inasmuch as the relation in the one case is between a fact and an idea, in the other between conflicting facts. The identity of the self, which Locke asserts, is one of ‘real being,’ and this is found to lie in consciousness, in apparent conflict with the fact that consciousness is a succession, of which ‘no two parts exist together.’ There is no such conflict, it will be said, between the _idea_ of a conscious being, who is the same yesterday, to-day, and for ever--the correspondence to which of any reality is a farther question--and the _fact_ of our consciousness being in succession. Allowing for the moment the validity of this distinction, we will consider first the difficulties that attach to Locke’s account of the idea of God, as an idea.

Locke’s account of this idea.

137. This idea, with him, is a ‘complex idea of substance.’ It is the idea each man has of the ‘thinking thing within him, enlarged to infinity.’ It is beset then in the first place with all the difficulties which we have found to belong to his doctrine of substance generally and of the thinking substance in particular. [1] These need not be recalled in detail. When God is the thinking substance they become more obvious. It is the antithesis to ‘material substance,’ as the source of ideas of sensation, that alone with Locke gives a meaning to ‘thinking substance,’ as the source of ideas of reflection: and if, as we have seen, the antithesis is untenable when it is merely the source of human ideas that is in question, much more must it be so in regard to God, to whom any opposition of material substance must be a limitation of his perfect nature. Of the generic element in the above definition, then, no more need here be said. It is the qualification of ‘enlargement to infinity,’ by which the idea of man as a thinking substance is represented as becoming the idea of God, that is the special difficulty now before us. Of this Locke writes as follows:--‘The complex idea we have of God is made up of the simple ones we receive from reflection. If I find that I know some few things, and some of them, or all perhaps, imperfectly, I can frame an idea of knowing twice as many: which I can double again as often as I can add to number, and thus enlarge my ideas of knowledge by extending its comprehension to all things existing or possible. The same I can do of knowing them more perfectly, _i.e._ all their qualities, powers, causes, consequences, and relations; and thus frame the idea of infinite or boundless knowledge. The same also may be done of power till we come to that we call infinite; and also of the duration of existence without beginning or end; and so frame the idea of an eternal being. ... All which is done by enlarging the simple ideas we have taken from the operation of our own minds by reflection, or by our senses from exterior things, to that vastness to which infinity can extend them. For it is infinity which joined to our ideas of existence, power, knowledge, &c., makes that complex idea whereby we represent to ourselves the supreme being’ (Book II. chap. xxiii. sec. 33--35). What is meant by this ‘joining of infinity’ to our ideas?

[1] See above, paragraph 35 and the following, and 127 and the following.

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

138. ‘Finite and infinite,’ says Locke, ‘are looked upon by the mind as the modes of quantity, and are to be attributed primarily only to those things that have parts and are capable of increase by the addition of any the least part’ (Book II. chap. xvii. sec. 1). Such are ‘duration and expansion.’ The applicability then of the term ‘infinite’ in its proper sense to God implies that he has expansion or duration; and it is characteristic of Locke that though he was clear about the divisibility of expansion and duration, as the above passage shows, he has no scruple about speaking of them as attributes of God, of whom as being ‘in his own essence simple and uncompounded’ he would never have spoken as ‘having parts.’ ‘Duration is the idea we have of perishing distance, of which no parts exist together but follow each other in succession; as expansion is the idea of lasting distance, all whose parts exist together.’ Yet of duration and expansion, thus defined, he says that ‘in their full extent’ (_i.e._ as severally ‘eternity and immensity’) ‘they belong only to the Deity’ (Book II. chap. xv. secs. 8 and 12). ‘A full extent’ of them, however, is in the nature of the case impossible. With a last moment duration would cease to be duration; without another space beyond it space would not be space. Locke is quite aware of this. When his conception of infinity is not embarrassed by reference to God, it is simply that of unlimited ‘addibility’--a juxtaposition of space to space, a succession of time upon time, to which we can suppose no limit so long as we consider space and time ‘as having parts, and thus capable of increase by the addition of parts,’ and which therefore excludes the very possibility of a totality or ‘full extent’ (Book II. chap. xvi. sec. 8, and xvii. sec. 13). The question, then, whether infinity of expansion and duration in this, its only proper, sense can be predicated of the perfect God, has only to be asked in order to be answered in the negative. Nor do we mend the matter if, instead of ascribing such infinity to God, we substitute another phrase of Locke’s, and say that He ‘fills eternity and immensity’ (Book II. chap. xv. sec. 8). Put for eternity and immensity their proper equivalents according to Locke, viz. unlimited ‘addibility’ of times and spaces, and the essential unmeaningness of the phrase becomes apparent.

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

139. In regard to any other attributes of God than those of his duration and expansion, [1] Locke admits that the term ‘infinite’ is applied ‘figuratively’ (Book II. chap. xvii. sec. 1). ‘When we call them (_e.g._ His power, wisdom, and goodness) infinite, we have no other idea of this infinity but what carries with it some reflection on, or intimation of, that number or extent of the acts or objects of God’s wisdom, &c., which can never be supposed so great or so many which these attributes will not always surmount, let us multiply them in our thoughts as far as we can with all the infinity of endless number.’ What determination, then, according to this passage, of our conception of God’s goodness is represented by calling it infinite? Simply its relation to a number of acts and objects of which the sum can always be increased, and which, just for that reason, cannot represent the perfect God. Is it then, it may be asked, of mere perversity that when thinking of God under attributes that are not quantitative, and therefore do not carry with them the necessity of incompleteness, we yet go out of our way by this epithet ‘infinite’ to subject them to the conditions of quantity and its ‘progressus ad infinitum?’

[1] In the passages referred to, Locke speaks of ‘duration and _ubiquity_.’ The proper counterpart, however, of ‘duration’ according to him is ‘expansion’--this being to space what duration is to time. Under the embarrassment, however, which necessarily attends the ascription of expansion to God, he tacitly substitutes for it ‘ubiquity,’ a term which does not match ‘duration,’ and can only mean presence throughout the _whole_ of expansion, presence throughout the whole of that which does not admit of a whole.

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

140. Retaining Locke’s point of view, our answer of course must be that our ideas of the Divine attributes, being primarily our own ideas of reflection, are either ideas of the single successive acts that constitute our inward experience or formed from these by abstraction and combination. In parts our experience is given, in parts only can we recall it. Our complex or abstract ideas are symbols which only take a meaning so far as we resolve them into the detached impressions which in the sum they represent, or recall the objects, each with its own before and after, from which they were originally taken. So it is with the ideas of wisdom, power, and goodness, which from ourselves we transfer to God. They represent an experience given in succession and piece-meal--a numerable series of acts and events, which like every other number is already infinite in the only sense of the word of which Locke can give a clear account, as susceptible of indefinite repetition (Book II. chap. vi. sec. 8.) When we ‘join infinity’ to these ideas, then, unless some other meaning is given to infinity, we merely state explicitly what was originally predicable of the experience they embody. Nor will it avail us much to shift the meaning of infinite, as Locke does when he applies it to the divine attributes, from that of indefinite ‘addibility’ to that of exceeding any sum which indefinite multiplication can yield us. Let us suppose an act of consciousness, from which we have taken an abstract idea of an attribute--say of wisdom--to be a million times repeated; our idea of the attribute will not vary with the repetition. Nor if, having supposed a limit to the repetition, we then suppose the act indefinitely repeated beyond this limit and accordingly speak of the attribute as infinite, will our idea of the attribute vary at all from what it was to begin with. Its content will be the same. There will be nothing to be said of it which could not have been said of the experience from which it was originally abstracted, and of which the essential characteristic--that it is one of a series of events of which no two can be present together--is incompatible with divine perfection.

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

141. It appears then that it is the subjection of our experience to the form of time which unfits the ideas derived from it for any combination into an idea of God; nor by being ‘joined with an infinity,’ which itself merely means the absence of limit to succession in time, is their unfitness in any way modified. On the contrary, by such conjunction from being latent it becomes patent. In one important passage Locke becomes so far aware of this that, though continuing to ascribe infinite duration to God, he does it under qualifications inconsistent with the very notion of duration. ‘Though we cannot conceive any duration without succession, nor put it together in our thoughts that any being does now exist to-morrow or possess at once more than the present moment of duration; yet we can conceive the eternal duration of the Almighty far different from that of man, or any other finite being: because man comprehends not in his knowledge or power all past and future things ... what is once past he can never recall, and what is yet to come he cannot make present. ... God’s infinite duration being accompanied with infinite knowledge and power, he sees all things past and to come’ (Book II. chap. xv. sec 12). It is clear that in this passage ‘infinite’ changes its meaning; that it is used in one sense--the proper sense according to Locke--when applied to duration, and in some wholly different sense, not a figurative one derived from the former, when applied to knowledge and power; and that the infinite duration of God, as ‘accompanied by infinite power and knowledge,’ is no longer in any intelligible sense duration at all. It is no longer ‘the idea we have of perishing distance,’ derived from our fleeting consciousness in which ‘what is once past can never be recalled,’ but the attribute of a consciousness of which, if it is to be described in terms of time at all, in virtue of its ‘seeing all things past and to come’ at once, it can only be said that it ‘does now exist to-morrow.’ If it be asked, What meaning can we have in speaking of such a consciousness? into what simple ideas can it be resolved when all our ideas are determined by a before and after?--the answer must be, Just as much or as little meaning as we have when, in like contradiction to the successive presentation of ideas, we speak of a self, constituted by consciousness, as identical with itself throughout the years of our life.

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

142. A more positive answer it is not our present business to give. Our concern is to show that ‘eternity and immensity,’ according to any meaning that Locke recognises, or that the observation of our ideas could justify, do not express any conception that can carry us beyond the perpetual incompleteness of our experience; but that in his doctrine of personal identity he does admit a conception which no observation of our ideas of reflection--since these are in succession and could not be observed if they were not--can account for; and that it is just this conception, the conception of a constant presence of consciousness to itself incompatible with conditions of space and time, that can alone give such meaning to ‘eternal and infinite’ as can render them significant epithets of God. Such a conception (we say it with respect) Locke admits when it is wanted without knowing it. It must indeed always underlie the idea of God, however alien to it may be attempted adaptations of the other ‘infinite’--the _progressus ad indefinitum_ in space and time--by which, as with Locke, the idea is explained. But it is one for which the psychological method of observing what happens in oneself cannot account, and which therefore this method, just so far as it is thoroughly carried out, must tend to discard. That which happens, whether we reckon it an inward or an outward, a physical or a psychical event--and nothing but an event can, properly speaking, be observed--is as such in time. But the presence of consciousness to itself, though, as the true ‘punctum stans,’ [1] it is the condition of the observation of events in time, is not such an event itself. In the ordinary and proper sense of ‘fact,’ it is not a fact at all, nor yet a possible abstraction from facts. To the method, then, which deals with phrases about the mind by ascertaining the observable ‘mental phenomena’ which they represent, it must remain a mere phrase, to be explained as the offspring of other phrases whose real import has been misunderstood. It can only recover a significance when this method, as with Hume, has done its worst, and is found to leave the possibility of knowledge, without such ‘punctum stans,’ still unaccounted for.

[1] Locke, Essay II. chap. xvii. sec. 16.

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

143. We have finally to notice the way in which Locke maintains our knowledge of the ‘real existence’ of thinking substance, both as that which ‘we call our mind,’ and as God. Of the former first. ‘Experience convinces us that we have an intuitive knowledge of our own existence.... If I know I feel pain, it is evident I have as certain perception of my own existence as of the pain I feel. If I know I doubt, I have as certain perception of the existence of the thing doubting as of that thought which I call doubt’ (Book IV. chap. ix. sec. 3). Upon this the remark must occur that the existence of a painful feeling is one thing; the existence of a permanent subject, remaining the same with itself, when the feeling is over, and through the succession of other feelings, quite another. The latter is what is meant by my own existence, of which undoubtedly there is a ‘certain perception,’ if the feeling of pain has become the ‘knowledge that I feel pain,’ and if by the ‘I’ is understood such a permanent subject. That the feeling, as ‘simple idea,’ is taken to begin with by Locke for the knowledge that I feel something, we have sufficiently seen. [1] Just as, in virtue of this conversion, it gives us ‘assurance’ of the real existence of the outer thing or material substance on the one side, so of the thinking substance on the other. It carries with it the certainty at once that I have a feeling, and that something makes me feel. But whereas, after the conversion of feeling into a felt thing has been throughout assumed--as indeed otherwise feeling could not be spoken of--a further question is raised, which causes much embarrassment, as to the real existence of such thing; on the contrary, the reference of the feeling to the _thinking_ thing is taken as carrying with it the real existence of such thing. The question whether it really exists or no is only once raised, and then summarily settled by the sentence we have quoted, while the reality whether of existence or of essence on the part of the outward thing, as we have found to our cost, is the main burden of the Third and Fourth Books.

[1] See above, paragraphs 26 and following, and 59 and following.

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

144. In principle, indeed, the answer to both questions, as given by Locke, is the same: for the reasons which he alleges for being assured of the ‘existence of a thing without us corresponding to the idea of sensation’ reduce themselves, as we have seen, to the reiteration of that reference of the idea to a thing, which according to him is originally involved in it, and which is but the correlative of its reference to a subject. This, however, is what he was not himself aware of. To him the outer and the inner substance were separate and independent things, for each of which the question of real existence had to be separately settled. To us, according to the view already indicated, it is the presence of self-consciousness, or thought as an object-to-itself, to feeling that converts it into a relation between feeling thing and felt thing, between ‘cogitative and incogitative substance.’ The source of substantiation upon each side being the same, the question as to the real existence of either substance must be the same, and equally so the answer to it. It is an answer that must be preceded by a counter question.--Does real existence mean existence independent of thought? To suppose such existence is to suppose an impossibility--one which is not the less so though the existence be supposed material, if ‘material’ means in ‘space’ and space itself is a relation constituted by the mind, ‘bringing things to and setting them by one another.’ Yet is the supposition itself but a mode of the logical substantiation we have explained, followed by an imaginary abstraction of the work of the mind from this, its own creation. Does real existence mean a possible feeling? If so, it is as clear that what converts feeling into a relation between felt thing and feeling subject cannot in this sense be real, as it is that without such conversion no distinction between real and fantastic would be possible. Does it, finally, mean individuality, in such a sense that unless I can say this or that is substance, thinking or material, substance does not really exist? If it does, the answer is that substance, being constituted by a relation by which self-conscious thought is for ever determining feelings, and which every predication represents, cannot be identified with any ‘this or that,’ though without it there could be no ‘this or that’ at all.

But he ignores this in treating of the self.

145. We have already found that Locke accepts each of the above as determinations of real existence, and that, though in spite of them he labours to maintain the real existence of outward things, he is so far faithful to them as to declare real essence unknowable. In answering the question as to ‘his own existence’ he wholly ignores them. He does not ask how the real existence of the thinking Ego sorts with his ordinary doctrine that the real is what would be in the world whether there were a mind or no; or its real identity, present throughout the particulars of experience, with his ordinary doctrine of the fictitiousness of ‘generals.’ A real existence of the mind, however, founded on the logical necessity of substantiation, rests on a shifting basis, so long as by the mind is understood a thinking thing, different in each man, to which his inner experience is referred as accidents to a substance. The same law of thought which compels such reference requires that the thinking thing in its turn, as that which is born grows and dies, be referred as an accident to some ulterior substance. ‘A fever or fall may take away my reason or memory, or both; and an apoplexy leave neither sense nor understanding, no, nor life.’ [1] Just as each outer thing turns out to be a ‘retainer to something else,’ so is it with the inner thing. Such a dependent being cannot be an ultimate substance; nor can any natural agents to which we may trace its dependence really be so either. The logical necessity of further substantiation would affect them equally, appearing in the supposition of an unknown something beyond, which makes them what they are. It is under such logical necessity that Locke, in regard to all the substances which he commonly speaks of as ultimate--God, spirit, body--from time to time gives warning of something still ulterior and unknowable, whether under the designation of substance or real essence (Book II. chap. xxiii. secs. 30 and 36). If, then, it will be said, substance is but the constantly-shifting result of a necessity of thought--so shifting that there is nothing of which we can finally say, ‘This is substance, not accident’--there can be no evidence of the ‘real existence’ of a permanent Ego in the necessary substantiation therein of my inner experience.

[1] Locke, Book III. chap. vi. sec. 4.

Sense in which the self is truly real.

146. The first result of such a consideration in a reader of Locke will naturally be an attempt to treat the inner synthesis as a fiction of thought or figure of speech, and to confine real existence to single feelings in the moments of their occurrence. This, it will seem, is to be faithful to Locke’s own clearer mind, as it frequently emerges from the still-returning cloud of scholasticism. The final result will rather be the discovery that the single feeling is nothing real, but that the synthesis of appearances, which alone for us constitutes reality, is never final or complete: that thus absolute reality, like ultimate substance, is never to be found by us--in a thinking as little as in a material thing--belonging as it does only to that divine self-consciousness, of which the presence in us is the source and bond of the ever-growing synthesis called knowledge, but which, because it is the source of that synthesis and not one of its partial results, is neither real nor knowable in the same sense as is any other object. It is this presence which alone gives meaning to ‘proofs of the being of God;’ to Locke’s among the rest. For it is in a sense true, as he held, that ‘my own real existence’ is evidence of the existence of God, since the self, in the only sense in which it is absolutely real or an ultimate subject, is already God. [1]

[1] See below, paragraph 152.

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

147. Our knowledge of God’s existence, according to him, is ‘demonstrative,’ based on the ‘intuitive’ knowledge of our own. Strictly taken, according to his definitions, this must mean that the agreement of the idea of God with existence is perceived mediately through the agreement of the idea of self with existence, which is perceived immediately; that thus the idea of God and the idea of self ‘agree’. [1] We need not, however, further dwell either on the contradiction implied in the knowledge of real existence, if knowledge is a perception of agreement between ideas and if real existence is the antithesis of ideas; or on the embarrassments which follow when a definition of reasoning, only really applicable to the comparison of quantities, is extended to other regions of knowledge. Locke virtually ignores his definitions in the passage before us. ‘If we know there is some real being’ (as we do know in the knowledge of our own existence) ‘and that non-entity cannot produce any real being, it is an evident demonstration that from eternity there has been something; since what was not from eternity had a beginning, and what had a beginning must be produced by something else’ (Book IV. chap. x. sec. 3). Next as to the qualities of this something else. ‘What had its being and beginning from another must also have all that which is in, and belongs to, its being from another too’ (Ibid, sec. 4.). From this is deduced the supreme power and perfect knowledge of the eternal being upon the principle that whatever is in the effect must also be in the cause--a principle, however, which has to be subjected to awkward limitations in order that, while proving enough, it may not prove too much, it might seem that, according to it, since the real being, from which as effect the eternal being as cause is demonstrated, is ‘both material and cogitative’ or ‘made up of body and spirit,’ matter as well as thought must belong to the eternal being too. That thought must belong to him, Locke is quite clear. It is as impossible, he holds, that thought should be derived from matter, or from matter and motion together, as that something should be derived from nothing. ‘If we will suppose nothing first or eternal, matter can never begin to be: if we suppose bare matter without motion eternal, motion can never begin to be: if we suppose only matter and motion first or eternal, thought can never begin to be’ (Book IV. chap. x. sec. 10). The objection which is sure to occur, that it must be equally impossible for matter to be derived from thought, he can scarcely be said to face. He takes refuge in the supreme power of the eternal being, as that which is able to create matter out of nothing. He does not anticipate the rejoinder to which he thus lays himself open, that this power in the eternal being to produce one effect not homogeneous with itself, viz. matter, may extend to another effect, viz. thought, and that thus the argument from thought in the effect to thought in the cause becomes invalid, and nothing but blind power, we know not what, remains as the attribute of the eternal being. Nor does he remember, when he meets the objection drawn from the inconceivability of matter being made out of nothing by saying that what is inconceivable is not therefore impossible (_ibid_. sec. 19), that it is simply the inconceivability of a sequence of something upon nothing that has given him his ‘evident demonstration’ of an eternal being.

[1] See above, paragraphs 25 and 24.

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

148. The value of the first step in Locke’s argument--the inference, namely, from there being something now to there having been something from eternity--must be differently estimated according to the meaning attached to ‘something’ and ‘from eternity.’ If the existence of something means the occurrence of an event, of this undoubtedly it can always be said that it follows another event, nor to this sequence can any limit be supposed, for a first event would not be an event at all. It would be a contingency contingent upon nothing. Thus understood, the argument from a something now to a something from eternity is merely a statement of the infinity of time according to that notion of infinity, as a ‘progressus ad indefinitum,’ which we have already seen to be Locke’s. [1] It is the exact reverse of an argument to a creation or a first cause. If we try to change its character by a supplementary consideration that infinity in the series of events is inconceivable, the rejoinder will be that a first event is not for that reason any less of a contradiction, and that the infinity which Locke speaks of only professes to be a negative idea, representing the impossibility of conceiving a first event (Book II. chap. xvii. sec. 13, &c.). In truth, however, when Locke speaks of ‘something from eternity’ he does not mean--what would clearly be no God at all--a series of events to which, because _of events_, and therefore in time, no limit can be supposed; but a being which is neither event nor series of events, to which there is no before or after. The inference to such a being is not of a kind with the transition from one event to another habitually associated with it; and if this be the true account of reasoning from effect to cause, no such reasoning can yield the result which Locke requires. As we have seen, however, this is not his account of it, [2] however legitimately it may follow from his general doctrine.

[1] See above, paragraph 138.

[2] See above, paragraph 68.

... and how ‘cause’.

