part II, sec. I, and part IV., sec. V.

[2] P. 346. [Book I, part II., sec. IV.]

[3] P. 480. [Book I, part IV., sec. II.]

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

252. Disguise it as he might, however, the admission that there was in some sense an abstract idea of space, which the existence of geometry required of him, really carried with it the admission either of a distinct impression of the same, or of some transmuting process by which the idea may become what the impression is not. His way of evading this consequence has been already noticed in our examination of his doctrine of ‘abstract ideas’ generally, though without special reference to extension. [1] It consists in asserting figure and colour to be ‘really,’ or as an impression, ‘the same and indistinguishable,’ but different as ‘relations and resemblances’ of the impression; in other words, different according to the ‘light in which the impression is considered’ or ‘the aspect in which it is viewed.’ Of these ‘separate resemblances and relations,’ however, are there ideas or are there not? If there are not, they are according to Hume nothing of which we are conscious at all; if there are, there must be distinguishable, and therefore separable, impressions corresponding. To say then that figure and colour form one and the same indistinguishable impression, and yet that they constitute ‘different resemblances and relations,’ without such explanation as Hume cannot consistently give, is in fact a contradiction in terms. The true explanation is that the ‘impression’ has a different meaning, when figure and colour are said to be inseparable in the impression, from that which it has when spoken of as a subject of different resemblances and relations. In the former sense it is the feeling pure and simple--_one_ as presented singly in time, after another and before a third. In this sense it is doubtless insusceptible of distinction into qualities of figure and colour, because (for reasons already stated) it can have no qualities at all. But the ‘simplicity in which many different resemblances and relations may be contained’ is quite other than this singleness. It is the unity of an object thought of under manifold relations--a unity of which Hume, reducing all consciousness to ‘impression’ and impression to feeling, has no consistent account to give. Failing such an account, the unity of the intelligible object, and the singleness of the feeling in time, are simply confused with each other. It is only an object as thought of, not a feeling as felt, that can properly be said to have qualities at all; while it is only because it is still regarded as a feeling that qualities of it, which cannot be referred to separate impressions, are pronounced the same and indistinguishable. If the idea of space is other than a feeling grown fainter, the sole reason for regarding it as originally an impression of colour disappears; if it _is_ such a feeling, it cannot contain such ‘different resemblances and relations’ as render it representative of objects not only coloured in every possible way, but not coloured at all.

[1] Above, paragraph 218.

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

253. It is thus by playing fast and loose with the difference between feeling and conception that Hume is able, when the character of extension as an intelligible relation is urged, to reply that it is the same with the feeling of colour; and on the other hand, when asked how there then can be an abstract idea of it, to reply that this does not mean a separate idea, but coloured objects considered under a certain relation, viz. under that which consists in the disposition of their parts. The most effective way of meeting him on his own ground is to ask him how it is, since ‘consideration’ can only mean a succession of ideas, and ideas are fainter impressions, that extension, being one and the same impression with colour, can by any ‘consideration’ become so different from it as to constitute a resemblance to objects that are not coloured at all. The true explanation, according to his own terminology, would be that the resemblance between the white globe and all other globes, being a resemblance not of impressions but of such relations between impressions as do not ‘depend on the nature of the impressions’ related, is unaffected by the presence or absence of colour or any other sensation. Of such relations, however, there can properly, if ideas are fainter impressions, be no ideas at all. In regard to those of cause and identity Hume virtually admits this; but the ‘propensities to feign’ by which in the case of these latter relations he tries to account for the appearance of there being ideas of them, cannot plausibly be applied to relations in space and time, of which, as we shall see, ideas must be assumed in order to account for the ‘fictions’ of body and necessary connexion. Since then they cannot be derived from any separate impression without the introduction in effect of a sixth sense, and since all constitutive action of thought as distinct from feeling is denied by Hume, the only way to save appearances is to treat the order in which a multitude of impressions present themselves as the same with each impression, even though immediately afterwards it may have to be confessed, that it is so independent of the nature of any or all of the impressions as to be the foundation of an abstract idea, which is representative of other impressions having nothing whatever in common with them but the order of appearance. This once allowed--an abstract idea having been somehow arrived at which is not really the copy of any impression--it is easy to argue back from the abstract idea to an impression, and because there is an idea of the composition of points to substitute a ‘composition of coloured points’ for colour as the original impression. From such impression, being already extension, the idea of extension can undoubtedly be abstracted.

Summary of contradictions in his account of extension.

254. We now know what becomes of ‘extended matter’ when the doctrine, which has only to be stated to find acceptance, that we cannot ‘look for anything anywhere but in our ideas’--in other words that for us there is no world but consciousness--is fairly carried out. Its position must become more and more equivocal, as the assumption, that consciousness reveals to us an alien matter, has in one after another of its details to be rejected, until a principle of synthesis within consciousness is found to explain it. In default of this, the feeling consciousness has to be made to take its place as best it may; which means that what is said of it as feeling has to be unsaid of it as extended, and _vice versâ_. As _feeling_, it carries no reference to anything other than itself, to an object of which it is a quality; as _extended_, it is a qualified object. As _extended_ again, its qualities are relations of coexistent parts; as _feeling_, it is an unlimited succession, and therefore, not being a possible whole, can have no parts at all. Finally as _feeling_, it must in each moment of existence either be ‘on the same footing’ with pain and pleasure or else--a distinction between impressions of sensation and reflection being unwarrantably admitted--be a colour, a taste, a sound, a smell, or ‘tangibility;’ as _extended_, it is an ‘order of appearance’ or ‘disposition of corpuscles,’ which, being predicable indifferently at any rate of two of these sensations, can no more be the same with either than either can be the same with the other. It is not the fault of Hume but his merit that, in undertaking to maintain more strictly than others the identification of extension with feeling, he brought its impossibility more clearly into view. The pity is that having carried his speculative enterprise so far before he was thirty, he allowed literary vanity to interfere with its consistent pursuit, caring only to think out the philosophy which he inherited so far as it enabled him to pose with advantage against Mystics and Dogmatists, but not to that further issue which is the entrance to the philosophy of Kant.

He gives no account of quantity as such.

255. As it was, he never came fairly to ask himself the fruitful question. How the sciences of quantity ‘continuous and discreet,’ which undoubtedly do exist, are possible to a merely feeling consciousness, because, while professedly reducing all consciousness to this form, he still allowed himself to interpret it in the terms of these sciences and, having done so, could easily account for their apparent ‘abstraction’ from it. If colour is already for feeling a magnitude, as is implied in calling it a ‘composition of coloured points,’ the question, how a knowledge of magnitude is possible, is of course superfluous. It only remains to deal, as Hume professes to do, with the apparent abstraction in mathematics of magnitude from colour and the consequent suppositions of pure space and infinite divisibility. Any ulterior problem he ignores. That magnitude is not any the more a feeling for being ‘endowed with colour’ he shows no suspicion. He pursues his ‘sensationalism’ in short, in its bearing on mathematics, just as far as Berkeley did and no further. The question at issue, as he conceived it, was not as to the possibility of magnitude altogether, but only as to the existence of a vacuum; not as to the possibility of number altogether, but only as to the infinity of its parts. Just as he takes magnitude for granted as found in extension, and extension as equivalent to the feeling of colour, so he takes number for granted, without indeed any explicit account of the impression in which it is to be found, but apparently as found in time, which again is identified with the succession of impressions. In the second part of the Treatise, though the idea of number is assumed and an account is given of it which is supposed to be fatal to the infinite divisibility of extension, we are told nothing of the impression or impressions from which it is derived. In the Fourth Part, however, there is a passage in which a certain consideration of time is spoken of as its source.

His account of the relation between Time and Number.

256. In the latter passage, in order to account for the idea of identity, he is supposing ‘a single object placed before us and surveyed for any time without our discovering in it any variation or interruption.’ ‘When we consider any two points of this time,’ he proceeds, ‘we may place them in different lights. We may either survey them at the very same instant; in which case they give us the idea of number, both by themselves and by the object, which must be multiplied in order to be conceived at once, as existent in these two different points of time: or, on the other hand, we may trace the succession of time by a like succession of ideas, and conceiving first one moment, along with the object then existent, imagine afterwards a change in the time without any variation or interruption in the object; in which case it gives us the idea of unity’. [1]

[1] P. 490. [Book I, part IV., sec. II.]

What does it come to?

257. A slight scrutiny of this passage will show that it is a prolonged tautology. The difference is merely verbal between the processes by which the ideas of number and unity are severally supposed to be given, except that in the former process it is the moment of surveying the times that is supposed to be one, while the times themselves are many; in the latter it is the object that is supposed to be one, but the times many. According to the second version of the former process--that according to which the different times surveyed together are said to give the idea of number ‘by their object’--even this difference disappears. The only remaining distinction is that in the one case the object is supposed to be given as one, ‘without interruption or variation,’ but to become multiple as conceived to exist in different moments; in the other the objects are supposed to be given as manifold, being ideas presented in successive times, but to become one through the imaginary restriction of the multiplicity to the times in distinction from the object. Undoubtedly any one of these verbally distinct processes will yield indifferently the ideas of number and of unity, since these ideas in strict correlativity are presupposed by each of them. ‘Two points of time surveyed at the same time’ will give us the idea of number because, being a duality in unity, they are already a number. So, too, and for the same reason, will the object, one in itself but multiple as existent at different times. Nor does the idea given by imagining ideas, successively presented, to be ‘one uninterrupted object,’ differ from the above more than many-in-one differs from one-in-many. The real questions of course are, How two times can be surveyed at one time; how a single object can be multiplied or become many; how a succession of ideas can be imagined to be an unvaried and uninterrupted object. To these questions Hume has no answer to give. His reduction of thought to feeling logically excluded an answer, and the only alternative for him was to ignore or disguise them.

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

258. In the passage from part II. of the Treatise, already referred to, he distinctly tells us that the unity to which existence belongs excludes multiplicity. ‘Existence itself belongs to unity, and is never applicable to number but on account of the unites of which the number is composed. Twenty men may be said to exist, but ’tis only because one, two, three, four, &c., are existent. ... A unite, consisting of a number of fractions, is merely a fictitious denomination, which the mind may apply to any quantity of objects it collects together; nor can such an unity any more exist alone than number can, as being in reality a true number. But the unity which can exist alone, and whose existence is necessary to that of all number, is of another kind and must be perfectly indivisible and incapable of being resolved into any lesser unity’. [1] What then is the ‘unity which can exist alone’? The answer, according to Hume, must be that it is an impression separately felt and not resoluble into any other impressions. But then the question arises, how a succession of such impressions can form a number or sum; and if they cannot, how the so-called real unity or separate impression can in any sense be a unite, since a unite is only so as one of a sum. To put the question otherwise, Is it not the case that a unite has no more meaning without number than number without unites, and that every number is not only just such a ‘fictitious denomination,’ as Hume pronounces a ‘unite consisting of a number of fractions’ to be, but a fiction impossible for our consciousness according to Hume’s account of it? It will not do to say that such a question touches only the fiction of ‘abstract number,’ but not the existence of numbered objects; that (to take Hume’s instance) twenty men exist with the existence of each individual man, each real unit, of the lot. It is precisely the numerability of objects--not indeed their existence, if that only means their successive appearance, but their existence _as a sum_--that is in question. If such numerability is possible for such a consciousness as Hume makes ours to be; in other words, if he can explain the fact that we count; ‘abstract number’ may no doubt be left to take care of itself. Is it then possible? ‘Separate impressions’ mean impressions felt at different times, which accordingly can no more co-exist than, to use Hume’s expression, ‘the year 1737 can concur with the year 1738;’ whereas the constituents of a sum must, as such, co-exist. Thus when we are told that ‘twenty may be said to exist because one, two, three, &c., are existent,’ the alleged reason, understood as Hume was bound to understand it, is incompatible with the supposed consequence. The existence of an object would, to him, mean no more than the occurrence of an impression; but that one impression should occur, and then another and then another, is the exact opposite of their coexistence as a sum of impressions, and it is such co-existence that is implied when the impressions are counted and pronounced so many. Thus when Hume tells us that a single object, by being ‘multiplied in order to be conceived at once as existent in different points of time,’ gives us the idea of number, we are forced to ask him what precisely it is which thus, being one, can become manifold. Is it a ‘unite that can exist alone’? That, having no parts, cannot become manifold by resolution. ‘But it may by repetition?’ No, for it is a separate impression, and the repetition of an impression cannot co-exist, so as to form one sum, with its former occurrence. ‘But it may be _thought of_ as doing so?’ No, for that, according to Hume, could only mean that feelings might concur in a fainter stage though they could not in a livelier. Is the single object then a unite which already consists of parts? But that is a ‘fictitious denomination,’ and presupposes the very idea of number that has to be accounted for.

[1] P. 338. [Book I, part II., sec. II.]

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

259. The impossibility of getting number, as a many-in-one, out of the succession of feelings, so long as the self is treated as only another name for that succession, is less easy to disguise when the supposed units are not merely given in succession, but are actually the moments of the succession; in other words, when time is the many-in-one to be accounted for. How can a multitude of feelings of which no two are present together, undetermined by relation to anything other than the feelings, be at the same time a consciousness of the relation between the moments in which the feelings are given, or of a sum which these moments form? How can there be a relation between ‘objects’ of which one has ceased before the other has begun to exist? ‘For the same reason,’ says Hume, ‘that the year 1737 cannot concur with the present year 1738, every moment must be distinct from, and posterior or antecedent to, another’. [1] How then can the present moment form one sum with all past moments, the present year with all past years; the sum which we indicate by the number 1738? The answer of common sense of course will be that, though the feeling of one moment is really past before that of another begins, yet thought retains the former, and combining it with the latter, gets the idea of time both as a relation and as a sum. Such an answer, however, implies that the retaining and combining thought is other than the succession of the feelings, and while it takes this succession to be the reality, imports into it that determination by the relations of past and present which it can only derive from the retaining and combining thought opposed to it. It is thus both inconsistent with Hume’s doctrine, which allows no such distinction between thought, _i.e._ the succession of ideas, and the succession of impressions, and inconsistent with itself. Yet Hume by disguising both inconsistencies contrives to avail himself of it. By tacitly assuming that a conception of ‘the manner in which impressions appear to the mind’ is given in and with the occurrence of the impressions, he imports the consciousness of time, both as relation and as numerable quantity, into the sequence of impressions. He thus gains the advantage of being able to speak of this sequence indifferently under predicates which properly exclude each other. He can make it now a consciousness in time, now a consciousness of itself as in time; now a series that cannot be summed, now a conception of the sum of the series. The sequence of feelings, then, having been so dealt with as to make it appear in effect that time can be _felt_, that it should be _thought of_ can involve no further difficulty. The conception, smuggled into sensitive experience as an ‘impression,’ can be extracted from it again as ‘idea,’ without ostensible departure from the principle that the idea is only the weaker impression.

[1] P. 338. [Book I, part II., sec. II.]

His ostensible explanation of it.

260. ‘The idea of time is not derived from a particular impression mixed up with others and plainly distinguishable from them, but arises altogether from the manner in which impressions appear to the mind, without making one of the number. Five notes played on the flute give us the impression and idea of time, though time be not a sixth impression which presents itself to the hearing or any other of the senses. Nor is it a sixth impression which the mind by reflection finds in itself. These five sounds, making their appearance in this particular manner, excite no emotion or affection in the mind, which being observed by it can give rise to a new idea. For _that_ is necessary to produce a new idea of reflection; nor can the mind, by revolving over a thousand times all its ideas of sensation, ever extract from them any new original idea, unless nature has so framed its faculties that it feels some new original impression arise from such a contemplation. But here it only takes notice of the _manner_ in which the different sounds make their appearance, and that it may afterwards consider without considering these particular sounds, but may conjoin it with any other objects. The ideas of some objects it certainly must have, nor is it possible for it without these ever to arrive at any conception of time; which, since it appears not as any primary distinct impression, can plainly be nothing but different ideas or impressions or objects disposed in a certain manner, _i.e._ succeeding each other. [1]

[1] P. 343. [Book I, part II., sec. III.]

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

261. In this passage the equivocation between ‘impression’ as feeling, and ‘impression’ as conception of the manner in which feelings occur, is less successfully disguised than is the like equivocation in the account of extension--not indeed from any failure in Hume’s power of statement, but from the nature of the case. In truth the mere reproduction of impressions can as little account for the one conception as for the other. Just as, in order to account for the ‘impression’ from which the abstract idea of space may be derived, we have to suppose first that the feeling of colour, through being presented by the self-conscious subject to itself, becomes a coloured thing, and next, that this thing is viewed as a whole of parts limiting each other; so, in order to account for the ‘impression’ from which the idea of time may be abstracted, we have to suppose the presentation of the succession of feelings to a consciousness not in succession, and the consequent view of such presented succession as a sum of numerable parts. It is a relation only possible for a thinking consciousness--a relation, in Hume’s language, not depending on the nature of the impressions related--that has in each case to be introduced into experience in order to be extracted from it again by ‘consideration:’ but there is this difference, that in one case the relation is not really between feelings at all, but between things or parts of a thing; while in the other it is just that relation between feelings, the introduction of which excludes the possibility that any feeling should be the consciousness of the relation. Thus to speak of a feeling of extension does not involve so direct a contradiction as to speak in the same way of time. The reader gives Hume the benefit of a way of thinking which Hume’s own theory excludes. Himself distinguishing between feeling and felt thing, and regarding extension as a relation between parts of a thing, he does not reflect that for Hume there is no such distinction; that a ‘feeling of extension’ means that feeling is extended, which again means that it has co-existent parts; and that what is thus said of feeling as _extended_ is incompatible with what is said of it as _feeling_. But when it comes to a ‘feeling of time’--a feeling of the successiveness of all feelings--the incompatibility between what is said of feeling as the object and what is implied of it as the subject is less easy to disguise. In like manner because we cannot really think of extension as being that which yet according to Hume it is, it does not strike us, when he speaks of it as coloured or of colour as extended, that he is making one feeling a quality of another. But it would be otherwise if any specific feeling were taken as a quality of what is ostensibly a relation between all feelings. There is thus no ‘sensible quality’ with which time can be said to be ‘endowed,’ as extension with ‘colour and solidity;’ none that can be made to do the same duty in regard to it as these do in regard to extension, ‘giving the idea’ of it without actually being it.

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

262. Hence, as the passage last quoted shows, in the case of time the alternative between ascribing it to a sixth sense, and confessing that it is not an impression at all, is very hard to avoid. It would seem that there is an impression of ‘the manner in which impressions appear to the mind,’ which yet is no ‘distinct impression.’ What, then, is it? It cannot be any one of the impressions of sense, for then it would be a distinct impression. It cannot be a ‘compound impression,’ for such composition is incompatible with that successiveness of all feelings to each other which is the object of the supposed impression. It cannot be any ‘new original impression’ arising from the contemplation of other impressions, for then, according to Hume, it would be ‘an affection or emotion.’ But after the exclusion of impressions of sense, compound impressions, and impressions of reflection, Hume’s inventory of the possible sources of ideas is exhausted. To have been consistent, he ought to have dealt with the relation of time as he afterwards does with that of cause and effect, and, in default of an impression from which it could be derived, have reduced it to a figure of speech. But since the possibility of accounting for the propensities to feign, which our language about cause and effect according to him represents, required the consciousness of relation in time, this course could not be taken. Accordingly after the possibility of time being an impression has been excluded as plainly as it can be by anything short of a direct negation, by a device singularly _naïf_ it is made to appear as an impression after all. On being told that the consciousness of time is not a ‘new original impression of reflection,’ since in that case it would be an emotion or affection, but ‘_only_ the notice which the mind takes of the manner in which impressions appear to it,’ the reader must be supposed to forget the previous admission that it is no distinct impression at all, and to interpret this ‘notice which the mind takes,’ because it is not an impression of reflection, as an impression of sense. To make such interpretation easier, the account given of time earlier in the paragraph quoted is judiciously altered at its close, so that instead of having to ascribe to feeling a consciousness of ‘the manner in which impressions appear to the mind,’ we have only to ascribe to it the impressions so appearing. But this alteration admitted, what becomes of the ‘abstractness’ of the idea of time, _i.e._ of the possibility of its being ‘conjoined with any objects’ indifferently? It is the essential condition of such indifferent conjunction, as Hume puts it, that time should be only the manner of appearance as distinct from the impressions themselves. If time _is_ the impressions, it must have the specific sensuous character which belongs to these. It must be a multitude of sounds, a multitude of tastes, a multitude of smells--these one after the other in endless series. How then can such a series of impressions become such an idea, _i.e._ so grow fainter as to be ‘conjoined’ indifferently ‘with any impressions whatever’?

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

263. The case then between Hume and the conceptions which the exact sciences presuppose, as we have so far examined it, stands thus. Of the idea of quantity, as such, he gives no account whatever. We are told, indeed, that there are ‘unites which can exist alone,’ _i.e._ can be felt separately, and which are indivisible; but how such unites, being separate impressions, can form a sum or number, or what meaning a unite can have except as one of a number--how again a sum formed of separate unites can be a continuous whole or magnitude--we are not told at all. Of the ideas of space and time we do find an account. They are said to be given in impressions, but, to justify this account of them, each impression has to be taken to be at the same time a consciousness of the manner of its own existence, as determined by relation to other impressions not felt along with it and as interpreted in a way that presupposes the unexplained idea of quantity. With this supposed origin of the ideas the sciences resting on them have to be adjusted. They may take the relations of number and magnitude, time and space, for granted, as ‘qualities of perceptions,’ and no question will be asked as to how the perceptions come to assume qualities confessed to be ‘independent of their own nature.’ It is only when they treat them in a way incompatible not merely with their being feelings--that must always be the case--but with their being relations between felt things, that they are supposed to cross the line which separates experimental knowledge from metaphysical jargon. So long then as space is considered merely as the relation of externality between objects of the ‘outer,’ time as that of succession between objects of the ‘inner,’ sense--in other words, so long as they remain what they are to the earliest self-consciousness and do not become the subject matter of any science of quantity--if we sink the difference between feelings and relations of felt things, and ask no questions about the origin of the distinction between outer and inner sense, they may be taken as data of sensitive experience. It is otherwise when they are treated as quantities, and it is their susceptibility of being so treated that, rightly understood, brings out their true character as the intelligible element in sensitive experience. But Hume contrives at once to treat them as quantities, thus seeming to give the exact sciences their due, and yet to appeal to their supposed origin in sense as evidence of their not having properties which, if they are quantities, they certainly must have. Having thus seemingly disposed of the purely intelligible character of quantity in its application to space and time, he can more safely ignore what he could not so plausibly dispose of--its pure intelligibility as number.

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

264. The condition of such a method being acquiesced in is, that quantity in all its forms should be found reducible to ultimate unites or indivisible parts in the shape of separate impressions. Should it be found so, the whole question indeed, how ideas of relation are possible for a merely feeling consciousness, would still remain, but mathematics would stand on the same footing with the experimental sciences, as a science of relations between impressions. Upon this reducibility, then, we find Hume constantly insisting. In regard to number indeed he could not ignore the fact that the science which deals with it recognizes no ultimate unite, but only such a one as ‘is itself a true number.’ But he passes lightly over this difficulty with the remark that the divisible unite of actual arithmetic is a ‘fictitious denomination’--leaving his reader to guess how the fiction can be possible if the real unite is a separate indivisible impression--and proceeds with the more hopeful task of resolving space into such impressions. He is well aware that the constitution of space by impressions and its constitution by indivisible parts stand or fall together. If space is a compound impression, it is made up of indivisible parts, for there is a ‘minimum visibile’ and by consequence a minimum of imagination; and conversely, if its parts are indivisible, they can be nothing but impressions; for, being indivisible, they cannot be extended, and, not being extended, they must be either simple impressions or nothing. With that instinct of literary strategy which never fails him, Hume feels that the case against infinite divisibility, from its apparent implication of an infinite capacity in the mind, is more effective than that in favour of space being a compound impression, and accordingly puts that to the front in the Second Part of the Treatise, in order, having found credit for establishing it, to argue back to the constitution of space by impressions. In fact, however, it is on the supposed composition of all quantity from separate impressions that his argument against its infinite divisibility rests.

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

265. The essence of his doctrine is contained in the following passages: ‘’Tis certain that the imagination reaches a _minimum_, and may raise up to itself an idea, of which it cannot conceive any subdivision, and which cannot be diminished without a total annihilation. When you tell me of the thousandth and ten thousandth part of a grain of sand, I have a distinct idea of these numbers and of their several proportions, but the images which I form in my mind to represent the things themselves are nothing different from each other nor inferior to that image by which I represent the grain of sand itself, which is supposed so vastly to exceed them. What consists of parts is distinguishable into them, and what is distinguishable is separable. But whatever we may imagine of the thing, the idea of a grain of sand is not distinguishable nor separable into twenty, much less into a thousand, ten thousand, or an infinite number of different ideas. ’Tis the same case with the impressions of the senses as with the ideas of the imagination. Put a spot of ink upon paper, fix your eye upon that spot, and retire to such a distance that at last you lose sight of it; ’tis plain that the moment before it vanished the image or impression was perfectly indivisible. ’Tis not for want of rays of light striking on our eyes that the minute parts of distant bodies convey not any sensible impression; but because they are removed beyond that distance at which their impressions were reduced to a _minimum_, and were incapable of any further diminution. A microscope or telescope, which renders them visible, produces not any new rays of light, but only spreads those which always flowed from them; and by that means both gives parts to impressions, which to the naked eye appear simple and uncompounded, and advances to a minimum what was formerly imperceptible.’ [1]

[1] P. 335, Part II. § 1.