149. The inference of cause with him is the inference from a change to something having power to produce it. [1] The value of this definition lies not in the notion of efficient power, but in that of an order of nature, which it involves. If instead of ‘something having power to produce it’ we read ‘something that accounts for the change,’ it expresses the inference on which all science rests, but which is as far as possible from being merely a transition from one event to another that usually precedes it. An event, interpreted as a change of something that remains constant, is no longer a mere event. It is no longer merely in time, a present which next moment becomes a past. It takes its character from relation to the thing or system of things of which it is an altered appearance, but which in itself is always the same. Only in virtue of such a relation does it require to be accounted for, to be referred to a ‘cause’ which is in truth the conception that holds together or reconciles the endless flux of events with eternal unity. The cause of a ‘phenomenon,’ even according to the authoritative exponent of the Logic which believes itself to follow Hume, is the ‘sum total of its conditions.’ In its fulness, that is, it is simply that system of things, conceived explicitly, of which there must already have been an implicit conception in order that the event might be regarded as a change and thus start the search for a cause. An event in time, apart from reference to something not in time, could suggest no enquiry into the sum of its conditions. Upon occurrence of a certain feeling there might indeed be spontaneous recollection of a feeling usually precedent, spontaneous expectation of another usually sequent. But such association of feelings can never explain that conception of cause in virtue of which, when accounting for a phenomenon, we set aside the event which in our actual experience has usually preceded it, for one which we only find to precede it in the single case of a crucial experiment. That we do so shows that it is not because of antecedence in time, however apparently uniform, that an educated man reckons a certain event to be the cause of another, but that, because of its sole sufficiency under the sum of known conditions to account for the given event, he decides it to be its uniform antecedent, however much ordinary appearances may tell to the contrary. Thus, though he may still strangely define cause as a uniformly antecedent event (in spite of its being a definition that would prevent him from speaking of gravity as the cause of the fall of a stone), it is clear that by such event he means one determined by a complex of conditions in an unchanging universe. These conditions, again, he may speak of as contingencies, _i.e._ as events contingent upon other events in endless series, but he must add ‘contingent in accordance with the uniformity of nature’--in other words, he must determine the contingencies by relation to what is not contingent; he must suppose nature unchanging, though our experience of it through sensation be a ‘progressus ad indefinitum’--if he is to allow a possibility of knowledge at all. In short, if events were merely events, feelings that happen to me now and next moment are over, no ‘law of causation’ and therefore no knowledge would be possible. If the knowledge founded on this law actually exists, then the ‘argumentum a contingentiâ mundi’ rightly understood--the ‘inference’ from nature to a being neither in time nor contingent but self-dependent and eternal, that constant reality of which events are the changing appearances--is valid because the conception of nature, of a world to be known, already implies such a being. To the rejoinder that implication in the conception of nature does not prove real existence, the answer must be the question. What meaning has real existence, the antithesis of illusion, except such as is equivalent to this conception?

[1] cf. Book II. chap. xxvi. sec. 1, and chap. xxi. sec. 1.

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

150. The value, then, of Locke’s demonstration of the existence of God, as an argument from there being something now to an eternal being from which the real existence that we know ‘has all which is in and belongs to it,’ depends on our converting it into the ‘argumentum a contingentiâ mundi,’ stated as above. In other words, it depends on our interpreting it in a manner which may be warranted by his rough account of causation, and by one of the incompatible views of the real that we have found in him, [1] but which is inconsistent with his opposition of reality to the work of the mind, and his reduction of it to ‘particular existence,’ as well as with his ordinary view that ‘infinite’ and ‘eternal’ can represent only a ‘progressus ad indefinitum.’ If by ‘real existence corresponding to an idea’ is meant its presentation in a particular ‘here and now,’ an attempt to find a real existence of God can bring us to nothing but such a contradiction in terms as a first event. To prove it from the real existence of the self is to prove one impossibility from another. If, on the other hand, real existence implies the determination of our ideas by an order of nature--if it means ideas ‘in ordine ad universum’ (to use a Baconian phrase), in distinction from ‘in ordine ad nos’--then the argument from a present to an eternal real existence is valid, but simply in the sense that the present is already real, and ‘has all that is in and belongs to it,’ only in virtue of the relation to the eternal.

[1] See above, paragraphs 49 and 91.

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

151. This, it may be said, is to vindicate Locke’s ‘proof’ only by making it Pantheistic. It gives us an eternity of nature, but not God. Our present concern, however, is not with the distinction between Pantheism and true Theism, but with the exposition of Locke’s doctrine according to the only development by which it can be made to show the real existence of an eternal being at all. It is only by making the most of certain Cartesian elements that appear in his doctrine, irreconcileable with its general purport, that we can find fair room in it for such a being, even as the system of nature. Any attempt to exhibit (in Hegelian phrase) ‘Spirit as the truth of nature,’ would be to go wholly beyond our record; yet without this the ‘ens realissimum’ cannot be the God whose existence Locke believes himself to prove--a _thinking_ being from whom matter and motion are derived, but in whom they are not. It is true that, according to the context, it is the real existence of the self from which that of the eternal being is proved. This is because, in the Fourth Book, where the ‘proof’ occurs, following the new train of enquiry started by the definition of knowledge, Locke has for the time left in abeyance his fundamental doctrine that all simple ideas are types of reality, and is writing as if ‘my own real existence’ were the only one known with intuitive certainty. This, however, makes no essential difference in the effect of his argument. The given existence, from which the divine is proved, is treated expressly as _both_ ‘material and cogitative:’ nor, since according to Locke the world is both and man is both, and even the ‘thinking thing’ takes its content from impressions made by matter, could it be otherwise. To have taken thought by itself as the basis of the proof would have been to leave the other part of the world, as he conceived it, to be referred to another God. The difficulty then arises, either that there is no inference possible from the nature of the effect to the nature of the eternal being, its cause; in which case no attribute whatever can be asserted of the latter: or that to it too, like the effect, matter as well as thought must belong.

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

152. As we have seen, neither of these alternative views is really met by Locke. To the former we may reply that the relation between two events, of which neither has anything in common with the other, but which we improperly speak of as effect and cause (_e.g._ death and a sunstroke), has no likeness to that which we have explained between the world in its contingency and the world as an eternal system--a relation according to which the cause is the effect in unity. Whatever is part of the reality of the world must belong, it would seem, to the ‘ens realissimum,’ its cause. We are thus thrown back on the other horn of the dilemma. Is not matter part of the reality of the world? This is a question to which the method of observing the individual consciousness can give none but a delusive answer. A true answer cannot be given till for this method has been substituted the enquiry, How knowledge is possible, and it has been found that it is only possible as the progressive actualisation in us of a self-consciousness in itself complete, and which in its completeness includes the world as its object. From the point of view thus attained the question as to matter will be, How is it related to this self-consciousness?--a question to which the answer must vary according to what is understood by ‘matter.’ If it means the abstract opposite of thought--that which is supposed void of all determination that comes of thinking--we must pronounce it simply a delusion, the creation of self-consciousness in one stage of its communication to us. If it means the world as in space and time, this we may allow to be real enough as a stage in the process by which self-consciousness constitutes reality. Thus understood, we may speak of it roughly as part of the ‘ens realissimum’ which the complete self-consciousness, or God, includes as its object, without any limitation of the divine perfectness. The limitation only seems to arise so far as we, being ourselves (as our knowledge and morality testify), though formally self-conscious, yet parts of this partial world, interpret it amiss and ascribe to it a reality, in abstraction from the self-conscious subject, which it only derives from relation to it. Thus while on the one hand it is the presence in us of God, as the self-conscious source of reality, that at once gives us the idea of God and of an eternal self, and renders superfluous the further question as to their real existence; on the other hand it is because, for all this presence, we are but emerging from nature, of which as animals we are parts, that to us there must seem an incompatibility of existence between God and matter, between the self and the flux of events which makes our life. This necessary illusion is our bondage, but when the source of illusion is known, the bondage is already being broken.

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

153. We have now sufficiently explored the system which it was Hume’s mission to try to make consistent with itself. We have found that it is governed throughout by the antithesis between what is given to consciousness--that in regard to which the mind is passive--as the supposed real on the one side, and what is ‘invented,’ ‘created,’ ‘superinduced’ by the mind on the other: while yet this ‘real’ in all its forms, as described by Locke, has turned out to be constituted by such ideas as, according to him, are not given but invented. Stripped of these superinductions, nothing has been found to remain of it but that of which nothing can be said--a chaos of unrelated, and therefore unmeaning, _individua_. Turning to the theory of the mind itself, the source of the superinduction, we have found this to be a reduplication of the prolonged inconsistency which forms the theory of the ‘real.’ It impresses itself with that which, according to the other theory, is the impress of matter, and it really exists as that which it itself invents. The value of Hume’s philosophy lies in its being an attempt to carry out the antithesis more rigorously--to clear the real, whether under the designation of mind or of its object, of all that could not be reckoned as given in feelings which occur to us ‘whether we will or no.’ The consequence is a splendid failure, a failure which it might have been hoped would have been taken as a sufficient proof that a theory, which starts from that antithesis, cannot even be stated without implicitly contradicting itself.

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

154. Such a doctrine--a doctrine founded on the testimony of the senses, which ends by showing that the senses testify to nothing--cannot be criticised step by step according to the order in which its author puts it, for its characteristic is that, in order to state itself, it has to take for granted popular notions which it afterwards shows to be unmeaning. Its power over ordinary thinkers lies just in this, that it arrives at its destructive result by means of propositions which every one believes, but to the validity of which its result is really fatal. An account of our primitive consciousness, which derives its plausibility from availing itself of the conceptions of cause and substance, is the basis of the argument which reduces these conceptions to words misunderstood. It cannot, therefore, be treated by itself, as it stands in the first part of the Treatise on the Understanding, but must be taken in connection with Part IV., especially with the section on ‘Scepticism with regard to the Senses;’ not upon the plan of discrediting a principle by reference to the ‘dangerous’ nature of its consequences, but because the final doctrine brings out the inconsistencies lurking in that assumed to begin with. On this side of his scepticism Hume mainly followed the orthodox Berkeley, of whose criticism of Locke, made with a very different purpose, some account must first be given. The connection between the two authors is instructive in many ways; not least as showing that when the most pious theological purpose expresses itself in a doctrine resting on an inadequate philosophical principle, it is the principle and not the purpose that will regulate the permanent effect of the doctrine.

Berkeley’s religious interest in making Locke consistent.

155. Berkeley’s treatises, we must remember, though professedly philosophical, really form a theological polemic. He wrote as the champion of orthodox Christianity against ‘mathematical atheism,’ and, like others of his order, content with the demolition of the rival stronghold, did not stay to enquire whether his own untempered mortar could really hold together the fabric of knowledge and rational religion which he sought to maintain. He found practical ungodliness and immorality excusing themselves by a theory of ‘materialism’--a theory which made the whole conscious experience of man dependent upon ‘unperceiving matter.’ This, whatever it might be, was not an object which man could love or reverence, or to which he could think of himself as accountable. Berkeley, full of devout zeal for God and man, and not without a tincture of clerical party-spirit (as appears in his heat against Shaftesbury, whom he ought to have regarded as a philosophical yoke-fellow), felt that it must be got rid of. He saw, or thought he saw, that the ‘new way of ideas’ had only to be made consistent with itself, and the oppressive shadow must vanish. Ideas, according to that new way (or, to speak less ambiguously, feelings) make up our experience, and they are not matter. Let us get rid, then, of the self-contradictory assumption that they are either copies of matter--copies of that, of which it is the sole and simple differentia that it is not an idea, or its effects--effects of that which can only be described as the unknown opposite of the only efficient power with which we are acquainted--and what becomes of the philosopher’s blind and dead substitute for the living and knowing God? It was one thing, however, to show the contradictions involved in Locke’s doctrine of matter, another effectively to replace it. To the latter end Berkeley cannot be said to have made any permanent contribution. That explicit reduction of ideas to feelings ‘particular in time,’ which was his great weapon of destruction, was incompatible with his doing so. He adds nothing to the philosophy, which he makes consistent with itself, while by making it consistent he empties it of three parts of its suggestiveness. His doctrine, in short, is merely Locke purged, and Locke purged is no Locke.

What is meant by relation of mind and matter?

156. The question which he mainly dealt with may be stated in general terms as that of the relation between the mind and the external world. Under this general statement, however, are covered several distinct questions, the confusion between which has been a great snare for philosophers--questions as to the relations _(a)_ between a sensitive and non-sensitive body, _(b)_ between thought and its object, _(c)_ between thought and something only qualified as the negation of thought. The last question, it will be observed, is what the second becomes upon a certain notion being formed of what the object of thought must be. Upon this notion being discarded a further question _(d)_, also covered by the above general statement, must still remain as to the relation between thought, as in each man, and the world which he does not make, but which, in some sort, makes him what he is. In what follows, these questions, for the sake of brevity, will be referred to symbolically.

Confusions involved in Locke’s materialism.

157. Locke’s doctrine of matter, as we have seen, involves a confusion between _(a)_ and _(b)_. The feeling of touch in virtue of an intellectual interpretation--_intellectual_ because implying the action of the mind as (according to Locke) the source of ideas of relation--becomes the idea of solidity, _i.e._ the idea of a relation between bodies in the way of impulse and resistance. But the function of the intellect in constituting the relation is ignored. Under cover of the ambiguous ‘idea,’ which stands alike for a nervous irritation and the intellectual interpretation thereof, the feeling of touch and conception of solidity are treated as one and the same. Thus the true _conceived_ outwardness of body to body--an outwardness which thought, as the source of relations, can alone constitute--becomes first an imaginary _felt_ outwardness of body to the organs of touch, and then, by a further fallacy--these organs being confused with the mind--an outwardness of body to mind, which we need only kick a stone to be sure of. Meanwhile the consideration of question _(d)_ necessitates the belief that the real world does not come and go with each man’s fleeting consciousness, and no distinction being recognised between consciousness as fleeting and consciousness as permanent, or between feeling and thought, the real world comes to be regarded as the absolute opposite of thought and its work. This opposition combines with the supposed externality of body to mind to give the notion that body is the real. The qualities which ‘the mind finds inseparable from body’ thus become qualities which would exist all the same ‘whether there were a perceiving mind or no,’ and are primarily real; while such as consist in our feelings, though real in so far as, ‘not being of our own making, they imply the action of things without us,’ are yet only secondarily so because this action is relative to something which is not body. Then, finally, by a renewed confusion of the relation between thought and its object with that between body and body, qualities, which are credited with a primary reality as independent of and antithetical to the mind, are brought within it again as ideas. They are supposed to copy themselves upon it by impact and impression; and that not in touch merely, but (visual feelings being interpreted by help of the same conception) in sight also.

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

158. Such ‘materialism’ invites two different methods of attack. On the one hand its recognised principle, that all intellectual ‘superinduction’ upon simple feeling is a departure from the real, may be insisted on, and it may be shown that it is only by such superinduction that simple feeling becomes a feeling of body. Matter, then, with all its qualities, is a fiction except so far as these can be reduced to simple feelings. Such in substance was Berkeley’s short method with the materialists. In his early life it seemed to him sufficient for the purposes of orthodox ‘spiritualism,’ because, having posed the materialist, he took the moral and spiritual attributes of God as ‘revealed,’ without enquiring into the possibility of such revelation to a merely sensitive consciousness. As he advanced, other questions, fatal to the constructive value of his original method, began to force themselves upon him. Granting that intellectual superinduction = fiction, how is the fiction possible to a mind which cannot originate? Exclude from reality all that such fiction constitutes, and what remains to be real? These questions, however, though their effect on his mind appears in the later sections of his ‘Siris,’ he never systematically pursued. He thus missed the true method of attack on materialism--the only one that does not build again that which it destroys--the method which allows that matter is real but only so in virtue of that intellectual superinduction upon feeling without which there could be for us no reality at all: that thus it is indeed opposed to thought, but only by a position which is thought’s own act. For the development of such views Berkeley had not patience in his youth nor leisure in his middle life. Whatever he may have suggested, all that he logically achieved was an exposure of the equivocation between feeling and felt body; and of this the next result, as appears in Hume, was a doctrine which indeed delivers mind from dependence on matter, but only by reducing it in effect to a succession of feelings which cannot know themselves.

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

159. It was upon the extension of the metaphor of impression to sight as well as touch, and the consequent notion that body, with its inseparable qualities, revealed itself through both senses, that Berkeley first fastened. Is it evident, as Locke supposed it to be, that men ‘perceive by their sight’ not colours merely, but ‘a distance between bodies of different colours and between parts of the same body’; [1] in other words, situation and magnitude? To show that they do not is the purpose of Berkeley’s ‘Essay towards a new Theory of Vision.’ He starts from two principles which he takes as recognised: one, that the ‘proper and immediate object of sight is colour’; the other, that distance from the eye, or distance in the line of vision, is not immediately seen. If, then, situation and magnitude are ‘properly and immediately’ seen, they must be qualities of colour. Now in one sense, according to Berkeley, they are so: in other words, there is such a thing as _visible_ extension. We see lights and colours in ‘sundry situations’ as well as ‘in degrees of faintness and clearness, confusion and distinctness.’ (_Theory of Vision_, sec. 77.) We also see objects as made up of certain ‘quantities of coloured points,’ _i.e._ as having visible magnitude. (Ibid. sec. 54.) But situation and magnitude _as visible_ are not external, not ‘qualities of body,’ nor do they represent by any _necessary_ connection the situation and magnitude that are truly qualities of body, the mind, ‘without the mind and at a distance.’ These are tangible. Distance in all its forms--as distance from the eye; as distance between parts of the same body, or magnitude; and as distance of body from body, or situation--is tangible. What a man means when he says that ‘he sees this or that thing at a distance’ is that ‘what he sees suggests to his understanding that after having passed a certain distance, to be measured by the motion of his body which is perceivable by touch, he shall come to perceive such and such tangible ideas which have been usually connected with such and such visible ideas’ (Ibid. sec. 45). On the same principle we are said to see the magnitude and situation of bodies. Owing to long experience of the connection of these tangible ideas with visible ones, the magnitude of the latter and their degrees of faintness and clearness, of confusion and distinctness, enable us to form a ‘sudden and true’ estimate of the magnitude of the former (_i.e._ of bodies); even as visible situation enables us to form a like estimate of the ‘situation of things outward and tangible’ (Ibid. secs. 56 and 99). The connection, however, between the two sets of ideas, Berkeley insists, is habitual only, not necessary. As Hume afterwards said of the relation of cause and effect, it is not constituted by the nature of the ideas related. [2] The visible ideas, that as a matter of fact ‘suggest to us the various magnitudes of external objects before we touch them, might have suggested no such thing.’ That would really have been the case had our eyes been so framed as that the _maximum visibile_ should be less than the _minimum tangibile_; and, as a matter of constant experience, the greater visible extension suggests sometimes a greater, sometimes a less, tangible extension according to the degree of its strength or faintness, ‘being in its own nature equally fitted to bring into our minds the idea of small or great or no size at all, just as the words of a language are in their own nature indifferent to signify this or that thing, or nothing at all.’ (Ibid. secs. 62-64.)

[1] Locke, Essay Book II. chap. xiii. sec. 2.

[2] See below, paragraph 283

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

160. So far, then, the conclusion merely is that body as external, and space as a relation between bodies or parts of a body, are not both seen and felt, but felt only; in other words, that it is only through the organs of touch that we receive, strictly speaking, impressions from without. This is all that the Essay on Vision goes to show; but according to the ‘Principles of Human Knowledge’ this conclusion was merely provisional. The object of touch does not, any more than the object of sight, ‘exist without the mind,’ nor is it ‘the image of an external thing.’ ‘In strict truth the ideas of sight, when by them we apprehend distance and things placed at a distance, do not suggest or mark out to us things actually existing at a distance, but only admonish us what ideas of touch will be imprinted in our minds at such and such distances of time, and in consequence of such and such actions’ (‘Principles of H. K.’ sec. 44). Whether, then, we speak of visible or tangible objects, the object _is_ the idea, its ‘esse is the percipi.’ Body is not a thing separate from the idea of touch, yet revealed by it; so far as it exists at all, it must either be that idea or be a succession of ideas of which that idea is suggestive. It follows that the notion of the real which identifies it with matter, as something external to and independent of consciousness, and which derives the reality of ideas from their relation to body as thus outward, must disappear. Must not, then, the distinction between the real and fantastic, between dreams and facts, disappear with it? What meaning is there in asking whether any given idea is real or not, unless a reference is implied to something other than the idea itself?

[There are no paragraphs 161-169 in any edition or reprint. Tr]

What then becomes of distinction between reality and fancy?

170. Berkeley’s theory, no less than Locke’s, requires such reference. He insists, as much as Locke does, on the difference between ideas of imagination which do, and those of sense which do not, depend on our own will. ‘It is no more than willing, and straightway this or that idea arises in my fancy; and by the same power it is obliterated and makes way for another.’ But ‘when in broad daylight I open my eyes, it is not in my power to choose whether I shall see or no, or to determine what particular objects shall present themselves to my view.’ Moreover ‘the ideas of sense are more strong, lively and distinct than those of the imagination; they have likewise a steadiness, order, and coherence, and are not excited at random as those which are the effects of human wills often are, but in a regular train and series’ (Ibid. secs. 28-30). These characteristics of ideas of sense, however, do not with Berkeley, any more than with Locke, properly speaking, _constitute_ their reality. This lies in their relation to something else, of which these characteristics are the tests. The difference between the two writers lies in their several views as to what this ‘something else’ is. With Locke it was body or matter, as proximately, though in subordination to the Divine Will, the ‘imprinter’ of those most lively ideas which we cannot make for ourselves. His followers insisted on the proximate, while they ignored the ultimate, reference. Hence, as Berkeley conceived, their Atheism, which he could cut from under their feet by the simple plan of eliminating the proximate reference altogether, and thus showing that God, not matter, is the immediate ‘imprinter’ of ideas on the senses and the suggester of such ideas of imagination as the ideas of sense, in virtue of habitual association, constantly introduce (Ibid. sec. 33).

The real = ideas that God causes.

171. To eliminate the reference to matter might seem to be more easy than to substitute for it a reference to God. If the object of the idea is only the idea itself, does not all determination by relation logically disappear from the idea, except (perhaps) such as consists in the fact of its sequence or antecedence to other ideas? This issue was afterwards to be tried by Hume--with what consequences to science and religion we shall see. Berkeley avoids it by insisting that the ‘percipi,’ to which ‘esse’ is equivalent, implies reference to a mind. At first sight this reference, as common to all ideas alike, would not seem to avail much as a basis either for a distinction between the real and fantastic or for any Theism except such as would ‘entitle God to all our fancies.’ If it is to serve Berkeley’s purpose, we must suppose the idea to carry with it not merely a relation to mind but a relation to it as its effect, and the conscious subject to carry with him such a distinction between his own mind and God’s as leads him to refer his ideas to God’s mind as their cause when they are lively, distinct and coherent, but when they are otherwise, to his own. And this, in substance, is Berkeley’s supposition. To show the efficient power of mind he appeals to our consciousness of ability to produce at will ideas of imagination; to show that there is a divine mind, distinct from our own, he appeals to our consciousness of inability to produce ideas of sense.

Is it then a succession of feelings?

172. Even those least disposed to ‘vanquish Berkeley with a grin’ have found his doctrine of the real, which is also his doctrine of God, ‘unsatisfactory.’ By the real world they are accustomed to understand something which--at least in respect of its ‘elements’ or ‘conditions’ or ‘laws’--permanently is; though the combinations of the elements, the events which flow from the conditions, the manifestations of the laws, may never be at one time what they will be at the next. But according to the Berkeleian doctrine the permanent seems to disappear: the ‘is’ gives place to a ‘has been’ and ‘will be.’ If I say (δεικτικῶς) [1] ‘there is a body,’ I must mean according to it that a feeling has just occurred to me, which has been so constantly followed by certain other feelings that it suggests a lively expectation of these. The suggestive feeling alone _is_, and it is ceasing to be. If this is the true account of propositions suggested by everyone’s constantly-recurrent experience, what are we to make of scientific truths, _e.g._ ‘a body will change its place sooner than let another enter it,’ ‘planets move in ellipses,’ ‘the square on the hypotheneuse is equal to the squares on the sides.’ In these cases, too, does the present reality lie merely in a feeling experienced by this or that scientific man, and to him suggestive of other feelings? Does the proposition that ‘planets move in ellipses’ mean that to some watcher of the skies, who understands Kepler’s laws, a certain perception of ‘visible extension’ (_i.e._ of colour or light and shade) not only suggests, as to others, a particular expectation of other feelings, which expectation is called a planet, but a further expectation, not shared by the multitude, of feelings suggesting successive situations of the visible extension, which further expectation is called elliptical motion? Such an explanation of general propositions would be a form of the doctrine conveniently named after Protagoras--‘ἀληθὲς ὃ ἑκάστῳ ἑκάστοτε δοκεῖ’ [2]--a doctrine which the vindicators of Berkeley are careful to tell us we must not confound with his. The question, however, is not whether Berkeley himself admits the doctrine, but whether or no it is the logical consequence of the method which he uses for the overthrow of materialists and ‘mathematical Atheists’?

[1] [Greek δεικτικῶς (deiktikos) = “affirmatively” or “capable of being proven” _i.e._ not merely hypothetically. Tr.]

[2] [Greek ἀληθὲς ὃ ἑκάστῳ ἑκάστοτε δοκεῖ (alethes ho hekasto hekastote dokei) = the truth for each man is as it appears to him. Tr.]

Berkeley goes wrong from confusion between thought and feeling. For Locke’s ‘idea of a thing’ he substitutes ‘idea’ simply.

173. His purpose was the maintenance of Theism, and a true instinct told him that pure Theism, as distinct from nature-worship and daemonism, has no philosophical foundation, unless it can be shown that there is nothing real apart from thought. But in the hurry of theological advocacy, and under the influence of a misleading terminology, he failed to distinguish this true proposition--there is nothing real apart from thought--from this false one, its virtual contradictory--there is nothing other than feeling. The confusion was covered, if not caused, by the ambiguity, often noticed, in the use of the term ‘idea.’ This to Berkeley’s generation stood alike for feeling proper, which to the subject that merely feels is neither outer nor inner, because not referring itself to either mind or thing, and for conception, or an object thought of under relations. According to Locke, pain, colour, solidity, are all ideas equally with each other and equally with the _idea of_ pain, _idea of_ colour, _idea of_ solidity. If all alike, however, were feelings proper, there would be no world either to exist or be spoken of. Locke virtually saves it by two suppositions, each incompatible with the equivalence of idea to feeling, and implying the conversion of it into conception as above defined. One is that there are abstract ideas; the other that there are primary qualities of which ideas are copies, but which do not come and go with our feelings. The latter supposition gives a world that ‘really exists,’ the former a world that may be known and spoken of; but neither can maintain itself without a theory of conception which is not forthcoming in Locke himself. We need not traverse again the contradictions which according to his statement they involve--contradictions which, under whatever disguise, must attach to every philosophy that admits a reality either in things as apart from thought or in thought as apart from things, and only disappear when the thing as thought of, and through thought individualised by the relations which constitute its community with the universe, is recognised as alone the real. Misled by the phrase ‘idea of a thing,’ we fancy that idea and thing have each a separate reality of their own, and then puzzle ourselves with questions as to how the idea can represent the thing--how the ideas of primary qualities can be copies of them, and how, if the real thing of experience be merely individual, a general idea can be abstracted from it. These questions Berkeley asked and found unanswerable. There were then two ways of dealing with them before him. One was to supersede them by a truer view of thought and its object, as together in essential correlation constituting the real; but this way he did not take. The other was to avoid them by merging both thing and idea in the indifference of simple feeling. For a merely sentient being, it is true--for one who did not think upon his feelings--the oppositions of inner and outer, of subjective and objective, of fantastic and real, would not exist; but neither would knowledge or a world to be known. That such oppositions, misunderstood, may be a heavy burden on the human spirit, the experience of current controversy and its spiritual effects might alone suffice to convince us; but the philosophical deliverance can only lie in the recognition of thought as their author, not in the attempt to obliterate them by the reduction of thought and its world to feeling--an attempt which contradicts itself, since it virtually admits their existence while it renders them unaccountable.

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

174. That Berkeley’s was such an attempt, looking merely to his treatment of primary qualities and abstract ideas, we certainly could not doubt: though, since language does not allow of its consistent statement, and Berkeley was quite ready to turn the exigencies of language to account, passages logically incompatible with it may easily be found in him. The hasty reader, when he is told that body or distance are suggested by feelings of sight and touch rather than immediately seen, accepts the doctrine without scruple, because he supposes that which is suggested to be a present reality, though not at present felt. But if not at present felt it is not according to Berkeley an idea, therefore ‘without the mind,’ therefore an impossibility. [1] That which is suggested, then, must itself be a feeling which consists in the expectation of other feelings. Distance, and body, _as suggested_, can be no more than such an expectation; and as _actually existing_, no more than the actual succession of the expected feelings--a succession of which, as of every succession, ‘no two parts exist together.’ [2] There is no time, then, at which it can be said that distance and body exist.

[1] Reference is here merely made to the doctrine by which Berkeley disposes of ‘matter,’ the consideration of its reconcilability with his doctrine of ‘spirits’ and ‘relations’ as objects of knowledge being postponed.

[2] Locke, Book II. chap. xv. sec. 1.

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

175. This, it may seem, however inconsistent with the doctrine of primary qualities, is little more than the result which Locke himself comes to in his Fourth Book; since, if ‘actual present succession’ forms our only knowledge of real existence, there could be no time at which distance and body might be _known_ as really existing. But Locke, as we have seen, is able to save mathematical, though not physical, knowledge from the consequences of this admission by his doctrine of abstract ideas--‘ideas removed in our thoughts from particular existence’--whose agreement or disagreement is stated in propositions which ‘concern not existence,’ and for that reason may be general without becoming either uncertain or uninstructive. This doctrine Berkeley expressly rejects on the ground that he could not perceive separately that which could not exist separately (‘Principles of Human Knowledge,’ Introduction, sec. 10); a ground which to the ordinary reader seems satisfactory because he has no doubt, and Berkeley’s instances do not suggest a doubt, as to the present existence of ‘individual objects’--this man, this horse, this body. But with Berkeley to exist means to be felt (‘Principles of Human Knowledge,’ sec. 3), and the feelings, which I name a body, being successive, its existence must be in succession likewise. The limitation, then, of possibility of ‘conception’ by possibility of existence, means that ‘conception,’ too, is reduced to a succession of feelings.

On the same principle all permanent relations should disappear.

176. Berkeley, then, as a consequence of the methods by which he disposes at once of the ‘real existence’ and ‘abstract idea of matter,’ has to meet the following questions:--How are either reality or knowledge possible without permanent relations? and, How can feelings, of which one is over before the next begins, constitute or represent a world of permanent relations? The difficulty becomes more obvious, though not more serious, when the relations in question are not merely themselves permanent, as are those between natural phenomena, but are relations between permanent parts like those of space. It is for this reason that its doctrine of geometry is the most easily assailable point of the ‘sensational’ philosophy. Locke distinguishes the ideas of space and of duration as got, the one from the permanent parts of space, the other ‘from the fleeting and perpetually perishing parts of succession.’ [1] He afterwards prefers to oppose the term ‘expansion’ to ‘duration,’ as bringing out more clearly than ‘space’ the opposition of relation between permanent facts to that between ‘fleeting successive facts which never exist together.’ How, then, can a consciousness, consisting simply of ‘fleeting successive facts,’ either be or represent that of which the differentia is that its facts are permanent and co-exist?

[1] Book II. chap. xiv. sec. 1.

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

177. This crucial question in regard to extension does not seem even to have suggested itself to Berkeley. The reason why is not far to seek. Professor Fraser, in his valuable edition, represents him as meaning by visible extension ‘coloured experience in sense,’ and by tangible extension ‘resistent experience in sense.’ [1] No fault can be found with this interpretation, but the essential question, which Berkeley does not fairly meet, is whether the experience in each case is complete in a single feeling or consists in a succession of feelings. If in a single feeling, it clearly is not extension, as a relation between parts, at all; if in a succession of feelings, it is only extension because a synthetic principle, which is not itself one of the feelings, but equally present to them all, transforms them into permanent parts of which each qualifies the other by outwardness to it. Berkeley does not see the necessity of such a principle, because he allows himself to suppose extension--at any rate visible extension--to be constituted by a single feeling. Having first pronounced that the proper object of sight is colour, he quietly substitutes for this _situations_ of colour, degrees of strength and faintness in colour, and quantities of coloured points, as if these, interchangeably with mere colour, were properly objects of sight and perceived in single acts of vision. Now if by object of sight were meant something other than the sensation itself--something which to a thinking being it suggests as its cause--there would be no harm in this language, but neither would there be any ground for saying that the proper object of sight is colour, for distinguishing visible from tangible extension, or for denying that the outwardness of body to body is seen. Such restrictions and distinctions have no meaning, unless by sight is meant the nervous irritation, the affection of the visual organ, as it is to a merely feeling subject; yet in the very passages where he makes them, by saying that we see situations and degrees of colour, and quantities of coloured points, Berkeley converts sight into a judgment of extensive and intensive quantity. He thus fails to discern that the transition from colour to coloured extension cannot be made without on the one hand either the presentation of successive pictures or (which comes to the same) successive acts of attention to a single picture, and on the other hand a synthesis of the successive presentations as mutually qualified parts of a whole. In other words, he ignores the work of thought involved in the constitution alike of coloured and tangible extension, and in virtue of which alone either is extension at all.

[1] See Fraser’s Berkeley, ‘Theory of Vision,’ note 42. I may here say that I have gone into less detail in my account of Berkeley’s system than I should otherwise have thought necessary, because Professor Fraser has supplied, in the way of explanation of it, all that a student can require.

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

178. But though he does not scruple to substitute for colour situations and quantities of coloured points, these do not with him constitute space, which he takes according to Locke’s account of it to be ‘distance between bodies or parts of the same body.’ This, according to his ‘Theory of Vision,’ is tangible extension, and this again is alone the object of geometry. As in that treatise a difference is still supposed between _tangible_ extension and the feeling of touch, the question does not there necessarily arise whether the tactual experience, that constitutes this extension, is complete in a single feeling or only in a succession of feelings; but when in the subsequent treatise the difference is effaced, it is decided by implication that the experience is successive: [1] and all received modifications of the theory, which assign to a locomotive or muscular sense the office which Berkeley roughly assigned to touch, make the same implication still more clearly. Now in the absence of any recognition of a synthetic principle, in relation to which the successive experience becomes what it is not in itself, this means nothing else than that space is a succession of feelings, which again means that space is not space, not a qualification of bodies or parts of body by mutual externality, since to such qualification it is necessary that bodies or their parts coexist. Thus, in his hurry to get rid of externality as independence of the mind, he has really got rid of it as a relation between bodies, and in so doing (however the result may be disguised) has logically made a clean sweep of geometry and physics.

[1] ‘Principles of Human Knowledge,’ sec. 44. It will be observed that in that passage Berkeley uses the term ‘distance’ not ‘space,’ and though with him the terms are strictly interchangeable, this may have helped to disguise from him the full monstrosity of the doctrine, ‘space is a succession of feelings,’ which, stated in that form, must surely have scandalised him.

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.

179. Of this result he himself shows no suspicion. He professes to be able, without violence to his doctrine, to accept the sciences as they stand, except so far as they rest upon the needless and unmeaning assumptions (as he reckoned them) of _pure_ space and its infinite divisibility. The truth seems to be that--at any rate in the state of mind represented his earlier treatises--he was only able to work on the lines which Locke had laid. It did not occur to him to treat the primary qualities as relations constituted by thought, because Locke had not done so. Locke having treated them as external to the mind, Berkeley does so likewise, and for that reason feels that they must be got rid of. The mode of riddance, again, was virtually determined for him by Locke. Locke having admitted that they copied themselves in feelings, the untenable element in this supposition had only to be dropped and they became feelings simply. It is thus only so far as space is supposed to exist after a mode of which, according to Locke himself, sense could take no copy--_i.e._ as exclusive not merely of all colour but of all body, and as infinitely divisible--that Berkeley becomes aware of its incompatibility with his doctrine. Pure space, or ‘vacuum,’ to him means space that can not be touched--a tangible extension that is not tangible--and is therefore a contradiction in terms. The notion that, though not touched, it might be seen, he excludes, [1] apparently for the same reason which prevents him from allowing _visible_ extension to be space at all; the reason, namely, that there is no ‘outness’ or relation of externality between the parts of such extension. The fact that there can be no such relation between the successive feelings which alone, according to him, constitute ‘tangible extension,’ he did not see to be equally fatal to the latter being in any true sense space. In other words, he did not see that the test of reduction to feeling, by which he disposed of the _vacuum_, disposed of space altogether. If he had, he would have understood that space and body were intelligible relations, which can be thought of apart from the feelings which through them become the world that we know, since it is they that are the conditions of these feelings becoming a knowledge, not the feelings that are the condition of the relations being known. Whether they can be thought of apart from each other--whether the simple relation of externality between parts of a whole can be thought of without the parts being considered as solid--is of course a further question, and one which Berkeley cannot be said properly to discuss at all, since the abstraction of space from body to him meant its abstraction from feelings of touch. The answer to it ceases to be difficult as soon as the question is properly stated.

[1] ‘Principles of Human Knowledge,’ sec. 116.

Berkeley disposes of space for fear of limiting God.

180. As with vacuum, so with infinite divisibility. Once let it be understood that extension is constituted by the relation of externality between homogeneous parts, and it follows that there can be no _least_ part of extension, none that does not itself consist of parts; in other words, that it is infinitely divisible: just as conversely it follows that there can be no _last_ part of it, not having another outside it; in other words, that (to use Locke’s phrase) it is infinitely addible. Doubtless, as Berkeley held, there is a ‘minimum visibile’; but this means that there are conditions under which any seen colour disappears, and disappearing, ceases to be known under the relation of extension; but it is only through a confusion of the relation with the colour that the disappearance of the latter is thought to be a disappearance of so much extension. [1] It was, in short, the same failure to recognise the true ideality of space, as a relation constituted by thought, that on the one hand made its ‘purity’ and infinity unmeaning to Berkeley, and on the other made him think that, if pure (_sc_. irreducible to feelings) and infinite, it must limit the Divine perfection, either as being itself God or as ‘something beside God which is eternal, uncreated, and infinite’ (‘Principles of Human Knowledge,’ sec. 117). Fear of this result set him upon that method of resolving space, and with it the world of nature, into sequent feelings, which, if it had been really susceptible of logical expression, would at best have given him nothing but a μέγα ζῶον [2] for God. If he had been in less of a hurry with his philosophy, he might have found that the current tendency to ‘bind God in nature or diffuse in space’ required to be met by a sounder than his boyish idealism--by an idealism which gives space its due, but reflects that to make space God, or a limitation on God, is to subject thought itself to the most superficial of the relations by which it forms the world that it knows.

[1] The same remark of course applies, _mutatis mutandis_, to the ‘minimum tangibile.’ See below, paragraphs 265 and 260.

[2] [Greek μέγα ζῶον (mega zoon) = great being. Tr.]

How he deals with possibility of general knowledge.

181. So far we have only considered Berkeley’s reduction of primary qualities, supposed to be sensible, to sensations as it affects the qualities themselves, rather than as it affects the possibility of universal judgments about them. If, indeed, as we have found, such reduction really amounts to the absolute obliteration of the qualities, no further question can remain as to the possibility of general knowledge concerning them. As Berkeley, however, did not admit the obliteration, the further question did remain for him: and the condition of his plausibly answering it was that he should recognise in the ‘idea,’ as subject of predication, that intelligible qualification by relation which he did not recognise in it simply as ‘idea,’ and which essentially differences it from feeling proper. If any particular ‘tangible extension,’ _e.g._ a right-angled triangle, is only a feeling, or in Berkeley’s own language, ‘a fleeting perishable passion’ [1] not existing at all, even as an ‘abstract idea,’ except when some one’s tactual organs are being affected in a certain way--what are we to make of such a general truth as that the square on its base is always equal to the squares on its sides? Omitting all difficulties about the convertibility of a figure with a feeling, we find two questions still remain--How such separation can be made of the figure from the other conditions of the tactual experience as that propositions should be possible which concern the figure simply; and how a single case of tactual experience--that in which the mathematician finds a feeling called a right-angled triangle followed by another which he calls equality between the squares, &c.--leads in the absence of any ‘necessary connexion’ to the expectation that the sequence will always be the same. [2] The difficulty becomes the more striking when it is remembered that though the geometrical proposition in question, according to Berkeley, concerns the tangible, the experience which suggests it is merely visual.

[1] ‘Principles of Human Knowledge,’ sec. 89.

[2] See above, paragraph 122.

His theory of universals ...

182. Berkeley’s answer to these questions must be gathered from his theory of general names. ‘It is, I know,’ he says, ‘a point much insisted on, that all knowledge and demonstration are about universal notions, to which I fully agree: but then it does not appear to me that those notions are formed by abstraction--_universality_, so far as I can comprehend, not consisting in the absolute positive nature or conception of anything, but in the relation it bears to the particulars signified or represented by it; by virtue whereof it is that things, names, or notions, being in their own nature _particular_, are rendered universal. Thus, when I demonstrate any proposition concerning triangles, it is to be supposed that I have in view the universal idea of a triangle; which is not to be understood as if I could frame an idea of a triangle which was neither equilateral nor scalene nor equicrural; but only that the particular triangle I considered, whether of this or that sort it matters not, doth equally stand for and represent all rectilinear triangles whatsoever, and is in that sense universal.’ Thus it is that ‘a man may consider a figure merely as triangular.’ (‘Principles of Human Knowledge,’ Introd. secs. 15 and 16.)

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

183. In this passage appear the beginnings of a process of thought which, if it had been systematically pursued by Berkeley, might have brought him to understand by the ‘percipi,’ to which he pronounced ‘esse’ equivalent, definitely the ‘intelligi.’ As it stands, the result of the passage merely is that the triangle (for instance) ‘in its own nature,’ because ‘particular,’ is not a possible subject of general predication or reasoning: that it is so only as ‘considered’ under a relation of resemblance to other triangles and by such consideration universalized. ‘In its own nature,’ or as a ‘particular idea,’ the triangle, we must suppose, is so much tangible (or visible, as symbolical of tangible) extension, and therefore according to Berkeley a feeling. But a relation, as he virtually admits, [1] is neither a feeling nor felt. The triangle, then, as considered under relation and thus a possible subject of general propositions, is quite other than the triangle in its own nature. This, of course, is so far merely a virtual repetition of Locke’s embarrassing doctrine that real things are not the things which we speak of, and which are the subject of our sciences; but it is a repetition with two fruitful differences--one, that the thing in its ‘absolute positive nature’ is more explicitly identified with feeling; the other, that the process, by which the thing thought and spoken of is supposed to be derived from the real thing, is no longer one of ‘abstraction,’ but consists in consideration of relation. It is true that with Berkeley the mere feeling has a ‘positive nature’ apart from considered relations, [2] and that the considered relation, by which the feeling is universalised, is only that of resemblance between properties supposed to exist independently of it. The ‘particular triangle,’ reducible to feelings of touch, has its triangularity (we must suppose) simply as a feeling. It is only the resemblance between the triangularity in this and other figures--not the triangularity itself--that is a relation, and, as a relation, not felt but considered; or in Berkeley’s language, something of which we have not properly an ‘idea’ but a ‘notion.’ [3]

[1] See ‘Principles of Human Knowledge,’ sec. 89. (2nd edit.)

[2] See below, paragraph 298.

[3] ‘Principles of Human Knowledge,’ Ibid. This perhaps is the best place for saying that it is not from any want of respect for Dr. Stirling that I habitually use ‘notion’ in the loose popular way which he counts ‘barbarous,’ but because the barbarism is so prevalent that it seems best to submit to it, and to use ‘conception’ as the equivalent of the German ‘Begriff.’

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

184. But though Berkeley only renders explicit the difficulties implicit in Locke’s doctrine of ideas, that is itself a great step taken towards disposing of them. Once let the equivocation between sensible qualities and sensations be got rid of--once let it be admitted that the triangle in its absolute nature, as opposed to the triangle considered, is merely a feeling, and that relations are not feelings or felt--and the question must soon arise, What in the absence of all relation remains to be the absolute nature of the triangle? It is a question which ultimately admits of but one answer. The triangularity of the given single figure must be allowed to be just as much a relation as the resemblance, consisting in triangularity, between it and other figures; and if a relation, then not properly felt, but understood. The ‘particular’ triangle, if by that is meant the triangle as subject of a singular proposition, is no more ‘particular in time,’ no more constituted by the occurrence of a feeling, than is the triangle as subject of a general proposition. It really exists as constituted by relation, and therefore only as ‘considered’ or understood. In its existence, as in the consideration of it, the relations indicated by the terms ‘equilateral, equicrural and scalene,’ presuppose the relation of triangularity, not it them; and for that reason it can be considered apart from them, though not they apart from it, without any breach between that which is considered and that which really exists. Thus, too, it becomes explicable that a single experiment should warrant a universal affirmation; that the mathematician, having once found as the result of a certain comparison of magnitudes that the square on the hypothenuse is equal to the square on the sides, without waiting for repeated experience at once substitutes for the singular proposition, which states his discovery, a general one. If the singular proposition stated a sensible event or the occurrence of a feeling, such substitution would be inexplicable: for if that were the true account of the singular proposition, a general one could but express such expectation of the recurrence of the event as repeated experience of it can alone give. But a relation is not contingent with the contingency of feeling. It is permanent with the permanence of the combining and comparing thought which alone constitutes it; and for that reason, whether it be recognised as the result of a mathematical construction or of a crucial experiment in physics, the proposition which states it must already be virtually universal.

Traces of progress in his idealism.