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

266. In this passage it will be seen that Hume virtually yields the point as regards number. When he is told of the thousandth or ten thousandth part of a grain of sand he has ‘a distinct idea of these numbers and of their different proportions,’ though to this idea no distinct ‘image’ corresponds; in other words, though the idea is not a copy of any impression. It is of such parts _as parts of the grain of sand_--as parts of a ‘compound impression’--that he can form no idea, and for the reason given in the sequel, that they are less than any possible impression, less than the ‘minimum visibile.’ This, it would seem, is a fixed quantity. That which is the least possible impression once is so always. Telescopes and microscopes do not alter it, but present it under conditions under which it could not be presented to the naked eye. Their effect, according to Hume, could not be to render that visible which existed unseen before, nor to reveal parts in that which previously had, though it seemed not to have, them--that would imply that an impression was ‘an image of something distinct and external’--but either to present a simple impression of sight where previously there was none or to substitute a compound impression for one that was simple. [1] It is then because all divisibility is supposed to be into impressions, _i.e._ into feelings, and because there are conditions under which every feeling disappears, that an infinite divisibility is pronounced impossible. But the question is whether a finite divisibility into feelings is not just as impossible as an infinite one. Just as for the reasons stated above [2] a ‘compound feeling’ is impossible, so is the division of a compound into feelings. Undoubtedly if the ‘minimum visibile’ were a feeling it would not be divisible, but for the same reason it would not be a quantity. But if it is not a quantity, with what meaning is it called a minimum, and how can a quantity be supposed to be made up of such ‘visibilia’ as have themselves no quantity? In truth the ‘minimum visibile’ is not a feeling at all but a felt thing, conceived under attributes of quantity; in particular, as the term ‘minimum’ implies, under a relation of proportion to other quantities of which, if expressed numerically, Hume himself, according to the admission above noticed, would have to confess there was an idea which was an image of no impression. That which thought thus presents to itself as a thing doubtless has been a feeling; but, as thus presented, it is already other than and independent of feeling. With a step backward or a turn of the head, the feeling may cease, ‘the spot of ink may vanish;’ but the thing does not therefore cease to be a thing or to have quantity, which implies the possibility of continuous division.

[1] It will be noticed that in the last sentence of the passage quoted, Hume assumes the convenient privilege of ‘speaking with the vulgar,’ and treats the ‘minimum visibile’ presented by telescope or microscope as representing something other than itself, which previously existed, though it was imperceptible.

[2] See above, §§ 241 & 246.

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

267. It is thus the confusion between feeling and conception that is at the bottom of the difficulty about divisibility. For a consciousness formed merely by the succession of feelings, as there would be no _thing_ at all, so there would be no parts of a thing--no addibility or divisibility. But Hume is forced by the exigencies of his theory to hold together, as best he may, the reduction of all consciousness to feeling and the existence for it of divisible objects. The consequence is his supposition of ‘compound impressions’ or feelings having parts, divisible into separate impressions but divisible no further when these separate impressions have been reached. We find, however, that in all the instances he gives it is not really a feeling that is divided into feelings, but a thing into other things. It is the heap of sand, for instance, that is divided into grains, not the feeling which, by intellectual interpretation, represents to me a heap of sand that is divided into lesser feelings. I may feel the heap and feel the grain, but it is not a feeling that is the heap nor a feeling that is the grain. Hume would not offend common sense by saying that it was so, but his theory really required that he should, for the supposition that the grain is no further divisible when there are no separate impressions into which it may be divided, implies that in that case it is itself a separate impression, even as the heap is a compound one. But what difference, it may be asked, does it make to say that the heap and the grain are not feelings, but things conceived of, if it is admitted, as since Berkeley it must be, that the thing is nothing outside or independent of consciousness? Do we not by such a statement merely change names and invite the question how a thought can have parts, in place of the question how a feeling can have them?

Upon true notion of quantity infinite divisibility follows of course.

268. If thought were no more than Hume takes feeling to be, this objection would be valid. But if by thought we understand the self-conscious principle which, present to all feelings, forms out of them a world of mutually related objects, permanent with its own permanence, we shall also understand that the relations by which thought qualifies its object are not qualities of itself--that, in thinking of its object as made up of parts, it does not become itself a quantum. We shall also be on the way to understand how thought, detaching that relation of simple distinctness by which it has qualified its objects, finds before it a multitude of units of which each, as combining in itself distinctions from all the other units, is at the same time itself a multitude; in other words, finds a quantum of which each part, being the same in kind with the whole and all other parts, is also a quantum; _i.e._ which is infinitely divisible. When once it is understood, in short, that quantity is simply the most elementary of the relations by which thought constitutes the real world, as detached from this world and presented by thought to itself as a separate object, then infinite divisibility becomes a matter of course. It is real just in so far as quantity, of which it is a necessary attribute, is real. If quantity, though not feeling, is yet real, that its parts should not be feelings can be nothing against their reality. This once admitted, the objections to infinite divisibility disappear; but so likewise does that mysterious dignity supposed to attach to it, or to its correlative, the infinitely addible, as implying an infinite capacity in the mind. From Hume’s point of view, the mind being ‘a bundle of impressions’--though how impressions, being successive, should form a bundle is not explained--its capacity must mean the number of its impressions, and, all divisibility being into impressions, it follows that infinite divisibility means an infinite capacity in the mind. This notion however arises, as we have shown, from a confusion between a _felt_ division of an impossible ‘compound feeling,’ and that conceived divisibility of an object which constitutes but a single attribute of the object and represents a single relation of the mind towards it. There may be a sense in which all conception implies infinity in the conceiving mind, but so far from this doing so in any special way, it arises, as we have seen, from the presentation of objects under that very condition of endless, unremoved, distinction which constitutes the true limitation of our thought.

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

269. When, as with Hume, it is only in its application to space and time that the question of infinite divisibility is treated, its true nature is more easily disguised, for the reason already indicated, that space and time are not necessarily considered as quanta. When Hume, indeed, speaks of space as a ‘composition of parts’ or ‘made up of points,’ he is of course treating it as a quantum; but we shall find that in seeking to avoid the necessary consequence of its being a quantum--the consequence, namely, that it is infinitely divisible--he can take advantage of the possibility of treating it as the simple, unquantified, relation of externality. We have already spoken of the dexterity with which, having shown that all divisibility, because into impressions, is into simple parts, he turns this into an argument in favour of the composition of space by impressions. ‘Our idea of space is compounded of parts which are indivisible.’ Let us take one of these parts, then, and ask what sort of idea it is: ‘let us form a judgment of its nature and qualities.’ ‘’Tis plain it is not an idea of extension: for the idea of extension consists of parts; and this idea, according to the supposition, is perfectly simple and indivisible. Is it therefore nothing? That is impossible,’ for it would imply that a real idea was composed of nonentities. The way out of the difficulty is to ‘endow the simple parts with colour and solidity.’ In words already quoted, ‘that compound impression, which represents extension, consists of several lesser impressions, that are indivisible to the eye or feeling, and may be called impressions of atoms or corpuscles endowed with colour and solidity.’ (Part II. § 3, near the end.)

Colours or coloured points? What is the difference?

270. It is very plain that in this passage Hume is riding two horses at once. He is trying so to combine the notion of the constitution of space by impressions with that of its constitution by points, as to disguise the real meaning of each. In what lies the difference between the feelings of colour, of which we have shown that they cannot without contradiction be supposed to ‘make up extension,’ and ‘coloured points or corpuscles’? Unless the points, as points, mean something, the substitution of coloured points for colours means nothing. But according to Hume the point is nothing except as an impression of sight or touch. If then we refuse his words the benefit of an interpretation which his doctrine excludes, we find that there remains simply the impossible supposition that space consists of feelings. This result cannot be avoided, unless in speaking of space as composed of points, we understand by the point that which is definitely other than an impression. Thus the question which Hume puts--If extension is made up of parts, and these, being indivisible, are unextended, what are they?--really remains untouched by his ostensible answer. Such a question indeed to a philosophy like Locke’s, which, ignoring the constitution of reality by relations, supposed real things to be first found and then relations to be superinduced by the mind--much more to one like Hume’s, which left no mind to superinduce them--was necessarily unanswerable.

True way of dealing with the question.

271. In truth, extension is the relation of mutual externality. The constituents of this relation have not, as such, any nature but what is given by the relation. If in Hume’s language we ‘separate each from the others and, considering it apart, form a judgment of its nature and qualities,’ by the very way we put the problem we render it insoluble or, more properly, destroy it; for, thus separated, they have no nature. It is this that we express by the proposition which would otherwise be tautological, that extension is a relation between extended points. The ‘points’ are the simplest expression for those coefficients to the relation of mutual externality, which, as determined by that relation and no otherwise, have themselves the attribute of being extended and that only. If it is asked whether the points, being extended, are therefore divisible, the answer must be twofold. _Separately_ they are not divisible, for separately they are nothing. Whether, as determined by mutual relation, they are divisible or no, depends on whether they are treated as forming a quantum or no. If they are not so treated, we cannot with propriety pronounce them to be either further divisible or not so, for the question of divisibility has no application to them. But being perfectly homogeneous with each other and with that which together they constitute, they are susceptible of being so treated, and are so treated when, with Hume in the passage before us, we speak of them as the parts of which extended matter consists. Thus considered as parts of a quantum and therefore themselves quanta, the infinite divisibility which belongs to all quantity belongs also to them.

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

272. In this lies the answer to the most really cogent argument which Hume offers against infinite divisibility ‘A surface terminates a solid; a line terminates a surface; a point terminates a line: but I assert that if the _ideas_ of a point, line, or surface were not indivisible, ’tis impossible we should ever conceive these terminations. For let these ideas be supposed infinitely divisible, and then let the fancy endeavour to fix itself on the idea of the last surface, line, or point, it immediately finds this idea to break into parts; and upon its seizing the last of these parts it loses its hold by a new division, and so on _ad infinitum_, without any possibility of its arriving at a concluding idea’. [1] If ‘point,’ ‘line,’ or ‘surface’ were really names for ‘ideas’ either in Hume’s sense, as feelings grown fainter, or in Locke’s, as definite imprints made by outward things, this passage would be perplexing. In truth they represent objects determined by certain conceived relations, and the relation under which the object is considered may vary without a corresponding variation in the name. When a ‘point’ is considered simply as the ‘termination of a line,’ it is not considered as a quantum. It represents the abstraction of the relation of externality, as existing between _two lines_. It is these lines, not the point, that in this case are the constituents of the relation, and thus it is they alone that are for the time considered as extended, therefore as quanta, therefore as divisible. So when the line in turn is considered as the ‘termination of a surface.’ It then represents the relation of externality _as between surfaces_, and for the time it is the surfaces, not the line, that are considered to have extension and its consequences. The same applies to the view of a surface as the termination of a solid. Just as the line, though not a quantum when considered simply as a relation between surfaces, becomes so when considered in relation to another line, so the point, though it ‘has no magnitude’ when considered as the termination of a line, yet acquires parts, or becomes divisible, so soon as it is considered in relation to other points as a constituent of extended matter; and it is thus that Hume considers it, ἑκὼν ἢ ἄκων [2], when he talks of extension as ‘made up of coloured points.’

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

[2] [Greek ἑκὼν ἢ ἄκων (hekon e akon) = like it or not. Tr.]

What becomes of the exactness of mathematics according to Hume?

273. It is the necessity then, according to his theory, of making space an impression that throughout underlies Hume’s argument against its infinite divisibility; and, as we have seen, the same theory which excludes its infinite divisibility logically extinguishes it as a quantity, divisible and measurable, altogether. He of course does not recognize this consequence. He is obliged indeed to admit that in regard to the proportions of ‘greater, equal and less,’ and the relations of different parts of space to each other, no judgments of universality or exactness are possible. We may judge of them, however, he holds, with various approximations to exactness, whereas upon the supposition of infinite divisibility, as he ingeniously makes out, we could not judge of them at all. He ‘asks the mathematicians, what they mean when they say that one line or surface is equal to, or greater or less than, another.’ If they ‘maintain the composition of extension by indivisible points,’ their answer, he supposes, will be that ‘lines or surfaces are equal when the numbers of points in each are equal.’ This answer he reckons ‘just,’ but the standard of equality given is entirely useless. ‘For as the points which enter into the composition of any line or surface, whether perceived by the sight or touch, are so minute and so confounded with each other that ’tis utterly impossible for the mind to compute their number, such a computation will never afford us a standard by which we may judge of proportions.’ The opposite sect of mathematicians, however, are in worse case, having no standard of equality whatever to assign. ‘For since, according to their hypothesis, the least as well as greatest figures contain an infinite number of parts, and since infinite numbers, properly speaking, can neither be equal nor unequal with respect to each other, the equality or inequality of any portion of space can never depend on any proportion in the number of their parts.’ His own doctrine is ‘that the only useful notion of equality or inequality is derived from the whole united appearance, and the comparison of, particular objects.’ The judgments thus derived are in many cases certain and infallible. ‘When the measure of a yard and that of a foot are presented, the mind can no more question that the first is longer than the second than it can doubt of those principles which are most clear and self-evident.’ Such judgments, however, though ‘sometimes infallible, are not always so.’ Upon a ‘review and reflection’ we often ‘pronounce those objects equal which at first we esteemed unequal,’ and vice versâ. Often also ‘we discover our error by a juxtaposition of the objects; or, where that is impracticable, by the use of some common and invariable measure which, being successively applied to each, informs us of their different proportions. And even this correction is susceptible of a new correction, and of different degrees of exactness, according to the nature of the instrument by which we measure the bodies, and the care which we employ in the comparison.’ [1]

[1] Pp. 351-53. [Book I, part II., sec. IV.]

The universal propositions of geometry either untrue or unmeaning.

274. Such indefinite approach to exactness is all that Hume can allow to the mathematician. But it is undoubtedly another and an absolute sort of exactness that the mathematician himself supposes when he pronounces all right angles equal. Such perfect equality ‘beyond what we have instruments and art’ to ascertain, Hume boldly calls a ‘mere fiction of the mind, useless as well as incomprehensible’. [1] Thus when the mathematician talks of certain angles as always equal, of certain lines as never meeting, he is either making statements that are untrue or speaking of nonentities. If his ‘lines’ and ‘angles’ mean ideas that we can possibly have, his universal propositions are untrue; if they do not, according to Hume they can mean nothing. He says, for instance, that ‘two right lines cannot have a common segment;’ but of such ideas of right lines as we can possibly have this is only true ‘where the right lines incline upon each other with a sensible angle.’ [2] It is not true when they ‘approach at the rate of an inch in 20 leagues.’ According to the ‘original standard of a right line,’ which is ‘nothing but a certain general appearance, ’tis evident right lines may be made to concur with each other’. [3] Any other standard is a ‘useless and incomprehensible fiction.’ Strictly speaking, according to Hume, we have it not, but only a tendency to suppose that we have it arising from the progressive correction of our actual measurements. [4]

[1] P. 353. [Book I, part II., sec. IV.]

[2] Cf. Aristotle, Metaph. 998a, on a corresponding view ascribed to Protagoras.

[3] P. 356. [Book I, part II., sec. IV.]

[4] P. 354. [Book I, part II., sec. IV.]

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

275. Now it is obvious that what Hume accounts for by means of this tendency to feign, even if the tendency did not presuppose conditions incompatible with his theory, is not mathematical science as it exists. It has even less appearance of being so than (to anticipate) has that which is accounted for by those propensities to feign, which he substitutes for the ideas of cause and substance, of being natural science as it exists. In the latter case, when the idea of necessary connexion has been disposed of, an impression of reflection can with some plausibility be made to do duty instead; but there is no impression of reflection in Hume’s sense of the word, no ‘propensity,’ that can be the subject of mathematical reasoning. He speaks, indeed, of our _supposing_ some imaginary standard--of our having ‘an obscure and implicit notion’--of perfect equality, but such language is only a way of saving appearances; for according to him, a ‘supposition’ or ‘notion’ which is neither impression nor idea, cannot be anything. A hasty reader, catching at the term ‘supposition,’ may find his statement plausible with all the plausibility of the modern doctrine, which accounts for the universality and exactness of mathematical truths as ‘hypothetical’--the doctrine that we suppose figures exactly corresponding to our definitions, though such do not really exist. With those who take this view, however, it is always understood that the definitions represent ideas, though not ideas to which real objects can be found exactly answering. Perhaps, if pressed about their distinction between idea and reality, they might find it hard consistently to maintain it, but it is by this practically that they keep their theory afloat. Hume can admit no such distinction. The real with him is the impression, and the idea the fainter impression. There can be no idea of a straight line, a curve, a circle, a right angle, a plane, other than the impression, other than the ‘appearance to the eye,’ and there are no appearances exactly answering to the mathematical definitions. If they do not _exactly_ answer, they might as well for the purposes of mathematical demonstration not answer at all. The Geometrician, having found that the angles at the base of _this_ isosceles triangle are equal to each other, at once takes the equality to be true of all isosceles triangles, as being exactly like the original one, and on the strength of this establishes many other propositions. But, according to Hume, no idea that we could have would be one of which the sides were precisely equal. The Fifth Proposition of Euclid then is not precisely true of the particular idea that we have before us when we follow the demonstration. Much less can it be true of the ideas, _i.e._ the several appearances of colour, indefinitely varying from this, which we have before us when we follow the other demonstrations in which the equality of the angles at the base of an isosceles is taken for granted.

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

276. Here, as elsewhere, what we have to lament is not that Hume ‘pushed his doctrine too far,’ so far as to exclude ideas of those exact proportions in space with which geometry purports to deal, but that he did not carry it far enough to see that it excluded all ideas of quantitative relations whatever. He thus pays the penalty for his equivocation between a feeling of colour and a disposition of coloured points. Even alongside of his admission that ‘relations of space and time’ are independent of the nature of the ideas so related, which amounts to the admission that of space and time there are no ideas at all in his sense of the word, he allows himself to treat ‘proportions between spaces’ as depending entirely on our ideas of the spaces--depending on ideas which in the context he by implication admits that we have not. [1] If, instead of thus equivocating, he had asked himself how sensations of colour and touch could be added or divided, how one could serve as a measure of the size of another, he might have seen that only in virtue of that in the ‘general appearance’ of objects which, in his own language, is ‘independent of the nature of the ideas themselves’--_i.e._ which does not belong to them as feelings, but is added by the comparing and combining thought--are the proportions of greater, less, and equal predicable of them at all; that what thought has thus added, viz. limitation by mutual externality, it can abstract; and that by such abstraction of the limit it obtains those several terminations, as Hume well calls them--the surface terminating bodies, the line terminating surfaces, the point terminating lines--from which it constructs the world of pure space: that thus the same action of thought in sense, which alone renders appearances measurable, gives an object matter which, because the pure construction of thought, we can measure exactly and with the certainty that the judgment based on a comparison of magnitudes in a single case is true of all possible cases, because in none of these can any other conditions be present than those which we have consciously put there.

[1] Part III. § 1, sub init.

Hume does virtually admit this in regard to numbers.

277. To have arrived at this conclusion Hume had only to extend to proportions in space the principle upon which the impossibility of sensualizing arithmetic compels him to deal with proportions in number. ‘We are possessed,’ he says, ‘of a precise standard by which we can judge of the equality and proportion of numbers; and according as they correspond or not to that standard we determine their relations without any possibility of error. When two numbers are so combined, as that the one has always an unite answering to every unite of the other, we pronounce them equal’. [1] Now what are the unites here spoken of? If they were those single impressions which he elsewhere [2] seems to regard as alone properly unites, the point of the passage would be gone, for combinations of such unites could at any rate only yield those ‘general appearances’ of whose proportions we have been previously told there can be no precise standard. They can be no other than those unites which, not being impressions, he has to call ‘fictitious denominations’--unites which are nothing except in relation to each other and of which each, being in turn divisible, is itself a true number. We can easily retort upon Hume, then, when he argues that the supposition of infinite divisibility is incompatible with any comparison of quantities because with any unite of measurement, that, according to his own virtual admission, in the only case where such comparison is exact the ultimate unite of measurement is still itself divisible; which, indeed, is no more than saying that whatever measures quantity must itself be a quantity, and that therefore quantity is infinitely divisible. If Hume, instead of slurring over this characteristic of the science of number, had set himself to explain it, he would have found that the only possible explanation of it was one equally applicable to the science of space--that what is true of the unite, as the abstraction of distinctness, is true also of the abstraction of externality. As the unite, because constituted by relation to other unites, so soon as considered breaks into multiplicity, and only for that reason is a quantity by which other quantities can be measured; so is it also with the limit in whatever form abstracted, whether as point, line, or surface. If the fact that number can have no least part since each part is itself a number or nothing, so far from being incompatible with the finiteness of number, is the consequence of that finiteness, neither can the like attribute in spaces be incompatible with their being definite magnitudes, that can be compared with and measured by each other. The real difference, which is also the rationale of Hume’s different procedure in the two cases, is that the conception of space is more easily confused than that of number with the feelings to which it is applied, and which through such application become sensible spaces. Hence the liability to the supposition, which is at bottom Hume’s, that the last feeling in the process of diminution before such sensible space disappears (being the ‘minimum visibile’) is the least possible portion of space.

[1] P. 374. [Book I, part III., sec. I.]

[2] Above, par. 258.

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

278. Just as that reduction of consciousness to feeling, which really excludes the idea of quantity altogether, is by Hume only recognised as incompatible with its infinite divisibility, so it is not recognised as extinguishing space altogether, but only space as a vacuum. If it be true, he says, ‘that the idea of space is nothing but the idea of visible or tangible points distributed in a certain order, it follows that we can form no idea of vacuum, or space where there is nothing visible or tangible’. [1] Here as elsewhere the acceptability of his statement lies in its being taken in a sense which according to his principles cannot properly belong to it. It is one doctrine that the ideas of space and body are essentially correlative, and quite another that the idea of space is equivalent to a feeling of sight or touch. It is of the latter doctrine that Hume’s denial of a vacuum is the corollary; but it is the former that gains acceptance for this denial in the mind of his reader. Space we have already spoken of as the relation of externality. If, abstracting this relation from the world of which it is the uniform but most elementary determination, we regard it as a relation between objects having no other determination, these become spaces and nothing but spaces--space pure and simple, _vacuum_. But we have known the world in confused fulness before we detach its constituent relations in the clearness of unreal abstraction. We have known bodies συγκεχυμένος [2], before we think their limits apart and out of these construct a world of pure space. It is thus in a sense true that in the development of our consciousness an idea of body precedes that of space, though the _abstraction_ of space--the detachment of the relation so-called from the real complex of relations--precedes that of body; and it is this fact that, in the face of geometry, strengthens common sense in its position that an idea of vacuum is impossible. It is not, however, the inseparability of space from body whether in reality or for our consciousness, but its identity with a certain sort of feeling, that is implied in Hume’s exclusion of the idea of vacuum. ‘Body,’ as other than feeling, is with him as much a fiction as vacuum. That there can be no idea of vacuum, is thus in fact merely his negative way of putting that proposition of which the positive form is, that space is a compound impression of sight and touch. Having examined that proposition in the positive, we need not examine it again in the negative form. It will be more to the purpose to enquire whether the ‘tendency to suppose’ or ‘propensity to feign’ by which, in the absence of any such idea, our language about ‘pure space’ has to be accounted for, does not according to Hume’s own showing presuppose such an idea.

[1] P. 358. [Book I, part II., sec. V.]

[2] [Greek συγκεχυμένος (synkechymenos) = confused or jumbled-up. Tr.]

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

279. By vacuum he understands invisible and intangible extension. If an idea of vacuum, then, is possible at all, he argues, it must be possible for darkness and mere motion to convey it. That they cannot do so _alone_ is clear from the consideration that darkness is ‘no positive idea’ and that an ‘invariable motion,’ such as that of a ‘man supported in the air and softly conveyed along by some invisible power,’ gives no idea at all. Neither can they do so when ‘attended with visible and tangible objects.’ ‘When two bodies present themselves where there was formerly an entire darkness, the only change that is discoverable is in the appearance of these two objects: all the rest continues to be, as before, a perfect negation of light and of every coloured or tangible object’. [1] ‘Such dark and indistinguishable distance between two bodies can never produce the idea of extension,’ any more than blindness can. Neither can a like ‘imaginary distance between tangible and solid bodies.’ ‘Suppose two cases, viz. that of a man supported in the air, and moving his limbs to and fro without meeting anything tangible; and that of a man who, feeling something tangible, leaves it, and after a motion of which he is sensible perceives another tangible object. Wherein consists the difference between these two cases? No one will scruple to affirm that it consists merely in the perceiving those objects, and that the sensation which arises from the motion is in both cases the same; and as that sensation is not capable of conveying to us an idea of extension, when unaccompanied with some other perception, it can no more give us that idea, when mixed with the impressions of tangible objects, since that mixture produces no alteration upon it’. [2] But though a ‘distance not filled with any coloured or solid object’ cannot give us an idea of vacuum, it is the cause why we falsely imagine that we can form such an idea. There are ‘three relations’--_natural_ relations according to Hume’s phraseology [3]--between it and that distance which really ‘conveys the idea of extension.’ ‘The distant objects affect the senses in the same manner, whether separated by the one distance or the other; the former species of distance is found capable of receiving the latter; and they both equally diminish the force of every quality. These relations betwixt the two kinds of distance will afford us an easy reason why the one has so often been taken for the other, and why we imagine we have an idea of extension without the idea of any object either of the sight or feeling’. [4]

[1] P. 362. [Book I, part II., sec. V.]

[2] P. 363. [Book I, part II., sec. V.]

[3] Above, § 206.

[4] P. 364. [Book I, part II., sec. V.]

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

280. It appears then that we have an idea of ‘distance unfilled with any coloured or solid object.’ To speak of this distance as ‘imaginary’ or fictitious can according to Hume’s principles make no difference, so long as he admits, which he is obliged to do, that we actually have an idea of it; for every idea, being derived from an impression, is as much or as little imaginary as every other. And not only have we such an idea, but Hume’s account of the ‘relations’ between it and the idea of extension implies that, _as ideas of distance_, they do not differ at all. But the idea of ‘distance unfilled with any coloured or solid object’ _is_ the idea of vacuum. It follows that the idea of extension does not differ from that of vacuum, except so far as it is other than the idea of distance. But it is from the consideration of distance that Hume himself expressly derives it; [1] and so derived, it can no more differ from distance than an idea from a corresponding impression. Thus, after all, he has to all intents and purposes to admit the idea of vacuum, but saves appearances by refusing to call it extension--the sole reason for such refusal being the supposition that every idea, and therefore the idea of extension, must be a datum of sense, which the admission of an idea of ‘invisible and intangible distance’ already contradicts.