185. Of such a doctrine Berkeley is rather the unconscious forerunner than the intelligent prophet. It is precisely upon the question whether, or how far, he recognised the constitution of things by intelligible relations, that the interpretation of his early (which is his only developed) idealism rests. Is it such idealism as Hume’s, or such idealism as that adumbrated in some passages of his own ‘Siris’? Is the idea, which is real, according to him a feeling or a conception? Has it a nature of its own, consisting simply in its being felt, and which we afterwards for purposes of our own consider in various relations; or does the nature consist only in relations, which again imply the action of a mind that is eternal--present to that which is in succession, but not in succession itself? The truth seems to be that this question in its full significance never presented itself to Berkeley, at least during the period represented by his philosophical treatises. His early idealism, as we learn from the commonplace-book brought to light by Professor Fraser, was merely a cruder form of Hume’s. By the time of the publication of the ‘Principles of Human Knowledge’ he had learnt that, unless this doctrine was to efface ‘spirit’ as well as ‘matter,’ he must modify it by the admission of a ‘thing’ that was not an ‘idea,’ and of which the ‘esse’ was ‘percipere’ not ‘percipi.’ This admission carried with it the distinction between the object felt and the object known, between ‘idea’ and ‘notion’--a distinction which was more clearly marked in the ‘Dialogues.’ Of ‘spirit’ we could have a ‘notion,’ though not an ‘idea.’ But it was only in the second edition of the ‘Principles’ that ‘relation’ was put along with ‘spirit,’ as that which could be known but which was no ‘idea:’ and then without any recognition of the fact that the whole reduction of primary qualities to mere ideas was thereby invalidated. The objects, with which the mathematician deals, are throughout treated as in their own nature ‘particular ideas,’ into the constitution of which relation does not enter at all; in other words, as successive feelings.

His way of dealing with physical truths.

186. If the truths of mathematics seemed to Berkeley explicable on this supposition, those of the physical sciences were not likely to seem less so. As long as the relations with which these sciences deal are relations between ‘sensible objects,’ he does not notice that they _are_ relations, and therefore not feelings or felt, at all. He treats felt things as if the same as feelings, and ignores the relations altogether. Thus a so-called ‘sensible’ motion causes him no difficulty. He would be content to say that it was a succession of ideas, not perceiving that motion implies a relation between spaces or moments as successively occupied by something that remains one with itself--a relation which a mere sequence of feelings could neither constitute nor of itself suggest. It is only about a motion which does not profess to be ‘seen,’ such as the motion of the earth, that any question is raised--a question easily disposed of by the consideration that in a different position we should see it. ‘The question whether the earth moves or not amounts in reality to no more than this, to wit, whether we have reason to conclude from what hath been observed by astronomers, that if we were placed in such and such circumstances, and such or such a position and distance both from the earth and sun, we should perceive the former to move among the choir of the planets, and appearing in all respects like one of them: and this by the established rules of nature, which we have no reason to mistrust, is reasonably collected from the phenomena’ (‘Principles of Human Knowledge,’ sec. 58). [1]

[1] Cf. ‘Dialogues,’ page 147, in Prof. Fraser’s edition.

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

187. Now this passage clearly does not mean--as it ought to mean if the ‘_esse_’ of the motion were the ‘_percipi_’ by us--that the motion of the earth would begin as soon as we were there to see it. It means that it is now going on as an ‘established law of nature,’ which may be ‘collected from the phenomena.’ In other words, it means that our successive feelings are so related to each other as determined by one present and permanent system, on which not they only but all possible feelings depend, that by a certain set of them we are led--not to expect a recurrence of them in like order according to the laws of association, but, what is the exact reverse of this--to infer that certain other feelings, of which we have no experience, would now occur to us if certain conditions of situation on our part were fulfilled, because the ‘ordo ad universum,’ of which these feelings would be the ‘ordo ad nos,’ does now obtain. But though Berkeley’s words mean this for us, they did not mean it for him. That such relation--merely intelligible, or according to his phraseology not an idea or object of an idea at all, as he must have admitted it to be--gives to our successive feelings the only ‘nature’ that they possess, he never recognised. By the relation of idea to idea, as he repeatedly tells us, he meant not a ‘necessary connexion,’ _i.e._ not a relation without which, neither idea would be what it is, but such _de facto_ sequence of one upon the other as renders the occurrence of one the unfailing but arbitrary sign that the other is coming. It is thus according to him (and here Hume merely followed suit) that feelings are symbolical--symbolical not of an order other than the feelings and which accounts for them, but simply of feelings to follow. To Berkeley, indeed, unlike Hume, the sequence of feelings symbolical of each other is also symbolical of something farther, viz. the mind of God: but when we examine what this ‘mind’ means, we find that it is not an intelligible order by which our feelings may be interpreted, or the spiritual subject of such an order, but simply the arbitrary will of a creator that this feeling shall follow that.

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

188. Such a doctrine could not help being at once confused in its account of reality, and insecure in its doctrine alike of the human spirit and of God. On the recognition of relations as constituting the _nature_ of ideas rests the possibility of any tenable theory of their reality. An isolated idea could be neither real nor unreal. Apart from a definite order of relation we may suppose (if we like) that it would _be_, but it would certainly not be real; and as little could it be unreal, since unreality can only result from the confusion in our consciousness of one order of relation with another. It is diversity of relations that distinguishes, for instance, these letters as they now appear on paper from the same as I imagine them with my eyes shut, giving each sort its own reality: just as upon confusion with the other each alike becomes unreal. Thus, though with Locke simple ideas are necessarily real, we soon find that even according to him they are not truly so in their simplicity, but only as related to an external thing producing them. He is right enough, however inconsistent with himself, in making relation constitute reality; wrong in limiting this prerogative to the one relation of externality. When he afterwards, in virtual contradiction to this limitation, finds the reality of moral and mathematical ideas just in that sole relation to the mind, as its products, which he had previously made the source of all unreality, he forces upon us the explanation which he does not himself give, that unreality does not lie in either relation as opposed to the other, but in the confusion of any relation with another. It is for lack of this explanation that Locke himself, as we have seen, finds in the liveliness and involuntariness of ideas the sole and sufficient tests (not _constituents_) of their reality; though they are obviously tests which put the dreams of a man in a fever upon the same footing with the ‘impressions’ of a man awake, and would often prove that unreal after dinner which had been proved real before. There is a well-known story of a man who in a certain state of health commonly saw a particular gory apparition, but who, knowing its origin, used to have himself bled till it disappeared. The reality of the apparition lay, he knew, in some relation between the circulation of his blood and his organs of sight, in distinction from the reality existing in the normal relations of his visual organs to the light: and in his idea, accordingly, there was nothing unreal, because he did not confuse the one relation with the other. Locke’s doctrine, however, would allow of no distinction between the apparition as it was for such a man and as it would be for one who interpreted it as an actual ‘ghost.’ However interpreted, the liveliness and the involuntariness of the idea remain the same, as does its relation to an efficient cause. If in order to its reality the cause must be an ‘outward body,’ then it is no more real when rightly, than when wrongly, interpreted; while on the ground of liveliness and involuntariness it is as real when taken for a ghost as when referred to an excess of blood in the head.

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

189. As has been pointed out above, it is in respect not of the ‘ratio cognoscendi’ but of the ‘ratio essendi’ that Berkeley’s doctrine of reality differs from Locke’s. With him it is not as an effect of an outward body, but as an immediate effect of God, that an ‘idea of sense’ is real. Just as with Locke real ideas and matter serve each to explain the other, so with Berkeley do real ideas and God. If he is asked, What is God? the answer is, He is the efficient cause of real ideas; if he is asked, What are real ideas? the answer is, Those which God produces, as opposed to those which we make for ourselves. To the inevitable objection, that this is a logical see-saw, no effective answer can be extracted from Berkeley but this--that we have subjective tests of the reality of ideas apart from a knowledge of their cause. In his account of these Berkeley only differs from Locke in adding to the qualifications of liveliness and involuntariness those of ‘steadiness, order, and coherence’ in the ideas. This addition may mean either a great deal or very little. To us it may mean that the distinction of real and unreal is one that applies not to feelings but to the conceived relations of feelings; not to events as such, but to the intellectual interpretation of them. The occurrence of a feeling taken by itself (it may be truly said) is neither coherent nor incoherent; nor can the sequence of feelings one upon another with any significance be called coherence, since in that case an incoherence would be as impossible as any failure in the sequence. As little can we mean by such coherence an usual, by incoherence an unusual, sequence of feelings. If we did, every sequence not before experienced--such, for instance, as is exhibited by a new scientific experiment--being unusual, would have to be pronounced incoherent, and therefore unreal. Coherence, in short, we may conclude, is only predicable of a system of relations, not felt but conceived; while incoherence arises from the attempt of an imperfect intelligence to think an object under relations which cannot ultimately be held together in thought. The qualification then of ‘ideas’ as coherent has in truth no meaning unless ‘idea’ be taken to mean not _feeling_ but _conception_: and thus understood, the doctrine that coherent ideas _are_ (Berkeley happily excludes the notion that they merely _represent_) the real, amounts to a clear identification of the real with the world of conception.

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

190. If such idealism were Berkeley’s, his inference from the ‘ideality’ of the real to spirit and God would be more valid than it is. To have got rid of the notion that the world first exists and then is thought of--to have seen that it only really exists as thought of--is to have taken the first step in the only possible ‘proof of the being of God,’ as the self-conscious subject in relation to which alone an intelligible world can exist, and the presence of which in us is the condition of our knowing it. [1] But there is nothing to show that in adopting coherence as one test, among others, of the reality of ideas, he attached to it any of the significance exhibited above. He adopted it from ordinary language without considering how it affected his view of the world as a succession of feelings. That still remained to him a sufficient account of the world, even when he treated it as affording intuitive certainty of a soul ‘naturally immortal,’ and demonstrative certainty of God. He is not aware, while he takes his doctrine of such certainty from Locke, that he has left out, and not replaced, the only solid ground for it which Locke’s system suggested.

[1] See above, paragraphs 146 and 149-152.

His view of the soul as ‘naturally immortal’.

191. The soul or self, as he describes it, does not differ from Locke’s ‘thinking substance,’ except that, having got rid of ‘extended matter’ altogether, he cannot admit with Locke any possibility of the soul’s being extended, and, having satisfied himself that ‘time was nothing abstracted from the succession of ideas in the mind,’ [1] he was clear that ‘the soul always thinks’--since the time at which it did not think, being abstracted from a succession of ideas, would be no time at all. A soul which is necessarily unextended and therefore ‘indiscerptible,’ and without which there would be no time, he reckons ‘naturally immortal.’

[1] ‘Principles of Human Knowledge,’ sec. 98.

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

192. Upon this the remark must occur that, if the fact of being unextended constituted immortality, all sounds and smells must be immortal, and that the inseparability of time from the succession of feelings may prove that succession endless, but proves no immortality of a soul unless there be one self-conscious subject of that succession, identical with itself throughout it. To the supposition of there being such a subject, which Berkeley virtually makes, his own mode of disposing of matter suggested ready objections. In Locke, as we have seen, the two opposite ‘things,’ thinking and material, always appear in strict correlativity, each representing (though he was not aware of this) the same logical necessity of substantiation. ‘Sensation convinces us that there are solid extended substances, and reflection that there are thinking ones.’ These are not two convictions, however, but one conviction, representing one and the same essential condition of knowledge. Such logical necessity indeed is misinterpreted when made a ground for believing the real existence either of a multitude of independent things, for everything is a ‘retainer’ to everything else; [1] or of a separation of the thinking from the material substance, since, according to Locke’s own showing, they at least everywhere overlap; [2] or of an absolutely last substance, which because last would be unknowable: but it is evidence of the action of a synthetic principle of self-consciousness without which all reference of feelings to mutually-qualified subjects and objects, and therefore all knowledge, would be impossible. It is idle, however, with Berkeley so to ignore the action of this principle on the one side as to pronounce the material world a mere succession of feelings, and so to take it for granted on the other as to assert that every feeling implies relation to a conscious substance. Upon such a method the latter assertion has nothing to rest on but an appeal to the individual’s consciousness--an appeal which avails as much or as little for material as for thinking substance, and, in face of the apparent fact that with a knock on the head the conscious independent substance may disappear altogether, cannot hold its own against the suggestion that the one substance no less than the other is reducible to a series of feelings, so closely and constantly sequent on each other as to seem to coalesce. We cannot substitute for this illusory appeal the valid method of an analysis of knowledge, without finding that substantiation in matter is just as necessary to knowledge as substantiation in mind. If this method had been Berkeley’s he would have found a better plan for dealing with the ‘materialism’ in vogue. Instead of trying to show that material substance was a fiction, he would have shown that it was really a basis of intelligible relations, and that thus all that was fictitious about it was its supposed sensibility and consequent opposition to the work of thought. Then his doctrine of matter would itself have established the necessity of spirit, not indeed as substance but as the source of all substantiation. As it was, misunderstanding the true nature of the antithesis between matter and mind, in his zeal against matter he took away the ground from under the spiritualism which he sought to maintain. He simply invited a successor in speculation, of colder blood than himself, to try the solution of spirit in the same crucible with matter.

[1] Above, paragraph 125.

[2] Above, paragraph 127.

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

193. His doctrine of God is not only open to the same objection as his doctrine of spiritual substance, but to others which arise from the illogical restrictions that have to be put upon his notion of such substance, if it is to represent at once the God of received theology and the God whose agency the Berkeleian system requires as the basis of distinction between the real and unreal. Admitting the supposition involved in his certainty of the ‘natural immortality’ of the soul--the supposition that the succession of feelings which constitutes the world, and which at no time was not, implies one feeling substance--that substance we should naturally conclude was God. Such a God, it is true (as has been already pointed out [1]), would merely be the μέγα ζῶον [2] of the crudest Pantheism, but it is the only God logically admissible--if any be admissible--in an ‘ideal’ system of which the text is not ‘the world really exists only as thought of,’ but ‘the world only exists as a succession of feelings.’ It was other than a _feeling_ substance, however, that Berkeley required not merely to satisfy his religious instincts, but to take the place held by ‘outward body’ with Locke as the efficient of real ideas. The reference to this feeling substance, if necessary for any idea, is necessary for all--for the ‘fantastic’ as well as for those of sense--and can therefore afford no ground for distinction between the real and unreal. Instead, however, of being thus led to a truer view of this distinction, as in truth a distinction between the complete and incomplete conception of an intelligible world, he simply puts the feeling substance, when he regards it as God, under an arbitrary limitation, making it relative only to those ideas of which with Locke ‘matter’ was the substance, as opposed to those which Locke had referred to the thinking thing. The direct consequence of this limitation, indeed, might seem to be merely to make God an animal of partial, instead of universal, susceptibility; but this consequence Berkeley avoids by dropping the ordinary notion of substance altogether, so as to represent the ideas of sense not as subsisting in God but as effects of His power--as related to Him, in short, just as with Locke ideas of sense are related to the primary qualities of matter. ‘There must be an active power to produce our ideas, which is not to be found in ideas themselves, for we are conscious that they are inert, nor in matter, since that is but a name for a bundle of ideas; which must therefore be in spirit, since of that we are conscious as active; yet not in the spirit of which we are conscious, since then there would be no difference between real and imaginary ideas; therefore in a Divine Spirit, to whom, however, may forthwith be ascribed the attributes of the spirit of which we are conscious.’ Such is the sum of Berkeley’s natural theology.

[1] Above, paragraph 180.

[2] [Greek μέγα ζῶον (mega zoon) = great being. Tr.]

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

194. From a follower of Hume it of course invites the reply that he does not see the necessity of an active power at all, to which, since, according to Berkeley’s own showing, it is no possible ‘idea’ or object of an idea, all his own polemic against the ‘absolute idea’ of matter is equally applicable; that the efficient power, of which we profess to be conscious in ourselves, is itself only a name for a particular feeling or impression which precedes certain other of our impressions; that, even if it were more than this, the transition from the spiritual efficiency of which we are conscious to another, of which it is the special differentia that we are not conscious of it, would be quite illegitimate, and that thus in saying that certain feelings are real because, being lively and involuntary, they must be the work of this unknown spirit, we in effect say nothing more than that they are real because lively and involuntary. Against a retort of this kind Berkeley’s theistic armour is even less proof than Locke’s. His ‘proof of the being of God’ is in fact Locke’s with the sole _nervus probandi_ left out. The value of Locke’s proof, as an argument from their being something now to their having been something from eternity, lay, we saw, in its convertibility into an argument from the world as a system of relations to a present and eternal subject of those relations. For its being so convertible there was this to be said, that Locke, with whatever inconsistency, at least recognised the constitution of reality by permanent relations, though he treated the mere relation of external efficiency--that in virtue of which we say of nature that it consists of bodies outward to and acting on each other--as if it alone constituted the reality of the world. Berkeley’s reduction of the ‘primary qualities of matter’ to a succession of feelings logically effaces this relation, and puts nothing intelligible, nothing but a name, in its place. The effacement of the distinction between the real and unreal, which would properly ensue, is only prevented by bringing back relation to something under the name of God, either wholly unknown and indeterminate, or else, under a thin disguise, determined by that very relation of external efficiency which, when ascribed to something only nominally different, had been pronounced a gratuitous fiction. If Berkeley had dealt with the opposition of reality to thought by showing the primary qualities to be conceived relations, and the distinction between the real and unreal to be one between the fully and the defectively conceived, the case would have been different. The real and God would alike have been logically saved. The peculiar embarrassment of Locke’s doctrine we have found to be that it involves the unreality of every object, into the constitution of which there enters any idea of reflection, or any idea retained in the mind, as distinct from the present effect of a body acting upon us--_i.e._ of every object of which anything can be said. With the definite substitution of full intelligibility of relations for present sensibility, as the true account of the real, this embarrassment would have been got rid of. At the same time there would have been implied an intelligent subject of these relations; the ascription to whom, indeed, of moral attributes would have remained a further problem, but who, far from being a ‘Great Unknown,’ would be at least determined by relation to that order of nature which is as necessary to Him as He to it. But in fact, as we have seen, the notion of the reality of relations, not felt but understood, only appears in Berkeley’s developed philosophy as an after-thought, and the notion of an order of nature, other than our feelings, which enables us to infer what feelings that have never been felt would be, is an unexplained intrusion in it. The same is true of the doctrine, which struggles to the surface in the Third Dialogue, that the ‘sensible world’ is to God not felt at all, but known; that to Him it is precisely not that which according to Berkeley’s refutation of materialism it really is--a series or collection of sensations. These ‘after-thoughts,’ when thoroughly thought out, imply a complete departure from Berkeley’s original interpretation of ‘phenomena’ as simple feelings; but with him, so far from being thought out, they merely suggested themselves incidentally as the conceptions of God and reality were found to require them. In other words, that interpretation of phenomena, which is necessary to any valid ‘collection’ from them of the existence of God, only appears in him as a consequence of that ‘collection’ having been made. To pursue the original interpretation, so that all might know what it left of reality, was the best way of deciding the question of its compatibility with a rational belief in God--a question of too momentous an interest to be fairly considered in itself. Thus to pursue it was the mission of Hume.

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

195. Hume begins with an account of the ‘perceptions of the human mind,’ which corresponds to Locke’s account of ideas with two main qualifications, both tending to complete that dependence of thought on something other than itself which Locke had asserted, but not consistently maintained. He distinguishes ‘perceptions’ (equivalent to Locke’s ideas) into ‘impressions’ and ‘ideas’ accordingly as they are originally produced in feeling or reproduced by memory and imagination, and he does not allow ‘ideas of reflection’ any place in the _original_ ‘furniture of the mind.’ ‘An impression first strikes upon the senses, and makes us perceive heat or cold, thirst or hunger, pleasure or pain, of some kind or other. Of this impression there is a copy taken by the mind, which remains after the impression ceases; and this we call an idea. This idea of pleasure or pain, when it returns upon the soul, produces the new impressions of desire and aversion, hope and fear, which may properly be called impressions of reflection, because derived from it. These, again, are copied by the memory and imagination, and become ideas; which, perhaps, in their turn give rise to other impressions and ideas; so that the impressions are only antecedent to their correspondent ideas, but posterior to those of sensation and derived from them’ (Part I. §2). He is at the same time careful to explain that the causes from which the impressions of sensation arise are unknown (ibid.), and that by the term ‘impression’ he is not to be ‘understood to express the manner in which our lively perceptions are produced in the soul, but merely the perceptions themselves’. [1] The distinction between impression and idea he treats as equivalent to that between feeling and thinking, which, again, lies merely in the different degrees of ‘force and liveliness’ with which the perceptions, thus designated, severally ‘strike upon the mind.’ [2] Thus the rule which he emphasises [3] ‘that all our simple ideas in their first appearance are derived from simple impressions which are correspondent to them and which they exactly represent,’ strictly taken, means no more than that a feeling must be more lively before it becomes less so. As the reproduced perception, or ‘idea,’ differs in this respect from the original one, so, according to the greater or less degree of secondary liveliness which it possesses, is it called ‘idea of memory,’ or ‘idea of imagination.’ The only other distinction noticed is that, as might be expected, the comparative faintness of the ideas of imagination is accompanied by a possibility of their being reproduced in a different order from that in which the corresponding ideas were originally presented. Memory, on the contrary, ‘is in a manner tied down in this respect, without any power of variation’; [4] which must be understood to mean that, when the ideas are faint enough to allow of variation in the order of reproduction, they are not called ‘ideas of memory.’

[1] p. 312, note [Introduction to the Treatise of Human Nature]

[2] See pp. 327 and 375 [Book I, part I., sec. II. and part III. sec. II.]

[3] p. 310 [Introduction to the Treatise of Human Nature]

[4] p. 318 [Book I, part I., sec. III.]

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

196. All, then, that Hume could find in his mind, when after Locke’s example he ‘looked into it,’ were, according to his own statement, feelings with their copies, dividing themselves into two main orders--those of sensation and those of reflection, of which the latter, though results of the former, are not their copies. The question, then, that he had to deal with was, to what impressions he could reduce those conceptions of relation--of cause and effect, substance and attribute, and identity--which all knowledge involves. Failing the impressions of sensation he must try those of reflection, and failing both he must pronounce such conceptions to be no ‘ideas’ at all, but words misunderstood, and leave knowledge to take its chance. The vital nerve of his philosophy lies in his treatment of the ‘association of ideas’ as a sort of process of spontaneous generation, by which impressions of sensation issue in such impressions of reflection, in the shape of habitual propensities,’ [1] as will account, not indeed for there being--since there really are not--but for there seeming to be, those formal conceptions which Locke, to the embarrassment of his philosophy, had treated as at once real and creations of the mind.

[1] Pp. 460 and 496 [Book I, part III., sec. XIV. and part IV., sec. II.]

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

197. Such a method meets at the outset with the difficulty that the impressions of sensation and those of reflection, if Locke’s determination of the former by reference to an impressive matter is excluded, are each determined only by reference to the other. What is an impression of reflection? It is one that can only come after an impression of sensation. What is an impression of sensation? It is one that comes before any impression of reflection. An apparent determination, indeed, is gained by speaking of the original impressions as ‘conveyed to us by our senses;’ but this really means determination by reference to the organs of our body as affected by outward bodies--in short, by a physical theory. But of the two essential terms of this theory, ‘our own body,’ and ‘outward body,’ neither, according to Hume, expresses anything present to the original consciousness. ‘Properly speaking, it is not our body we perceive when we regard our limbs and members, but certain impressions which enter by the senses.’ Nor do any of our impressions ‘inform us of distance and outness (so to speak) immediately, and without a certain reasoning and experience’. [1] In such admissions Hume is as much a Berkeleian as Berkeley himself, and they effectually exclude any reference to body from those original impressions, by reference to which all other modes of consciousness are to be explained.