[1] Part II. § 3, sub. inst.

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

281. We now know the nature of that preliminary manipulation which ‘impressions and ideas’ have to undergo, if their association is to yield the result which Hume requires--if through it the succession of feelings is to become a knowledge of things and their relations. Such a result was required as the only means of maintaining together the two characteristic positions of Locke’s philosophy; that, namely, the only world we can know is the world of ‘ideas,’ and that thought cannot originate ideas. Those relations, which Locke had inconsistently treated at once as intellectual superinductions and as ultimate conditions of reality, must be dealt with by one of two methods. They must be reduced to impressions where that could plausibly be done: where it could not, it must be admitted that we have no ideas of them, but only ‘tendencies to suppose’ that we have such, arising from the association, through ‘natural relations,’ of the ideas that we have. So dexterously does Hume work the former method that, of all the ‘philosophical relations’ which he recognizes, only Identity and Causation remain to be disposed of by the latter; and if the other relations--resemblance, time and space, proportion in quantity and degree in quality--could really be admitted as data of sense, there would at least be a possible basis for those ‘tendencies to suppose’ which, in the absence of any corresponding ideas, the terms ‘Identity’ and ‘Causation’ must be taken to represent. But, as we have shown, they can only be claimed for sense, if sense is so far one with thought--one not by conversion of thought into sense but by taking of sense into thought--as that Hume’s favourite appeals to sense against the reality of intelligible relations become unmeaning. They may be ‘impressions,’ there may be ‘impressions of them,’ but only if we deny of the impression what Hume asserts of it, and assert of it what he denies--only if we understand by ‘impression’ not an ‘internal and perishing existence;’ not that which, if other than taste, colour, sound, smell or touch, must be a ‘passion or emotion ‘; _not_ that which carries no reference to an object other than itself, and which must _either_ be single _or_ compound; but something permanent and constituted by permanently coexisting parts; something that may ‘be conjoined with’ any feeling, because it is none; that always carries with it a reference to a subject which it is not but of which it is a quality; and that is both many and one, since ‘in its simplicity it contains many different resemblances and relations.’

282. In the account just adduced of vacuum, the effect of that double dealing with ‘impressions,’ which we shall have to trace at large in Hume’s explanation of our language about Causation and Identity, is already exhibited in little. Just as, after the idea of pure space has been excluded because not a copy of any possible impression, we yet find an ‘idea,’ only differing from it in name, introduced as the basis of that tendency to suppose which is to take the place of the excluded idea, so we shall find ideas of relation in the way of Identity and Causation--ideas which according to Hume we have not--presupposed as the source of those ‘propensities to feign’ which he accounts for the appearance of our having them.

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

283. The primary characteristic of these relations according to Hume, which they share with those of space and time, and which in fact vitiates that definition of ‘philosophical relation,’ as depending on comparison, which he adopts, is that they ‘depend not on the ideas compared together, but may be changed without any change in the ideas’. [1] It follows that they are not objects of knowledge, according to the definition of knowledge which Hume inherited, as ‘the perception of agreement or disagreement between ideas.’ A partial recognition of this consequence in regard to cause and effect we found in Locke’s suspicion that a science of nature was impossible--impossible because, however often a certain ‘idea of quality and substance’ may have followed or accompanied another, such sequence or accompaniment never amounts to agreement or ‘necessary connexion’ between the ideas, and therefore never can warrant a general assertion, but only the particular one, that the ideas in question have so many times occurred in such an order. ‘Matters of fact,’ however, which no more consist in agreement of ideas than does causation, are by Locke treated without scruple as matter of knowledge when they can be regarded as relations between present sensations. Thus the ‘particular experiment’ in Physics constitutes knowledge--the knowledge, for instance, that a piece of gold is now dissolved in aqua regia; and when ‘I myself see a man walk on the ice, it is knowledge.’ In such cases it does not occur to him to ask, either what are the ideas that agree or how much of the experiment is a present sensation. [2] Nor does Hume commonly carry his analysis further. After admitting that the relations called ‘identity and situation in time and place’ do not depend on the nature of the ideas related, he proceeds: ‘When both the objects are present to the senses along with the relation, we call _this_ perception rather than reasoning; nor is there in this case any exercise of the thought or any action, properly speaking, but a mere passive admission of the impressions through the organs of sensation. According to this way of thinking, we ought not to receive as reasoning any of the observations we may make concerning _identity_ and the _relations_ of _time_ and _place_; since in none of them the mind can go beyond what is immediately present to the senses, either to discover the real existence or the relations of objects’. [3]

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

[2] Above, §§ 122 & 123.

[3] P. 376. [Book I, part III., sec. II.]

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

284. This passage points out the way which Hume’s doctrine of causation was to follow. That in any case ‘the mind should go beyond a present feeling, either to discover the real existence or the relations of objects’ other than present feelings, was what he could not consistently admit. In the judgment of causation, however, it seems to do so. ‘From the existence or action of one object,’ seen or remembered, it seems to be assured of the existence or action of another, not seen or remembered, on the ground of a necessary connection between the two. [1] It is such assurance that is reckoned to constitute reasoning in the distinctive sense of the term, as different at once from the analysis of complex ideas and the simple succession of ideas--such reasoning as, in the language of a later philosophy, can yield synthetic propositions. What Hume has to do, then, is to explain this ‘assurance’ away by showing that it is not essentially different from that judgment of relation in time and place which, because the related objects are ‘present to the senses along with the relation,’ is called ‘perception rather than reasoning,’ and to which no ‘exercise of the thought’ is necessary, but a ‘mere passive admission of impressions through the organs of sensation.’ Nor, for the assimilation of reasoning to perception, is anything further needed than a reference to the connection of ideas with impressions and of the ideas of imagination with those of memory, as originally stated by Hume. When both of the objects compared are present to the senses, we call the comparison perception; when neither, or only one, is so present, we call it reasoning. But the difference between the object that is present to sense, and that which is not, is merely the difference between impression and idea, which again is merely the difference between the more and the less lively feeling. [2] To feeling, whether with more or with less vivacity, every object, whether of perception or reasoning, must alike be present. Is it then a sufficient account of the matter, according to Hume, to say that when we are conscious of contiguity and succession between objects of which both are impressions we call it perception; but that when both objects are ideas, or one an impression and the other an idea, we call it reasoning? Not quite so. Suppose that I ‘have seen that species of object we call flame, and have afterwards felt that species of sensation we call heat.’ If I afterwards remembered the succession of the feeling upon the sight, both objects (according to Hume’s original usage of terms [3]) would be ideas as distinct from the impressions; or, if upon seeing the flame I remembered the previous experience of heat, one object would be an idea; but we should not reckon it a case of reasoning. ‘In all cases wherein we reason concerning objects, there is only one either perceived or _remembered_, and the other is supplied in conformity to our past experience’--supplied by the only other faculty than memory that can ‘supply an idea,’ viz. imagination. [4]

[1] Pp. 376, 384. [Book I, part III., secs. II. and IV.]

[2] Pp. 327, 375. [Book I, part I., sec. VII. and part III., sec. III.]

[3] Above, par. 195.

[4] Pp. 384, 388. [Book I, part III., secs. IV. and V.]

Relation of cause and effect the same as this transition.

285. This being the only account of ‘inference from the known to the unknown,’ which Hume could consistently admit, his view of the relation of cause and effect must be adjusted to it. It could not be other than a relation either between impression and impression, or between impression and idea, or between idea and idea; and all these relations are equally between feelings that we experience. Thus, instead of being the ‘objective basis’ on which inference from the known to the unknown rests, it is itself the inference; or, more properly, it and the inference alike disappear into a particular sort of transition from feeling to feeling. The problem, then, is to account for its seeming to be other than this. ‘There is nothing in any objects to persuade us that they are always _remote_ or always _contiguous_; and when from experience and observation we discover that the relation in this particular is invariable, we always conclude that there is some secret _cause_ which separates or unites them’. [1] It would seem, then, that the relation of cause and effect is something which we infer from experience, from the connection of impressions and ideas, but which is not itself impression or idea. And it would _seem_ further, that, as we infer such an unexperienced relation, so likewise we make inferences from it. In regard to identity ‘we readily suppose an object may continue individually the same, though several times absent from and present to the senses; and ascribe to it an identity, notwithstanding the interruption of the perception, whenever we conclude that if we had kept our hand or eye constantly upon it, it would have conveyed an invariable and uninterrupted perception. But this conclusion beyond the impressions of our senses can be founded only on the connection of _cause and effect_; nor can we otherwise have any security that the object is not changed upon us, however much the new object may resemble that which was formerly present to the senses.’

[1] P. 376. [Book I, part III., sec. II.]

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

286. This relation which, going beyond our actual experience, we seem to infer as the explanation of invariable contiguity in place or time of certain impressions, and from which again we seem to infer the identity of an object of which the perception has been interrupted, is what we call necessary connection. It is their supposed necessary connection which distinguishes objects related as cause and effect from those related merely in the way of contiguity and succession, [1] and it is a like supposition that leads us to infer what we do not see or remember from what we do. If then the reduction of thought and the intelligible world to feeling was to be made good, this supposition, not being an impression of sense or a copy of such, must be shown to be an ‘impression of reflection,’ according to Hume’s sense of the term, _i.e._ a tendency of the soul, analogous to desire and aversion, hope and fear, derived from impressions of sense but not copied from them; [2] and the inference which it determines must be shown to be the work of imagination, as affected by such impression of reflection. This in brief is the purport of Hume’s doctrine of causation.

[1] P. 376. [Book I, part III., sec. II.]

[2] Above, par. 195.

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

287. After his manner, however, he will go about with his reader. The supposed ‘objective basis’ of knowledge is to be made to disappear, but in such a way that no one shall miss it. So dexterously, indeed, is this done, that perhaps to this day the ordinary student of Hume is scarcely conscious of the disappearance. Hume merely announces to begin with that he will ‘postpone the direct survey of this question concerning the nature of necessary connection,’ and deal first with these other two questions, viz. (1) ‘For what reason we pronounce it _necessary_ that everything whose existence has a beginning, should also have a cause?’ and (2) ‘Why we conclude that such particular causes must _necessarily_ have such particular effects; and what is the nature of that _inference_ we draw from the one to the other, and of the _belief_ we repose in it?’ That is to say, he will consider the inference from cause or effect, before he considers cause and effect as a relation between objects, on which the inference is supposed to depend. Meanwhile necessary connection, as a relation between objects, is naturally supposed in some sense or other to survive. In _what_ sense, the reader expects to find when these two preliminary questions have been answered. But when they have been answered, necessary connection, as a relation between objects, turns out to have vanished.

Account of the inference given by Locke and Clarke rejected.

288. With the first of the above questions Hume only concerns himself so far as to show that we cannot know either intuitively or demonstratively, in Locke’s sense of the words, that ‘everything whose existence has a beginning also has a cause.’ Locke’s own argument for the necessity of causation--that ‘something cannot be produced by nothing’--as well as Clarke’s--that ‘if anything wanted a cause it would produce itself, _i.e._ exist before it existed’--are merely different ways, as Hume shows, of assuming the point in question. ‘If everything must have a cause, it follows that upon exclusion of other causes we must accept of the object itself, or of nothing, as causes. But ’tis the very point in question, whether everything must have a cause or not’. [1] On that point, according to Locke’s own showing, there can be no certainty, intuitive or demonstrative; for between the idea of beginning to exist and the idea of cause there is clearly no agreement, mediate or immediate. They are not similar feelings, they are not quantities that can be measured against each other, and to these alone can the definition of knowledge and reasoning, which Hume retained, apply. There thus disappears that last remnant of ‘knowledge’ in regard to nature which Locke had allowed to survive--the knowledge that there is a necessary connection, though one which we cannot find out. [2]

[1] P. 382. [Book I, part III., sec. III.]

[2] cf. Locke IV. 3, 29, and Introduc, par. 121.

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

289. Having thus shown, as he conceives, what the true answer to the first of the above questions is not, Hume proceeds to show what it is by answering the second. ‘Since it is not from knowledge or any scientific reasoning that we derive the opinion of the necessity of a cause to every new production,’ it must be from experience; [1] and every general opinion derived from experience is merely the summary of a multitude of particular ones. Accordingly when it has been explained why we infer particular causes from particular effects (and _vice versâ_), the inference from every event to a cause will have explained itself. Now ‘all our arguments concerning causes and effects consist both of an impression of the memory or senses, and of the idea of that existence which produces the object of the impression or is produced by it. Here, therefore, we have three things to explain, viz. _first_, the original impression; _secondly_, the transition to the idea of the connected cause or effect; _thirdly_, the nature and qualities of that idea.’ [2]

[1] P. 383. [Book I, part III., sec. III.]

[2] P. 385. [Book I, part III., sec. V.]

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

290. As to the original impression we must notice that there is a certain inconsistency with Hume’s previous usage of terms in speaking of an _impression_ of memory at all. [1] This, however, will be excused when we reflect that according to him impression and idea only differ in liveliness, and that he is consistent in claiming for the ideas of memory, not indeed the maximum, but a high degree of vivacity, superior to that which belongs to ideas of imagination. All that can be said, then, of that ‘original impression,’ whether of the memory or senses, which is necessary to any ‘reasoning from cause or effect,’ is that it is highly vivacious. That the transition from it to the ‘idea of the connected cause or effect’ is not determined by reason, has already been settled. It could only be so determined, according to the received account of reason, if there were some agreement in respect of quantity or quality between the idea of cause and that of the effect, to be ascertained by the interposition of other ideas. [2] But when we examine any particular objects that we hold to be related as cause and effect, _e.g._ the sight of flame and the feeling of heat, we find no such agreement. What we _do_ find is their ‘constant conjunction’ in experience, and ‘conjunction’ is equivalent to that ‘contiguity in time and place,’ which has already been pointed out as one of those ‘natural relations’ which act as ‘principles of union’ between ideas. [3] Because the impression of flame has always been found to be followed by the impression of heat, the idea of flame always suggests the idea of heat. It is simple custom then that determines the transition from the one to the other, or renders ‘necessary’ the connection between them. In order that the transition, however, may constitute an inference from cause to effect (or _vice versâ_), one of the two objects thus naturally related, but not both, must be presented as an impression. If both were impressions it would be a case of ‘sensation, not reasoning;’ if both were ideas, no belief would attend the transition. This brings us to the question as to the ‘nature and qualities’ of the inferred idea.

[1] Above, par. 195.

[2] Cf. Locke IV. 17, 2.

[3] Above, par. 206.

_c_. The qualities of this idea.

291. ‘’Tis evident that all reasonings from causes or effects terminate in conclusions concerning matter of fact, _i.e._ concerning the existence of objects or of their qualities’; [1] in other words, in belief. If this meant a new idea, an idea that we have not previously had, it would follow that inference could really carry us beyond sense, that there could be an idea not copied from any prior impression. But according to Hume it does not mean this. ‘The idea of existence is the very same with the idea of what we conceive to be existent;’ [2] and not only so, ‘the _belief_ of existence joins no new ideas to those which compose the idea of the object. When I think of God, when I think of him as existent, and when I believe him to be existent, my idea of him neither increases nor diminishes’. [3] In what then lies the difference between incredulity and belief; between an ‘idea assented to,’ or an object believed to exist, and a fictitious object or idea from which we dissent? The answer is, ‘not in the parts or composition of the idea, but in the manner of conceiving it,’ which must be understood to mean the manner of ‘feeling’ it; and this difference is further explained to lie in ‘the superior force, or vivacity, or steadiness’ with which it is felt.’ [4] We are thus brought to the further question, how it is that this ‘superior vivacity’ belongs to the inferred idea when we ‘reason’ from cause to effect or from effect to cause. The answer here is that the ‘impression of the memory or senses,’ which in virtue of a ‘natural relation’ suggests the idea, also ‘communicates to it a share of its force or vivacity.’

[1] P. 394. [Book I, part III., sec. VII.]

[2] P. 370. [Book I, part II., sec. VI.]

[3] P. 395. [Book I, part III., sec. II.]

[4] P. 398 [Book I, part III., sec. VII.]. Cf. above, par. 170, for the corresponding view in Berkeley.

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

292. Thus it appears that in order to the conclusion that any particular cause must have any particular effect, there is needed first the presence of an impression, and secondly the joint action of those two ‘principles of union among ideas,’ resemblance and contiguity. In virtue of the former principle the given impression calls up the image of a like impression previously experienced, which again in virtue of the latter calls up the image of its usual attendant, and the liveliness of the given impression so communicates itself to the recalled ideas as to constitute belief in their existence. If this is the true account of the matter, the question as to the nature of necessary connexion has answered itself. ‘The necessary connexion betwixt causes and effects is the foundation of our inference from one to the other. The foundation of the inference is the transition arising from the accustomed union. These are therefore the same’. [1] We may thus understand how it is that there seems to be an idea of such connexion to which no impression of the senses, or (to use an equivalent phrase of Hume’s) no ‘quality in objects’ corresponds. If the first presentation of two objects, of which one is cause, the other effect, (_i.e._ of which we afterwards come to consider one the cause, the other the effect) gives no idea of a connexion between them, as it clearly does not, neither can it do so however often repeated. It would not do so, unless the repetition ‘either discovered or produced something new’ in the objects; and it does neither. But it does ‘produce a new impression in the mind.’ After observing a ‘constant conjunction of the objects, and an uninterrupted resemblance of their relations of contiguity and succession, we immediately feel a determination of the mind to pass from one of the objects to its usual attendant, and to conceive it in a stronger light on account of that relation.’ It is of this ‘internal impression,’ this ‘propensity which custom produces,’ that the idea of necessary connexion is the copy. [2]

[1] P. 460. [Book I, part III., sec. XIV.]

[2] Pp. 457-460. [Book I, part III., sec. XIV.]

The transition not to anything beyond sense.

293. The sequence of ideas, which this propensity determines, clearly does not involve any inference ‘beyond sense,’ ‘from the known to the unknown,’ ‘from instances of which we have had experience, to those of which we have had none,’ any more than does any other ‘recurrence of an idea’--which, as we have seen, merely means, according to Hume, the return of a feeling at a lower level of intensity after it has been felt at a higher. The idea which we speak of as an inferred cause or effect is only an ‘instance of which we have no experience’ in the sense of being _numerically different_ from the similar ideas, whose previous constant association with an impression like the given one, determines the ‘inference;’ but in the same sense the ‘impression’ which I now feel on putting my hand to the fire is different from the impressions previously felt under the same circumstances, and I do not for that reason speak of this impression as an instance of which I have had no experience. Thus Hume, though retaining the received phraseology in reference to the ‘conclusion from any particular cause to any particular effect’--phraseology which implies that prior to the inference the object inferred is in some sense unknown or unexperienced--yet deprives it of meaning by a doctrine which makes inference, as he himself puts it, ‘a species of sensation,’ ‘an unintelligible instinct of our souls,’ ‘more properly an act of the sensitive than of the cogitative part of our natures’ [1]--which in fact leaves no ‘part of our natures’ to be cogitative at all.

[1] Pp. 404, 475, and 471. [Book I, part III., sec. VIII., part IV. sec. I. and part III., sec. XVI.]

Nor determined by any objective relation.

294. We are not entitled then, it would seem, to say that any inference to matter of fact, any proof of an ‘instructive proposition,’--as distinct from the conclusion of a syllogism, which is simply derived from the analysis of a proposition already conceded,--rests on the relation of cause and effect. Such language implies that the relation is other than the inference, whereas, in fact, they are one and the same, each being merely a particular sort of sequence of feeling upon feeling--that sort of which the characteristic is that, when the former feeling only has the maximum of vivacity, it still, owing to the frequency with which it has been attended by the other, imparts to it a large, though less, amount of vivacity. This is the naked result to which Hume’s doctrine leads--a result which, thus put, might have set men upon reconsidering the first principles of the Lockeian philosophy. But he wished to find acceptance, and would not so put it. A consideration of the points in which he had to sacrifice consistency to plausibility--since he was always consistent where he decently could be--will lead us to the true αἴτιον τοῦ ψευδοῦς [1], the impossibility on his principles of explaining the world of knowledge.

[1] [Greek αἴτιον τοῦ ψευδοῦς (aition tou pseudous) = the cause of the error. Tr.]

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

295. As the outcome of his doctrine, he submits two definitions of the relation of cause and effect. Considering it as ‘a _philosophical_ relation or comparison of two ideas, we may define a cause to be an object precedent and contiguous to another, and where all objects resembling the former are placed in like relations of precedency and contiguity to those objects that resemble the latter.’ Considering the relation as ‘a _natural_ one, or as an association between ideas,’ we may say that ‘a _cause_ is an object precedent and contiguous to another, and so united with it that the idea of one determines the mind to form the idea of the other, and the impression of the one to form a more lively idea of the other’. [1]

[1] P. 464. [Book I, part III., sec. XIV.]

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

296. Our first enquiry must be how far these definitions are really consistent with the theory from which they are derived. At the outset, it is a surprise to find that the ‘philosophical relation’ of cause and effect, as distinct from the natural one, should still appear to survive. Such a distinction has no meaning unless it implies a conceived relation of objects other than the _de facto_ sequence of feelings, of which one ‘naturally’ introduces the other. It is the characteristic of Locke’s doctrine of knowledge that in it this distinction is still latent. His language constantly implies that knowledge, as a perception of relations, is other than the sequence of feelings; but by confining his view chiefly to relation in the way of likeness and unlikeness--a relation that exists between feelings merely as felt, or as they are for the feeling consciousness--he avoids the necessity of deciding what the ‘ideas’ are in the connection of which knowledge and reasoning consist, whether objects constituted by conceived relations or feelings suggestive of each other. But when once attention had been fixed, as it was by Hume, on an ostensible relation between objects, like that of cause and effect, which, if it exist at all, is clearly not one in the way of resemblance between feelings, the distinction spoken of becomes patent. If the colour red had not the likeness and unlikeness which it has to the colour blue, the colours would be different feelings from what they are; but if the flame of fire and its heat were not regarded severally as cause and effect, it would make no difference to them as feelings; or, to put it conversely, it is not upon any comparison of two feelings with each other that we regard them as related in the way of cause and effect. In what sense then can the relation between flame and heat be a philosophical relation, as defined by Hume--a relation in virtue of which we compare objects, or an idea that we acquire upon comparison?

Examination of Hume’s language about them.

297. This definition, indeed, is not stated so exactly or so uniformly as might be wished. In different passages ‘philosophical relation’ appears as that in respect of which we compare any two ideas; as that of which we acquire the idea by comparing objects, [1] and finally (in the context of the passage last quoted) as itself the comparison. [2] The real source of this ambiguity lies in that impossibility of regarding an object as anything apart from its relations, which compels any theory that does not recognize it to be inconsistent with itself. It is Locke’s cardinal doctrine that real ‘objects’ are first given as simple ideas, and that their relations, unreal in contrast with the simple ideas, are superinduced by the mind--a doctrine which Hume completes by excluding all ideas that are not either copies of simple feelings or compounds of these, and by consequence ideas of relation altogether. The three statements of the nature of philosophical relation, given above, mark three stages of departure from, or approach to, consistency with this doctrine. The first, implying as it does that relation is not merely a subjective result in our minds from the comparison of ideas, but belongs to the ideas themselves, is most obviously inconsistent with it according to the form in which it is presented by Locke; but the second is equally incompatible with Hume’s completion of the doctrine, for it implies that we so compare ideas as to acquire an idea of relation other than the ideas put together--an idea at once open to Hume’s own challenge, ‘Is it a colour, sound, smell, &c.; or is it a passion or emotion?’

[1] Cf. Part I. 5.

[2] P. 464. [Book I, part III., sec. XIV.]

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

298. We are thus brought to the third statement, according to which philosophical relation, instead of being an idea acquired upon comparison, is itself the comparison. A comparison of ideas may seem not far removed from the simple sequence of resembling ideas; but if we examine the definition of cause, as stated above, which with Hume corresponds to the view of the relation of cause and effect as a ‘_philosophical_’ one, we find that the relation in question is neither a comparison of the related objects nor an idea which arises upon such comparison. According to his statement a comparison is indeed necessary to give us an idea of the relation--a comparison, however, not of the objects which we reckon severally cause and effect with each other, but _(a)_ of each of the two objects with other like objects, and _(b)_ of the relation of precedency and contiguity between the two objects with that previously observed between the like objects. Now, unless the idea of relation between objects in the way of cause and effect is one that consists in, or is acquired by, comparison _of those objects_, the fact that another sort of comparison is necessary to constitute it does not touch the question of its possibility. However we come to have it, however reducible to impressions the objects may be, it is not only other than the idea of either object taken singly; it is not, as an idea of resemblance might be supposed to be, constituted by the joint presence or immediate sequence upon each other of the objects. Here, then, is an idea which is not taken either from an impression or from a compound of impressions (if such composition be possible), and this idea is ‘the source of all our reasonings concerning matters of fact.’

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

299. The modern followers of Hume may perhaps seek refuge in the consideration that though the relation of cause and effect between objects is not one in the way of resemblance or one of which the idea is given by comparison of the objects, it yet results from comparisons, which may be supposed to act like chemical substances whose combination produces a substance with properties quite different from those of the combined substances, whether taken separately or together. Some anticipation of such a solution, it may be said, we find in Hume himself, who is aware that from the repetition of impressions of sense and their ideas new, heterogeneous, impressions--those of ‘reflection’--are formed. Of this more will be said when we come to Hume’s treatment of cause and effect as a ‘natural relation.’ For the present we have to enquire what exactly is implied in the comparisons from which this heterogeneous idea of relation is derived. If we look closely we shall find that they presuppose a consciousness of relations as little reducible to resemblance, _i.e._ as little the result of comparison, as that of cause and effect itself. It has been already noticed how Hume treats the judgment of proportion between figures as a mere affair of sense, because such relation depends entirely on the ideas compared, without reflecting that the existence of the figures presupposes those relations of space to which, because (as he admits) they do not depend on the comparison of ideas, the only excuse for reckoning any relation sensible does not apply. In the same way he contents himself with the fact that the judgment of cause and effect implies a comparison of present with past experience, and may thus be brought under his definition of ‘philosophical relation,’ without observing that the experiences compared are themselves by no means reducible to comparison. We judge that an object, which we now find to be precedent and contiguous to another, is its cause when, comparing present experience with past, we find that it always has been so. That in effect is Hume’s account of the relation, ‘considered as a philosophical one:’ and it implies that the constitution of the several experiences compared involves two sorts of relation which Hume admits not to be derived from comparison, _(a)_ relation in time and place, _(b)_ relation in the way of identity.