[1] p. 481 [Book I, part IV., sec. II.]

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

198. He thus logically cuts off his psychology from the support which, according to popular conceptions, its primary truths derive from physiology. We have already noticed how with Locke metaphysic begs defence of physic; [1] how, having undertaken to answer by the impossible method of self-observation the question as to what consciousness is to itself at its beginning, he in fact tells us what it is to the natural philosopher, who accounts for the production of sensation by the impact of matter ‘on the outward parts, continued to the brain.’ To those, of course, who hold that the only possible theory of knowledge and of the human spirit is physical, it must seem that this was his greatest merit; that, an unmeaning question having been asked, it was the best thing to give an answer which indeed is no answer to the question, but has some elementary truth of its own. According to them, though he may have been wrong in supposing consciousness to be to itself what the physiologist explains it to be--since any supposition at all about it except as a phenomenon, to which certain other phenomena are invariably antecedent, is at best superfluous--he was not wrong in taking the physiological explanation to be the true and sufficient one. To such persons we can but respectfully point out that they have not come in sight of the problem which Locke and his followers, on however false a method, sought to solve; that, however certain may be the correlation between the brain and thought, in the sense that the individual would be incapable of the processes of thought unless he had brain and nerves of a particular sort, yet it is equally certain that every theory of the correlation must presuppose a knowledge of the processes, and leave that knowledge exactly where it was before; that thus their science, valuable like every other science within its own department, takes for granted just what metaphysic, as a theory of knowledge, seeks to explain. When the origin, for instance, of the conception of body or of that of an organic structure is in question, it is in the strictest sense preposterous to be told that body makes the conception of body, and that unless the brain were organic to thought I should not now be thinking. ‘The brain is organic to thought;’ here is a proposition involving conceptions within conceptions--a whole hierarchy of ideas. How am I enabled to re-think these in order, to make my way from the simpler to the more complex, by any iteration or demonstration of the proposition, which no one disputes, or by the most precise examination of the details of the organic structure itself?

[1] See above, paragraph 17.

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

199. The quarrel of the physiologist with the metaphysician is, in fact, due to an _ignorantia elenchi_ on the part of the former, for which the behaviour of English ‘metaphysicians,’ in attempting to assimilate their own procedure to that of the natural philosophers, and thus to win the popular acceptance which these alone can fairly look for, has afforded too much excuse. The question really at issue is not between two co-ordinate sciences, as if a theory of the human body were claiming also to be a theory of the human soul, and the theory of the soul were resisting the aggression. The question is, whether the conceptions which all the departmental sciences alike presuppose shall have an account given of them or no. For dispensing with such an account altogether (life being short) there is much to be said, if only men would or could dispense with it; but the physiologist, when he claims that his science should supersede metaphysic, is not dispensing with it, but rendering it in a preposterous way. He accounts for the formal conceptions in question, in other words for thought as it is common to all the sciences, as sequent upon the antecedent facts which his science ascertains--the facts of the animal organisation. But these conceptions--the relations of cause and effect, &c.--are necessary to constitute the facts. They are not an _ex post facto_ interpretation of them, but an interpretation without which there would be no ascertainable facts at all. To account for them, therefore, as the result of the facts is to proceed as a geologist would do, who should treat the present conformation of the earth as the result of a certain series of past events, and yet, in describing these, should assume the present conformation as a determining element in each.

Hume’s psychology will not answer it either.

200. ‘Empirical psychology,’ however, claims to have a way of its own for explaining thought, distinct from that of the physiologist, but yet founded on observation, though it is admitted that the observation takes place under difficulties. Its method consists in a history of consciousness, as a series of events or successive states observed in the individual by himself. By tracing such a chain of _de facto_ sequence it undertakes to account for the elements common to all knowledge. Its first concern, then, must be, as we have previously put it, to ascertain what consciousness is to itself at its beginning. No one with Berkeley before him, and accepting Berkeley’s negative results, could answer this question in Locke’s simple way by making the primitive consciousness report itself as an effect of the operation of body. To do so is to transfer a later and highly complex form of consciousness, whose growth has to be traced, into the earlier and simple form from which the growth is supposed to begin. This, upon the supposition that the process of consciousness by which conceptions are formed is a series of psychical events--a supposition on which the whole method of empirical psychology rests--is in principle the same false procedure as that which we have imagined in the case of a geologist above. But the question is whether, by any procedure not open to this condemnation, the theory could seem to do what it professes to do--explain thought or ‘cognition by means of conceptions’ as something which happens in sequence upon previous psychical events. Does it not, however stated, carry with it an implication of the supposed later state in the earlier, and is it not solely in virtue of this implication that it seems to be able to trace the genesis of the later? No one has pursued it with stricter promises, or made a fairer show of being faithful to them, than Hume. He will begin with simple feeling, as first experienced by the individual--unqualified by complex conceptions, physical or metaphysical, of matter or of mind--and trace the process by which it generates the ‘ideas of philosophical relation.’ If it can be shown, as we believe it can be, that, even when thus pursued, its semblance of success is due to the fact that, by interpreting the earliest consciousness in terms of the latest, it puts the latter in place of the former, some suspicion may perhaps be created that a natural history of self-consciousness, and of the conceptions by which it makes the world its own, is impossible, since such a history must be of events, and self-consciousness is not reducible to a series of events; being already at its beginning formally, or potentially, or implicitly all that it becomes actually or explicitly in developed knowledge.

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

201. If Hume were consistent in allowing no other determination to the impression than that of its having the maximum of vivacity, or to other modes of consciousness than the several degrees of their removal from this maximum, he would certainly have avoided the difficulties which attend Locke’s use of the metaphor of impression, while at the same time he would have missed the convenience, involved in this use, of being able to represent the primitive consciousness as already a recognition of a thing impressing it, and thus an ‘idea of a quality of body.’ But at the outset he remarks that ‘the examination of our sensations’ (_i.e._ our impressions of sensation) ‘belongs more to anatomists and natural philosophers than to moral,’ and that for that reason he shall begin not with them but with ideas. [1] Now this virtually means that he will begin, indeed, with the feelings he finds in himself, but with these as determined by the notion that they are results of something else, of which the nature is not for the present explained. Thus, while he does not, like Locke, identify our earliest consciousness with a rough and ready physical theory of its cause, he gains the advantage of this identification in the mind of his reader, who from sensation, thus apparently defined, transfers a definiteness to the ideas and secondary impressions as derived from it, though in the sequel the theory turns out, if possible at all, to be at best a remote result of custom and association. We shall see this more clearly if we look back to the general account of impressions and ideas quoted above. ‘An impression first strikes upon the senses and makes us perceive pleasure or pain, of which a copy is taken by the mind,’ called an idea. Now if we set aside the notion of a body making impact upon a sensuous, and through it upon a mental, tablet, pleasure or pain _is_ the impression, which, again, is as much or as little in the mind as the idea. Thus the statement might be re-written as follows:--‘Pleasure or pain makes the mind perceive pleasure or pain, of which a copy is taken by the mind.’ This, of course, is nonsense; but between this nonsense and the plausibility of the statement as it stands, the difference depends on the double distinction understood in the latter--the distinction _(a)_ between the producing cause of the impression and the impression produced; and _(b)_ between the impression as produced on the senses, and the idea as preserved by the mind. This passage, as we shall see, is only a sample of many of the same sort. Throughout, however explicitly Hume may give warning that the difference between impression and idea is only one of liveliness, however little he may scruple in the sequel to reduce body and mind alike to the succession of feelings, his system gains the benefit of the contrary assumption which the uncritical reader is ready to make for him. As often as the question returns whether a phrase, purporting to express an ‘abstract conception,’ expresses any actual idea or no, his test is, ‘Point out the impression from which the idea, if there be any, is derived’--a test which has clearly no significance if the impression is merely the idea itself at a livelier stage (for a person, claiming to have the idea, would merely have to say that he had never known it more lively, and that, therefore, it was itself an impression, and the force of the test would be gone), but which seems so satisfactory because the impression is regarded as the direct effect of outward things, and thus as having a prerogative of reality over any perception to which the mind contributes anything of its own. By availing himself alternately of this popular conception of the impression of sensation and of his own account of it, he gains a double means of suppressing any claim of thought to originate. Every idea, by being supposed in a more lively state, can be represented as derived from an impression, and thus (according to the popular notion) as an effect of something which, whatever it is, is not thought. If thereupon it is pointed out that this outward something is a form of substance which, according to Hume’s own showing, is a fiction of thought, there is an easy refuge open in the reply that ‘impression’ is only meant to express a lively feeling, not any dependence upon matter of which we know nothing.

[1] p. 317 [Book I, part I., sec. III.]

So the ‘Positivist’ juggles with ‘phenomena’.

202. Thus the way is prepared for the juggle which the modern popular logic performs with the word ‘phenomenon’--a term which gains acceptance for the theory that turns upon it because it conveys the notion of a relation between a real order and a perceiving mind, and thus gives to those who avail themselves of it the benefit of an implication of the ‘noumena’ which they affect to ignore. Hume’s inconsistency, however, stops far short of that of his later disciples. For the purpose of detraction from the work of thought he availed himself, indeed, of that work as embodied in language, but only so far as was necessary to his destructive purpose. He did not seriously affect to be reconstructing the fabric of knowledge on a basis of fact. There occasionally appears in him, indeed, something of the charlatanry of common sense in passages, more worthy of Bolingbroke than himself, where he writes as a champion of facts against metaphysical jargon. But when we get behind the mask of concession to popular prejudice, partly ironical, partly due to his undoubted vanity, we find much more of the ancient sceptic than of the ‘positive philosopher.’

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

203. The ancient sceptic (at least as represented by the ancient philosophers), finding knowledge on the basis of distinction between the real and apparent to be impossible, discarded the enterprise of arriving at general truth in opposition to what appears to the individual at any particular instant, and satisfied himself with noting such general tendencies of expectation and desire as would guide men in the conduct of life and enable them to get what they wanted by contrivance and persuasion. [1] Such a state of mind excludes all motive to the ‘interrogation of nature,’ for it recognises no ‘nature’ but the present appearance to the individual; and this does not admit of being interrogated. The ‘positive philosopher’ has nothing in common with it but the use, in a different sense, of the word ‘apparent.’ He plumes himself, indeed, on not going in quest of any ‘thing-in-itself’ other than what appears to the senses; but he distinguishes between a real and apparent in the order of appearance, and considers the real order of appearance, having a permanence and uniformity which belong to no feeling as the individual feels it, to be the true object of knowledge. No one is more severe upon ‘propensities to believe,’ however spontaneously suggested by the ordinary sequence of appearances, if they are found to conflict with the order of nature as ascertained by experimental interrogation; _i.e._ with a sequence observed (it may be) in but a single instance. Which of the two attitudes of thought is the more nearly Hume’s, will come out as we proceed. It was just with the distinction between the ‘real and fantastic,’ as Locke had left it, that he had to deal; and, as will appear, it is finally by a ‘propensity to feign,’ not by a uniform order of natural phenomena, that he replaces the real which Locke, according to his first mind, had found in archetypal things and their operations on us.

[1] Cf. Plato’s ‘Protagoras,’ 323, and ‘Theaetetus,’ 167, with the concluding paragraphs of the last part of the first book of Hume’s ‘Treatise on Human Nature.’

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

204. We have seen that Berkeley, having reduced ‘simple ideas’ to their simplicity by showing the illegitimacy of the assumption that they report qualities of a matter which is itself a complex idea, is only able to make his constructive theory march by the supposition of the reality and knowability of ‘spirit’ and relations. ‘Ideas’ are ‘fleeting, perishable passions;’ but the relations between them are uniform, and in virtue of this uniformity the fleeting idea may be interpreted as a symbol of a real order. But such relations, as real, imply the presence of the ideas to the constant mind of God, and, as knowable, their presence to a like mind in us. We have further seen how little Berkeley, according to the method by which he disposed of ‘abstract general ideas,’ was entitled to such a supposition. Hume sets it aside; but the question is, whether without a supposition virtually the same he can represent the association of ideas as doing the work that he assigned to it.

... in regard to ‘spirit’,

205. His exclusion of Berkeley’s supposition with regard to ‘spirit’ is stated without disguise, though unfortunately not till towards the end of the first book of the ‘Treatise on Human Nature,’ which could not have run so smoothly if the statement had been made at the beginning. It follows legitimately from the method, which he inherited, of ‘looking into his mind to see how it wrought.’ ‘From what impression,’ he asks, ‘could the idea of self be derived? It must be some one impression that gives rise to every real idea. But self or person is not any impression, but that to which our several impressions and ideas are supposed to have a reference. If any impression gives rise to the idea of self, that impression must continue invariably the same through the whole course of our lives, since self is supposed to exist after that manner. But there is no impression constant and invariable. Pain and pleasure, grief and joy, passions and sensations succeed each other, and never all exist at the same time. It cannot, therefore, be from any of these impressions, or from any other, that the idea of self is derived; and, consequently, there is no such idea.’ Again: ‘When I enter most intimately into what is called myself, I always stumble on some particular perception of heat or cold, light or shade, love or hatred, pain or pleasure. I never can catch myself at any time without a perception, and never can observe anything but the perception. When my perceptions are removed for any time, as by sound sleep, so long am I insensible of myself, and may truly be said not to exist.’ Thus ‘men are nothing but a bundle or collection of different perceptions that succeed each other with inconceivable rapidity, and are in a perpetual flux or movement. Our eyes cannot turn in their sockets without varying our perceptions. Our thought is still more variable than our sight. ... nor is there any single power of the soul which remains unalterably the same perhaps for one moment.... There is properly no simplicity in the mind at one time nor identity at different’. [1]

[1] pp. 533 and 534 [Book I., part IV., sec. VI.]

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

206. His position in regard to ideas of relation cannot be so summarily exhibited. It is from its ambiguity, indeed, that his system derives at once its plausibility and its weakness. In the first place, it is necessary, according to him, to distinguish between ‘natural’ and ‘philosophical relation.’ The latter is one of which the idea is acquired by the comparison of objects, as distinct from natural relation or ‘the quality by which two ideas are connected together in the imagination, and the one naturally’ (_i.e._ according to the principle of association) ‘introduces the other’. [1] Of philosophical relation--or, according to another form of expression, of ‘qualities by which the ideas of philosophical relation are produced’--seven kinds are enumerated; viz. ‘resemblance, identity, relations of time and place, proportion in quantity and number, degrees in quality, contrariety, and causation’. [2] Some of these do, some do not, _apparently_ correspond to the qualities by which the mind is _naturally_ ‘conveyed from one idea to another;’ or which, in other words, constitute the ‘gentle force’ that determines the order in which the imagination habitually puts together ideas. Freedom in the conjunction of ideas, indeed, is implied in the term ‘imagination,’ which is only thus differenced from ‘memory;’ but, as a matter of fact, it commonly only connects ideas which are related to each other in the way either of resemblance, or of contiguity in time and place, or of cause and effect. Other relations of the philosophical sort are the opposite of _natural_. Thus, ‘distance will be allowed by philosophers to be a true relation, because we acquire an idea of it by the comparing of objects; but in a common way we say, “that nothing can be more distant than such or such things from each other; nothing can have less relation”’ (ibid.).

[1] p. 322 [Book I, part I., sec. V.]

[2] ibid., and p. 372 [Book I., part III., sec. I.]

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

207. Hume’s classification of philosophical relations evidently serves the same purpose as Locke’s, of the ‘four sorts of agreement or disagreement between ideas,’ in the perception of which knowledge consists; [1] but there are some important discrepancies. Locke’s second sort, which he awkwardly describes as ‘agreement or disagreement in the way of relation,’ may fairly be taken to cover three of Hume’s kinds; viz. relations of time and place, proportion in quantity or number, and degrees in any quality. About Locke’s first sort, ‘identity and diversity,’ there is more difficulty. Under ‘identity,’ as was pointed out above, he includes the relations which Hume distinguishes as ‘identity proper’ and ‘resemblance.’ ‘Diversity’ at first sight might seem to correspond to ‘contrariety;’ but the latter, according to Hume’s usage, is much more restricted in meaning. Difference of number and difference of kind, which he distinguishes as the opposites severally of identity and resemblance, though they come under Locke’s ‘diversity,’ are not by Hume considered relations at all, on the principle that ‘no relation of any kind can subsist without some degree of resemblance.’ They are ‘rather a negation of relation than anything real and positive.’ ‘Contrariety’ he reckons only to obtain between ideas of existence and non-existence, ‘which are plainly resembling as implying both of them an idea of the object; though the latter excludes the object from all times and places in which it is supposed not to exist’. [2] There remain ‘cause and effect’ in Hume’s list; ‘co-existence’ and ‘real existence’ in Locke’s. ‘Co-existence’ is not expressly identified by Locke with the relation of cause and effect, but it is with ‘necessary connection.’ It means specially, it will be remembered [3], the co-existence of ideas, not as constituents of a ‘nominal essence,’ but as qualities of real substances in nature; and our knowledge of this depends on our knowledge of necessary connection between the qualities, either as one supposing the other (which is the form of necessary connection between primary qualities), or as one being the effect of the other (which is the form of necessary connection between the ideas of secondary qualities and the primary ones). Having no knowledge of necessary connection as in real substances, we have none of ‘co-existence’ in the above sense, but only of the present union of ideas in any particular experiment. [4] The parallel between this doctrine of Locke’s and Hume’s of cause and effect will appear as we proceed. To ‘real existence,’ since the knowledge of it according to Locke’s account is not a perception of agreement between ideas at all, it is not strange that nothing should correspond in Hume’s list of relations.

[1] See above, paragraph 25 and the passages from Locke there referred to.

[2] p. 323 [Book I, part I., sec. V.]

[3] See above, paragraph 122.

[4] Locke, Book IV. sec. iii. chap. xiv.; and above, paragraph 121 and 122.

Could Hume consistently admit idea of relation at all?

208. It is his method of dealing with these ideas of philosophical relation that is specially characteristic of Hume, Let us, then, consider how the notion of relation altogether is affected by his reduction of the world of consciousness to impressions and ideas. What is an impression? To this, as we have seen, the only direct answer given by him is that it is a feeling which must be more lively before it becomes less so. [1] For a further account of what is to be understood by it we must look to the passages where the governing terms of ‘school-metaphysics’ are, one after the other, shown to be unmeaning, because not taken from impressions. Thus, when the idea of substance is to be reduced to an ‘unintelligible chimaera,’ it is asked whether it ‘be derived from the impressions of sensation or reflection? If it be conveyed to us by our senses, I ask, which of them, and after what manner? If it be perceived by the eyes, it must be a colour; if by the ears, a sound; if by the palate, a taste; and so of the other senses. But I believe none will assert that substance is either a colour, or a sound, or a taste. The idea of substance must therefore be derived from an impression of reflection, if it really exist. But the impressions of reflection resolve themselves into our passions and emotions’. [2] From the polemic against abstract ideas we learn further that ‘the appearance of an object to the senses’ is the same thing as an ‘impression becoming present to the mind’. [3] That is to say, when we talk of an impression of an object, it is not to be understood that the feeling is determined by reference to anything other than itself: it is itself the object. To the same purpose, in the criticism of the notion of an external world, we are told that ‘the senses are incapable of giving rise to the notion of the continued existence of their objects, after they no longer appear to the senses; for that is a contradiction in terms’ (since the appearance _is_ the object); and that ‘they offer not their impressions as the images of something distinct, or independent, or external, because they convey to us nothing but a single perception, and never give us the least intimation of anything beyond’. [4] The distinction between impression of sensation and impression of reflection, then, cannot, any more than that between impression and idea, be regarded as either really or apparently a distinction between outer and inner. ‘All impressions are internal and perishing existences’; [5] and, ‘everything that enters the mind being in reality as the impression, ’tis impossible anything should to feeling appear different’. [6]

[1] See above, paragraphs 195 and 197.

[2] p. 324 [Book I, part I., sec. VI.]

[3] p. 327 [Book I, part I., sec. VII.]

[4] p. 479 [Book I, part IV., sec. II.]

[5] p. 483 [Book I, part IV., sec. II.]

[6] p. 480 [Book I, part IV., sec. II.]

209. This amounts to a full acceptance of Berkeley’s doctrine of sense; and the question necessarily arises--such being the impression, and all ideas being impressions grown weaker, can there be an idea of relation at all? Is it not open to the same challenge which Hume offers to those who talk of an idea of substance or of spirit? ‘It is from some one impression that every real idea is derived.’ What, then, is the one impression from which the idea of relation is derived? ‘If it be perceived by the eyes, it must be a colour; if by the ears, a sound; if by the palate, a taste; and so of the other senses.’ There remain ‘our passions and emotions;’ but what passion or emotion is a resemblance, or a proportion, or a relation of cause and effect?

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.

210. Respect for Hume’s thoroughness as a philosopher must be qualified by the observation that he does not attempt to meet this difficulty in its generality, but only as it affects the relations of identity and causation. The truth seems to be that he wrote with Berkeley steadily before his mind; and it was Berkeley’s treatment of these two relations in particular as not sensible but intelligible, and his assertion of a philosophic Theism on the strength of their mere intelligibility, that determined Hume, since it would have been an anachronism any longer to treat them as sensible, to dispose of them altogether. The condition of his doing so with success was that, however unwarrantably, he should treat the other relations as sensible. The language, which seems to express ideas of the two questionable relations, he has to account for as the result of certain impressions of reflection, called ‘propensities to feign,’ which in their turn have to be accounted for as resulting from the _natural_ relations of ideas according to the definition of these quoted above, [1] as ‘the qualities by which one idea habitually introduces another.’ Among these, as we saw, he included not only resemblance and contiguity in time or place, but ‘cause and effect.’ ‘There is no relation,’ he says, ‘which produces a stronger connection in the fancy than this.’ But in this, as in much of the language which gives the first two Parts their plausibility, he is taking advantage of received notions on the part of the reader, which it is the work of the rest of the book to set aside. In any sense, according to him, in which it differs from usual contiguity, the relation of cause and effect is itself reducible to a ‘propensity to feign’ arising from the other natural relations; but when the reader is told of its producing ‘a strong connection in the fancy,’ he is not apt to think of it as itself nothing more than the product of such a connection. For the present, however, we have only to point out that Hume, when he co-ordinates it with the other natural relations, must be understood to do so provisionally. According to him it is derived, while they are primary. Upon them, then, rested the possibility of filling the gap between the occurrence of single impressions, none ‘determined by reference to anything other than itself,’ and what we are pleased to call our knowledge, with its fictions of mind and thing, of real and apparent, of necessary as distinct from usual connection.