Observation of succession already goes beyond sense.

300. As to relations in time and space, we have already traced out the inconsistencies which attend Hume’s attempt to represent them as compound ideas. The statement at the beginning of Part III., that they are relations not dependent on the nature of compared ideas, is itself a confession that such representation is erroneous. If the difficulty about the synthesis of successive feelings in a consciousness that consists merely of the succession could be overcome, we might admit that the putting together of ideas might constitute such an idea of relation as depends on the nature of the combined ideas. But no combination of ideas can yield a relation which remains the same while the ideas change, and changes while they remain the same. Thus, when Hume tells us that ‘in none of the observations we may make concerning relations of time and place can the mind go beyond what is immediately present to the senses, to discover the relations of objects’ [1] the statement contradicts itself. Either we can make no observation concerning relation in time and place at all, or in making it we already ‘go beyond what is immediately present to the senses,’ since we observe what is neither a feeling nor several feelings put together. If then Hume had succeeded in his reduction of reasoning from cause or effect to observation of this kind, as modified in a certain way by habit, the purpose for which the reduction is attempted would not have been attained. The separation between perception and inference, between ‘intuition’ and ‘discourse,’ would have been got rid of, but inference and discourse would not therefore have been brought nearer to the mere succession of feelings, for the separation between feeling and perception would remain complete; and that being so, the question would inevitably recur--If the ‘observation’ of objects as related in space and time already involves a transition from the felt to the unfelt, what greater difficulty is there about the interpretation of a feeling as a change to be accounted for (which is what is meant by inference to a cause), that we should do violence to the sciences by reducing it to repeated observation lest it should seem that in it we ‘go beyond’ present feeling?

[1] P. 376. [Book I, part III., sec. II.]

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

301. Relation in the way of identity is treated by Hume in the third part of the Treatise [1] pretty much as he treats contiguity and distance. He admits that it does not depend on the nature of any ideas so related--in other words, that it is not constituted by feelings as they would be for a merely feeling consciousness--yet he denies that the mind ‘in any observations we may make concerning it’ can go beyond what is immediately present to the senses. Directly afterwards, however, we find that there _is_ a judgment of identity which involves a ‘conclusion beyond the impressions of our senses’--the judgment, namely, that an object of which the perception is interrupted continues individually the same notwithstanding the interruption. Such a judgment, we are told, is a supposition founded only on the connection of cause and effect. How any ‘observation concerning identity’ can be made without it is not there explained, and, pending such explanation, observations concerning identity are freely taken for granted as elements given by sense in the experience from which the judgment of cause and effect is derived. In the second chapter of Part IV., however, where ‘belief in an external world’ first comes to be explicitly discussed by Hume, we find that ‘propensities to feign’ are as necessary to account for the judgment of identity as for that of necessary connection. If that chapter had preceded, instead of following, the theory of cause and effect as given in Part III., the latter would have seemed much less plain sailing than to most readers it has done. It is probably because nothing corresponding to it appears in that later redaction of his theory by which Hume sought popular acceptance, that the true suggestiveness of his speculation was ignored, and the scepticism, which awakened Kant, reduced to the commonplaces of inductive logic. To examine its purport is the next step to be taken in the process of testing the possibility of a ‘natural history’ of knowledge. Its bearing on the doctrine of cause will appear as we proceed.

[1] P. 376. [Book I, part III., sec. II.]

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

302. The problem of identity necessarily arises from the fusion of reality and feeling. We must once again recall the propositions in which Hume represents this fusion--that ‘everything which enters the mind is both in reality and appearance as the perception;’ that ‘so far as the senses are judges, all perceptions are the same in the manner of their existence;’ that ‘perceptions’ are either impressions, or ideas which are ‘fainter impressions;’ and ‘impressions are internal and perishing existences, and appear as such.’ If these propositions are true--and the ‘new way of ideas’ inevitably leads to them--how is it that we _believe_ in ‘a _continued_ existence of objects even when they are not present to the senses,’ and an existence ‘distinct from the mind and perception’? They are the same questions from which Berkeley derived his demonstration of an eternal mind--a demonstration premature because, till the doctrine of ‘ideas,’ and of mind as their subject, had been definitely altered in a way that Berkeley did not attempt, it was explaining a belief difficult to account for by one wholly unaccountable. Before Theism could be exhibited with the necessity which Locke claimed for it, it was requisite to try what could be done with association of ideas and ‘propensities to feign’ in the way of accounting for the world of knowledge, in order that upon their failure another point of departure than Locke’s might be found necessary. The experiment was made by Hume. He has the merit, to begin with, of stating the nature of identity with a precision which we found wanting in Locke. ‘In that proposition, _an object is the same with itself_, if the idea expressed by the word _object_ were no ways distinguished from that meant by _itself_, we really should mean nothing.’ ‘On the other hand, a multiplicity of objects can never convey the idea of identity, however resembling they may be supposed. ... Since then both number and unity are incompatible with the relation of identity, it must lie in something that is neither of them. But at first sight this seems impossible.’ The explanation is that when ‘we say that an object is the same with itself, we mean that the object existent at one time is the same with itself existent at another. By this means we make a difference betwixt the idea meant by the word _object_ and that meant by _itself_ without going the length of number, and at the same time without restraining ourselves to a strict and absolute unity.’ In other words, identity means the unity of a thing through a multiplicity of times; or, as Hume puts it, ‘the invariableness and uninterruptedness of any object through a supposed variation of time’. [1]

[1] Pp. 489, 490. [Book I, part IV., sec. II.]

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

303. Now that ‘an object exists’ can with Hume mean no more than that an ‘impression’ is felt, and without succession of feelings according to him there is no time. [1] It follows that unity in the existence of the object, being incompatible with _succession_ of feelings, is incompatible also with existence in time. Either then the unity of the object or its existence at manifold times--both being involved in the conception of identity--must be a fiction; and since ‘all impressions are perishing existences,’ perishing with a turn of the head or the eyes, it cannot be doubted which it is that is the fiction. That the existence of an object, which we call the same with itself, is broken by as many intervals of time as there are successive and different, however resembling, ‘perceptions,’ must be the fact; that it should yet be one throughout the intervals is a fiction to be accounted for, Hume accounts for it by supposing that when the separate ‘perceptions’ have a strong ‘natural relation’ to each other in the way of resemblance, the transition from one to the other is so ‘smooth and easy’ that we are apt to take it for the ‘same disposition of mind with which we consider one constant and uninterrupted perception;’ and that, as a consequence of this mistake, we make the further one of taking the successive resembling perceptions for an identical, _i.e._ uninterrupted as well as invariable object. [2] But we cannot mistake one object for another unless we have an idea of that other object. If then we ‘mistake the succession of our interrupted perceptions for an identical object,’ it follows that we have an idea of such an object--of a thing one with itself throughout the succession of impressions--an idea which can be a copy neither of any one of the impressions nor, even if successive impressions could put themselves together, of all so put together. Such an idea being according to Hume’s principles impossible, the appearance of our having it was the fiction he had to account for; and he accounts for it, as we find, by a ‘habit of mind’ which already presupposes it. His procedure here is just the same as in dealing with the idea of vacuum. In that case, as we saw, having to account for the appearance of there being the impossible idea of pure space, he does so by showing, that having ‘an idea of distance not filled with any coloured or tangible object,’ we mistake this for an idea of extension, and hence suppose that the latter may be invisible and intangible. He thus admits an idea, virtually the same with the one excluded, as the source of the ‘tendency to suppose’ which is to replace the excluded idea. So in his account of identity. Either the habit, in virtue of which we convert resembling perceptions into an identical object, is what Hume admits to be a contradiction, ‘a habit acquired by what was never present to the mind’; [3] or the idea of identity must be present to the mind in order to render the habit possible.

[1] ‘Wherever we have no successive perceptions, we have no notion of time.’ (p. 342) [Book I, part II., sec. III.].

[2] P. 492. [Book I, part IV., sec. II.]

[3] P. 487. [Book I, part IV., sec. II.]

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

304. The device by which this _petitio principii_ is covered is one already familiar to us in Hume. In this case it is so palpable that it is difficult to believe he was unconscious of it. As he has ‘to account for the belief of the vulgar with regard to the existence of body,’ he will ‘entirely conform himself to their manner of thinking and expressing themselves;’ in other words, he will assume the fiction in question as the beginning of a process by which its formation is to be accounted for. The vulgar make no distinction between thing and appearance. ‘Those very sensations which enter by the eye or ear are with them the true objects, nor can they readily conceive that this pen or this paper, which is immediately perceived, represents another which is different from, but resembling it. In order therefore to accommodate myself to their notions, I shall at first suppose that there is only a single existence, which I shall call indifferently _object_ and _perception_, according as it shall seem best to suit my purpose, understanding by both of them what any common man may mean by a hat, or shoe, or stone, or any other impression conveyed to him by his senses’. [1] Now it is of course true that the vulgar are innocent of the doctrine of representative ideas. They do not suppose that this pen or this paper, which is immediately perceived, represents another which is different from, but resembling, it; but neither do they suppose that this pen or this paper is a sensation. It is the intellectual transition from this, that, and the other successive sensations to this pen or this paper, as the identical object to which the sensations are referred as qualities, that is unaccountable if, according to Hume’s doctrine, the succession of feelings constitutes our consciousness. In the passage quoted he quietly ignores it, covering his own reduction of felt thing to feeling under the popular identification of the real thing with the perceived. With ‘the vulgar’ that which is ‘immediately perceived’ is the real thing, just because it is not the mere feeling which with Hume it is. But under pretence of provisionally adopting the vulgar view, he entitles himself to treat the mere feeling, because according to him it is that which is immediately perceived, as if it were the permanent identical thing, which according to the vulgar is what is immediately perceived.

[1] P. 491. [Book I, part IV., sec. II.]

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

305. Thus without professedly admitting into consciousness anything but the succession of feelings he gets such individual objects as Locke would have called objects of ‘actual present sensation.’ When ‘I survey the furniture of my chamber,’ according to him, I see sundry ‘identical objects’--this chair, this table, this inkstand, &c. [1] So far there is no fiction to be accounted for. It is only when, having left my chamber for an interval and returned to it, I suppose the objects which I see to be identical with those I saw before, that the ‘propensity to feign’ comes into play, which has to be explained as above. But in fact the original ‘survey’ during which, seeing the objects, I suppose them to continue the same with themselves, involves precisely the same fiction. In that case, says Hume, I ‘suppose the change’ (which is necessary to constitute the idea of identity) ‘to lie only in the time.’ But without ‘succession of perceptions,’ different however resembling, there could according to him be no change of time. The continuous survey of this table, or this chair, then, involves the notion of its remaining the same with itself throughout a succession of different perceptions--_i.e._ the full-grown fiction of identity--just as much as does the supposition that the table I see now is identical with the one I saw before. The ‘reality,’ confusion with which of ‘a smooth passage along resembling ideas’ is supposed to constitute the ‘fiction,’ is already itself the fiction--the fiction of an object which must be other than our feelings, since it is permanent while they are successive, yet so related to them that in virtue of reference to it, instead of being merely different from each other, they become changes of a thing.

[1] P. 493. [Book I, part IV., sec. II.]

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

306. Having thus in effect imported all three ‘fictions of imagination’--identity, continued existence, and existence distinct from perception--into the original ‘perception,’ Hume, we may think, might have saved himself the trouble of treating them as separate and successive formations. Unless he had so treated them, however, his ‘natural history’ of consciousness would have been far less imposing than it is. The device, by which he represents the ‘vulgar’ belief in the reality of the felt thing as a belief that the mere feeling is the real object, enables him also to represent the identity, which a smooth transition along closely resembling sensations leads us to suppose, as still merely identity of a _perception_. ‘The very image which is present to the senses is with us the real body; and ’tis to these interrupted images we ascribe a perfect identity’. [1] The identity lying thus in the images or appearances, not in anything to which they are referred, a further fiction seems to be required by which we may overcome the contradiction between the interruption of the appearances and their identity--the fiction of ‘a continued being which may fill the intervals’ between the appearances. [2] That a ‘propension’ towards such a fiction would naturally arise from the uneasiness caused by such a contradiction, we may readily admit. The question is how the propension can be satisfied by a supposition which is merely another expression for one of the contradictory beliefs. What difference is there between the appearance of a perception and its existence, that interruption of the perception, though incompatible with uninterruptedness in its appearance, should not be so with uninterruptedness in its existence? It may be answered that there is just the difference between relation to a feeling subject and relation to a thinking one--between relation to a consciousness which is in time, or successive, and relation to a thinking subject which, not being itself in time, is the source of that determination by permanent conditions, which is what is meant by the real existence of a perceived thing. But to Hume, who expressly excludes such a subject--with whom ‘it exists’ = ‘it is felt’--such an answer is inadmissible. He can, in fact, only meet the difficulty by supposing the existence of unfelt feelings, of unperceived perceptions. The appearance of a perception is its presence to ‘what we call a mind,’ which ‘is nothing but a heap or collection of different perceptions, united together by certain relations, and supposed, though falsely, to be endowed with a perfect simplicity and identity’. [3] To consider a perception, then, as existing though not appearing is merely to consider it as detached from this ‘heap’ of other perceptions, which, on Hume’s principle that whatever is distinguishable is separable, is no more impossible than to distinguish one perception from all others. [4] In fact, however, it is obvious that the supposed detachment is the very opposite of such distinction. A perception distinguished from all others is determined by that distinction in the fullest possible measure. A perception _detached_ from all others, left out of the ‘heap which we call a mind,’ being out of all relation, has no qualities--is simply nothing. We can no more ‘consider’ it than we can see vacancy. Yet it is by the consideration of such nonentity, by supposing a world of unperceived perceptions, of ‘existences’ without relation or quality, that the mind, according to Hume--itself only ‘a heap of perceptions’--arrives at that fiction of a continued being which, as involved in the supposition of identity, is the condition of our believing in a world of real things at all.

[1] P. 493. [Book I, part IV., sec. II.]

[2] Pp. 494, 495. [Book I, part IV., sec. II.]

[3] P. 495. [Book I, part IV., sec. II.]

[4] Ibid.

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

307. It is implied, then, in the process by which, according to Hume, the fiction of a continued being is arrived at, that this being is supposed to be not only continued but ‘distinct from the mind’ and ‘independent’ of it. With Hume, however, the supposition of a distinct and ‘independent’ existence of the _perception_ is quite different from that of a distinct and independent object other than the perception. The former is the ‘vulgar hypothesis,’ and though a fiction, it is also a universal belief: the latter is the ‘philosophical hypothesis,’ which, if it has a tendency to obtain belief at all, at any rate derives that tendency, in other words ‘acquires all its influence over the imagination,’ from the vulgar one. [1] Just as the belief in the independent and continued existence of perceptions results from an instinctive effort to escape the uneasiness, caused by the contradiction between the interruption of resembling perceptions and their imagined identity, so the contradiction between this belief and the evident dependence of all perceptions ‘on our organs and the disposition of our nerves and animal spirits’ leads to the doctrine of representative ideas or ‘the double existence of perceptions and objects.’ ‘This philosophical system, therefore, is the monstrous offspring of two principles which are contrary to each other, which are both at once embraced by the mind and which are unable mutually to destroy each other. The imagination tells us that our resembling perceptions have a continued and uninterrupted existence, and are not annihilated by their absence. Reflection tells us that even our resembling perceptions are interrupted in their existence and different from each other. The contradiction betwixt these opinions we elude by a new fiction which is conformable to the hypotheses both of reflection and fancy, by ascribing these contrary qualities to different existences; the interruption to _perceptions_, and the continuance to _objects_’. [2]

[1] P. 500. [Book I, part IV., sec. II.]

[2] P. 502. [Book I, part IV., sec. II.]

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

308. Here, again, we find that the contradictory announcements, which it is the object of this new fiction to elude, are virtually the same as those implied in that judgment of identity which is necessary to the ‘perception’ of this pen or this paper. That ‘interruption of our resembling perceptions,’ of which ‘reflection’ (in the immediate context ‘Reason’) is here said to ‘tell us,’ is merely that difference in time, or succession, which Hume everywhere else treats as a datum of sense, and which, as he points out, is as necessary a factor in the idea of identity, as is the imagination of an existence continued throughout the succession. Thus the contradiction, which suggests this philosophical fiction of double existence, has been already present and overcome in every perception of a qualified object. Nor does the fiction itself, by which the contradiction is eluded, differ except verbally from that suggested by the contradiction between the interruption and the identity of perceptions. What power is there in the word ‘object’ that the supposition of an unperceived existence of perceptions, continued while their appearance is broken, should be an unavoidable fiction of the imagination, while that of ‘the double existence of perceptions and objects’ is a gratuitous fiction of philosophers, of which ‘vulgar’ thinking is entirely innocent?

Are they not all involved in the simplest perception?

309. That it is gratuitous we may readily admit, but only because a recognition of the function of the Ego in the primary constitution of the qualified individual object--this pen or this paper--renders it superfluous. To the philosophy, however, in which Hume was bred, the perception of a qualified object was simply a feeling. No intellectual synthesis of successive feelings was recognized as involved in it. It was only so far as the dependence of the feeling on our organs, in the absence of any clear distinction between feeling and felt thing, seemed to imply a dependent and broken existence of the thing, that any difficulty arose--a difficulty met by the supposition that the felt thing, whose existence was thus broken and dependent, represented an unfelt and permanent thing of which it is a copy or effect. To the Berkeleian objections, already fatal to this supposition, Hume has his own to add, viz. that we can have no idea of relation in the way of cause and effect except as between objects which we have observed, and therefore can have no idea of it as existing between a perception and an object of which we can only say that it is not a perception. Is all existence then ‘broken and dependent’? That is the ‘sceptical’ conclusion which Hume professes to adopt--subject, however, to the condition of accounting for the contrary supposition (without which, as he has to admit, we could not think or speak, and which alone gives a meaning to his own phraseology about impressions and ideas) as a fiction of the imagination. He does this, as we have seen, by tracing a series of contradictions, with corresponding hypotheses invented, either instinctively or upon reflection, in order to escape the uneasiness which they cause, all ultimately due to our mistaking similar successive feelings for an identical object. Of such an object, then, we must have an idea to begin with, and it is an object permanent throughout a variation of time, which means a succession of feelings; in other words, it is a felt thing, as distinct from feelings but to which feelings are referred as its qualities. Thus the most primary perception--that in default of which Hume would have no reality to oppose to fiction, nor any point of departure for the supposed construction of fictions--already implies that transformation of feelings into changing relations of a thing which, preventing any incompatibility between the perpetual brokenness of the feeling and the permanence of the thing, ‘eludes’ by anticipation all the contradictions which, according to Hume, we only ‘elude’ by speaking as if we had ideas that we have not.

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

310. ‘Ideas that we _have not_;’ for no one of the fictions by which we elude the contradictions, nor indeed any one of the contradictory judgments themselves, can be taken to represent an ‘idea’ according to Hume’s account of ideas. He allows himself indeed to speak of our having ideas of identical objects, such as _this table while I see or touch it_--though in this case, as has been shown, either the object is not identical or the idea of it cannot be copied from an impression--and of our transferring this idea to resembling but interrupted perceptions. But the supposition to which the contradiction involved in this transference gives rise--the supposition that the perception continues to exist when it is not perceived--is shown by the very statement of it to be no possible copy of an impression. Yet according to Hume it is a ‘belief,’ and a belief is ‘a lively idea associated with a present impression.’ What then is the impression and what the associated idea? ‘As the propensity to feign the continued existence of sensible objects arises from some lively impressions of the memory, it bestows a vivacity on that fiction; or, in other words, makes us believe the continued existence of body’. [1] Well and good: but this only answers the first part of our question. It tells us what are the impressions in the supposed case of belief, but not what is the associated idea to which their liveliness is communicated. To say that it arises from a propensity to feign, strong in proportion to the liveliness of the supposed impressions of memory, does not tell us of what impression it is a copy. Such a propensity indeed would be an ‘impression of reflection,’ but the fiction itself is neither the propensity nor a copy of it. The only possible supposition left for Hume would be that it is a ‘compound idea;’ but what combination of ‘perceptions’ can amount to the existence of perceptions when they are not perceived?

[1] P. 496. [Book I, part IV., sec. II.]

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

311. From this long excursion into Hume’s doctrine of relation in the way of identity--having found him admitting explicitly that it is only by a ‘fiction of the imagination’ that we identify this table as now seen with this table as seen an hour ago, and implicitly that the same fiction is involved in the perception of this table as an identical object even when hand or eye is kept upon it, while yet he says not a word to vindicate the possibility of such a fiction for a faculty which can merely reproduce and combine ‘perishing impressions’--we return to consider its bearing upon his doctrine of relation in the way of cause and effect. According to him, as we saw, [1] that relation, ‘considered as a philosophical’ one, is founded on a comparison of present experience with past, in the sense that we regard an object, precedent and contiguous to another, as its cause when all like objects have been found similarly related. The question then arises whether the experiences compared--the present and the past alike--do not involve the fiction of identity along with the whole family of other fictions which Hume affiliates to it? Does the relation of precedence and sequence, which, if constant, amounts to that of cause and effect, merely mean precedence and sequence of two feelings, indefinitely like an indefinite number of other feelings that have thus the one preceded and the other followed; or is it a relation between one qualified thing or definite fact always the same with itself, and another such thing or fact always the same with itself? The question carries its own answer. If in the definition quoted Hume used the phrase ‘all like objects’ instead of the ‘same object,’ in order to avoid the appearance of introducing the ‘fiction’ of identity into the definition of cause, the device does not avail him much. The effect of the ‘like’ is neutralized by the ‘all.’ A _uniform_ relation is impossible except between objects of which each has a definite identity.

[1] Above, pars. 298 and 299.

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

312. When Hume has to describe the experience which gives the idea of cause and effect, he virtually admits this. ‘The nature of experience,’ he tells us, ‘is this. We remember to have had frequent instances of the existence of one species of objects, and also remember that the individuals of another species of objects have always attended them, and have existed in a regular order of contiguity and succession with regard to them. Thus we remember to have seen that species of object we call _flame_, and to have felt that species of sensation we call _heat_. We likewise call to mind their constant conjunction in all past instances. Without any farther ceremony we call the one cause, and the other effect, and infer the existence of the one from the other’. [1] It appears, then, that upon experiencing certain sensations of sight and touch, we recognize each as ‘one of a species of objects’ which we remember to have observed in certain constant relations before. In virtue of the recognition the sensations become severally this _flame_ and this _heat_; and in virtue of the remembrance the objects thus recognized are held to be related in the way of cause and effect. Now it is clear that though the recognition takes place upon occasion of a feeling, the object recognized--this flame or this heat--is by no means the feeling as a ‘perishing existence.’ Unless the feeling were taken to represent a thing, conceived as permanently existing under certain relations and attributes--in other words, unless it were _identified_ by thought--it would be no definite object, not this _flame_ or this _heat_, at all. The moment it is named, it has ceased to be a feeling and become a felt thing, or, in Hume’s language, an ‘individual of _a species of objects_.’ And just as the present ‘perception’ is the recognition of such an individual, so the remembrance which determines the recognition is one wholly different from the return with lessened liveliness of a feeling more strongly felt before. According to Hume’s own statement, it consists in recalling ‘frequent instances of the existence of _a species of objects_.’ It is remembrance of an experience in which every feeling, that has been attended to, has been interpreted as a fresh appearance of some qualified object that ‘exists’ throughout its appearances--an experience which for that reason forms a connected whole. If it were not so, there could be no such comparison of the relations in which two objects are now presented with those in which they have always been presented, as that which according to Hume determines us to regard them as cause and effect. The condition of our so regarding them is that we suppose the objects now presented to be _the same_ with those of which we have had previous experience. It is only on supposition that a certain sensation of sight is not merely like a multitude of others, but represents the same object as that which I have previously known as flame, that I infer the sequence of heat and, when it does follow, regard it as an effect. If I thought that the sensation of sight, however like those previously referred to flame, did not represent the same object, I should not infer heat as effect; and conversely, if, having identified the sensation of sight as representative of flame, I found that the inferred heat was not actually felt, I should judge that I was mistaken in the identification. It follows that it is only an experience of identical, and by consequence related and qualified, objects, of which the memory can so determine a sequence of feelings as to constitute it an experience of cause and effect. Thus the perception and remembrance upon which, according to Hume, we judge one object to be the cause of another, alike rest on the ‘fictions of identity and continued existence.’ Without these no present experience would, in his language, be an instance of an individual of a certain species existing in a certain relation, nor would there be a past experience of individuals of the same species, by comparison with which the constancy of the relation might be ascertained.

[1] P. 388. [Book I, part III., sec. VI.]

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

313. Against this derivation of the conception of cause and effect, as implying that of identity, may be urged the fact that when we would ascertain the truth of any identification we do so by reference to causes and effects. As Hume himself puts it at the outset of his discussion of causation, an inference of identity ‘beyond the impressions of our senses can be founded only on the connexion of cause and effect.’ ... ‘Whenever we discover a perfect resemblance between a new object and one which was formerly present to the senses, we consider whether it be common in that species of objects; whether possibly or probably any cause could operate in producing the change and resemblance; and according as we determine concerning these causes and effects, we form our judgment concerning the identity of the object’. [1] This admission, it may be said, though it tells against Hume’s own subsequent explanation of identity as a fiction of the imagination, is equally inconsistent with any doctrine that would treat identity as the presupposition of inference to cause or effect. Now undoubtedly if the identity of interrupted perceptions is one fiction of the imagination and the relation of cause and effect another, each resulting from ‘custom,’ to say with Hume, that we must have the idea of cause in order to arrive at the supposition of identity, is logically to exclude any derivation of that idea from an experience which involves the supposition of identity. The ‘custom’ which generates the idea of cause must have done its work before that which generates the supposition of identity can begin. Hume therefore, after the admission just quoted, was not entitled to treat the inference to cause or effect as a habit derived from experience of identical things. But it is otherwise if the conceptions of causation and identity are correlative--not results of experience of which one must be formed before the other, but co-ordinate expressions of one and the same synthetic principle, which renders experience possible. And this is the real state of the case. It is true, as Hume points out, that when we want to know whether a certain sensation, precisely resembling one that we have previously experienced, represents the same object, we do so by asking how otherwise it can be accounted for. If no difference appears in its antecedents or sequents, we identify it--refer it to the same thing--as that previously experienced; for its relations (which, since it is an event in time, take the form of antecedence and sequence) _are_ the thing. The conceptions of identity and of relation in the way of cause and effect are thus as strictly correlative and inseparable as those of the thing and of its relations. Without the conception of identity experience would want a centre, without that of cause and effect it would want a circumference. Without the supposition of objects which ‘existing at one time are the same with themselves as existing at other times’--a supposition which at last, when through acquaintance with the endlessness of orderly change we have learnt that there is but one object for which such identity can be claimed without qualification, becomes the conception of nature as a uniform whole--there could be no such comparison of the relations in which an object is now presented with those in which it has been before presented, as determines us to reckon it the cause or effect of another; but it is equally true that it is only by such comparison of relations that the identity of any particular object can be ascertained.

[1] P. 376. [Book I, part III., sec. II.]

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

314. Thus, though we may concede to Hume that neither in the inference to the relation of cause and effect nor in the conclusions we draw from it do we go ‘beyond experience,’ [1] this will merely be, if his account of it as a ‘philosophical relation’ be true, because in experience we already go beyond sense. ‘There is nothing,’ says Hume, ‘in any object considered in itself that can afford us a reason for drawing a conclusion beyond it’ [2]--a statement which to him means that, if the mind really passes from it to another, this is only because as a matter of fact another feeling follows on the first. But, in truth, if each feeling were merely ‘considered in itself,’ the fact that one follows on another would be no fact _for the subject of the feelings_, no starting-point of intelligent experience at all; for the fact is the relation between the feelings--a relation which only exists for a subject that considers neither feeling ‘in itself,’ as a ‘separate and perishing existence,’ but finds a reality in the determination of each by the other which, as it is not either or both of them, so survives, while they pass, as a permanent factor of experience. Thus in order that any definite ‘object’ of experience may exist for us, our feelings must have ceased to be what according to Hume they are in themselves. They cease to be so in virtue of the presence to them of the Ego, in common relation to which they become related to each other as mutually qualified members of a permanent system--a system which at first for the individual consciousness exists only as a forecast or in outline, and is gradually realized and filled up with the accession of experience. It is quite true that nothing more than the reference to such a system, already necessary to constitute the simplest object of experience, is involved in that interpretation of every event as a changed appearance of an unchanging order, and therefore to be accounted for, which we call inference to a cause or the inference of necessary connection; or, again, in the identification of the event, the determination of its particular nature by the discovery of its particular cause.

[1] Above, pars. 285 & 286.

[2] P. 436 and elsewhere. [Book I, part III., sec. XII.]

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

315. The supposed difference then between immediate and mediate cognition is no absolute difference. It is not a difference between experience and a process that goes beyond experience, or between an experience unregulated by a conception of a permanent system and one that is so regulated. It lies merely in the degree of fullness and articulation which that conception has attained. If this had been what Hume meant to convey in his assimilation of inference to perception, he would have gone far to anticipate the result of the enquiry which Kant started. And this is what he might have come to mean if, instead of playing fast and loose with ‘impression’ and ‘object,’ using each as plausibility required on the principle of accommodation to the ‘vulgar,’ he had faced the consequence of his own implicit admission, that every perception of an object as identical is a ‘fiction’ in which we go beyond present feeling. As it is, his ‘scepticism with regard to the senses’ goes far enough to empty their ‘reports’ of the content which the ‘vulgar’ ascribe to them, and thus to put a breach between sense and the processes of knowledge, but not far enough to replace the ‘sensible thing’ by a function of reason. In default of such replacement, there was no way of filling the breach but to bring back the vulgar theory under the cover of habits and ‘tendencies to feign,’ which all suppose a ready-made knowledge of the sensible thing as their starting-point. Hence the constant contradiction, which it is our thankless task to trace, between his solution of the real world into a succession of feelings and the devices by which he sought to make room in his system for the actual procedure of the physical sciences. Conspicuous among these is his allowance of that view of relation in the way of cause and effect as an objective reality, which is represented by his definition of it as a ‘philosophical relation.’ It is in the sense represented by that definition that his doctrine has been understood and retained by subsequent formulators of inductive logic; but on examining it in the light of his own statements we have found that the relation, as thus defined, is not that which his theory required, and as which to represent it is the whole motive of his disquisition on the subject. It is not a sequence of impression upon impression, distinguished merely by its constancy; nor a sequence of idea upon impression, distinguished merely by that transfer of liveliness to the idea which arises from the constancy of its sequence upon the impression. It is a relation between ‘objects’ of which each is what it is only as ‘an instance of a species’ that exists continuously, and therefore in distinction from our ‘perishing impressions,’ according to a regular order of ‘contiguity and succession.’ As such existence and order are by Hume’s own showing no possible impressions, and by consequence no possible ideas, so neither are the ‘objects’ which derive their whole character from them.

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

316. It may be said, however, that wherever Hume admits a definition purporting to be of a ‘philosophical relation,’ he does so only as an accommodation, and under warning that every such relation is ‘fictitious’ except so far as it is equivalent to a natural one; that according to his express statement ‘it is only so far as causation is a _natural_ relation, and produces an union among our ideas, that we are able to reason upon it or draw any inference from it’; [1] and that therefore it is only by his definition of it as a ‘natural relation’ that he is to be judged. Such a vindication of Hume would be more true than effective. That with him the ‘philosophical’ relation of cause and effect is ‘fictitious,’ with all the fictitiousness of a ‘continued existence distinct from perceptions,’ is what it has been the object of the preceding paragraphs to show. But the fictitiousness of a relation can with him mean nothing else than that, instead of having an idea of it, we have only a ‘tendency to suppose’ that we have such an idea. Thus the designation of the philosophical relation of cause and effect carries with it two conditions, one negative, the other positive, on the observance of which the logical value of the designation depends. The ‘tendency to suppose’ must _not_ after all be itself translated into the idea which it is to replace; and it _must_ be accounted for as derived from a ‘natural relation’ which is not fictitious. That the negative condition is violated by Hume, we have sufficiently seen. He treats the ‘philosophical relation’ of cause and effect, in spite of the ‘fictions’ which it involves, not as a name for a tendency to suppose that we have an idea which we have not, but as itself a definite idea on which he founds various ‘rules for judging what objects are really so related and what are not’. [2] That the positive condition is violated also--that the ‘natural relation’ of cause and effect, according to the sense in which his definition of it is meant to be understood, already itself involves ‘fictions,’ and only for that reason is a possible source of the ‘philosophical’--is what we have next to show.

[1] P. 394. [Book I, part III., sec. VII.]

[2] Part III. § 15.

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

317. That definition, it will be remembered, runs as follows: ‘A cause is an object precedent and contiguous to another, and so united with it in the imagination that the idea of the one determines the mind to form the idea of the other, and the impression of the one to form a more lively idea of the other.’ Now, as has been sufficiently shown, the object of an idea with Hume can properly mean nothing but the impression from which the idea is derived, which again is only the livelier idea, even as the idea is the fainter impression. The idea and the object of it, then, only differ as different stages in the vivacity of a feeling. [1] It must be remembered, further, in regard to the ‘determination of the mind’ spoken of in the definition, that the ‘mind’ according to Hume is merely a succession of impressions and ideas, and that its ‘determination’ means no more than a certain habitualness in this succession. Deprived of the benefit of ambiguous phraseology, then, the definition would run thus: ‘A cause is a lively feeling immediately precedent to another, [2] and so united with it that when either of the two more faintly recurs, the other follows with like faintness, and when either occurs with the maximum of liveliness the other follows with less, but still great, liveliness.’ Thus stated, the definition would correspond well enough to the process by which Hume arrives at it, of which the whole drift, as we have seen, is to merge the so-called objective relation of cause and effect, with the so-called inference from it, in the mere habitual transition from one feeling to another. But it is only because not thus stated, and because the actual statement is understood to carry a meaning of which Hume’s doctrine does not consistently admit, that it has a chance of finding acceptance. Its plausibility depends on ‘object’ and ‘mind’ and ‘determination’ being understood precisely in the sense in which, according to Hume, they ought not to be understood, so that it shall express not a sequence of feeling upon feeling, as this might be for a merely feeling subject, but that permanent relation or law of nature which to a subject that thinks upon its feelings, and only to such a subject, their sequence constitutes or on which it depends.

[1] See above, paragraphs 195 and 208. Cf. also, among other passages, one in the chapter now under consideration (p. 451) [Book I, part III., sec. XIV.]--‘Ideas always represent their _objects or impressions_.’

[2] The phrase ‘immediately precedent’ would seem to convey Hume’s meaning better than his own phrase ‘precedent and contiguous.’ Contiguity _in space_ (which is what we naturally understand by ‘contiguity,’ when used absolutely) he could not have deliberately taken to be necessary to constitute the relation of cause and effect, since the impressions so related, as he elsewhere shows, may often not be in space at all.

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

318. It is this essential distinction between the sequence of feeling upon feeling for a sentient subject and the relation which to a thinking subject this sequence constitutes--a distinction not less essential than that between the conditions, through which a man passes in sleep, as they are for the sleeping subject himself, and as they are for another thinking upon them--which it is the characteristic of Hume’s doctrine of natural relation in all its forms to disguise. Only in virtue of the presence to feelings of a subject, which distinguishes itself from them, do they become related objects. Thus, with Hume’s exclusion of such a subject, with his reduction of mind and world alike to the succession of feelings, relations and ideas of relation logically disappear. But by help of the phrase ‘natural relation,’ covering, as it does, two wholly different things--the involuntary sequence of one feeling upon another, and that determination of each by the other which can only take place for a synthetic self-consciousness--he is able on the one hand to deny that the relations which form the framework of knowledge are more than sequences of feeling, and on the other to clothe them with so much of the real character of relations as qualifies them for ‘principles of union among ideas.’ Thus the mere occurrence of similar feelings is with him already that relation in the way of resemblance, which in truth only exists for a subject that can contemplate them as permanent objects. In like manner the succession of feelings, which can only constitute time for a subject that contrasts the succession with its own unity, and which, if ideas were feelings, would exclude the possibility of an idea of time, is yet with him indifferently time and the idea of time, though ideas are feelings and there is no ‘mind’ but their succession.

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

319. The fallacy of Hume’s doctrine of causation is merely an aggravated form of that which has generally passed muster in his doctrine of time. If time, because a relation between feelings, can be supposed to survive the exclusion of a thinking self and the reduction of the world and mind to a succession of feelings, the relation of cause and effect has only to be assimilated to that of time in order that its incompatibility with the desired reduction may disappear, The great obstacle to such assimilation lies in that opposition to the mere sequence of feelings which causation as ‘matter of fact’--as that in discovering which we ‘discover the real existence and relations of objects’--purports to carry with it. Why do we set aside our usual experience as delusive in contrast with the exceptional experience of the laboratory--why do we decide that an event which has seemed to happen cannot really have happened, because under the given conditions no adequate cause of it could have been operative--if the relation of cause and effect is itself merely a succession of seemings, repeated so often as to leave behind it a lively expectation of its recurrence? This question, once fairly put, cannot be answered: it can only be evaded. It is Hume’s method of evasion that we have now more particularly to notice.

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

320. In its detailed statement it is very different from the method adopted in those modern treatises of Logic which, beginning with the doctrine that facts are merely feelings in the constitution of which thought has no share, still contrive to make free use in their logical canon of the antithesis between the real and apparent. The key to this modern method is to be found in its ambiguous use of the term ‘phenomenon,’ alike for the feeling as it is felt, ‘perishing’ when it ceases to be felt, and for the feeling as it is for a thinking subject--a qualifying and qualified element in a permanent world. Only if facts were ‘phenomena’ in the former sense would the antithesis between facts and conceptions be valid; only if ‘phenomena’ are understood in the latter sense can causation be said to be a law of phenomena. So strong, however, is the charm which this ambiguous term has exercised, that to the ordinary modern logician the question above put may probably seem unmeaning. ‘The appearance,’ he will say, ‘which we set aside as delusive does not consist in any of the reports of the senses--these are always true--but in some false supposition in regard to them due to an insufficient analysis of experience, in some reference of an actual sensation to a group of supposed possibilities of sensation, called a “thing,” which are either unreal or with which it is not really connected. The correction of the false appearance by a discovery of causation is the replacement of a false supposition, as to the possibility of the antecedence or sequence of one feeling to another, by the discovery, through analysis of experience, of what feelings do actually precede and follow each other. It implies no transition from feelings to things, but only from a supposed sequence of feelings to the actual one. Science in its farthest range leaves us among appearances still. It only teaches us what really appears.’

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

321. Now the presupposition of this answer is the existence of just that necessary connexion as between appearances, just that objective order, for which, because it is not a possible ‘impression or idea,’ Hume has to substitute a blind propensity produced by habit. Those who make it, indeed, would repel the imputation of believing in any ‘necessary connexion,’ which to them represents that ‘mysterious tie’ in which they vaguely suppose ‘metaphysicians’ to believe. They would say that necessary connexion is no more than uniformity of sequence. But sequence of what? Not of feelings as the individual feels them, for then there would be no perfect uniformities, but only various degrees of approximation to uniformity, and the measure of approximation in each case would be the amount of the individual’s experience in that particular direction. The procedure of the inductive logician shows that his belief in the uniformity of a sequence is irrespective of the number of instances in which it has been experienced. A single instance in which one feeling is felt after another, if it satisfy the requirements of the ‘method of difference,’ _i.e._ if it show exactly what it is that precedes and what it is that follows in that instance, suffices to establish a uniformity of sequence, on the principle that what is fact once is fact always. Now a uniformity that can be thus established is in the proper sense necessary. Its existence is not contingent on its being felt by anyone or everyone. It does not come into being with the experiment that shows it. It is felt because it is real, not real because it is felt. It may be objected indeed that the principle of the ‘uniformity of nature,’ the principle that what is fact once is fact always, itself gradually results from the observation of facts which are feelings, and that thus the principle which enables us to dispense with the repetition of a sensible experience is itself due to such repetition. The answer is, that feelings which are conceived as facts are already conceived as constituents of a nature. The same presence of the thinking subject to, and distinction of itself from, the feelings, which renders them knowable _facts_, renders them members of a world which is one throughout its changes. In other words, the presence of facts from which the uniformity of nature, as an abstract rule, is to be inferred, is already the consciousness of that uniformity _in concreto_.

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

322. Hume himself makes a much more thorough attempt to avoid that pre-determination of feelings by the conception of a world, of things and relations, which is implied in the view of them as permanent facts. He will not, if he can help it, so openly depart from the original doctrine that thought is merely weaker sense. Such conceptions as those of the uniformity of nature and of reality, being no possible ‘impressions or ideas,’ he only professes to admit in a character wholly different from that in which they actually govern inductive philosophy. Just as by reality he understands not something to which liveliness of feeling may be an index, but simply that liveliness itself, and by an inferred or believed reality a feeling to which this liveliness has been communicated from one that already has it; so he is careful to tell us ‘that the supposition that the future resembles the past is derived entirely from habit, by which we are determined to expect for the future the same train of objects to which we have been accustomed’. [1] The supposition then _is_ this ‘determination,’ this ‘propensity,’ to expect. Any ‘idea’ derived from the propensity can only be the propensity itself at a fainter stage; and between such a propensity and the conception of ‘nature,’ whether as uniform or otherwise, there is a difference which only the most hasty reader can be liable to ignore. But if by any confusion an expectation of future feelings, determined by the remembrance of past feelings, could be made equivalent to any conception of nature, it would not be of nature as uniform. As is the ‘habit’ which determines the expectation, such must be the expectation itself; and as have been the sequences of feeling in each man’s past, such must be the habit which results from them. Now no one’s feelings have always occurred to him in the same relative order. There may be some pairs of feelings of which one has always been felt before the other and never after it, and between which there has never been an intervention of a third--although (to take Hume’s favourite instance) even the feeling of heat may sometimes precede the sight of the flame--and in these cases upon occurrence of one there will be nothing to qualify the expectation of the other. But just so far as there are exceptions in our past experience to the immediate sequence of one feeling upon another, must there be a qualification of our expectation of the future, if it be undetermined by extraneous conceptions, with reference to those particular feelings.

[1] P. 431. [Book I, part III., sec. XII.]

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

323. Thus the expectation that ‘the future will resemble the past,’ if the past means to each man (and Hume could not allow of its meaning more) merely the succession of his own feelings, must be made up of a multitude of different expectations--some few of these being of that absolute and unqualified sort which alone, it would seem, can regulate the transition that we are pleased to call ‘necessary connexion;’ the rest as various in their strength and liveliness as there are possible differences between cases where the chances are evenly balanced and where they are all on one side. From Hume’s point of view, as he himself says, ‘every past experiment,’ _i.e._ every instance in which feeling _(a)_ has been found to follow feeling _(b)_, ‘may be considered a kind of chance’. [1] As are the instances of this kind to the instances in which some other feeling has followed _(b)_, such are the chances or ‘probability’ that _(a)_ will follow _(b)_ again, and such upon the occurrence of _(b)_ will be that liveliness in the expectation of _(a)_, which alone with Hume is the reality of the connexion between them. In such an expectation, in an expectation made up of such expectations, there would be nothing to serve the purpose which the conception of the uniformity of nature actually serves in inductive science. It could never make us believe that a feeling felt before another--as when the motion of a bell is seen before the sound of it has been heard--represents the real antecedent. It could never set us upon that analysis of our experience by which we seek to get beyond sequences that are merely usual, and admit of indefinite exceptions, to such as are invariable; upon that ‘interrogation of nature’ by which, on the faith that there is a uniformity if only we could find it out, we wrest from her that confession of a law which she does not spontaneously offer. The fact that some sequences of feeling have been so uniform as to result in unqualified expectations (if it be so) could of itself afford no motive for trying to compass other expectations of a like character which do not naturally present themselves. Nor could there be anything in the appearance of an exception to a sequence, hitherto found uniform, to lead us to change our previous expectation for one which shall not be liable to such modification. The previous expectation would be so far weakened, but there is nothing in the mere weakening of our expectations that should lead to the effort to place them beyond the possibility of being weakened. Much less could the bundle of expectations come to conceive themselves as one system so as that, through the interpretation of each exception to a supposed uniformity of sequence as an instance of a real one, the changes of the parts should prove the unchangeableness of the whole.

[1] P. 433. [Book I, part III., sec. XII.]

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

324. That a doctrine which reduces the order of nature to strength of expectation, and exactly reverses the positions severally given to belief and reality in the actual procedure of science, [1] should have been ostensibly adopted by scientific men as their own--with every allowance for Hume’s literary skill and for the charm which the prospect of overcoming the separation between reason and instinct exercises over naturalists--would have been unaccountable if the doctrine had been thus nakedly put or consistently maintained. But it was not so. Hume’s sense of consistency was satisfied when expectation determined by remembrance had been put in the place of necessary connexion, as the basis of ‘inference to matters of fact.’ It does not lead him to adjust his view of the fact inferred to his view of the basis on which the inference rests. Expectation is an ‘impression of reflection,’ and if the relation of cause and effect is no more than expectation, that which seemed most strongly to resist reduction to feeling has yet been so reduced. But if the expectation is to be no more than an impression of reflection, the object expected must itself be no more than an impression of some kind or other. The expectation must be expectation of a feeling, pure and simple. Nor does Hume in so many words allow that it is otherwise, but meanwhile though the expectation itself is not openly tampered with, the remembrance that determines it is so. This is being taken to be that, which it cannot be unless ideas unborrowed from impressions are operative in and upon it. It is being regarded, not as the recurrence of a multitude of feelings with a liveliness indefinitely less than that in virtue of which they are called impressions of sense, and indefinitely greater than that in virtue of which they are called ideas of imagination, but as the recognition of a world of experience, one, real and abiding. An expectation determined by such remembrance is governed by the same ‘fictions’ of identity and continued existence which are the formative conditions of the remembrance. Expectation and remembrance, in fact, are one and the same intellectual act, one and the same reference of feelings, given in time, to an order that is not in time, distinguished according to the two faces which, its ‘matter’ being in time, it has to present severally to past and future. The remembrance is the measure of the expectation, but as the remembrance carries with it the notion of a world whose existence does not depend on its being remembered, and whose laws do not vary according to the regularity or looseness with which our ideas are associated, so too does the expectation, and only as so doing becomes the mover and regulator of ‘inference from the known to the unknown.’

[1] It is by a curious fate that Hume should have been remembered, at any rate in the ‘religious’ world, chiefly by the argument against miracles which appears in the ‘Essays’--an argument which, however irrefragable in itself, turns wholly upon that conception of nature as other than our instinctive expectations and imaginations, which has no proper place in his system (see Vol. IV. page 89). If ‘necessary connexion’ were really no more than the transition of imagination, as determined by constant association, from an idea to its usual attendant--if there were no conception of an objective order to determine belief other than the belief itself--the fact that such an event, as the revival of one four-days-dead at the command of a person, had been believed, since it would show that the imagination was at liberty to pass from the idea of the revival to that of the command (or _vice versa_) with that liveliness which constitutes reality, would show also that no necessary connexion, no law of nature in the only sense in which Hume entitles himself to speak of such, was violated by the sequence of the revival on the command. At the same time there would be nothing ‘miraculous,’ according to his definition of the miraculous as distinct from the extraordinary, in the case. Taken strictly, indeed, his doctrine implies that a belief in a miracle is a contradiction in terms. An event is not regarded as miraculous unless it is regarded as a ‘transgression of a law of nature by a particular volition of the Deity or by the interposition of some invisible agent’ (page 93, note 1); but it could not transgress a law of nature in Hume’s sense unless it were so inconsistent with the habitual association of ideas as that it could not be believed. Hume’s only consistent way of attacking miracles, then, would have been to show that the events in question, as _miraculous_, had never been believed. Having been obliged to recognize the belief in their having happened, he is open to the retort ‘ad hominem’ that according to his own showing the belief in the events constitutes their reality. Such a retort, however, would be of no avail in the theological interest, which requires not merely that the events should have happened but that they should have been _miraculous_, _i.e._ ‘transgressions of a law of nature by a particular volition of the Deity.’

325. In the passage already quoted, where Hume is speaking of the expectation in question as depending simply on habit, he yet speaks of it as an expectation ‘of the _same train of objects_ to which we have been accustomed.’ These words in effect imply that it is _not_ habit, as constituted simply by the repetition of separate sequences of feelings, that governs the expectation--in which case, as we have seen, the expectation would be made up of expectations as many and as various in strength as have been the sequences and their several degrees of regularity--but, if habit in any sense, habit as itself governed by conceptions of ‘identity and distinct continued existence,’ in virtue of which, as past experience is not an indefinite series of perishing impressions of separate men but represents one world, so all fresh experience becomes part ‘of the same train of objects;’ part of a system of which, as a whole, ‘the change lies only in the time’. [1] If now we look back to the account given of the relation of memory to belief we shall find that it is just so far as, without distinct avowal, and in violation of his principles, he makes ‘impressions of memory’ carry with them the conception of a real system, other than the consciousness of their own liveliness, that he gains a meaning for belief which makes it in any respect equivalent to the judgment, based on inference, of actual science.

[1] P. 492. [Book I, part IV., sec. II.]

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

326. Any one who has carefully read the chapters on inference and belief will have found himself frequently doubting whether he has caught the author’s meaning correctly. A clear line of thought may be traced throughout, as we have already tried to trace it [1]--one perfectly consistent with itself and leading properly to the conclusion that ‘all reasonings are nothing but the effect of custom, and that custom has no influence but by enlivening the imagination’ [2]--but its even tenour is disturbed by the exigency of showing that proven fact, after turning out to be no more than enlivened imagination, is still what common sense and physical science take it to be. According to the consistent theory, ideas of memory are needed for inference to cause or effect, simply because they are lively. Such inference is inference to a ‘real existence,’ that is to an ‘idea assented to,’ that is to a feeling having such liveliness as, not being itself one of sense or memory, it can only derive from one of sense or memory through association with it. That the inferred idea is a cause or effect and, as such, has ‘real existence,’ merely means that it has this derived liveliness or is believed; just as the reality ascribed to the impression of memory lies merely in its having this abundant liveliness from which to communicate to its ‘usual attendant.’ But while the title of an idea to be reckoned a cause or effect is thus made to depend on its having the derived liveliness which constitutes belief, [3] on the other hand we find Hume from time to time making belief depend on causation, as on a relation of objects distinct from the lively suggestion of one by the others. ‘Belief arises only from causation, and we can draw no inference from one object to another except they be connected by this relation.’ ‘The relation of cause and effect is requisite to persuade us of any real existence’. [4] In the context of these disturbing admissions we find a reconsideration of the doctrine of memory which explains them, but only throws back on that doctrine the inconsistency which they exhibit in the doctrine of belief.

[1] Above, paragraphs 289 and ff.

[2] P. 445. [Book I, part III., sec. XIII.]

[3] It may be as well here to point out the inconsistency in Hume’s use of ‘belief.’ At the end of sec. 5 (Part III.) the term is extended to ‘impressions of the senses and memory.’ We are said to believe when ‘we feel an _immediate impression_ of the senses, or a repetition of that impression in the memory. But in the following section the characteristic of belief is placed in the _derived_ liveliness of an _idea_ as distinct from the immediate liveliness of impression.

[4] Pp. 407 & 409. [Book I, part III., sec. IX.]