[1] See above, paragraph 206.

211. We will begin with Resemblance. As to this, it will be said, it is an affectation of subtlety to question whether there can be an impression of it or no. The difficulty only arises from our regarding the perception of resemblance as different from, and subsequent to, the resembling sensations; whereas, in fact, the occurrence of two impressions of sense, such as (let us say) yellow and red, is itself the impression of their likeness and unlikeness. Hume himself, it may be further urged, at any rate in regard to resemblance, anticipates this solution of an imaginary difficulty by his important division of philosophical relations into two classes [1]--‘such as depend entirely on the ideas which we compare together, and such as may be changed without any change in the ideas’--and by his inclusion of resemblance in the former class.

[1] p. 372 [Book I, part III., sec. I.]

Is resemblance then an impression?

212. Now we gladly admit the mistake of supposing that sensations undetermined by relation first occur, and that afterwards we become conscious of their relation in the way of likeness or unlikeness. Apart from such relation, it is true, the sensations would be nothing. But this admission involves an important qualification of the doctrine that impressions are single, and that the mind (according to Hume’s awkward figure) is a ‘bundle or collection of these,’ succeeding each other ‘in a perpetual flux or movement.’ It implies that the single impression in its singleness is what it is through relation to another, which must therefore be present along with it; and that thus, though they may occur in a perpetual flux of succession--every turn of the eyes in their sockets, as Hume truly says, giving a new one--yet, just so far as they are qualified by likeness or unlikeness to each other, they must be taken out of that succession by something which is not itself in it, but is indivisibly present to every moment of it. This we may call soul, or mind, or what we will; but we must not identify it with the brain [1] either directly or by implication (as we do when we ‘refer to the anatomist’ for an account of it), since by the brain is meant something material, _i.e._ divisible, which the unifying subject spoken of, as feeling no less than as thinking, cannot be. In short, any such modification of Hume’s doctrine of the singleness and successiveness of impressions as will entitle us to speak of their carrying with them, though single and successive, the consciousness of their resemblance to each other, will also entitle us to speak of their carrying with them a reference to that which is not itself any single impression, but is permanent throughout the impressions; and the whole ground of Hume’s polemic against the idea of self or spirit is removed. [2]

[1] It is, of course, quite a different thing to say that the brain (or, more properly, the whole body) is organic to it.

[2] See above, paragraph 205.

Distinction between resembling feelings and idea of resemblance.

213. The above admission, however, does not dispose of the question about ideas of resemblance. A feeling qualified by relation of resemblance to other feelings is a different thing from an idea of that relation--different with all the difference which Hume ignores between feeling and thought, between consciousness and self-consciousness. The qualification of successive feelings by mutual relation implies, indeed, the presence to them of a subject permanent and immaterial (_i.e._ not in time or space); but it does not imply that this subject presents them to itself as related objects, permanent with its own permanence, which abide and may be considered apart from ‘the circumstances in time’ of their occurrence. Yet such presentation is supposed by all language other than interjectional. It is it alone which can give us names of things, as distinct from noises prompted by the feelings as they occur. Of course it is open to any one to say that by an idea of resemblance he does not mean any thought involving the self-conscious presentation spoken of, but merely a feeling qualified by resemblance, and not at its liveliest stage. Thus Hume tells us that by ‘idea’ he merely means a feeling less lively than it has been, and that by idea _of anything_ he implies no reference to anything other than the idea, [1] but means just a related idea, _i.e._ a feeling qualified by ‘natural relation’ to other feelings. It is by this thoughtful abnegation of thought, as we shall find, that he arrives at his sceptical result. But language (for the reason mentioned) would not allow him to be faithful to the abnegation. He could not make such a profession without being false to it. This appears already in his account of ‘complex’ and ‘abstract’ ideas.

[1] See above, paragraph 208.

Substances = collections of ideas.

214, His account of the idea of a substance [1] is simply Locke’s, as Locke’s would become upon elimination of the notion that there is a real ‘something’ in which the collection of ideas subsist, and from which they result. It thus avoids all difficulties about the relation between nominal and real essence. Just as Locke says that in the case of a ‘mixed mode’ the nominal essence _is_ the real, so Hume would say of a substance. The only difference is that while the collection of ideas, called a mixed mode, does not admit of addition without a change of its name, that called a substance does. Upon discovery of the solubility of gold in aqua regia we add that idea to the collection, to which the name ‘gold’ has previously been assigned, without disturbance in the use of the name, because the name already covers not only the ideas of certain qualities, but also the idea of a ‘principle of union’ between them, which will extend to any ideas presented along with them. As this principle of union, however, is not itself any ‘real essence,’ but ‘part of the complex idea,’ the question, so troublesome to Locke, whether a proposition about gold asserts real co-existence or only the inclusion of an idea in a nominal essence, will be superfluous. How the ‘principle of union’ is to be explained, will appear below. [2]

[1] p. 324 [Book I, part I., sec. VI.]

[2] Paragraph 303, and the following.

How can ideas ‘in flux’ be collected?

215. There are names, then, which represent ‘collections of ideas.’ How can we explain such collection if ideas are merely related feelings grown’ fainter? Do we, when we use one of these names significantly, recall, though in a fainter form, a series of feelings that we have experienced in the process of collection? Does the chemist, when he says that gold is soluble in aqua regia, recall the visual and tactual feeling which he experienced when he found it soluble? If so, as that feeling took its character from relation to a multitude of other ‘complex ideas,’ he must on the same principle recall in endless series the sensible occurrences from which each constituent of each constituent of these was derived; and a like process must be gone through when gold is pronounced ductile, malleable, &c. But this would be, according to the figure which Hume himself adopts, to recall a ‘perpetual flux.’ The very term ‘collection of ideas,’ indeed, if this be the meaning of ideas, is an absurdity, for how can a perpetual flux be collected? If we turn for a solution of the difficulty to the chapter where Hume expressly discusses the significance of general names, we shall find that it is not the question we have here put, and which flows directly from his account of ideas, that he is there treating, but an entirely different one, and one that could not be raised till for related feeling had been substituted the thought of an object under relations.

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

216. The chapter mentioned concerns the question which arises out of Locke’s pregnant statement that words and ideas are ‘particular in their existence’ even when ‘general in their signification.’ From this statement we saw [1] that Berkeley derived his explanation of the apparent generality of ideas--the explanation, namely, which reduces it to a relation, yet not such a one as would affect the nature of the idea itself, which is and remains ‘particular,’ but a symbolical relation between it and other particular ideas for which it is taken to stand. An idea, however, that carries with it a consciousness of symbolical relation to other ideas, cannot but be qualified by this relation. The generality must become part of its ‘nature,’ and, accordingly, the distinction between idea and thing being obliterated, of the nature of things. Thus Berkeley virtually arrives at a result which renders unmeaning his preliminary exclusion of universality from ‘the absolute, positive nature or conception of anything.’ Hume seeks to avoid it by putting ‘custom’ in the place of the consciousness of symbolical relation. True to his vocation of explaining away all functions of thought that will not sort with the treatment of it as ‘decaying sense,’ he would resolve that idea of a relation between certain ideas, in virtue of which one is taken to stand for the rest, into the _de facto_ sequence upon one of them of the rest. Here, as everywhere else, he would make related feelings do instead of relations of ideas; but whether the related feelings, as he is obliged to describe them, do not already presuppose relations of ideas in distinction from feelings, remains to be seen.

[1] Above, paragraphs 182 and 183.

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

217. The question about ‘generality of signification,’ as he puts it, comes to this. In every proposition, though its subject be a common noun, we necessarily present to ourselves some one individual object ‘with all its particular circumstances and proportions.’ How then can the proposition be general in denotation and connotation? How can it be made with reference to a multitude of individual objects other than that presented to the mind, and how can it concern only such of the qualities of the latter as are common to the multitude? The first part of the question is answered as follows:-‘When we have found a resemblance among several objects that often occur to us, we apply the same name to all of them ... whatever differences may appear among them. After we have acquired a custom of this kind, the hearing of that name revives the idea of one of these objects, and makes the imagination conceive it with all its particular circumstances and proportions. But as the same word is supposed to have been frequently applied to other individuals, that are different in many respects from that idea which is immediately present to the mind, the word not being able to revive the idea of all these individuals, only touches the soul and revives that custom which we have acquired by surveying them. They are not really and in fact present to the mind, but only in power. ... The word raises up an individual idea along with a certain custom, and that custom produces any other individual one for which we may have occasion. ... Thus, should we mention the word triangle and form the idea of a particular equilateral one to correspond to it, and should we afterwards assert _that the three angles of a triangle are equal to each other_, the other individuals of a scalenum and isosceles, which we overlooked at first, immediately crowd in upon us and make us perceive the falsehood of this proposition, though it be true with relation to that idea which we had formed’. [1]

[1] p. 328 [Book I, part I., sec. VII.]

218. Next, as to the question concerning connotation:--‘The mind would never have dreamed of distinguishing a figure from the body figured, as being in reality neither distinguishable nor different nor separable, did it not observe that even in this simplicity there might be contained many different resemblances and relations. Thus, when a globe of white marble is presented, we receive only the impression of a white colour disposed in a certain form, nor are we able to distinguish and separate the colour from the form. But observing afterwards a globe of black marble and a cube of white, and comparing them with our former object, we find two separate resemblances in what formerly seemed, and really is, perfectly inseparable. After a little more practice of this kind, we begin to distinguish the figure from the colour by a _distinction of reason_;--_i.e._ we consider the figure and colour together, since they are, in effect, the same and indistinguishable; but still view them in different aspects according to the resemblances of which they are susceptible. ... A person who desires us to consider the figure of a globe of white marble without thinking on its colour, desires an impossibility; but his meaning is, that we should consider the colour and figure together, but still keep in our eye the resemblance to the globe of black marble or that to any other globe whatever’. [1]

[1] p. 333 [Book I, part I., sec. VII.]

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

219. It is clear that the process described in these passages supposes ‘ab initio’ the conversion of a feeling into a conception; in other words, the substitution of the definite individuality of a thing, thought of under attributes, for the mere singleness in time of a feeling that occurs after another and before a third. The ‘finding of resemblances and differences among objects that often occur to us’ implies that each object is distinguished as one and abiding from manifold occurrences, in the way of related feelings, in which it is presented to us, and that these accordingly are regarded as representing permanent relations or qualities of the object. Thus from being related feelings, whether more or less ‘vivacious,’ they have become, in the proper sense, ideas of relation. The difficulty about the use of general names, as Hume puts it, really arises just from the extent to which this process of determination by ideas of relation, and with it the removal of the object of thought from simple feeling, is supposed to have gone. It is because the idea is so complex in its individuality, and because this qualification is not understood to be the work of thought, by comparison and contrast accumulating attributes on an object which it itself constitutes, but is regarded as given ready-made in an impression (_i.e._ a feeling), that the question arises whether a general proposition is really possible or no. To all intents and purposes Hume decides that it is not. The mind is so tied down to the particular collection of qualities which is given to it or which it ‘finds,’ that it cannot present one of them to itself without presenting all. Having never found a triangle that is not equilateral or isosceles or scalene, we cannot imagine one, for ideas can only be copies of impressions, and the imagination, though it has a certain freedom in combining what it finds, can invent nothing that it does not find. Thus the idea, represented by a general name and of which an assertion, general in form, is made, must always have a multitude of other qualities besides those common to it with the other individuals to which the name is applicable. If any of these, however, were included in the predicate of the proposition, the sleeping custom, which determines the mind to pass from the idea present to it to the others to which the name has been applied, would be awakened, and it would be seen at once that the predicate is not true of them. When I make a general statement about ‘the horse,’ there must be present to my mind some particular horse of my acquaintance, but if on the strength of this I asserted that ‘the horse is a grey-haired animal,’ the custom of applying the name without reference to colour would return upon me and correct me--as it would not if the predicate were ‘four-footed.’

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

220. It would seem then that the predicate may, though the subject cannot, represent either a single quality, or a set of qualities which falls far short even of those common to the class, much more of those which characterise any individual. If I can think these apart, or have an idea of them, as the predicate of a proposition, why not (it may be asked) as the subject? It may be said, indeed, with truth, that it is a mistake to think of the subject as representing one idea and the predicate another; that the proposition as a whole represents one idea, in the sense of a conception of relation between attributes, and that at bottom this account of it is consistent with Locke’s definition of knowledge as a perception of relation between ‘ideas,’ since with him ‘ideas’ and ‘qualities’ are used interchangeably. [1] It is no less true, however, that the relation between attributes, which the proposition states, is a relation between them in an individual subject. It is the nature of the individuality of this subject, then, that is really in question. Must it, as Hume supposed, be ‘considered’ under other qualities than those to which the predicate relates? When the proposition only concerns the relation between certain qualities of a spherical figure, must the figure still be considered as of a certain colour and material?

[1] See above, paragraph 17.

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

221. The possibility of such a question being raised implies that the step has been already taken, which Hume ignored, from feeling to thought. His doctrine on the matter arises from that mental equivocation, of which the effects on Locke have been already noticed, [1] between the mere singleness of a feeling in time and the individuality of the object of thought as a complex of relations. If the impression is the single feeling which disappears with a turn of the head, and the idea a weaker impression, every idea must indeed be in one sense ‘individual,’ but in a sense that renders all predication impossible because it empties the idea of all content. Really, according to Hume’s doctrine of general names, it is individual in a sense which is the most remote opposite of this, as a multitude of ‘different resemblances and relations’ in ‘simplicity.’ It is just such an individual as Locke supposed to be found (so to speak) ready-made in nature, and from which he supposed the mind successively to abstract ideas less and less determinate. Such an object Hume, coming after Berkeley, could not regard in Locke’s fashion as a separate material existence outside consciousness. The idea with him is a ‘copy’ not of a thing but of an ‘impression,’ but to the impression he transfers all that individualization by qualities which Locke had ascribed to the substance found in nature; and from the impression again transfers it to the idea which ‘is but the weaker impression.’ Thus the singleness in time of the impression becomes the ‘simplicity’ of an object ‘containing many different resemblances and relations,’ and the individuality of the subject of a proposition, instead of being regarded in its true light as a temporary isolation from other relations of those for the time under view--an individuality which is perpetually shifting its limits as thought proceeds--becomes an individuality fixed once for all by what is given in the impression. Because, as is supposed, I can only ‘see’ a globe as of a certain colour and material, I can only think of it as such. If the ‘sight’ of it had been rightly interpreted as itself a complex work of thought, successively detaching felt things from the ‘flux’ of feelings and determining these by relations similarly detached, the difficulty of thinking certain of these--_e.g._ those designated as ‘figure’--apart from the rest would have disappeared. It would have been seen that this was merely to separate in reflective analysis what had been gradually put together in the successive synthesis of perception. But such an interpretation of the supposed _datum_ of sense would have been to elevate thought from the position which Hume assigned to it, as a ‘decaying sense,’ to that of being itself the organizer of the world which it knows. [2]

[1] See above, paragraphs 47, 95, &c.

[2] The phrase ‘decaying sense’ belongs to Hobbes, but its meaning is adopted by Hume.

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

222. Here, then, as elsewhere, the embarrassment of Hume’s doctrine is nothing which a better statement of it could avoid. Nay, so dexterous is his statement, that only upon a close scrutiny does the embarrassment disclose itself. To be faithful at once to his reduction of the impression to simple feeling, and to his account of the idea as a mere copy of the impression, was really impossible. If he had kept his word in regard to the impression, he must have found thought filling the void left by the disappearance, under Berkeley’s criticism, of that outward system of things which Locke had commonly taken for granted. He preferred fidelity to his account of the idea, and thus virtually restores the fiction which represents the real world as consisting of so many, materially separate, bundles of qualities--a fiction which even Locke in his better moments was beginning to outgrow--with only the difference that for the separation of ‘substances’ in space he substitutes a separation of ‘impressions’ in time. That thought (the ‘idea’) can but faintly copy feeling (the ‘impression’) he consistently maintains, but he avails himself of the actual determination of feeling by reference to an object of thought--the determination expressed by such phrases as impression of a man, impression of a globe, &c.--to charge the feeling with a content which it only derives from such determination, while yet he denies it. By this means predication can be accounted for, as it could not be if our consciousness consisted of mere feelings and their copies, but only in the form of the singular proposition; because the object of thought determined by relations, being identified with a single feeling, must be limited by the ‘this’ or ‘that’ which expresses this singleness of feeling. It is really _this_ or _that_ globe, _this_ or _that_ man, that is the subject of the proposition, according to Hume, even when in form it is general. It is true that the general name ‘globe’ or ‘man’ not merely represents a ‘particular’ globe or man, though that is all that is presented to the mind, but also ‘raises up a custom which produces any other individual idea for which we may have occasion.’ As this custom, however, is neither itself an idea nor affects the singleness of the subject idea, it does not constitute any distinction between singular and general propositions, but only between two sorts of the singular proposition according as it does, or does not, suggest an indefinite series of other singular propositions, in which the same qualities are affirmed of different individual ideas to which the subject-name has been applied.

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

223. A customary sequence, then, of individual ideas upon each other is the reality, which through the delusion of words (as we must suppose) has given rise to the fiction of there being such a thing as general knowledge. We say ‘fiction,’ for with the possibility of general propositions, as the Greek philosophers once for all pointed out, stands or falls the possibility of science. Locke was so far aware of this that, upon the same principle which led him to deny the possibility of general propositions concerning real existence, he ‘suspected’ a science of nature to be impossible, and only found an exemption for moral and mathematical truth from this condemnation in its ‘bare ideality.’ Hume does away with the exemption. He applies to all propositions alike the same limitation which Locke applies to those concerning real existence. With Locke there may very well be a proposition which to the mind, as well as in form, is general--one of which the subject is an ‘abstract general idea’--but such proposition ‘concerns not existence.’ As knowledge of real existence is limited to the ‘actual present sensation,’ so a proposition about such existence is limited to what is given in such sensation. It is a real truth that this piece of gold is now being dissolved in aqua regia, when the ‘particular experiment’ is going on under our eyes, but the general proposition ‘gold is soluble’ is only an analysis of a nominal essence. With Hume the distinction between propositions that do, and those that do not, ‘concern existence’ disappears. Every proposition is on the same footing in this respect, since it must needs be a statement about an ‘idea,’ and every idea exists. ‘Every object that is presented must necessarily be existent. ... Whatever we conceive, we conceive to be existent. Any idea we please to form is the idea of a being; and the idea of a being is any idea we please to form’. [1] But since, according to him, the idea cannot be separated, as Locke supposed it could, from the conditions ‘that determine it to this or that particular existence,’ propositions of the sort which Locke understood by ‘general propositions concerning substances,’ though if they were possible they would ‘concern existence’ as much as any, are simply impossible. Hume, in short, though he identifies the real and nominal essences which Locke had distinguished, yet limits the nominal essence by the same ‘particularity in space and time’ by which Locke had limited the real.

[1] p. 370 [Book I, part II., sec. VI.]

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

224. A great advance in simplification has been made when the false sort of ‘conceptualism’ has thus been got rid of--that conceptualism which opposes knowing and being under the notion that things, though merely individual in reality, may be known as general. This riddance having been achieved, as it was by Hume, the import of the proposition becomes the central question of philosophy, the answer to which must determine our theory of real existence just as much as of the mind. The issue may be taken on the proposition in its singular no less than in its general form. The weakness of Hume’s opponents, indeed, has lain primarily in their allowing that his doctrine would account for any significant predication whatever, as distinct from exclamations prompted by feelings as they occur. This has been the inch, which once yielded, the full ell of his nominalism has been easily won; just as Locke’s empiricism becomes invincible as soon as it is admitted that qualified things are ‘found in nature’ without any constitutive action of the mind. As the only effective way of dealing with Locke is to ask,--After abstraction of all that he himself admitted to be the creation of thought, what remains to be merely found?--so Hume must be met _in limine_ by the question whether, apart from such ideas of relation as according to his own showing are not simple impressions, so much as the singular proposition is possible. If not, then the singularity of such proposition does not consist in any singleness of presentation to sense; it is not the ‘particularity in time’ of a present feeling; and the exclusion of generality, whether in thoughts or in things, as following from the supposed necessity of such singleness or particularity, is quite groundless.

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

225. Hitherto the idea of relation which we have had specially in view has been that of relation in the way of resemblance, and the propositions have been such as represent the most obvious ‘facts of observation’--facts about this or that ‘body,’ man or horse or ball. We have seen that these already suppose the thought of an object qualified, not transitory as are feelings, but one to which feelings are referred on their occurrence as resemblances or differences between it and other objects; but that by an equivocation, which unexamined phraseology covers, between the thought of such an object and feeling proper--as if because we talk of seeing a man, therefore a man were a feeling of colour--Hume is able to represent them as mere data of sense, and thus to ignore the difference between related feelings and ideas of relation. Thus the first step has been taken towards transferring to the sensitive subject, as merely sensitive, the power of thought and significant speech. The next is to transfer to it ideas of those other relations [1] which Hume classifies as ‘relations of time and place, proportion in quantity or number, degrees in any quality’. [2] This done, it is sufficiently equipped for achieving its deliverance from metaphysics. An animal, capable of experiments concerning matter of fact, and of reasoning concerning quantity and number, would certainly have some excuse for throwing into the fire all books which sought to make it ashamed of its animality. [3]

[1] The course which our examination of Hume should take was marked out, it will be remembered, by his enumeration of the ‘_natural_’ relations that regulate the association of ideas. It might seem a departure from this course to proceed, as in the text, from the relation of resemblance to ‘relations of time and place, proportion in quantity or number, and degrees of any quality,’ since these appear in Hume’s enumeration, not of ‘_natural_’ but of ‘_philosophical_’ relations. Such departure, however, is the consequence of Hume’s own procedure. Whether he considered these relations merely equivalent to the ‘natural ones’ of resemblance and contiguity, he does not expressly say; but his reduction of the principles of mathematics to data of sense implies that he did so. The treatment of degrees in quality and proportions in quantity as sensible implies that the difference between resemblance and measured resemblance, between contiguity and measured contiguity, is ignored.

[2] p. 368 [Book I, part II., sec. V.]

[3] If we take in our hand any volume of divinity or school-metaphysics, for instance, let us ask, _Does it contain any abstract reasoning for quantity or number?_ No. _Does it contain any experimental reasoning concerning matter of fact and existence?_ No. _Commit it then to the flames, for it can contain nothing but sophistry and illusion.’_--‘Inquiry concerning the Human Understanding,’ at the end.