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

327. This reconsideration arises out of an objection to his doctrine which Hume anticipates, to the effect that since, according to it, belief is a lively idea associated ‘to a present impression,’ any suggestion of an idea by a resembling or contiguous impression should constitute belief. How is it then that ‘belief arises only from causation’? His answer, which must be quoted at length, is as follows:--‘’Tis evident that whatever is present to the memory, striking upon the mind with a vivacity which resembles an immediate impression, must become of considerable moment in all the operations of the mind and must easily distinguish itself above the mere fictions of the imagination. Of these impressions or ideas of the memory we form a kind of system, comprehending whatever we remember to have been present either to our internal perception or senses, and every particular of that system, joined to the present impressions, we are pleased to call a _reality_. But the mind stops not here. For finding that with this system of perceptions there is another connected by custom or, if you will, by the relation of cause and effect, it proceeds to the consideration of their ideas; and as it feels that ’tis in a manner necessarily determined to view these particular ideas, and that the custom or relation by which it is determined admits not of the least change, it forms them into a new system, which it likewise dignifies with the title of _realities_. The first of these systems is the object of the memory and senses; the second of the judgment. ’Tis this latter principle which peoples the world, and brings us acquainted which such existences as, by their removal in time and place, lie beyond the reach of the senses and memory’. [1]

[1] P. 408. [Book I, part III., sec. IX.]

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

328. From this it appears that ‘what we are pleased to call reality’ belongs, not merely to a ‘present impression,’ but to ‘every particular of a system joined to the present impression’ and ‘comprehending whatever we remember to have been present either to our internal perception or senses.’ This admission already amounts to an abandonment of the doctrine that reality consists in liveliness of feeling. It cannot be that every particular of the system comprehending all remembered facts, which is joined with the present impression, can have the vivacity of that impression either along with it or by successive communication. We can only feel one thing at a time, and by the time the vivacity had spread far from the present impression along the particulars of the system, it must have declined from that indefinite degree which marks an impression of sense. It is not, then, the derivation of vivacity from the present impression, to which it is joined, that renders the ‘remembered system’ real; and what other vivacity can it be? It may be said indeed that each particular of the system had once the required vivacity, was once a present impression; but if in ceasing to be so, it did not cease to be real--if, on the contrary, it could not become a ‘particular of the system,’ counted real, without becoming other than the ‘perishing existence’ which an impression is--it is clear that there is a reality which lively feeling does not constitute and which involves the ‘fiction’ of an existence continued in the absence, not only of lively feeling, but of all feelings whatsoever. So soon, in short, as reality is ascribed to a system, which cannot be an ‘impression’ and of which consequently there cannot be an ‘idea,’ the first principle of Hume’s speculation is abandoned. The truth is implicitly recognized that the reality of an individual object consists in that system of its relations which only exists for a conceiving, as distinct from a feeling, subject, even as the unreal has no meaning except as a confused or inadequate conception of such relations; and that thus the ‘present impression’ is neither real nor unreal in itself, but may be equally one or the other according as the relations, under which it is conceived by the subject of it, correspond to those by which it is determined for a perfect intelligence. [1]

[1] See above, paragraphs 184 & 183.

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

329. A clear recognition of this truth can alone explain the nature of belief as a result of inference from the known to the unknown, which is, at the same time, inference to a matter of fact. The popular notion, of course, is that certain facts are given by feeling without inference and then other facts inferred from them. But what is ‘fact’ taken to mean? If a feeling, then an inferred fact is a contradiction, for it is an unfelt feeling. If (as should be the case) it is taken to mean the relation of a feeling to something, then it already involves inference--the interpretation of the feeling by means of the conception of a universal, self or world, brought to it--an inference which is all inference _in posse_, for it implies that a universe of relations is there, which I must know if I would know the full reality of the individual object: so that no fact can be even partially known without compelling an inference to the unknown, nor can there be any inference to the unknown without modification of what already purports to be known. Hume, trying to carry out the equivalence of fact and feeling, and having clearer sight than his masters, finds himself in the presence of this difficulty about inference. Unless the inferred object is other than one of sense (outer or inner) or of memory, there is no reasoning, but only perception; [1] but if it is other, how can it be real or even an object of consciousness at all, since consciousness is only of impressions, stronger or fainter? The only consistent way out of the difficulty, as we have seen, is to explain inference as the expectation of the recurrence of a feeling felt before, through which the unknown becomes known merely in the sense that from the repetition of the recurrence the expectation has come to amount to the fullest assurance. But according to this explanation the difference between the inferences of the savage and those of the man of science will lie, not in the objects inferred, but in the strength of the expectation that constitutes the inference. Meanwhile, if a semblance of explanation has been given for the inference from cause to effect, that from effect to cause remains quite in the dark. How can there be inference from a given feeling to that felt immediately before it?

[1] Pp. 376 & 388. [Book I, part III., secs. II. and VI.]

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

330. From the avowal of such paradoxical results, Hume only saved himself by reverting, as in the passage before us, to the popular view--to the distinction between two ‘systems of reality,’ one perceived, the other inferred; one ‘the object of the senses and memory,’ the other ‘of the judgment.’ He sees that if the educated man erased from his knowledge upon us by of the world all ‘facts’ but those for which he has ‘the evidence of his senses and memory,’ his world would be unpeopled; but he has not the key to the true identity between the two systems. Not recognizing the inference already involved in a fact of sense or memory, he does not see that it is only a further articulation of this inference which gives the fact of judgment; that as the simplest fact for which we have the ‘evidence of sense’ is already not a feeling but an explanation of a feeling, which connects it by relations, that are not feelings, with an unfelt universe, so inferred causes and effects are explanations of these explanations, by which they are connected as mutually determinant in the one world whose presence the simplest fact, the most primary explanation of feeling, supposes no less than the most complete. Not seeing this, what is he to make of the system of merely inferred realities? He will represent the relation of cause and effect, which connects it with the ‘system of memory,’ as a habit derived from the constant _de facto_ sequence of this or that ‘inferred’ upon this or that remembered idea. The mind, ‘feeling’ the unchangeableness of this habit, regards the idea, which in virtue of it follows upon the impression of memory, as equally real with that impression. In this he finds an answer to the two questions which he himself raises: _(a)_ ‘Why is it that we draw no inference from one object to another, except they be connected by the relation of cause and effect;’ or (which is the same, since inference to an object implies the ascription of reality to it), ‘Why is this relation requisite to persuade us of any real existence?’ and _(b)_, ‘How is it that the relations of resemblance and contiguity have not the same effect?’ The answer to the first is, that we do not ascribe reality to an idea recalled by an impression, unless we find that, owing to its customary sequence upon the impression, we cannot help passing from the one to the other. The answer to the second corresponds. The contiguity of an idea to an impression, if it has been repeated often enough and without any ‘arbitrary’ action on our part, is the relation of cause and effect, and thus does ‘persuade us of real existence.’ A ‘feigned’ contiguity, on the other hand, because we are conscious that it is ‘of our mere good-will and pleasure’ that we give the idea that relation to the impression, can produce no belief. ‘There is no reason why, upon the return of the same impression, we should be determined to place the same object in the same relation to it’. [1] In like manner we must suppose (though this is not so clearly stated) that when an impression--such as the sight of a picture--calls up a resembling idea (that of the man depicted) with much vivacity, it does not ‘persuade us of his real existence’ because we are conscious that it is by the ‘mere good-will and pleasure’ of some one that the likeness has been produced.

[1] P. 409. [Book I, part III., sec. IX.]

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

331. Now this account has the fault of being inconsistent with Hume’s primary doctrine, inasmuch as it makes the real an object of thought in distinction from feeling, without the merit of explaining the extension of knowledge beyond the objects of sense and memory. It turns upon a conception of the real, as the unchangeable, which the succession of feelings, in endless variety, neither is nor could suggest. It implies that not in themselves, but as representing such an unchangeable, are the feelings which ‘return on us whether we will or no,’ regarded as real. The peculiar sequence of one idea on another, which is supposed to constitute the relation of cause and effect, is not, according to this description of it, a sequence of feelings simply; it is a sequence reflected on, found to be unchangeable, and thus to entitle the sequent idea to the prerogative of reality previously awarded (but only by the admission as real of the ‘fiction’ of distinct continued existence) to the system of memory. But while the identification of the real with feeling is thus in effect abandoned, in saving the appearance of retaining it, Hume makes his explanation of the ‘system of judgment’ futile for its purpose. He saves the appearance by intimating that the relation of cause and effect, by which the inferred idea is connected with the idea of memory and derives reality from it, is only the repeated sequence of the one idea upon the other, of the less lively feelings upon the more lively, or a habit that results from such repetition. But if the sequence of the inferred idea upon the other must have been so often repeated in order to the existence of the relation which renders the inference possible, the inferred idea can be no new one, but must itself be an idea of memory, and the question, how any one’s knowledge comes to extend beyond the range of his memory, remains unanswered.

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

332. What Hume himself seems to mean us to understand is, that the inferred idea is one of imagination, as distinct from memory; and that the characteristic of the relation of cause and effect is that through it ideas of imagination acquire the reality that would otherwise be confined to impressions of sense and memory. But, according to him, ideas of imagination only differ from those of memory in respect of their less liveliness, and of the freedom with which we can combine ideas in imagination that have not been given together as impressions. [1] Now the latter difference is in this case out of the question. A compound idea of imagination, in which simple ideas are put together that have never been felt together, can clearly never be connected with an impression of sense or memory by a relation derived from constant experience of the sequence of one upon the other, and specially opposed to the creations of ‘caprice’. [2] We are left, then, to the supposition that the inferred idea, as idea of imagination, is one originally given as an impression of sense, but of which the liveliness has faded and requires to be revived by association in the way of cause and effect with one that has retained the liveliness proper to an idea of memory. Then the question recurs, how the restoration of its liveliness by association with an impression, on which it must have been constantly sequent in order that the association may be possible, is compatible with the fact that its liveliness has faded. And however this question may be dealt with, if the relation of cause and effect is merely custom, the extension of knowledge by means of it remains unaccounted for; the breach between the expectation of the recurrence of familiar feelings and inductive science remains unfilled; Locke’s ‘suspicion’ that ‘a science of nature is impossible,’ instead of being overcome, is elaborated into a system.

[1] Part I., sec. 3; cf. note on p. 416 [Book I, part III., sec. IX.].

[2] P. 409. [Book I, part III., sec. IX.]

Inference then can give no new knowledge.

333. Thus inference, according to Hume’s account of it as originating in habit, suffers from a weakness quite as fatal as that which he supposes to attach to it if accounted for as the work of reason. ‘The work of reason’ to a follower of Locke meant either the mediate perception of likeness between ideas, which the discovery of cause or effect cannot be; or else syllogism, of which Locke had shown once for all that it could yield no ‘instructive propositions.’ But if an idea arrived at by that process could be neither new nor real--not new, because we must have been familiar with it before we put it into the compound idea from which we ‘deduce’ it; not real, because it has not the liveliness either of sensation or of memory--the idea inferred according to Hume’s process, however real with the reality of liveliness, is certainly not new. ‘If this means’ (the modern logician may perhaps reply), ‘that according to Hume no new phenomenon can be given by inference, he was quite right in thinking so. If the object of inference were a separate phenomenon, it would be quite true that it must have been repeatedly perceived before it could be inferred, and that thus inference would be nugatory. But inference is in fact not to such an object, but to a uniform relation of certain phenomena in the way of co-existence and sequence; and what Hume may be presumed to mean is not that every such relation must have been perceived before it can be inferred, much less that it must have been perceived so constantly that an appearance of the one phenomenon causes instinctive expectation of the other, but _(a)_ that the phenomena themselves must have been given by immediate perception, and _(b)_ that the conception of a law of causation, in virtue of which a uniformity of relation between them is inferred from a single instance of it, is itself the result of an “inductio per enumerationem simplicem,” of the accumulated experience of generations that the same sequents follow the same antecedents.’

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

334. At the point which our discussion has reached, few words should be wanted to show that thus to interpret Hume is to read into him an essentially alien theory, which has doubtless grown out of his, but only by a process of adaptation which it needs a principle the opposite of his to justify. Hume, according to his own profession, knows of no objects but impressions and ideas--feelings stronger or more faint--of no reality which it needs thought, as distinct from feeling, to constitute. But a uniform relation between phenomena is neither impression nor idea, and can only exist for thought. He could not therefore admit inference to such relation as to a real existence, without a double contradiction, nor does he ever explicitly do so. He never allows that inference is other than a transition to a certain sort of feeling, or that it is other than the work of imagination, the weakened sense, as enlivened by custom to a degree that puts it _almost_ on a level with sense; which implies that in every case of inference the inferred object is _not_ a uniform relation--for how can there be an image of uniform relation?--and that it _is_ something which has been repeatedly and without exception perceived to follow another before it can be inferred. Even when in violation of his principle he has admitted a ‘system of memory’--a system of things which have been felt, but which are not feelings, stronger or fainter, and which are what they are only through relation--he still in effect, as we have seen, makes the ‘system of judgment,’ which he speaks of as inferred from it, only the double of it. To suppose that, on the strength of a general inference, itself the result of habit, in regard to the uniformity of nature, particular inferences may be made which shall be other than repetitions of a sequence already habitually repeated, is, if there can be degrees of contradiction, even more incompatible with Hume’s principles than to suppose such inferences without it. If a uniformity of relation between particular phenomena is neither impression nor idea, even less so is the system of all relations.

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

335. There is language, however, in the chapters on ‘Probability of Chances and of Causes,’ which at first sight might seem to warrant the ascription of such a supposition to Hume. According to the distinction which he inherited from Locke all inference to or from causes or effects, since it does not consist in any comparison of the related ideas, should be merely probable. And as such he often speaks of it. His originality lies in his effort to explain what Locke had named; in his treating that ‘something not joined on both sides to, and so not showing the agreement or disagreement of, the ideas under consideration’ which yet ‘makes me believe’, [1] definitely as Habit. But ‘in common discourse,’ as he remarks, ‘we readily affirm that many arguments from causation exceed probability’; [2] the explanation being that in these cases the habit which determines the transition from impression to idea is ‘full and perfect.’ There has been enough past experience of the immediate sequence of the one ‘perception’ on the other to form the habit, and there has been no exception to it. In these cases the ‘assurance,’ though distinct from knowledge, may be fitly styled ‘proof,’ the term ‘probability’ being confined to those in which the assurance is not complete. Hume thus comes to use ‘probability’ as equivalent to incompleteness of assurance, and in this sense speaks of it as ‘derived either from imperfect experience, or from contrary causes, or from analogy’. [3] It is derived from analogy when the present impression, which is needed to give vivacity to the ‘related idea,’ is not perfectly like the impressions with which the idea has been previously found united; ‘from contrary causes,’ when there have been exceptions to the immediate sequence or antecedence of the one perception to the other; ‘from imperfect experience’ when, though there have been no exceptions, there has not been enough experience of the sequence to form a ‘full and perfect habit of transition.’ Of this last ‘species of probability,’ Hume says that it is a kind which, ‘though it naturally takes place before any entire proof can exist, yet no one who is arrived at the age of maturity can any longer be acquainted with. ’Tis true, nothing is more common than for people of the most advanced knowledge to have attained only an imperfect experience of many particular events; which naturally produces only an imperfect habit and transition; but then we must consider that the mind, having formed another observation concerning the connexion of causes and effects, gives new force to its reasoning from that observation; and by means of it can build an argument on one single experiment, when duly prepared and examined. What we have found once to follow from any object we conclude will for ever follow from it; and if this maxim be not always built upon as certain, ’tis not for want of a sufficient number of experiments, but because we frequently meet with instances to the contrary’--which give rise to the other sort of weakened assurance or probability, that from ‘contrary causes’. [4]

[1] Locke, 4, 15, 3.

[2] P. 423. [Book I, part III., sec. XI.]

[3] P. 439. [Book I, part III., sec. XIII.]

[4] Pp. 429 & 430. [Book I, part III., sec. XII.]

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

336. There is a great difference between the meaning which the above passage conveys when read in the light of the accepted logic of science, and that which it conveys when interpreted consistently with the theory in the statement of which it occurs. Whether Hume, in writing as he does of that conclusion from a single experiment, which our observation concerning the connexion of cause and effect enables us to draw, understood himself to be expressing his own theory or merely using the received language provisionally, one cannot be sure; but it is certain that such language can only be justified by those ‘maxims of philosophers’ which it is the purpose or effect of his doctrine to explain away--in particular the maxims that ‘the connexion between all causes and effects is equally necessary and that its seeming uncertainty in some instances proceeds from the secret opposition of contrary causes;’ and that ‘what the vulgar call chance is but a concealed cause’. [1] These maxims represent the notion that the law of causation is objective and universal; that all seeming limitations to it, all ‘probable and contingent matter,’ are the reflections of our ignorance, and exist merely _ex parte nostrâ_. In other words, they represent the notion of that ‘continued existence distinct from our perceptions,’ which with Hume is a phrase generated by ‘propensities to feign.’ Yet he does not profess to reject them; nay, he handles them as if they were his own, but after a very little of his manipulation they are so ‘translated’ that they would not know themselves. Because philosophers ‘allow that what the vulgar call chance is nothing but a concealed cause,’ ‘probability of causes’ and ‘probability of chances’ may be taken as equivalent. But chance, as ‘merely negation of a cause,’ has been previously explained, on the supposition that causation means a ‘perfect habit of imagination,’ to be the absence of such habit--the state in which imagination is perfectly indifferent in regard to the transition from a given impression to an idea, because the transition has not been repeated often enough to form even the beginning of a habit. Such being mere chance, ‘probability of chances’ means a state of imagination between the perfect indifference and that perfect habit of transition, which is ‘necessary connexion.’ ‘Probability of causes’ is the same thing. Its strength or weakness depends simply on the proportion between the number of experiments (‘each experiment being a kind of chance’) in which A has been found to immediately follow B, and the number of those in which it has not. [2] Mere chance, probability, and causation then are equally states of imagination. The ‘equal necessity of the connexion between all causes and effects’ means not that any ‘law of causation pervades the universe,’ but that, unless the habit of transition between any feelings is ‘full and perfect,’ we do not speak of these feelings as related in the way of cause and effect.

[1] Pp. 429 & 430. [Book I, part III., sec. XII.]

[2] Pp. 424-428, 432-434. [Book I, part III., secs. XI. and XII.]

Laws of nature are unqualified habits of expectation.

337. Interpreted consistently with this doctrine, the passage quoted in the last paragraph but one can only mean that, when a man has arrived at maturity, his experience of the sequence of feelings cannot fail in quantity. He must have had experience _enough_ to form not only a perfect habit of transition from any impression to the idea of its usual attendant, but a habit which would act upon us even in the case of novel events, and lead us after a single experiment or a sequence confidently to expect its recurrence, if only the experience had been _uniform_. It is because it has not been so, that in many cases the habit of transition is still imperfect, and the sequence of A on B not ‘proven,’ but ‘probable.’ The probability then which affects the imagination of the matured man is of the sort that arises from ‘contrary causes,’ as distinct from ‘imperfect experience.’ This is all that the passage in question can fairly mean. Such ‘probability’ cannot become ‘proof,’ or the ‘imperfect habit,’ perfect, by _discovery_ of any necessary connexion or law of causation, for the perfect habit of transition, the imagination enlivened to the maximum by custom, _is_ the law of causation. The formation of the habit constitutes the law: to discover it would be to discover what does not yet exist. The incompleteness of the habit in certain directions, the limitation of our assurance to certain sequences as distinct from others, must be equally a limitation to the universality of the law. It is impossible then that on the faith of the universality of the law we should seek to extend the range of that assurance which is identical with it. Our ‘observation concerning the connexion of causes and effects’ merely means the sum of our assured expectations, founded on habit, at any given time, and that on the strength of this we should ‘prepare an experiment,’ with a view to assuring ourselves of a universal sequence from a single instance, is as unaccountable as that, given the instance, the assurance should follow.

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

338. The case then stands thus. In order to make the required distinction between inference to real existence and the lively suggestion of an idea, Hume has to graft on his theory the alien notion of an objective system, an order of nature, represented by ideas of memory, and on the strength of such a notion to interpret a transition from these ideas to others, because we cannot help making it, as an objective necessity. Of such alien notion and interpretation he avails himself in his definition (understood as he means it to be understood) of cause as a ‘natural relation’. [1] But he had not the boldness of his later disciples. Though he could be inconsistent so far, he could not be inconsistent far enough to make his theory of inference fit the practice of natural philosophers. Bound by his doctrine of ideas as copied from impressions, he can give no account of inferred ideas that shall explain the extension of knowledge beyond the expectation that we shall feel again what we have felt already. It was not till another theory of experience was forthcoming than that given by the philosophers who were most fond of declaring their devotion to it, that the procedure of science could be justified. The old philosophy, we are often truly told, had been barren for want of contact with fact. It sought truth by a process which really consisted in evolving the ‘connotation’ of general names. The new birth came when the mind had learnt to leave the idols of the tribe and cave, and to cleave solely to experience. If the old philosophy, however, was superseded by science, science itself required a new philosophy to answer the question. What constitutes experience? It was in effect to answer this question that Locke and Hume wrote, and it is the condemnation of their doctrine that, according to it, experience is not a possible parent of science. It is not those, we know, who cry ‘Lord, Lord!’ the loudest, that enter into the kingdom of heaven, nor does the strongest assertion of our dependence on experience imply a true insight into its nature. Hume has found acceptance with men of science as the great exponent of the doctrine that there can be no new knowledge without new experience. It has not been noticed that with him such ‘new experience’ could only mean a further repetition of familiar feelings, and that if it means more to his followers, it is only because they have been less faithful than he was to that antithesis between thought and reality which they are not less loud in asserting.

[1] See above, paragraph 317.

His attitude towards doctrine of thinking substance.

339. From the point that our enquiry has reached, we can anticipate the line which Hume could not but take in regard to Self and God. His scepticism lay ready to his hand in the incompatibility between the principles of Locke and that doctrine of ‘thinking substance,’ which Locke and Berkeley alike maintained. If the reader will revert to the previous part of this introduction, in which that doctrine was discussed, [1] he will find it equally a commentary upon those sections of the ‘Treatise on Human Nature’ which deal with ‘immateriality of the soul’ and ‘personal identity.’ Substance, we saw, alike as ‘extended’ and as ‘thinking,’ was a ‘creation of the mind,’ yet real; something of which there was an ‘idea,’ but of which nothing could be said but that it was not an ‘idea.’ The ‘thinking’ substance, moreover, was at a special disadvantage in contrast with the ‘extended,’ because, in the first place, it could not, like body, be represented as given to consciousness in the feeling of solidity, and secondly it was not wanted. It was a mere double of the extended substance to which, as the ‘something wherein they do subsist and from which they do result’ our ideas had already been referred. Having no conception, then, of Spirit or Self before him but that of the thinking substance, of which Berkeley had confessed that it was not a possible idea or object of an idea, Hume had only to apply the method, by which Berkeley himself had disposed of extended substance, to get rid of Spirit likewise. This could be done in a sentence, [2] but having done it, Hume is at further pains to show that immateriality, simplicity, and identity cannot be ascribed to the soul; as if there were a soul left to which anything could be ascribed.

[1] Above, paragraphs 127-135, 144-146, & 192.

[2] P. 517. [Book I, part IV., sec. V.]

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

340. There were two ways of conceiving the soul as immaterial, of which Hume was cognizant. One, current among the theologians and ordinary Cartesians and adopted by Locke, distinguishing extension and thought as severally divisible and indivisible, supposed separate substances--matter and the soul--to which these attributes, incapable of ‘local conjunction,’ severally belonged. The other, Berkeley’s, having ostensibly reduced extended matter to a succession of feelings, took the exclusion of all ‘matter’ to which thought could be ‘joined’ as a proof that the soul was immaterial. Hume, with cool ingenuity, turns each doctrine to account against the other. From Berkeley he accepts the reduction of sensible things to sensations. Our feelings do not represent extended objects other than themselves; but we cannot admit this without acknowledging the consequence, as Berkeley himself implicitly did, [1] that certain of our impressions--those of sight and touch--are themselves extended. What then becomes of the doctrine, that the soul must be immaterial because thought is not extended, and cannot be joined to what is so? Thought means the succession of impressions. Of these some, though the smaller number, are actually extended; and those that are not so are united to those that are by the ‘natural relations’ of resemblance and of contiguity in time of appearance, and by the consequent relation of cause and effect. [2] The relation of local conjunction, it is true, can only obtain between impressions which are alike extended. The ascription of it to such as are unextended arises from the ‘propensity in human nature, when objects are united by any relation, to add some new relation in order to complete the union’. [3] This admission, however, can yield no triumph to those who hold that thought can only be joined to a ‘simple and indivisible substance.’ If the existence of unextended impressions requires the supposition of a thinking substance ‘simple and indivisible,’ the existence of extended ones must equally imply a thinking substance that has all the properties of extended objects. If it is absurd to suppose that perceptions which are unextended can belong to a substance which is extended, it is equally absurd to suppose that perceptions which are extended can belong to a substance that is not so. Thus Berkeley’s criticism has indeed prevailed against the vulgar notion of a material substance as opposed to a thinking one, but meanwhile he is himself ‘hoist with his own petard.’ If that thinking substance, the survival of which was the condition of his theory serving its theological purpose, [4] is to survive at all, it can only be as equivalent to Spinoza’s substance, in which ‘both matter and thought were supposed to inhere.’ The universe of our experience--‘the sun, moon, and stars; the earth, seas, plants, animals, men, ships, houses, and other productions, either of art or nature’--is the same universe when it is called ‘the universe of objects or of body,’ and when it is called ‘the universe of thought, or of impressions and ideas;’ but to hold, according to Spinoza’s ‘hideous hypothesis,’ that ‘the universe of objects or of body’ inheres in one simple uncompounded substance, is to rouse ‘a hundred voices of scorn and detestation;’ while the same hypothesis in regard to the ‘universe of impressions and ideas’ is treated ‘with applause and veneration.’ It was to save God and Immortality that the ‘great philosopher,’ who had found the true way out of the scholastic absurdity of abstract ideas, [5] had yet clung to the ‘unintelligible chimaera’ of thinking substance; and after all, in doing so, he fell into a ‘true atheism,’ indistinguishable from that which had rendered the unbelieving Jew ‘so universally infamous’. [6]

[1] See above, par. 177.

[2] Pp. 520-521. [Book I, part IV., sec. V.]

[3] P. 521. [Book I, part IV., sec. V.]

[4] See page 325. [Book I, part I., sec. VII.]

[5] See above, paragraphs 191 and foll.

[6] Pp. 523-526. [Book I, part IV., sec. V.]

Causality of spirit treated in the same way.

341. The supposition of spiritual substance being thus at once absurd, and of a tendency the very opposite of the purpose it was meant to serve, can anything better be said for the supposition of a spiritual cause? It was to the representation of spirit as cause rather than as substance, it will be remembered, that both Locke and Berkeley trusted for the establishment of a Theism which should not be Pantheism. [1] Locke, in his demonstration of the being of God, trusted for proof of a first cause to the inference from that which begins to exist to something having power to produce it, and to the principle of necessary connexion--connexion in the way of agreement of ideas--between cause and effect for proof that this first cause must be immaterial, even as its effect, viz. our thought, is. Hume’s doctrine of causation, of course, renders both sides of the demonstration unmeaning. Inference being only the suggestion by a feeling of the image of its ‘usual attendant,’ there can be no inference to that which is not a possible image of an impression. Nor, since causation merely means the constant conjunction of impressions, and there is no such contrariety between the impression we call ‘motion of matter’ and that we call ‘thought,’ anymore than between any other impressions, [2] as is incompatible with their constant conjunction, is there any reason why we should set aside the hourly experience, which tells us that bodily motions are the cause of thoughts and sentiments. If, however, there were that necessary connexion between effect and cause, by which Locke sought to show the spirituality of the first cause, it would really go to show just the reverse of infinite power in such cause. It is from our impressions and ideas that we are supposed to infer this cause; but in these--as Berkeley had shown, and shown as his way of proving the existence of God--there is no efficacy whatever. They are ‘inert.’ If then the cause must agree with the effect, the Supreme Being, as the cause of our impressions and ideas, must be ‘inert’ likewise. If, on the other hand, with Berkeley we cling to the notion that there must be efficient power somewhere, and having excluded it from the relation of ideas to each other or of matter to ideas, find it in the direct relation of God to ideas, we fall ‘into the grossest impieties;’ for it will follow that God ‘is the author of all our volitions and impressions.’ [3]

[1] See above, §§ 147, 171, 193.

[2] There is no contrariety, according to Hume, except between existence and non-existence (p. 323) [Book I, part I., sec. V.] and as all impressions and ideas equally exist (p. 394) [Book I, part III., sec. VII.], there can be no contrariety between any of them. He does indeed in certain leading passages allow himself to speak of contrariety between ideas (_e.g._ pp. 494 and 535 [Book I, part IV., secs. II. and VI.]), which is incidental evidence that the ideas there treated of are not so, according to his account of ideas, at all.

[3] Pp. 529-531 [Book I, part IV., sec. V.], a commentary on the argument here given has been in effect supplied in paragraphs 148-152, and 194.

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

342. Against the doctrine of a real ‘identity of the self or person’ Hume had merely to exhibit the contradictions which Locke’s own statement of it involves. [1] To have transferred this identity definitely from ‘matter’ to consciousness was in itself a great merit, but, so transferred, in the absence of any other theory of consciousness than Locke’s, it only becomes more obviously a fiction. If there is nothing real but the succession of feelings, identity of body, it is true, disappears as inevitably as identity of mind; and so we have already found it to do in Hume. [2] But whereas the notion of a unity of body throughout the succession of perceptions only becomes contradictory through the medium of a reduction of body to a succession of perceptions, the identity of a mind, which has been already defined as a succession of perceptions, is a contradiction in terms. There can be ‘properly no simplicity in it at one time, nor identity at different; it is a kind of theatre where several perceptions successively make their appearance.’ But this comparison must not mislead us. ‘They are the successive perceptions only, that constitute the mind; nor have we the most distant notion of the place where these scenes are represented, or of the materials of which it is composed.’ The problem for Hume then in regard to personal, as it had been in regard to bodily, identity is to account for that ‘natural propension to imagine’ it which language implies.

[1] See above, §§ 134 and foll.

[2] See above, §§ 306 and foll.

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

343. The method of explanation in each case is the same. He starts with two suppositions, to neither of which he is logically entitled. One is that we have a ‘distinct idea of identity or sameness,’ _i.e._ of an object that remains invariable and uninterrupted through a supposed variation of time’--a supposition which, as we have seen, upon his principles must mean that a feeling, which is one in a succession of feelings, is yet all the successive feelings at once. The other is that we have an idea ‘of several different objects existing in succession, and connected together by a close’ (natural) ‘relation’--which in like manner implies that a feeling, which is one among a succession of feelings, is at the same time a consciousness of these feelings as successive and under that qualification by mutual relation which implies their equal presence to it. These two ideas, which in truth are ‘distinct and even contrary’ [1] we yet come to confuse with each other, because ‘that action of the imagination, by which we consider the uninterrupted and invisible object, and that by which we reflect on the succession of related objects, are almost the same to the feeling.’ Thus, though what we call our mind is really a ‘succession of related objects,’ we have a strong propensity to mistake it for an ‘invariable and uninterrupted object.’ To this propensity we at last so far yield as to assert our successive perceptions to be in effect the same, however interrupted and variable; and then, by way of ‘justifying to ourselves this absurdity, feign the continued existence of the perceptions of our senses, to remove the interruption; and run into the notion of a _soul_ and _self_, and _substance_, to disguise the variation’. [2]

[1] See note to § 341.

[2] Pp. 535-536. [Book I, part IV., sec. VI.].

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

344. It will be seen that the theory, which we have just summarised, would merely be a briefer version of that given in the section on ‘Scepticism with regard to the Senses,’ if in the sentence, which states its conclusion, for ‘the notion of a soul and self and substance’ were written ‘the notion of a double existence of perceptions and objects’. [1] To a reader who has not thoroughly entered into the fusion of being and feeling, which belongs to the ‘new way of ideas,’ it may seem strange that one and the same process of so-called confusion has to account for such apparently disparate results, as the notion of a permanently identical self and that of the distinct existence of body. If he bears in mind, however, that with Hume the universe of our experience is the same when it is called ‘the universe of objects or of body’ and when it is called the ‘universe of thought or my impressions and ideas’, [2] he will see that on the score of consistency Hume is to be blamed, not for applying the same method to account for the fictions of material and spiritual identity, but for allowing himself, in his preference for physical, as against theological, pretension, to write as if the supposition of spiritual were really distinct from that of material identity, and might be more contemptuously disposed of. The original ‘mistake,’ out of which according to him the two fictitious suppositions arise, is one and the same; and though it is a ‘mistake’ without which, as we have found [3] from Hume’s own admissions, we could not speak even in singular propositions of the most ordinary ‘objects of sense’--this pen, this table, this chair--it is yet one that on his principles is logically impossible, since it consists in a confusion between ideas that we cannot have. Of this original ‘mistake’ the fictions of body and of its ‘continued and distinct existence’ are but altered expressions. They represent in truth the same logical category of substance and relation. And of the Self according to Locke’s notion of it [4] (which was the only one that Hume had in view), as a ‘thinking thing’ within each man among a multitude of other thinking things, the same would have to be said. But in order to account for the ‘mistake,’ of which the suppositions of thinking and material substance are the correlative expressions, and which it is the net result of Hume’s speculation to exhibit at once as necessary and as impossible, we have found another notion of the self forced upon us--not as a double of body, but as the source of that ‘familiar theory’ which body in truth is, and without which there would be no universe of objects, whether ‘bodies’ or ‘impressions and ideas,’ at all.

[1] Above, §§ 306-310.

[2] Above, § 340.

[3] Above, §§ 303 & 304.

[4] Above, §§ 129-132.

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

345. Thus the more strongly Hume insists that ‘the identity which we ascribe to the mind of man is only a fictitious one’, [1] the more completely does his doctrine refute itself. If he had really succeeded in reducing those ‘invented’ relations, which Locke had implicitly recognised as the framework of the universe, to what he calls ‘natural’ ones--to mere sequences of feeling--the case would have been different. With the disappearance of the conception of the world as a system of related elements, the necessity of a thinking subject, without whose presence to feelings they could not become such elements, would have disappeared likewise. But he cannot so reduce them. In all his attempts to do so we find that the relation, which has to be explained away, is pre-supposed under some other expression, and that it is ‘fictitious’ not in the sense which Hume’s theory requires--the sense, namely, that there is no such thing either really or in imagination, either as impression or idea--but in the sense that it would not exist if we did not think about our feelings. Thus, whereas identity ought for Hume’s purpose to be either a ‘natural relation,’ or a propensity arising from such relation, or nothing, we find that according to his account, though neither natural relation nor propensity, it yet exists both as idea and as reality. He saves appearances indeed by saying [2] that natural relations of ideas ‘produce it,’ but they do so, according to his detailed account of the matter, in the sense that, the idea of an identical object being given, we mistake our successive and resembling feelings for such an object. In other words, the existence of numerically identical things is a ‘fiction,’ not as if there were no such things, but because it implies a certain operation of thought upon our feelings, a certain interpretation of impressions under direction of an idea not derived from impressions. By a like equivocal use of ‘fiction’ Hume covers the admission of real identity in its more complex forms--the identity of a mass, whose parts undergo perpetual change of distribution; of a body whose form survives not merely the redistribution of its materials, but the substitution of others; of animals and vegetables, in which nothing but the ‘common end’ of the changing members remains the same. The reality of such identity of mass, of form, of organism, he quietly takes for granted. [3] He calls it ‘fictitious’ indeed, but only either in the sense above given or in the sense that it is mistaken for mere numerical identity.

[1] P. 540. [Book I, part IV., sec. VI.]

[2] P. 543 [Book I, part IV., sec. VI.]. ‘Identity depends on the relations of ideas; and these relations produce identity by means of that easy transition they occasion.’ Strictly it should be ‘that easy transition in which they consist;’ since, according to Hume, the ‘easiness of transition’ is not an effect of natural relation, but constitutes it. Cf. pp. 322 & 497 [Book I, part I., sec. V. and part IV., sec. II.], and above, § 318.

[3] Pp. 536-538. [Book I, part IV., sec. VI.]

346. After he has thus admitted, as constituents of the ‘universe of objects,’ a whole hierarchy of ideas of which the simplest must vanish before the demand to ‘point out the impression from which it is derived,’ we are the less surprised to find him pronouncing in conclusion ‘that the true idea of the human mind is to consider it as a system of different perceptions or different existences, which are linked together by the relation of cause and effect, and mutually produce, destroy, influence and modify each other’. [1] A better definition than this, as a _definition of nature_, or one more charged with ‘fictions of thought,’ could scarcely be desired. If the idea of such a system is a true idea at all, which we are only wrong in confusing with mere numerical identity, we need be the less concerned that it should be adduced as the true idea not of nature but of the ‘human mind.’ Having learnt, through the discipline which Hume himself furnishes, that the recognition of a system of nature logically carries with it that of a self-conscious subject, in relation to which alone ‘different perceptions’ become a system of nature, we know that we cannot naturalise the ‘human mind’ without presupposing that which is neither nature nor natural, though apart from it nature would not be--that of which the designation as ‘mind,’ as ‘human,’ as ‘personal,’ is of secondary importance, but which is eternal, self-determined, and thinks.

[1] P. 541. [Book I, part IV., sec. VI.]

T.H. Green

GENERAL INTRODUCTION TO VOL. II.

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

1. In his speculation on morals, no less than on knowledge, Hume follows the lines laid down by Locke. With each there is a precise correspondence between the doctrine of nature and the doctrine of the good. Each gives an account of reason consistent at least in this that, as it allows reason no place in the constitution of real objects, so it allows it none in the constitution of objects that determine desire and, through it, the will. With each, consequently, the ‘moral faculty,’ whether regarded as the source of the judgments ‘ought and ought not,’ or of acts to which these judgments are appropriate, can only be a certain faculty of feeling, a particular susceptibility of pleasure and pain. The originality of Hume lies in his systematic effort to account for those objects, apparently other than pleasure and pain, which determine desire, and which Locke had taken for granted without troubling himself about their adjustment to his theory, as resulting from the modification of primary feelings by ‘associated ideas.’ ‘Natural relation,’ the close and uniform sequence of certain impressions and ideas upon each other, is the solvent by which in the moral world, as in the world of knowledge, he disposes of those ostensibly necessary ideas that seem to regulate impressions without being copied from them; and in regard to the one application of it as much as to the other, the question is whether the efficiency of the solvent does not depend on its secretly including the very ideas of which it seems to get rid.

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

2. The place held by the ‘Essay concerning Human Understanding,’ as a sort of philosopher’s Bible in the last century, is strikingly illustrated by the effect of doctrines that only appear in it incidentally. It does not profess to be ethical treatise at all, yet the moral psychology contained in the chapter ‘of Power’ (II. 21), and the account of moral good and evil contained In the chapter ‘of other Relations’ (II. 28) furnished the text for most of the ethical speculation that prevailed in England, France, and Scotland for a century later. If Locke’s theory was essentially a reproduction of Hobbes’, it was yet in the form he gave it that it survived while Hobbes was decried and forgotten. The chapter on Power is in effect an account of determination by motives. More, perhaps, than any other part of the essay it bears the marks of having been written ‘currente calamo.’ In the second edition a summary was annexed which differs somewhat in the use of terms, but not otherwise, from the original draught. The main course of thought, however, is clear throughout. Will and freedom are at first defined in all but identical terms as each a ‘power to begin or forbear action barely by a preference of the mind’ (§§ 5, 8, 71). Nor is this identification departed from, except that the term ‘will’ is afterwards restricted to the ‘preference’ or ‘power of preference,’ while freedom is confined to the power of acting upon preference; in which sense it is pointed out that though there cannot be freedom without will, there may be will without freedom, as when, through the breaking of a bridge, a man cannot help falling into the water, though he prefers not to do so. ‘Freedom’ and ‘will’ being thus alike powers, if not the same power, it is as improper to ask whether the will is free as whether one power has another power. The proper question is whether man is free (§§ 14, 21), and the answer to this question, according to Locke, is that within certain limits he is free to act, but that he is not free to will. When in any case he has the option of acting or forbearing to act, he cannot help preferring, _i.e._ willing, one or other alternative. If it is further asked, What determines the will or preference? the answer is that ‘nothing sets us upon any new action but some uneasiness’ (§ 29), viz., the ‘most urgent uneasiness we at any time feel’ (§ 40), which again is always ‘the uneasiness of desire fixed on some absent good, either negative, as indolence to one in pain, or positive, as enjoyment of pleasure.’ In one sense, indeed, it may be said that the will often runs counter to desire, but this merely means that we ‘being in this world beset with sundry uneasinesses, distressed with different desires,’ the determination of the will by the most pressing desire often implies the counteraction of other desires which would, indeed, under other circumstances, be the most pressing, but at the particular time of the supposed action are not so.

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

3. So far Locke’s doctrine amounts to no more than this, that action is always determined by the strongest motive; and only those who strangely hold that human freedom is to be vindicated by disputing that truism will care to question it. To admit that the strongest desire always moves action (there being, in fact, no test of its strength but its effect on action) and that, since every desire causes uneasiness till it is satisfied, the strongest desire is also the most pressing uneasiness, [1] is compatible with the most opposite views as to the constitution of the objects which determine desire. To understand that it is this constitution of the desired object, not any possible intervention of unmotived willing between the presentation of a strongest motive and action, which forms the central question of ethics, is the condition of all clear thinking on the subject. It is a question, however, which Locke ignores, and popular philosophy, to its great confusion, has not only continued to do the same, but would probably resent as pedantic any attempt at more accurate analysis. When we hear of the strongest ‘desire’ being the uniform motive to action, we have to ask, in the first place, whether the term is confined to impulses determined by a prior consciousness, or is taken to include those impulses, commonly called ‘mere appetites,’ which are not so determined, but depend directly and solely on the ‘constitution of our bodily organs.’ The _appetite_ of hunger is obviously quite independent of any remembrance of the pleasure of eating, yet nothing is commoner than to identify with such simple appetite the desire determined by consciousness of some sort, as when we say of a drunkard, who never drinks merely because he is thirsty, that he is governed by his appetite. Upon this distinction, however, since it is recognised by current psychology, it is less important to insist than on that between the kinds of prior consciousness which may determine desire proper. Does this prior consciousness consist simply in the return of an image of past pleasure with consequent hope of its renewal, or is it a conception--the thought of an object under relations to self or of self in relation to certain objects--in a word, self-consciousness as distinct from simple feeling?

[1] Locke’s language in regard to ‘the most pressing uneasiness’ will not be found uniformly consistent. His usual doctrine is that the strength of a desire, as evinced by the resulting action, and the uneasiness which it causes are in exact proportion to each other. According to this view, desire for future happiness can only become a prevalent motive when the uneasiness which it causes has come to outweigh every other (Cf. Chap, xxi., Secs. 43 and 45). On the other hand, he sometimes seems to distinguish the desire for future pleasure from present uneasiness, while at the same time implying that it may be a strongest motive (Cf. sec. 65). But if so, it follows that there may be a strongest desire which is not the most pressing uneasiness. (See below, sec. 13.) Hume, distinguishing strong from violent desires, and restricting ‘uneasiness’ to the latter, is able to hold that it is not alone the present uneasiness which determines action. (Book II., part 3, sec. 3, sub fin.)

Effect of this conception on the objects of human desire.

4. Of desire determined in the former way we have experience, if at all, in those motives which actuate us, as we say, ‘unconsciously’; which means, without our attending to them--feelings which we do not fix even momentarily by reference to self or to a thing. As we cannot set ourselves to recall such feelings without thinking them, without determining them by that reference to self which we suppose them to exclude, they cannot be described; but some of our actions (such as the instinctive recurrence to a sweet smell), seem only to be thus accounted for, and probably those actions of animals which do not proceed from appetite proper are to be accounted for in the same way. But whether such actions are facts in human experience or no, those which make us what we are as men are not so determined. The man whom we call the slave of his appetite, the enlightened pleasure-hunter, the man who lives for his family, the artist, the enthusiast for humanity, are alike in this, that the desire which moves their action is itself determined not by the recurring image of a past pleasure, but by the conception of self. The self may be conceived of simply as a subject to be pleased, or may be a subject of interests, which, indeed, when gratified, produce pleasure but are not produced by it--interests in persons, in beautiful things, in the order of nature and society--but self is still not less the ‘punctum stans’ whose presence to each passing pleasure renders it a constituent of a happiness which is to be permanently pursued, than it is the focus in which the influences of that world which only self-conscious reason could constitute--the world of science, of art, of human society--must be regathered in order to become the personal interests which move the actions of individuals. It is in this self-consciousness involved in our motives, in that conversion into a conception by reference to self, which the image even of the merest animal pleasure must undergo before it can become an element in the formation of character, that the possibility of freedom lies. Without it we should be as sinless and as unprogressive, as free from remorse and aspiration, as incapable of selfishness and self-denial as the animals. Each pleasure would be taken as it came. We should have ‘the greatest happiness of which our nature is capable,’ without possibility of asking ourselves whether we might not have had more. It is only the conception of himself as a permanent subject to be pleased that can set man upon the invention of new pleasures, and then, making each pleasure a disappointment when it comes, produce the ‘vicious’ temper; only this that can suggest the reflection how much more pleasure he might have had than he has had, and thus produce what the moralists know as ‘cool selfishness’; only this, on the other hand, which, as ‘enlightened self-love,’ perpetually balances the attraction of imagined pleasure by the calculation whether it will be good for one as a whole. Nor less is it the conception of self, with a ‘matter’ more adequate to its ‘form,’ taking its content not from imagined pleasure, but from the work of reason in the world of nature and humanity, which determines that personal devotion to a work or a cause, to a state, a church, or mankind, which we call self-sacrifice.

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

5. If, now, we ask ourselves whether Locke recognised this function of reason, as self-consciousness, in the determination of the will, the answer must be yes and no. His cardinal doctrine, as we have sufficiently seen, forbade him to admit that reason or thought could originate an object. The only possible objects with him are either simple ideas or resoluble into these, and the simple idea, as that which we receive in pure passivity, is virtually feeling. Now no combination of feelings (supposing it possible [1]) can yield the conception of self as a permanent subject even of pleasure, much less as a subject of social claims. It cannot, therefore, yield the objects, ranging from sensual happiness to the moral law, humanity, and God, of which this conception is the correlative condition. Thus, strictly taken, Locke’s doctrine excludes every motive to action, but appetite proper and such desire as is determined by the imagination of animal pleasure or pain, and in doing so renders vice as well as virtue unaccountable--the excessive pursuit of pleasure as well as that dissatisfaction with it which affords the possibility of ordinary reform. On the other hand, the same happy intellectual unscrupulousness, which we have traced in his theory of knowledge, attends him also here. Just as he is ready on occasion to treat any conceived object that determines sense as if it were itself a sensation, so he is ready to treat any object that determines desire, without reference to the work of thought in its construction, as if it were itself the feeling of pleasure, or of uneasiness removed, which arises upon satisfaction of the desire. In this way, without professedly admitting any motive but remembered pleasure--a motive which, if it were our only one, would leave ‘man’s life as cheap as beasts’’--he can take for granted any objects of recognised interest as accounting for the movement of human life, and as constituents of an utmost possible pleasure which it is his own fault if every one does not pursue.

[1] Cf. Introduction to Vol. I., §§ 215 and 247.

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

6. The term ‘happiness’ is the familiar cover for confusion between the animal imagination of pleasure and the conception of personal well-being. It is so when--having raised the question. What moves desire?--Locke answers, ‘happiness, and that alone.’ What, then, is happiness? ‘Good and evil are nothing but pleasure and pain,’ and ‘happiness in its full extent is the utmost pleasure we are capable of.’ [1] This is ‘the proper object of desire in general,’ but Locke is careful to explain that the happiness which ‘moves every particular man’s desire’ is not the full extent of it, but ’so much of it as is considered and taken to make a necessary part of his happiness.’ It is that ‘wherewith he in his present thoughts can satisfy himself.’ Happiness in this sense ‘every one constantly pursues,’ and without possibility of error; for ‘as to present pleasure the mind never mistakes that which is really good or evil.’ Every one ‘knows what best pleases him, and that he actually prefers.’ That which is the greater pleasure or the greater pain is really just as it appears (Ibid. §§ 43, 58, 63). Now in these statements, if we look closely, we shall find that four different meanings of happiness are mixed up, which we will take leave to distinguish by letters--_(a)_ happiness as an abstract conception, the sum of possible pleasure; _(b)_ happiness as equivalent to the pleasure which at any time survives most strongly in imagination; _(c)_ happiness as the object of the self-conscious pleasure-seeker; _(d)_ happiness as equivalent to any object at any time most strongly desired, not really a pleasure, but by Locke identified with happiness in sense _(b)_ through the fallacy of supposing that the pleasure which arises on satisfaction of any desire, great in proportion to the strength of the desire, is itself the object which excites desire.

[1] Ibid., sec. 42, and cap. 28, sec. 5.

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

7. Happiness ‘in its full extent,’ as ‘the utmost pleasure we are capable of,’ is an unreal abstraction if ever there was one. It is curious that those who are most forward to deny the reality of universals, in that sense in which they are the condition of all reality, viz., as relations, should yet, having pronounced these to be mere names, be found ascribing reality to a universal, which cannot without contradiction be supposed more than a name. Does this ‘happiness in its full extent’ mean the ‘aggregate of possible enjoyments,’ of which modern utilitarians tell us? Such a phrase simply represents the vain attempt to get a definite by addition of indefinites. It has no more meaning than ‘the greatest possible quantity of time’ would have. Pleasant feelings are not quantities that can be added. Each is over before the next begins, and the man who has been pleased a million times is not really better off--has no more of the supposed chief good in possession--than the man who has only been pleased a thousand times. When we speak of pleasures, then, as forming a possible whole, we cannot mean pleasures as feelings, and what else do we mean? Are we, then, by the ‘happiness’ in question to understand pleasure _in general_, as might be inferred from Locke’s speaking of it as the ‘object of desire _in general_’? But it is in its mere particularity that each pleasure has its being. It is a simple idea, and therefore, as Locke and Hume have themselves taught us, momentary, indefinable, in ‘perpetual flux,’ changing every moment upon us. Pleasure _in general_, therefore, is not pleasure, and it is nothing else. It is not a conceived reality, as a relation, or a thing determined by relations, is, since pleasure as feeling, in distinction from its conditions which are not feelings, for the same reason that it cannot be defined, cannot be conceived. It is a mere name which utilitarian philosophy has mistaken for a thing; but for which--since no one, whatever his theory of the desirable, can actually desire either the abstraction of pleasure in general or the aggregate of possible pleasures--a practical substitute is apt to be found in any lust of the flesh that may for the time be the strongest.