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

226. In thus leaving mathematics and a limited sort of experimental physics (limited by the exclusion of all general inference from the experiment) out of the reach of his scepticism, and in making them his basis of attack upon what he conceived to be the more pretentious claims of knowledge, Hume was again following the course marked out for him by Locke. It will be remembered that Locke, even when his ‘suspicion’ of knowledge is at its strongest, still finds solid ground _(a)_ in ‘particular experiments’ upon nature, expressed in singular propositions as opposed to assertions of universal or necessary connexion, and _(b)_ in mathematical truths which are at once general, certain, and instructive, because ‘barely ideal.’ All speculative propositions that do not fall under one or other of these heads are either ‘trifling’ or merely ‘probable.’ Hume draws the line between certainty and probability at the same point, nor in regard to the ground of certainty as to ‘matter of fact or existence’ is there any essential difference between him and his master. As this ground is the ‘actual present sensation’ with the one, so it is the ‘impression’ with the other; and it is only when the proposition becomes universal or asserts a necessary connection, that the certainty, thus given, is by either supposed to fail. It is true that with Locke this authority of the sensation is a derived authority, depending on its reference to a ‘body now operating upon us,’ while with Hume, so far as he is faithful to his profession of discarding such reference, it is original. But with each alike the fundamental notion is that a feeling must be ‘true _while it lasts_,’ and that in regard to real existence or matter of fact no other truth can be known but this. Neither perceives that a truth thus restricted is no truth at all--nothing that can be stated even in a singular proposition; that the ‘particularity in time,’ on which is supposed to depend the real certainty of the simple feeling, is just that which deprives it of significance [1]--because neither is really faithful to the restriction. Each allows himself to substitute for the momentary feeling an object qualified by relations, which are the exact opposite of momentary feelings. ‘If I myself see a man walk on the ice,’ says Locke (IV, xv. 5), ‘it is past probability, it is knowledge:’ nor would Hume, though ready enough on occasion to point out that what is seen must be a colour, have any scruple in assuming that such a complex judgment as the above so-called ‘sight’ has the certainty of a simple impression. It is only in bringing to bear upon the characteristic admission of Locke’s Fourth Book, that no general knowledge of nature can be more than probable, a more definite notion of what probability is, and in exhibiting the latent inconsistency of this admission with Locke’s own doctrine of ideas as effects of a causative substance, that he modifies the theory of _physical_ certainty which he inherited. In their treatment of mathematical truths on the other hand, of propositions involving relations of distance, quantity and degree, a fundamental discrepancy appears between the two writers. The ground of certainty, which Hume admits in regard to propositions of this order, must be examined before we can appreciate his theory of probability as it affects the relations of cause and substance.

[1] See above, paragraphs 45 and 97.

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

227. It has been shown [1] that Locke’s opposition of mathematical to physical certainty, with his ascription to the former of instructive generality on the ground of its bare ideality--the ‘ideal’ in this regard being opposed to what is found in sensation--strikes at the very root of his system. It implies that thought can originate, and that what it originates is in some sort real--nay, as being nothing else than the ‘primary qualities of matter,’ is the source of all other reality. Here was an alien element which ‘empiricism’ could not assimilate without changing its character. Carrying such a conception along with it, it was already charged with an influence which must ultimately work its complete transmutation by compelling, not the admission of an ideal world of guess and aspiration alongside of the empirical, but the recognition of the empirical as itself ideal The time for this transmutation, however, was not yet. Berkeley, in over-hasty zeal for God, had missed that only true way of finding God in the world which lies in the discovery that the world is Thought. Having taken fright at the ‘mathematical Atheism,’ which seemed to grow out of the current doctrines about primary qualities of matter, instead of applying Locke’s own admissions to show that these were intelligible and merely intelligible, he fancied that he had won the battle for Theism by making out that they were merely feelings or sequences of feelings. From him Hume got the text for all he had to say against the metaphysical mathematicians; but, for the reason that Hume applied it with no theological interest, its true import becomes more apparent with him than with Berkeley.

[1] See above, paragraphs 117 and 125.

His criticisms of the doctrine of primary qualities.

228. His account of mathematical truths, as contained in Part II. of the First Book of the ‘Treatise on Human Nature,’ cannot be fairly read except in connection with the chapters in Part IV. on ‘Scepticism with regard to the Senses,’ and on ‘the Modern Philosophy.’ The latter chapter is expressly a polemic against Locke’s doctrine of primary qualities, and its drift is to reverse the relations which Locke had asserted between them and sensations, making the primary qualities depend on sensations, instead of sensations on the primary qualities. In Locke himself we have found that two inconsistent views on the subject perpetually cross each other. [1] According to one, momentary sensation is the sole conveyance to us of reality; according to the other, the real is constituted by qualities of bodies which not only ‘are in them whether we perceive them or not,’ but which only complex ideas of relation can represent. The unconscious device which covered this inconsistency lay, we found, [2] in the conversion of the mere feeling of touch into the touch _of a body_, and thus into an experience of solidity. By this conversion, since solidity according to Locke’s account carries with it all the primary qualities, these too become data of sensation, while yet, by the retention of the opposition between them and ideas, the advantage is gained of apparently avoiding that identification of what is real with simple feeling, which science and common sense alike repel.

[1] See above, paragraph 99 and following.

[2] See above, paragraph 101.

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

229. Hume makes a show of getting rid of this see-saw. Instead of assuming at once the reality of sensation on the strength of its relation to the primary qualities and the reality of these on the strength of their being given in tactual experience, he pronounces sensations alone the real, to which the primary qualities must be reduced, if they are not to disappear altogether. ‘If colours, sounds, tastes, and smells be merely perceptions, nothing we can conceive is possessed of a real, continued, and independent existence’. [1] That they are perceptions is of course undoubted. The question is, whether there is a real something beside and beyond them, contrast with which is implied in speaking of them as ‘_merely_ perceptions.’ The supposed qualities of such a real are ‘motion, extension, and solidity’. [2] To modes of these the other primary qualities enumerated by Locke are reducible; and of these again motion and extension, according to Locke’s account no less than Hume’s own, presuppose solidity. What then do we assert of the real, in contrast with which we talk of perception, as _mere_ perception, when we say that it is solid? ‘In order to form an idea of solidity we must conceive two bodies pressing on each other without any penetration. ... Now, what idea do we form of these bodies? ... To say that we conceive them as solid is to run on _ad infinitum_. To affirm that we paint them out to ourselves as extended, either resolves them all into a false idea or returns in a circle; extension must necessarily be conceived either as coloured, which is a false idea, [3] or as solid, which brings us back to the first question.’ Of solidity, then, the ultimate determination of the supposed real, there is ‘no idea to be formed’ apart from those perceptions to which, as independent of our senses, it is opposed. ‘After exclusion of colours, sounds, heat and cold from the rank of external existences, there remains nothing which can afford us a just and consistent idea of body.’

[1] p. 513 [Book I, part IV., sec. IV.]

[2] Ibid.

[3] ‘A false idea,’ that is, according to the doctrine that extension is a primary quality, while colour is only an idea of a secondary quality, not resembling the quality as it is in the thing.

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

230. Our examination of Locke has shown us how it is that his interpretation of ideas by reference to body is fairly open to this attack. It is so because, in thus interpreting them, he did not know what he was really about. He thought he was explaining ideas of sense according to the only method of explanation which he recognises--the method of resolving complex into simple ideas, and of ‘sending a man to his senses’ for a knowledge of the simple. In fact, however, when he explained ideas of sense as derived from the qualities of body, he was explaining simple ideas by reference to that which, according to his own showing, is a complex idea. To say that, as Locke understood the derivation in question, the primary qualities are an ἄιτιον γενέσεως to the ideas of secondary qualities, but not an ἄιτιον γνώσεως [1]--that without our having ideas of them they cause those ideas of sense from which afterwards our ideas of the primary qualities are formed--is to suppose an order of reality other than the order of our sensitive experience, and thus to contradict Locke’s fundamental doctrine that the genesis of ideas is to be found by observing their succession in ‘our own breasts.’ It is not thus that Locke himself escapes the difficulty. As we have seen, he supposes our ideas of sense to be from the beginning ideas of the qualities of bodies, and virtually justifies the supposition by sending the reader to his sense of touch for that idea of solidity in which, as he defines it, all the primary qualities are involved. That the sense in question does not really yield the idea is what Hume points out when he says that, ‘though bodies are felt by means of their solidity, yet the feeling is quite a different thing from the solidity, nor have they the least resemblance to each other.’ In other words, having come to suppose that there are solid bodies, we explain our feeling as due to their solidity; but we may not at once interpret feeling as the result of solidity, and treat solidity as itself a feeling. It was by allowing himself so to treat it that Locke disguised from himself the objection to his interpretation of feeling. Hume tears off the disguise, and in effect gives him the choice of being convicted either of reasoning in a circle or of explaining the simple idea by reference to the complex. The solidity, which is to explain feeling, can itself only be explained by reference to body. If body is only a complex of ideas of sense, in referring tactual feeling to it we are explaining a simple idea by reference to a compound one. If it is not, how is it to be defined except in the ‘circular’ way, which Locke in fact adopts when he makes body a ‘texture of solid parts’ and solidity a relation of bodies? [2]

[1] [Greek ἄιτιον γενέσεως (aition geneseos) = cause of coming-to-be, ἄιτιον γνώσεως (aition gnoseos) = cause of being known. Tr.]

[2] See above, paragraph 101.

True rationale of Locke’s doctrine.

231. This ‘vicious circle’ was nothing of which Locke need have been ashamed, if only he had understood and avowed its necessity. Body is to solidity and to the primary qualities in general simply as a substance to the relations that determine it; and the ‘circle’ in question merely represents the logical impossibility of defining a substance except by relations, and of defining these relations without presupposing a substance. It was only Locke’s confusion of the order of logical correlation with the sequence of feelings in time, that laid him open to the charge of making body and the ideas of primary qualities, and again the latter ideas and those of secondary qualities, at once precede and follow each other. To avoid this confusion by recognising the logical order--the order of intellectual ‘fictions’--as that apart from which the sequence of feelings would be no order of knowable reality at all, would be of course impossible for one who took Locke’s antithesis of thought and fact for granted. The time for that was not yet. A way of escape had first to be sought in a more strict adherence to Locke’s identification of the sequence of feelings with the order of reality. Hence Hume’s attempt, reversing Locke’s derivation of ideas of sense from primary qualities of body, to derive what with Locke had been primary qualities, as compound impressions of sense, from simple impressions and to reduce body itself to a name not for any ‘just and consistent idea,’ but for a ‘propensity to feign,’ the gradual product of custom and imagination. The question by which the value of such derivation and reduction is to be tried is our old one, whether it is not a tacit conversion of the supposed original impressions into qualities of body that alone makes them seem to yield the result required of them. If the Fourth Book of the ‘Treatise on Human Nature,’ with its elimination of the idea of body, had come before the second, would not the plausibility of the account of mathematical ideas contained in the latter have disappeared? And conversely, if these ideas had been reduced to that which upon elimination of the idea of body they properly become, would not that ‘propensity to feign,’ which is to take the place of the excluded idea, be itself unaccountable?

With Hume ‘body’ logically disappears. What then?

232. ‘After exclusion of colours, sounds, heat and cold, from the rank of external existences, there remains nothing which can afford us a just and consistent idea of body.’ Now, no one can ‘exclude them from the rank of external existences’ more decisively than Hume. They are impressions, and ‘all impressions are internal and perishing existences, and appear as such.’ Nor does he shirk the consequence, that we have no ‘just and consistent idea of body.’ It is true that we cannot avoid a ‘belief in its existence’--a belief which according to Hume consists in the supposition of ‘a continued existence of objects when they no longer appear to the senses, and of their existence as distinct from the mind and perceptions;’ in other words, as ‘external to and independent of us.’ This belief, however, as he shows, is not given by the senses. That we should feel the existence of an object to be continued when we no longer feel it, is a contradiction in terms; nor is it less so, that we should feel it to be distinct from the feeling. We cannot, then, have an impression of body; and, since we cannot have an idea which does not correspond to an impression or collection of impressions, it follows that we can have no idea of it. How the ‘belief in its existence’ is accounted for by Hume in the absence of any idea of it, is a question to be considered later. [1] Our present concern is to know whether the idea of extension can hold its ground when the idea of body is excluded.

[1] See below, paragraph 303, and foll.

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

233. ‘The first notion of space and extension,’ he says, ‘is derived solely from the senses of sight and feeling: nor is there anything but what is coloured or tangible that has parts disposed after such a manner as to convey the idea.’ Now, there may be a meaning of ‘derivation,’ according to which no one would care to dispute the first clause of this sentence. Those who hold that _really_, i.e. _for a consciousness to which the distinction between real and unreal is possible_, there is no feeling except such as is determined by thought, are yet far from holding that the determination is arbitrary; that any and every feeling is potentially any and every conception. Of the feelings to which the visual and tactual nerves are organic, as they would be for a merely feeling consciousness, nothing, they hold, can be said; in that sense they are an ἄπειρον; [1] but for the thinking consciousness, or (which is the same) as they _really_ are, these feelings do, while those to which other nerves are organic do not, form the specific possibility of the conception of space. According to this meaning of the words, all must admit that ‘the first notion of space and extension is derived from the senses of sight and feeling;’ though it does not follow that a repeated or continued activity of either sense is necessary to the continued presence of the notion. With Hume, however, the derivation spoken of must mean that the notion of space is, to begin with, simply a visual or tactual feeling, and that such it remains, though with indefinite abatement and revival in the liveliness of the feeling, according to the amount of which it is called ‘impression’ or ‘idea.’ If we supposed him to mean, not that the notion of space was either a visual or tactual feeling indifferently, but that it was a compound result of both, [2] we should merely have to meet a further difficulty as to the possibility of such composition of feelings when their inward synthesis in a soul, and the outward in a body, have been alike excluded. In the next clause of the sentence, however, we find that for visual and tactual feelings there are quietly substituted ‘coloured and tangible objects, having parts so disposed as to convey the idea of extension.’ It is in the light of this latter clause that the uncritical reader interprets the former. He reads back the plausibility of the one into the other, and, having done so, finds the whole plausible. Now this plausibility of the latter clause arises from its implying a three-fold distinction--a distinction of colour or tangibility on the one side from the disposition of the parts on the other; a distinction of the colour, tangibility and disposition of parts alike from an object to which they belong; and a distinction of this object from the idea that it conveys. In other words, it supposes a negative answer to the three following questions:--Is the idea of extension the same as that of colour or tangibility? Is it possible without reference to something other than a possible impression? Is the idea of extension itself extended? Yet to the two latter questions, according to Hume’s express statements, the answer must be affirmative; nor can he avoid the affirmative answer to the first, to which he would properly be brought, except by equivocation.

[1] [Greek ἄπειρον (apeiron) = unlimited, indefinite or infinite. Tr.]

[2] It is not really in this sense that the impression of space according to Hume is a ‘compound’ one, as will appear below.

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

234. The _pièces justificatives_ for this assertion are not far to seek. Some of them have been adduced already. The idea of space, like every other idea, must be a ‘copy of an impression.’ [1] To speak of a feeling in its fainter stage as an ‘image’ of what it was in its livelier stage may, indeed, seem a curious use of terms; but in this sense only, according to Hume’s strict doctrine, can the idea of space be spoken of as an ‘image’ of anything at all. The impression from which it is derived, _i.e._ the feeling at its liveliest, cannot properly be so spoken of, for ‘no impression is presented by the senses as the image of anything distinct, or external, or independent.’ [2] If no impression is so presented, neither can any idea, which copies the impression, be so. It can involve no reference to anything which does not come and go with the impression. Accordingly no distinction is possible between space on the one hand, and either the impression or idea of it on the other. All impressions and ideas that can be said to be of extension must be themselves extended; and conversely, as Hume puts it, ‘all the qualities of extension are qualities of a perception.’ It should follow that space is either a colour or feeling of touch. In the terms which Hume himself uses with reference to ‘substance,’ ‘if it be perceived by the eyes, it must be colour; if by the ears, a sound; and so on, of the other senses.’ As he expressly tells us that it is ‘perceived by the eyes,’ the conclusion is inevitable.

[1] P. 340 [Book I, part II., sec. III.]

[2] P. 479 [Book I, part IV., sec. II.]

The parts of space are parts of a perception.

235. Hume does not attempt to reject the conclusion directly. He had too much eye to the appearance of consistency for that. But, in professing to admit it, he wholly alters its significance. The passage in question must be quoted at length. ‘The table, which just now appears to me, is only a perception, and all its qualities are qualities of a perception. Now, the most obvious of all its qualities is extension. The perception consists of parts. These parts are so situated as to afford us the notion of distance and contiguity, of length, breadth, and thickness. The termination of these three dimensions is what we call figure. The figure is moveable, separable, and divisible. Mobility and separability are the distinguishing properties of extended objects. And, to cut short all disputes, the very idea of extension is copied from nothing but an impression, and consequently must perfectly agree to it. To say the idea of extension agrees to anything is to say it is extended.’ Thus ‘there are impressions and ideas that are really extended.’ [1]

[1] P. 523 [Book I, part IV., sec. V.]

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

236. In order to a proper appreciation of this passage it is essential to bear in mind that Hume, so far as the usages of language would allow him, ignores all such differences in modes of consciousness as the Germans indicate by the distinction between ‘Empfindung’ and ‘Vorstellung,’ and by that between ‘Anschauung’ and ‘Begriff;’ or, more properly, that he expressly merges them in a mode of consciousness for which, according to the most consistent account that can be gathered from him, the most natural term would be ‘feeling.’ [1] It is true that Hume himself, admitting a distinction in the degree of vivacity with which this consciousness is at different times presented, inclines to restrict the term ‘feeling’ to its more vivacious stage, and to use ‘perception’ as the more general term, applicable whatever the degree of vivacity may be. [2] We must not allow him, however, in using this term to gain the advantage of a meaning which popular theory does, but his does not, attach to it. ‘Perception’ with him covers ‘idea’ as well as ‘impression;’ but nothing can be said of idea that cannot be said of impression, save that it is less lively, nor of impression that cannot be said of idea, save that it is more so. It is this explicit reduction of all consciousness virtually, if not in name, to feeling that brings to the surface the difficulties latent in Locke’s ‘idealism.’ These we have already traced at large; but they may be summed up in the question, How can feelings, as ‘particular in time’ or (which is the same) in ‘perpetual flux,’ constitute or represent a world of permanent relations? [3] The difficulty becomes more obvious, though not more real, when the relations in question are not merely themselves permanent, like those between natural phenomena, but are ‘relations between permanent parts,’ like those of space. It is for this reason that its doctrine about geometry has always been found the most easily assailable point of the ‘sensational’ philosophy. Locke distinguishes the ideas of space and of duration as got, the one ‘from the permanent parts of space,’ the other ‘from the fleeting and perpetually perishing parts of succession.’ [4] He afterwards prefers the term ‘expansion’ to space, as the opposite of duration, because it brings out more clearly the distinction of a relation between permanent parts from that between ‘fleeting successive parts which never exist together.’ How, then, can a consciousness consisting simply of ‘fleeting successive parts’ either be or represent that of which the differentia is that its parts are permanent and co-exist?

[1] As implying no distinction from, or reference to, a thing causing and a subject experiencing it. See above, paragraphs 195 and 208, and the passages there referred to.

[2] ‘To hate, to love, to think, to feel, to see; all this is nothing but to perceive.’ p. 371 [Book I, part II., sec. IV.]. ‘When I shut my eyes and _think_ of my chamber, the ideas I form are exact representations of the impressions I _felt_.’ p. 312 [Book I, part I., sec. I.].

[3] See above, paragraphs 172 & 176.

[4] Essay Book II. chap. xiv. sec. 1.

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

237. If this crux had been fairly faced by Hume, he must have seen that the only way in which he could consistently deal with it was by radically altering, with whatever consequence to the sciences, Locke’s account of space. As it was, he did not face it, but--whether intentionally or only in effect--disguised it by availing himself of the received usages of language, which roughly represent a theory the exact opposite of his own, to cover the incompatibility between the established view of the nature of space, and his own reduction of it to feeling. A very little examination of the passage, quoted at large above, will show that while in it a profession is made of identifying extension and a certain sort of perception with each other, its effect is not really to reduce extension to such a perception as Hume elsewhere explains all perceptions to be, but to transfer the recognised properties of extension which with such reduction would disappear, to something which for the time he chooses to reckon a perception, but which he can only so reckon at the cost of contradicting his whole method of dealing with the ideas of God, the soul, and the world. The passage, in fact, is merely one sample of the continued shuffle by which Hume on the one hand ascribes to feeling that intelligible content which it only derives from relation to objects of thought, and on the other disposes of these objects because they are not feelings.

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

238. ‘The table, which just now appears to me, is only a perception, and all its qualities are qualities of a perception. Now, the most obvious of all its qualities is extension. The perception consists of parts. These parts are so situated as to afford us the notion of distance and contiguity, of length, breadth, and thickness,’ &c., &c. If, now, throughout this statement (as according to Hume’s doctrine we are entitled to do) we write _feeling_ for ‘perception’ and ‘notion,’ it will appear that this table is a feeling, which has another feeling, called extension, as one of its qualities; and that this latter feeling consists of parts. These, in turn, must be themselves feelings, since the parts of which a perception consists must be themselves perceived, and, being perceived, must, according to Hume, be themselves perceptions which = feelings. These feelings, again, afford us other feelings of certain relations--distance and contiguity, &c.--feelings which, as Hume’s doctrine allows of no distinction between the feeling and that of which it is the feeling, must be themselves relations. Thus it would seem that a feeling may have another feeling as one of its qualities; that the feeling, which is thus a quality, has other feelings as its co-existent parts; and that the feelings which are parts ‘afford us’ other feelings which are relations. Is that sense or nonsense?

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

239. To this a follower of Hume, if he could be brought to admit the legitimacy of depriving his master of the benefit of synonyms, might probably reply, that the apparent nonsense only arises from our being unaccustomed to such use of the term ‘feeling;’ that the table is a ‘bundle of feelings,’ actual and possible, of which the actual one of sight suggests a lively expectation, easily confused with the presence, of the others belonging to the other senses; that any one of these may be considered a quality of the total impression formed by all; that the feeling thus considered, if it happens to be visual, may not improperly be said to consist of other feelings, as a whole consists of parts, since it is the result of impressions on different parts of the retina, and from a different point of view even itself to be the relation between the parts, just as naturally as a mutual feeling of friendship may be said either to consist of the loves of the two parties to the friendship, or to constitute the relation between them. Such language represents those modern adaptations of Hume, which retain his identification of the real with the felt but ignore his restrictions on the felt. Undoubtedly, if Hume allowed us to drop the distinction between feeling as it might be for a merely feeling consciousness, and feeling as it is for a thinking consciousness, the objection to his speaking of feeling in those terms, in which it must be spoken of if extension is to be a feeling, would disappear; but so, likewise, would the objection to speaking of thought as constitutive of reality. To appreciate his view we must take feeling not as we really know it--for we cannot know it except under those conditions of self-consciousness, the logical categories, which in his attempt to get at feeling, pure and simple, Hume is consistent enough to exclude--but as it becomes upon exclusion of all determination by objects which Hume reckons fictitious. What it would thus become _positively_ we of course cannot say, for of the unknowable nothing can be said; but we can decide _negatively_ what it cannot be. Can that in any case be said of it, which must be said of it if a feeling may be extended, and if extension is a feeling? Can it be such a quality of an object, so consisting of parts, and such a relation, as we have found that Hume takes it to be in his account of the perception of this table?

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

240. After having taken leave throughout the earlier part of the ‘Treatise on Human Nature’ to speak in the ordinary way of objects and their qualities--and otherwise of course he could not have spoken at all--in the fourth book he seems for the first time to become aware that his doctrine did not authorise such language. To perceive qualities of an object is to be conscious of relation between a subject and object, of which neither perishes with the moment of perception. Such consciousness is self-consciousness, and cannot be reduced to any natural observable event, since it is consciousness of that of which we cannot say ‘Lo, here,’ or ‘Lo, there,’ ‘it is now but was not then,’ or ‘it was then but is not now.’ It is therefore something which the spirit of the Lockeian philosophy cannot assimilate, and which Hume, as the most consistent exponent of that spirit, most consistently tried to get rid of. The subject as self, the object as body, he professes to reduce to figures of speech, to be accounted for as the result of certain ‘propensities to feign:’ nor will he allow that any impression or idea (and impressions and ideas with him, be it remembered, exhaust our consciousness) carries with it a reference to an object other than itself, any more than do pleasure or pain to which ‘in their nature’ all perceptions correspond. [1] He cannot, indeed, avoid speaking of the consciousness thus reduced to the level of simple pain and pleasure, as being that which in fact it can only be when determined by relation to a self-conscious subject, _i.e._ as itself an object; but he is so far faithful in his attempt to avoid such determination, that he does not reckon the object more permanent than the impression. It, too, is a ‘perishing existence.’ As the impression disappears with a ‘turn of the eye in its socket,’ so does the object, which really is the impression, and cannot appear other than it is any more than a feeling can be felt to be what it is not. [2]

[1] ‘Every impression, external and internal, passions, affections, sensations, pains, and pleasures, are originally on the same footing; and, whatever other differences we may observe among them, appear, all of them, in their true colours, as impressions or perceptions.’ p. 480. [Book I, part IV., sec. II.]

‘All sensations are felt by the mind such as they really are; and, when we doubt whether they present themselves as distinct objects or as mere impressions, the difficulty is not concerning their nature, but concerning their relations and situation.’ p. 480. [ibid.]

[2] See above, paragraph 208, with the passages there cited.

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

241. Such being the only possible object, how can qualities of it be perceived? We cannot here find refuge in any such propensity to feign as that which, according to Hume, leads us to ‘endow objects with a continued existence, distinct from our perceptions.’ If such propensities can give rise to impressions at all, it can only be to impressions of reflection, and it cannot be in virtue of them that extension, an impression of sensation, is given as a quality of an object. Now if there is any meaning in the phrase ‘qualities of an object,’ it implies that the qualities co-exist with each other and the object. Feelings, then, which are felt as qualities of another feeling must co-exist with, _i.e._ (according to Hume) be felt at the same time as, it and each other. Thus, if an impression of sight be the supposed object, no feeling that occurs after this impression has disappeared can be a quality of it. Accordingly, when Hume speaks of extension being seen as one of the qualities of this table, he is only entitled to mean that it is one among several feelings, experienced at one and the same time, which together constitute the table. Whatever is not so experienced, whether extension or anything else, can be no quality of that ‘perception.’ How much of the perception, then, will survive? Can any feelings, strictly speaking, be cotemporaneous? Those received through different senses, as Hume is careful to show, may be; _e.g._ the smell, taste, and colour of a fruit. [1] In regard to them, therefore, we may waive the difficulty, How can feelings successive to each other be yet co-existent qualities? but only to find ourselves in another as to what the object may be of which the cotemporaneous feelings are qualities. It cannot, according to Hume, be other than one or all of the cotemporaneous feelings. Is, then, the taste of an apple a quality of its colour or of its smell, or of colour, smell, and taste put together? It will not help us to speak of the several feelings as qualities of the ‘total impression;’ for the ‘total impression’ either merely means the several feelings put together, or else covertly implies just that reference to an object other than these, which Hume expressly excludes.

[1] ‘The taste and smell of any fruit are inseparable from its other qualities of colour and tangibility, and ... ’tis certain they are always co-existent. Nor are they only co-existent in general, but also cotemporary in their appearance in the mind.’ p. 521. (Contrast p. 370, where existence and appearance are identified.) [Book I, part IV., sec. V. and part II, sec. IV.]

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

242. In fact, however, when he speaks of the feeling, which is called extension, as a quality of the feeling, which is called sight, of the table, he has not even the excuse that he might have had if the feelings in question, being of different senses, might be cotemporary. According to him they are feelings of the same sense. The extension of the table he took to be a datum of sight just as properly as its colour; yet he cannot call it the same as colour, but only ‘a quality of the coloured object.’ As the ‘coloured object,’ however, apart from ‘propensities to feign,’ can, according to him, be no other than the feeling of colour, his doctrine can only mean that, colour and extension being feelings of the same sense, the latter is a quality of the former. Is this any more possible than that red should be a quality of blue, or a sour taste of a bitter one? Must not the two feelings be successive, however closely successive, so that the one which is object will have disappeared before the other, which is to be its quality, will have occurred? [1]

[1] It should be needless to point out that by taking extension to be a quality of ‘tangibility’ or muscular effort we merely change the difficulty. The question as to its relation to such feelings will be simply a repetition of that, put in the text, as to its relation to the feeling of colour.

Hume equivocates by putting ‘coloured points’ for colour.

243. If we look to the detailed account which Hume gives of the relation between extension and colour, we find that he avoids the appearance of making one feeling a quality of another, by in fact substituting for colour a superficies of coloured points, in which it is very easy to find extension as a quality because it already is extension as an object. To speak of extension, though a feeling, as made up of parts is just as legitimate or illegitimate as to speak of the feeling of colour being made up of coloured points. The legitimacy of this once admitted, there remains, indeed, a logical question as to how it is that a quality should be spoken of in terms that seem proper to a substance--as is done when it is said to consist of parts--and yet, again, should be pronounced a relation of these parts; but to one who professed to merge all logical distinctions in the indifference of simple feeling, such a question could have no recognised meaning. It is, then, upon the question whether, according to Hume’s doctrine of perception, the perception of an object made up of coloured points may be used interchangeably with the perception of colour, that the consistency of his doctrine of extension must finally be tried.

244. The detailed account is to the following effect:--‘Upon opening my eyes and turning them to the surrounding objects, I perceive many visible bodies; and upon shutting them again and considering the distance betwixt these bodies, I acquire the idea of extension.’ From what impression, Hume proceeds to ask, is this idea derived? ‘Internal impressions’ being excluded, ‘there remain nothing but the senses which can convey to us this original impression.’ ... ‘The table before me is alone sufficient by its view to give me the idea of extension. This idea, then, is borrowed from and represents some impression which this moment appears to the senses. But my senses convey to me only the impressions of coloured points, disposed in a certain manner. ... We may conclude that the idea of extension is nothing but a copy of these coloured points and of the manner of their appearance.’ [1]

[1] Pp. 340 and 341. [Book I, part II., sec. III.]

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

245. If the first sentence of the above had been found by Hume in an author whom he was criticising, he would scarcely have been slow to pronounce it tautological. As it stands, it simply tells us that having seen things extended we consider their extension, and upon considering it acquire an idea of it. It is a fair sample enough of those ‘natural histories’ of the soul in vogue among us, which by the help of a varied nomenclature seem able to explain a supposed later state of consciousness as the result of a supposed earlier one, because the terms in which the earlier is described in effect assume the later. It may be said, however, that it is only by a misinterpretation of a carelessly written sentence that Hume can be represented as deriving the idea of extension from the consideration of distance; that, as the sequel shows, he regarded the ‘consideration’ and the ‘idea’ in question as equivalent, and derived from the same impression of sense. It is undoubtedly upon his account of this impression that his doctrine of extension depends. It is described as ‘an impression of coloured points disposed in a certain manner.’ To it the idea of extension is related simply as a copy; which, we have seen, properly means with Hume, as a feeling in a less lively stage is related to the same feeling in a more lively stage. It is itself, we must note, the _impression_ of extension; and it is an impression of sense, about which, accordingly, no further question can properly be raised. Hume, indeed, allows himself to speak as if it were included in a ‘perception of visible bodies’ other than itself; just as in the passage from the fourth book previously examined, he speaks as if the perception, called extension, were a quality of some other perception. This we must regard as an exercise of the privilege which he claims of ‘speaking with the vulgar while he thought with the learned;’ since, according to him, ‘visible body,’ in any other sense than that of the impression of coloured points, is properly a name for a ‘propensity to feign’ resulting from a process posterior to all impressions of sense. The question remains whether, in speaking of an impression as one of ‘coloured points disposed in a certain manner,’ he is not introducing a ‘fiction of thought’ into the impression just as much as in calling it a ‘perception of body.’

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

246. An impression, we know, can, according to Hume, never be _of_ an object in the sense of involving a reference to anything other than itself. When one is said, then, to be _of_ coloured points, &c., this can only mean that itself _is_, or consists of, such points. Thus the question we have to answer is only a more definite form of the one previously put, Can a feeling consist of parts? In answering it we must remember that the parts, here supposed to be coloured points, must, according to Hume’s doctrine, be themselves impressions or they are nothing. Consistently with this he speaks of extension as ‘a compound impression, consisting of parts or lesser impressions, that are indivisible to the eye or feeling, and may be called impressions of atoms or corpuscles, endowed with colour and solidity.’ [1] Now, unless we suppose that a multitude of feelings of one and the same sense can be present together, these ‘lesser impressions’ must follow each other and precede the ‘compound impression.’ That is to say, none of the parts of which extension consists will be in existence at the same time, and all will have ceased to exist before extension itself comes into being. Can we, then, adopt the alternative supposition that a multitude of feelings of one and the same sense can be present together? In answering this question according to Hume’s premisses we may not help ourselves by saying that in a case of vision there really are impressions on different parts of the retina. To say that it _really_ is so, is to say that it is so for the _thinking_ consciousness--for a consciousness that distinguishes between what it feels and what it knows. To a man, as simply seeing and while he sees, his sight is not an impression on the retina at all, much less a combination of impressions on different parts of the retina. It is so for him only as thinking on the organs of his sight; or, if we like, as ‘seeing’ them in another, but ‘seeing’ them in a way determined by sundry suppositions (bodies, rays, and the like) which are not feelings, and therefore with Hume not possible ‘perceptions,’ at all. But it is the impression of sight, as it would be for one simply seeing and while he sees, undetermined by reference to anything other than itself, whether subject or object--an impression as it would be for a merely feeling consciousness or (in Hume’s language) ‘on the same footing with pain and pleasure’--that we have to do with when, from Hume’s point of view, we ask whether a multitude of such impressions can be present at once, _i.e._ as one impression.

[1] P. 345 [Book I, part II., sec. IV.]

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

247. If this question had been brought home to Hume, he could scarcely have avoided the admission that to answer it affirmatively involved just as much of a contradiction as that which he recognises between the ‘interrupted’ and ‘continuous’ existence of objects; [1] and just as in the latter case he gets over the contradiction by taking the interrupted existence, because the datum of sense, to be the reality, and the continued existence to be a belief resulting from ‘propensities to feign,’ so in the case before us he must have taken the multiplicity of successive impressions to be the reality, and their co-existence as related parts to be a figure of speech, which he must account for as best he could. As it is, he so plays fast and loose with the meaning of ‘impression’ as to hide the contradiction which is involved in the notion of a ‘compound impression’ if impression is interpreted as feeling--the contradiction, namely, that a single feeling should he felt to be manifold--and in consequence loses the chance of being brought to that truer interpretation of the compound impression, as the thought of an object under relations, which a more honest trial of its reduction to feeling might have shown to be necessary. To convict so skilful a writer of a contradiction in terms can never be an easy task. He does not in so many words tell us that all impressions of sight must be successive, but he does tell us that ‘the impressions of touch,’ which, indifferently with those of sight, he holds to constitute the compound impression of extension, ‘change every moment upon us.’ [2] And in the immediate sequel of the passage where he has made out extension to be a compound of co-existent impressions, he derives the idea of time ‘from the succession of our perceptions _of every kind_, ideas as well as impressions, and impressions of reflection as well as of sensation.’ The parts of time, he goes on to say, cannot be co-existent; and, since ‘time itself is nothing but different ideas and impressions succeeding each other,’ these parts, we must conclude, are those ‘perceptions of every kind’ from which the idea of time is derived. [3] It is only, in fact, by availing himself of the distinction, which he yet expressly rejects, between the impression and its object, that he disguises the contradiction in terms of first pronouncing certain impressions, as parts of space, co-existent, and then pronouncing all impressions, as parts of time, successive. A statement that ‘as from the coexistence of visual, and also of tactual, perceptions we receive the idea of extension, so from the succession of perceptions of every kind we form the idea of time,’ would arouse the suspicion of the most casual reader; while Hume’s version of the same,--‘as ’tis from the disposition of visible and tangible objects we receive the idea of space, so from the succession of ideas and impressions we form the idea of time’ [4]--has the full ring of empirical plausibility.

[1] P. 483 and following, and p. 486 [Book I, part IV., sec. II.]

[2] P. 516 [Book I, part IV., sec. IV.].

[3] Pp. 342, 343 [Book I, part II., sec. III.].

[4] P. 342 [Book I, part II., sec. III.]

The fact that colours mix, not to the purpose.

248. This plausibility depends chiefly on our reading into Hume’s doctrine a physical theory which, as implying a distinction between feeling and its real but unfelt cause, is strictly incompatible with it. Is it not an undoubted fact, the reader asks, that two colours may combine to produce a third different from both--that red and yellow, for instance, together produce orange? Is not this already an instance of a compound impression? Why may not a like composition of unextended impressions of colour constitute an impression different from any one of the component impressions, viz. extended colour? A moment’s consideration, however, will show that no one has a conscious sensation at once of red and yellow, and of orange as a compound of the two. The elements which combine to produce the colour called orange are not--as they ought to be if it is to be a case of compound impression in Hume’s sense--feelings of the person who sees the orange colour, but certain known causes of feeling, confused in language with the feelings, which separately they might produce, but which in fact they do not produce when they combine to give the sensation of orange; and to such causes of feeling, which are not themselves feelings, Hume properly can have nothing to say.

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

249. So far we have been considering the composition of impressions generally, without special reference to extension. The contradiction pointed out arises from the confusion between impressions as felt and impressions as thought of; colour, between feelings as they are in themselves, presented successively in time, and feelings as determined by relation to the thinking subject, which takes them out of the flux of time and converts them into members of a permanent whole. It is in this form that the confusion is most apt to elude us. When the conceived object is one of which the qualities can really be felt, _e.g._ colour, we readily forget that a felt quality is no longer simply a feeling. But the case is different when the object is one, like extension, which forces on us the question whether its qualities can be felt, or presented in feeling, at all. A compound of impressions of colour, to adopt Hume’s phraseology, even if such composition were possible, would still be nothing else than an impression of colour. In more accurate language, the conception, which results from the action of thought upon feelings of colour, can only be a conception of colour. Is extension, then, the same as colour? To say that it was would imply that geometry was a science of colour; and Hume, though ready enough to outrage ‘Metaphysics and School Divinity,’ always stops reverently short of direct offence to the mathematical sciences. As has been said above, of the three main questions about the idea of extension which his doctrine raises--Is it itself extended? Is it possible without reference to something other than a possible impression? Is it the same as the idea of colour or tangibility?--the last is the only one which he can scarcely even profess to answer in the affirmative. [1] Even when he has gone so far as to speak of the parts of a perception, a sound instinct compels him, instead of identifying the perception directly with extension, to speak of it as ‘affording through the situation of its parts the notion of’ extension. [2] In like manner, when he has asserted extension to be a compound of impressions, he avoids the proper consequence of the assertion by speaking of the component impressions as those, not of colour but, of coloured points, ‘atoms or corpuscles endowed with colour and solidity;’ and, again, does not call extension the compound of these simply, but the compound of them as ‘disposed in a certain manner.’ When the idea which is a copy of this impression has to be spoken of, the expression is varied again. It is an ‘idea of the coloured points _and of the manner of their appearance_,’ or of their ‘disposition.’ The disposition of the parts having been thus virtually distinguished from their colour, it is easy to suppose that, finding a likeness in the disposition of points under every unlikeness of their colour, ‘we omit the peculiarities of colour, as far as possible, and found an abstract idea merely on that disposition of points, or manner of appearance, in which they agree. Nay, even when the resemblance is carried beyond the objects of one sense, and the impressions of touch are found to be similar to those of sight in the disposition of their parts, this does not hinder the abstract idea from representing both on account of their resemblance’. [3]

[1] Above, paragraph 233. Though, as we shall see, he does so in one passage.

[2] Above, paragraph 235.

[3] P. 341 [Book I, part II., sec. III.]

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

250. If words have any meaning, the above must imply that the disposition of points is at least a different idea from either colour or tangibility, however impossible it may be for us to experience it without one or other of the latter. Nor can we suppose that this impression, other than colour, is one that first results from the composition of colours, even if we admit that such composition could yield a result different from colour. According to Hume, the components of the compound impression are already impressions of coloured ‘points, atoms, or corpuscles,’ and such points imply just that limitation by mutual externality, which is already the disposition in question. Is this ‘disposition,’ then, an impression of sensation? If so, ‘through which of the senses is it received? If it be perceived by the eyes it must be a colour,’ &c. &c.; [1] but from colour, the impression with which Hume would have identified it if he could, he yet finds himself obliged virtually to distinguish it. It is a relation, and not even one of those relations, such as resemblance, which in Hume’s language, ‘depending on the nature of the impressions related,’ [2] may plausibly be reckoned to be themselves impressions. The ‘disposition’ of parts and their ‘situation’ he uses interchangeably, and the situation of impressions he expressly opposes to their ‘nature’ [3]--that nature in respect of which all impressions, call them what we like, are ‘originally on the same footing’ with pain and pleasure. Consistently with this he pronounces the ‘external position’ of objects--their position as bodies external to each other and to our body--to be no datum of sense, no impression or idea, at all. [4] Our belief in it has to be accounted for as a complex result of ‘propensities to feign.’ How, then, can there be an impression of that which does not belong to the nature of any impression? What difference is there between ‘bodies’ and ‘corpuscles endowed with colour and solidity,’ that the outwardness of the latter to each other--also called their ‘distance’ from each, other [5]--should be an impression, while it is admitted that the same relation between ‘bodies’ cannot be so?

[1] Above, paragraph 208.

[2] P. 372 [Book I, part III., sec. I.], ‘Philosophical relations may be divided into two classes: into such as depend entirely on the ideas which we compare together; and such as may be changed without any change in the ideas. ... The relations of contiguity and distance between two objects may be changed without any change in the objects themselves or their ideas.’

[3] P. 480. [Book I, part IV., sec. II.] ‘When we doubt whether sensations present themselves as distinct objects or as mere impressions, the difficulty is not concerning their nature, but concerning their relations and situation.’

[4] P. 481. [Book I, part IV., sec. II.] In there showing that the senses alone cannot convince us of the external existence of body, he remarks that ‘sounds, tastes, and smells appear not to have any existence in extension;’ and (p. 483) [ibid] ‘as far as the senses are judges, all perceptions are the same in the manner of their existence.’ Therefore perceptions of sight cannot have ‘an existence in extension’ any more than ‘sounds, tastes, and smells;’ and if so, how can ‘existence in extension’ be a perception?

[5] Above, paragraphs 235 and 244.

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

251. To have plainly admitted that it was not an impression must have compelled Hume either to discard the ‘abstract idea’ with which geometry deals, or to admit the possibility of ideas other than ‘fainter impressions.’ It is a principle on which he insists with much emphasis and repetition, that whatever ‘objects,’ ‘impressions,’ or ‘ideas’ are distinguishable are also separable. [1] Now if there is an abstract idea of extension, it can scarcely be other than distinguishable, and consequently (according to Hume’s account of the relation of idea to impression) derived from a distinguishable and therefore separable impression. It would seem then that Hume cannot escape conviction of one of two inconsistencies; either that of supposing a separate impression of extension, which yet is not of the nature of any assignable sensation; or that of supposing an abstract idea of it in the absence of any such impression. We shall find that he does not directly face either horn of the dilemma, but evades both of them. He admits that ‘the ideas of space and time are no separate and distinct ideas, but merely those of the manner or order in which objects’ (_sc._ impressions) ‘exist’. [2] In the Fourth Book, where the equivalence of impression to feeling is more consistently carried out, the fact that what is commonly reckoned an impression is really a judgment about the ‘manner of existence,’ as opposed to the ‘nature,’ of impressions, is taken as sufficient proof that it is no impression at all; and if not an impression, therefore not an idea. [3] He thus involuntarily recognized the true difference between feeling and thought, between the mere occurrence of feelings and the presentation of that occurrence by the self-conscious subject to itself; and, if only he had known what he was about in the recognition, might have anticipated Kant’s distinction between the matter and form of sensation. In the Second Book, however, he will neither say explicitly that space is an impression of colour or a compound of colours--that would be to extinguish geometry; nor yet that it is impression of sense separate from that of colour--that would lay him open to the retort that he was virtually introducing a sixth sense; nor on the other hand will he boldly avow of it, as he afterwards does of body, that it is a fiction. He denies that it is a separate impression, so far as that is necessary for avoiding the challenge to specify the sense through which it is received; he distinguishes it from a mere impression of sight, when it is necessary to avoid its simple identification with colour. By speaking of it as ‘the manner in which objects exist’--so long as he is not confronted with the declarations of the Fourth Book or with the question how, the objects being impressions, their order of existence can be at once that of succession in time and of co-existence in space--he gains the credit for it of being a datum of sight, yet so far distinct from colour as to be a possible ‘foundation for an abstract idea,’ representative also of objects not coloured at all but tangible. At the same time, if pressed with the question how it could be an impression of sight and yet not interchangeable with colour, he could put off the questioner by reminding him that he never made it a ‘separate or distinct impression, but one of the manner in which objects exist.’

[1] Pp. 319, 326, 332, 335, 518. [Book I, part I., sec. IV and VII,