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

8. Having begun by making this fiction ‘the proper object of desire in general,’ Locke saves the appearance of consistency by representing the particular pleasure or removal of uneasiness, which he in fact believed to be the object of every desire, as if it were a certain part of the ‘full extent of happiness’ which the individual, having this full extent before him, picked out as being what ‘in his present thoughts would satisfy him.’ Nor does he ever give up the notion of a ‘happiness in general,’ in distinction from the happiness of each man’s actual choice, as a possible motive, which a man who finds himself wretched in consequence of his actions may be told that he ought to have adopted. His real notion, however, of the happiness which is motive to action is a confused result of the three other notions of happiness, distinguished above as _(b)_, _(c)_ and _(d)_. As that about which no one can be mistaken, ‘happiness’ can only be so in sense _(b)_, as the ‘pleasure which survives most strongly in imagination.’ Of this it can be said truly, and of this only, that ‘it really is just as it appears,’ and that ‘a man never chooses amiss’ since he must ‘know what best pleases him.’ But with this, almost in the same breath, Locke confuses ‘happiness’ in senses _(c)_ and _(d)_. So soon as it is said of an object that it is ‘taken by the individual to make a necessary part of his happiness,’ it is implied that it is determined by his conception of self. It is something which, as the result of the action of this conception on his past experience, he has come to present to himself as a constituent of his personal good. Unless he were conscious of himself as a permanent subject, he could have no conception of happiness as a whole from relation to which each present object takes its character as a part. Nor of the objects determined by this relation is it true, as Locke says, that they are always pleasures, or that they ‘are really just as they appear.’ Our readiness to accept his statements to this effect, is at bottom due to a confusion between the pleasure, or removal of uneasiness, incidental to the satisfaction of a desire and the object which excites the desire. If having explained desire, as Locke does, by reference to the good, we then allow ourselves to explain the good by reference to desire, it will indeed be true that no man can be mistaken as to his present good, but only in the sense of the identical proposition that every man most desires what he does most desire; and true also, that every attained good is pleasure, but only in the sense that what satisfies desire does satisfy it. The man of whom it could be truly said, in any other sense than that of the above identical proposition, that his only objects of desire--the only objects which he ‘takes to make a necessary part of his happiness’--were pleasures, would be a man, as we say, of no interests. He would be a man who either lived simply for pleasures incidental to the satisfaction of animal appetite, or one who, having been interested in certain objects in which reason alone enables us to be interested--_e.g._, persons, pursuits, or works of art--and having found consequent pleasure, afterwards vainly tries to get the pleasure without the interests. To the former type of character, of course, the approximations are numerous enough, though it may be doubted whether such an ideal of sensuality is often fully realised. The latter in its completeness, which would mean a perfect misery that could only issue in suicide, would seem to be an impossibility, though it is constantly being approached in proportion to the unworthiness and fleetingness of the interests by which men allow themselves to be governed, and which, after stimulating an indefinite hunger for good, leave it without an object to satisfy it; in proportion, too, to the modern habit of hugging and poring over the pleasures which our higher interests cause us till these interests are vitiated, and we find ourselves in restless and hopeless pursuit of the pleasure when the interest which might alone produce it is gone.

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

9. Just as it is untrue, then, of the object of desire, as ‘taken to be part of one’s happiness’ or determined by the conception of self, that it is always a pleasure, so it is untrue that it is always really just as it appears, except in the trifling sense that what is most strongly desired is most strongly desired. Rather it is never really what it appears. It is least of all so to the professed pleasure-seeker. Obviously, to the man who seeks the pleasure incidental to interests which he has lost, there is a contradiction in his quest which for ever prevents what seems to him desirable from satisfying his desire. And even the man who lives for merely animal pleasure, just because he seeks it as part of a happiness, never finds it to be that which he sought. There is no mistake about the pleasure, but he seeks it as that which shall satisfy him, and satisfy him, since he is not an animal, it cannot. Nor are our higher objects of desire ever what they seem. That is too old a topic with poets and moralizers to need enforcing. Each in its turn, we know, promises happiness when it shall have been attained, but when it is attained the happiness has not come. The craving for an object adequate to oneself, which is the source of the desire, is still not quenched; and because it is not, nor can be, even ‘the joy of success’ has its own bitterness.

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

10. The case, then, stands thus. Locke, having too much ‘common sense’ to reduce all objects of desire to the pleasures incidental to satisfactions of appetite, takes for granted any number of objects which only reason can constitute (or, in other words, which can only exist for a self-conscious subject) without any question as to their origin. It is enough for him that they are not conscious inventions of the individual, and that they are related to feeling--though related as determining it. This being so, they are to him no more the work of thought than are the satisfactions of appetite. The conception of them is of a kind with the simple remembrance or imagination of pleasures caused by such satisfactions. The question how, if only pleasure is the object of desire, they came to be desired before there had been experience of the pleasures incidental to their attainment, is virtually shelved by treating these latter pleasures as if they were themselves the objects originally desired. So far consistency at least is saved. No object but feeling, present or remembered, is ostensibly admitted within human experience. But meanwhile, alongside of this view, comes the account of the strongest motive as determined by the conception of self--as something which a man ‘takes to be a necessary part of his happiness,’ and which he is ‘answerable to himself’ for so taking. The inconsistency of such language with the view that every desired object must needs be a pleasure, would have been less noticeable if Locke himself had not frankly admitted, as the corollary of this view that the desired good ‘is really just as it appears.’ The necessity of this admission has always been the rock on which consistent Hedonism has broken. Locke himself has scarcely made it when he becomes aware of its dangerous consequences, and great part of the chapter on Power is taken up by awkward attempts to reconcile it with the distinction between true happiness and false, and with the existence of moral responsibility. If greatest pleasure is the only possible object, and the production of such pleasure the only possible criterion of action, and if ‘as to present pleasure and pain the mind never mistakes that which is really good or evil,’ with what propriety can any one be told that he might or that he ought to have chosen otherwise than he has done? ‘He has missed the true good,’ we say, ‘which he might and should have found’; but ‘good,’ according to Locke, is only pleasure, and pleasure, as Locke in any other connexion would be eager to tell us, must mean either some actual present pleasure or a series of pleasures of which each in turn is present. If every one without possibility of mistake has on each occasion chosen the greatest present pleasure, how can the result for him at any time be other than the true good, _i.e._, the series of greatest pleasures, each in its turn present, that have been hitherto possible for him?

Objections to the Utilitarian answer to these questions.

11. A modern utilitarian, if faithful to the principle which excludes any test of pleasure but pleasure itself, will probably answer that every one does attain the maximum of pleasure possible for him, his character and circumstances being what they are; but that with a change in these his choice would be different. He would still choose on each occasion the greatest pleasure of which he was then capable, but this pleasure would be one ‘truer’--in the sense of being more intense, more durable, and compatible with a greater quantity of other pleasures--than is that which he actually chooses. But admitting that this answer justifies us in speaking of any sort of pleasure as ‘truer’ than that at any time chosen by any one--which is a very large admission, for of the intensity of any pleasure we have no test but its being actually preferred, and of durability and compatibility with other pleasures the tests are so vague that a healthy and unrepentant voluptuary would always have the best of it in an attempt to strike the balance between the pleasures he has actually chosen and any truer sort--it still only throws us back on a further question. With a better character, it is said, such as better education and improved circumstances might have produced, the actually greatest happiness of the individual--_i.e._, the series of pleasures which, because he has chosen them, we know to have been the greatest possible for him--might have been greater or ‘truer.’ But the man’s character is the result of his previous preferences; and if every one has always chosen the greatest pleasure of which he was at the time capable, and if no other motive is possible, how could any other than his actual character have been produced? How could that conception of a happiness truer than the actual, of something that should be most pleasant, and therefore preferred, though it is not--a conception which all education implies--have been a possible motive among mankind? To say that the individual is, to begin with, destitute of such a conception, but acquires it through education from others, does not remove the difficulty. How do the educators come by it? Common sense assumes them to have found out that more happiness might have been got by another than the merely natural course of living, and to wish to give others the benefit of their experience. But such experience implies that each has a conception of himself as other than the subject of a succession of pleasures, of which each has been the greatest possible at the time of its occurrence; and the wish to give another the benefit of the experience implies that this conception, which is no possible image of a feeling, can originate action. The assumption of common sense, then, contradicts the two cardinal principles of the Hedonistic philosophy; yet, however disguised in the terminology of development and evolution, it, or some equivalent supposition, is involved in every theory of the progress of mankind.

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

12. Such difficulties do not suggest themselves to Locke, because he is always ready to fall back on the language of common sense without asking whether it is reconcilable with his theory. Having asserted, without qualification, that the will in every case is determined by the strongest desire, that the strongest desire is desire for the greatest pleasure, and that ‘pleasure is just so great, and no greater, than it is felt,’ he finds a place for moral freedom and responsibility in the ‘power a man has to suspend his desires and stop them from determining his will to any action till he has examined whether it be really of a nature in itself and consequences to make him happy or no.’ [1] But how does it happen that there is any need for such suspense, if as to pleasure and pain ‘a man never chooses amiss,’ and pleasure is the same with happiness or the good? To this Locke answers that it is only present pleasure which is just as it appears, and that in ‘comparing present pleasure or pain with future we often make wrong judgments of them;’ again, that not only present pleasure and pain, but ‘things that draw after them pleasure and pain, are considered as good and evil,’ and that of these consequences under the influence of present pleasure or pain we may judge amiss. [2] By these wrong judgments, it will be observed, Locke does not mean mistakes in discovering the proper means to a desired end (Aristotle’s ἀγνοία ἡ καθ’ ἕκαστα) [3], which it is agreed are not a ground for blame or punishment, but wrong desires--desires for certain pleasures as being the greater, which are not really the greater. Regarding such desires as involving comparisons of one good with another, he counts them judgments, and (the comparison being incorrectly made) _wrong_ judgments. A certain present pleasure, and a certain future one, are compared, and though the future would really be the greater, the present is preferred; or a present pleasure, ‘drawing after it’ a certain amount of pain, is compared with a less amount of present pain, drawing after it a greater pleasure, and the present pleasure preferred. In such cases the man ‘may justly incur punishment’ for the wrong preference, because having ‘the power to suspend his desire’ for the present pleasure, he has not done so, but ‘by too hasty choice of his own making has imposed on himself wrong measures of good and evil.’ ‘When he has once chosen it,’ indeed, ‘and thereby it is become part of his happiness, it raises desire, and that proportionately gives him uneasiness, which determines his will.’ But the original wrong choice, having the ‘power of suspending his desires,’ he might have prevented. In not doing so he ‘vitiated his own palate,’ and must be ‘answerable to himself’ for the consequences. [4]

[1] II. 21, Sec. 51 and 56.

[2] Ibid., Sec. 61, 63, 67.

[3] [Greek ἀγνοία ἡ καθ’ ἕκαστα (agnoia he kath’ hekasta) = unawareness of the particular circumstances. Tr.]

[4] Ibid., Sec. 56.

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

13. Responsibility for evil, then (with its conditions, blame, punishment, and remorse) supposes that a man has gone wrong in the comparison of present with future pleasure or pain, having had the chance of going right. Upon this we must remark that as moving desire--and it is the determination of desire that is here in question--NO pleasure can be present in the sense of actual enjoyment, or (in Hume’s language) as ‘impression,’ but only in memory or imagination, as ‘idea.’ Otherwise desire would not be desire. It would not be that uneasiness which, according to Locke, implies the absence of good, and alone moves action. On the other hand, to imagination EVERY pleasure must be present that is to act as motive at all. In whatever sense, then, pleasure, as pleasure, _i.e._ as undetermined by conceptions, can properly be said to move desire, every pleasure is equally present and equally future. [1] For man, if he only felt and retained his feelings in memory, or recalled them in imagination, the only difference among the imagined pleasures which solicit his desires, other than difference of intensity, would lie in the imagined pains with which each may have become associated. One pleasure might be imagined in association with a greater amount of the pain of waiting than another. In that sense, and only in that, could one be distinguished from the other as a future pleasure from a present one. According as the greater imagined intensity of the future pleasure did or did not outweigh the imagined pain of waiting for it, the scale of desire would turn one way or the other. Or with one pleasure, imagined as more intense than another, might be associated an expectation of a greater amount of pain to be ‘drawn after it.’ Here, again, the question would be whether the greater imagined intensity of pleasure would have the more effect in exciting desire, or the greater amount of imagined sequent pain in quenching it--a question only to be settled by the action which results. In whatever sense it is true of the ‘present pleasure or pain,’ that it is really just as it appears, it is equally true of the future. Whenever the determination of desire is in question, the statement that present pleasure is just as it appears must mean that the pleasure _present in imagination_ is so, and in this sense all motive pleasures are equally so present. Undoubtedly the pleasure associated with the pain of prolonged expectancy might turn out greater, and that associated with sequent pain less, than was imagined; but so might a pleasure not thus associated. Of every pleasure alike it is as true, that while it is imagined it is just as it is imagined, as that while felt it is just as it is felt; and if man only felt and imagined, there would be no more reason why he should hold himself accountable for his imaginations than for his feelings. Whatever pleasure was most attractive in imagination would determine desire, and, through it, action, which would be the only measure of the amount of the attraction. It would not indeed follow because an action was determined by the pleasure most attractive in imagination, that the ensuing pleasure in actual enjoyment would be greater than might have been attained by a different action--though it would be very hard to show the contrary--but it would follow that the man attained the greatest pleasure of which his nature was capable. There would be no reason why he should blame himself, or be blamed by others, for the result.

[1] It is noticeable that when Locke takes to distinguishing the pleasures that move desire into present and future, he speaks as if the future pleasure alone were an absent good, in contradiction to his previous view that every object of desire is an absent good. (Cf. sec. 65 with sec. 57 of cap. 21.)

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

14. Thus on Locke’s supposition, that desire is only moved by pleasure--which must mean _imagined_ pleasure, since pleasure, determined by conceptions, is excluded by the supposition that pleasure alone is the ultimate motive, and pleasure in actual enjoyment is no longer desired--the ‘suspense of desire,’ that he speaks of, can only mean an interval, during which a competition of imagined pleasures (one associated with more, another with less, of sequent or antecedent pain) is still going on, and none has become finally the strongest motive. Of such suspense it is unmeaning to say that a man has ‘the power of it,’ or that, when it terminates in an action which does not produce so much pleasure as another might have done, it is because the man ‘has vitiated his palate,’ and that therefore he must be ‘answerable to himself’ for the consequences. This language really implies that pleasures, instead of being ultimate ends, are determined to be ends through reference to an object beyond them which the man himself constitutes; that it is only through his conception of self that every pleasure--not indeed best pleases him, or is most attractive in imagination--but becomes his personal good. It may be that he identifies his personal good with the pleasure most attractive in imagination; but a pleasure so identified is quite a different motive from a pleasure simply as imagined. It is no longer mere pleasure that the man seeks, but self-satisfaction through the pleasure. The same consciousness of self, which sets him on the act, continues through the act and its consequences, carrying with it the knowledge (commonly called the ‘voice of conscience’) that it is to himself, as the ultimate motive, that the act and its consequences, whether in the shape of natural pains or civil penalties, are due--a knowledge which breeds remorse, and, through it, the possibility of a better mind. Thus, when Locke finds the ground of responsibility in a man’s power of suspending his desire till he has considered whether the act, to which it inclines him, is of a kind to make him happy or no, the value of the explanation lies in the distinction which it may be taken to imply, but which Locke could not consistently admit, between the imagination of pleasure and the conception of self as a permanent subject of happiness, by reference to which an imagined pleasure becomes a strongest motive. It is not really as involving a comparison between imagined pleasures, but as involving the consideration whether the greatest imagined pleasure will be the best for one in the long run, that the suspense of desire establishes the responsibility of man. Even if we admitted with Locke that nothing entered into the consideration but an estimate of ‘future pleasures’--and Locke, it will be observed, by supposing the estimate to include ‘pleasures of a sort we are unacquainted with,’ [1] which is as much of a contradiction as to suppose a man influenced by unfelt feelings, renders this restriction unmeaning--still to be determined by the consideration whether something is good for me on the whole is to be determined, not by the imagination of pleasure, but by the conception of self, though it be of self only as a subject to be pleased.

[1] Cap. 21, sec. 65. He has specially in view the pleasures of ‘another life’, which ‘being intended for a state of happiness, must certainly be agreeable to every one’s wish and desire: could we suppose their relishes as different there as they are here, yet the manna in heaven will suit every one’s palate.’

Locke finds moral freedom in necessity of pursuing happiness.

15. The mischief is that, though his language implies this distinction, he does not himself understand it. ‘The care of ourselves,’ he tells us, ‘that we mistake not imaginary for real happiness, is the necessary foundation of our liberty. The stronger ties we have to an unalterable pursuit of happiness in general, which is our greatest good, and which, as such, our desires always follow, the more are we free from any necessary determination of our will to any particular action, till we have examined whether it has a tendency to, or is inconsistent with, our real happiness.’ [1] But he does not see that the _rationale_ of the freedom, thus paradoxically, though truly, placed in the strength of a tie, lies in that determination by the conception of self to which the ‘unalterable pursuit of happiness’ is really equivalent. To him it is not as one mode among others in which that self-determination appears, but simply in itself, that the consideration of what is for our real happiness is the ‘foundation of our liberty,’ and the consideration itself is no more than a comparison between imagined pleasures and pains. Hence to a reader who refuses to read into Locke an interpretation which he does not himself supply, the range of moral liberty must seem as narrow as its nature is ambiguous. As to its range, the greater part of our actions, and among them those which we are apt to think our best, are not and could not be preceded by any consideration whether they are for our real happiness or no. In truth, they result from a character which the conception of self has rendered possible, or express an interest in objects of which this conception is the condition, and for that reason they represent a will self-determined and free; but they do not rest on the foundation which Locke calls ‘the necessary foundation of our liberty.’ As to the nature of this liberty, the reader, who takes Locke at his word, would find himself left to choose between the view of it as the condition of a mind ‘suspended’ between rival presentations of the pleasant, and the equally untenable view of it as that ‘liberty of indifference,’ which Locke himself is quite ready to deride--as consisting in a choice prior to desire, which determines what the desire shall be. [2]

[1] Cap. 21, sec. 51.

[2] Cf. the passage in sec. 56: ‘When he has once chosen it, and thereby it is become part of his happiness, it raises desire,’ &c. (Cf. also sec. 43 sub fin.)

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

16. This ambiguous deliverance about moral freedom, it must be observed, is the necessary result on a mind, having too strong a practical hold on life to tamper with human responsibility, of a doctrine which denies the originativeness of thought, and in consequence cannot consistently allow any motive to desire, but the image of a past pleasure or pain. The full logical effect of the doctrine, however, does not appear in Locke, because, with his way of taking any desire of which the satisfaction produces pleasure to have pleasure for its object, he never comes in sight of the question how the manifold objects of actual human interest are possible for a being who only feels and retains, or combines, his feelings. An action moved by love of country, love of fame, love of a friend, love of the beautiful, would cause him no more difficulty than one moved by desire for the renewal of some sensual enjoyment, or for that maintenance of health which is the condition of such enjoyment in the future. If pressed about them, we may suppose that--availing himself of the language probably current in the philosophic society in which he lived, though it first became generally current in England through the writings of his quasi-pupil, Shaftesbury--he would have said that he found in his breast affections for public good, as well as for self-good, the satisfaction of which gave pleasure, and to which his doctrine, that pleasure is the ‘object of desire in general,’ was accordingly applicable. The question--of what feelings or combinations of feelings are the objects which excite these several desires copies?--it does not occur to him to ask. It is only when a class of actions presents itself for which a motive in the way of desire or aversion is not readily assignable that any difficulty arises, and then it is a difficulty which the assignment of such a motive, without any question asked as to its possibility for a merely feeling and imagining subject, is thought sufficiently to dispose of. Such a class of actions is that of which we say that we ‘ought’ to do them, even when we are not compelled and had rather not. We ought, it is generally admitted, to keep our promises, even when it is inconvenient to us to do so and no punishment could overtake us if we did not. We ought to be just even in ways that the law does not prescribe, and when we are beyond its ken; and that, too, in dealing with men towards whom we have no inclination to be generous. We ought even--so at least Locke ‘on the authority of Revelation’ would have said--to forgive injuries which we cannot forget, and if not ‘to love our enemies’ in the literal sense, which may be an impossibility, yet to act as if we did. To what motive are such actions to be assigned?

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

17. ‘To desire for pleasure or aversion from pain,’ Locke would answer, ‘but a pleasure and pain other than the natural consequences of acts and attached to them by some law.’ This is the result of his enquiry into ‘Moral Relations’ (Book II., chap. 28). Good and evil, he tells us, being ‘nothing but pleasure and pain, moral good or evil is only the conformity or disagreement of our actions to some law, whereby good or evil, _i.e._, pleasure or pain, is drawn on us by the will and power of the law-maker.’ All law according to its ‘true nature’ is a rule set to the actions of others by an intelligent being, having ‘power to reward the compliance with, and punish deviation from, his rule by some good and evil that is not the natural product and consequence of the action itself; for that, being a natural convenience or inconvenience, would operate of itself without a law.’ Of such law there are three sorts. 1. Divine Law, ‘promulgated to men by the light of nature or voice of revelation, by comparing their actions to which they judge whether, as duties or sins, they are like to procure them happiness or misery from the hands of the Almighty.’ 2. Civil Law, ‘the rule set by the Commonwealth to the actions of those who belong to it,’ reference to which decides ‘whether they be criminal or no.’ 3. ‘The law of opinion or reputation,’ according to agreement or disagreement with which actions are reckoned ‘virtues or vices.’ This law may or may not coincide with the divine law. So far as it does, virtues and vices are really, what they are always supposed to be, actions ‘in their own nature ‘severally right or wrong. It is not as really right or wrong, however, but only as esteemed so, that an act is virtuous or vicious, and thus ‘the common measure of virtue and vice is the approbation or dislike, praise or blame, which by a tacit consent establishes itself in the several societies, tribes, and clubs of men in the world, whereby several actions come to find credit or disgrace among them, according to the judgment, maxims, or fashions of the place.’ Each sort of law has its own ‘enforcement in the way of good and evil.’ That of the civil law is obvious. That of the Divine Law lies in the pleasures and pains of ‘another world,’ which (we have to suppose) render actions ‘in their own nature good and evil.’ That of the third sort of law lies in those consequences of social reputation and dislike which are stronger motives to most men than are the rewards and punishments either of God or the magistrate (chap. 28, §§ 5-12).

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

18. ‘Moral goodness or evil,’ Locke concludes, ‘is the conformity or non-conformity of any action’ to one or other of the above rules (§ 14). But such conformity or non-conformity is not a feeling, pleasant or painful, at all. If, then, the account of the good as consisting in pleasure, of which the morally good is a particular form, is to be adhered to, we must suppose that, when moral goodness is said to be conformity to law, it is so called merely with reference to the specific means of attaining that pleasure in which moral good consists. Not the conception of conformity to law, but the imagination of a certain pleasure, will determine the desire that moves the moral act, as every other desire. The distinction between the moral act and an act judiciously done for the sake, let us say, of some pleasure of the palate, will lie only in the channel through which comes the pleasure that each is calculated to obtain. If the motive of an act done for the sake of the pleasure of eating differs from the motive of an act done for the sake of sexual pleasure on account of the difference of the channels through which the pleasures are severally obtained, in that sense only can the motive of either of these acts, upon Locke’s principles, be taken to differ from the motive of an act morally done. The explanation, then, of the acts not readily assignable to desire or aversion, of which we say that we only do them because we ‘ought,’ has been found. They are so far of a kind with all actions done to obtain or avoid what Locke calls ‘future’ pleasures or pains that the difficulty of assigning a motive for them only arises from the fact that their immediate result is not an end but a means. They differ from these, however, inasmuch as the pleasure they draw after them is not their ‘natural consequence,’ any more than the pain attaching to a contrary act would be, but is only possible through the action of God, the magistrate, or society in some of its forms.

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

19. After the above examination we can easily anticipate the points on which a candid and clear-headed man, who accepted the principles of Locke’s doctrine, would see that it needed explanation and development. If all action is determined by impulse to remove the most pressing uneasiness, as consisting in desire for the greatest pleasure of which the agent is at the time capable; if this, again, means desire for the renewal of some ‘impression’ previously experienced, and all impressions are either those of sense or derived from them, how are we to account for those actual objects of human interest and pursuit which seem far removed from any combination of animal pleasures or of the means thereto, and specially for that class of actions determined, as Locke says, by expectation of pain or pleasure other than the ‘natural consequence’ of the act, to which the term ‘moral’ is properly applied? Hume, as we have seen, [1] in accepting Locke’s principles, clothes them in a more precise terminology, marking the distinction between the feeling as originally felt and the same as returning in memory or imagination as that between ‘impression and idea,’ and excluding _original_ ideas of reflection. ‘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’ _(a)_. ‘These, again, are copied by the memory and imagination, and become ideas; which perhaps in their turn give rise to other impressions’ _(b)_. Thus the impressions of reflection, marked _(a)_, will be determined by ideas copied from impressions of sense. If desires, they will be desires for the renewal either of a pleasure incidental to the satisfaction of appetite, or of a pleasant sight or sound, a sweet taste or smell. These desires and their satisfactions will again be copied in ideas, but how can the impressions _(b)_ to which these ideas give rise be other than desires for the renewal of the original animal pleasures? How do they come to be desires as unlike these as are the motives which actuate not merely the saint or the philanthropist, but the ordinary good neighbour or honest citizen or head of a family?

[1] General Introd., Vol. I, par. 195

Questions which he found at issue, a. Is virtue interested? b. What is conscience?

20. During the interval between the publication of Locke’s essay and the ‘Treatise on Human Nature’ there had been much writing on ethical questions in English. The effect of this on Hume is plain enough. He writes with reference to current controversy, and in the moral part of the treatise probably had the views of Clarke, Shaftesbury, Butler, and Hutcheson more consciously before him than Locke’s. This does not interfere, however, with the propriety of affiliating him in respect of his views on morals, no less than on knowledge, directly to Locke, whose principles and method were in the main accepted by all the moralists of that age. His characteristic lies in his more consistent application of these, and the effect of current controversy upon him was chiefly to show him the line which this application must take. It was a controversy which turned almost wholly on two points; _(a)_ the distinction between ‘interested and disinterested,’ selfish and unselfish affections; _(b)_ the origin and nature of that ‘law,’ relation to which, according to Locke, constitutes our action ‘virtuous or vicious.’ In the absence of any notion of thought but as a faculty which puts together simple ideas into complex ones, of reason but as a faculty which calculates means and perceives the agreement of ideas mediately, it could have but one end.

Hobbes’ answer to first question,

21. By the generation in which Hume was bred the issue as to the possible disinterestedness of action was supposed to lie between the view of Hobbes and that of Shaftesbury. Hobbes’ moral doctrine had not been essentially different from Locke’s, but he had been offensively explicit on questions which Locke left open to more genial views than his doctrine logically justified. Each started from the position that the ultimate motive to every action can only be the imagination of one’s own pleasure or pain, and neither properly left room for the determination of desire by a conceived object as distinct from remembered pleasure. But while Locke, as we have seen, illogically took for granted desires so determined, and thus made it possible for a disciple to admit any benevolent desires as motives on the strength of the pleasure which they produce when satisfied, Hobbes had been more severe in his method, and had explained every desire, of which the direct motive could not be taken to be the renewal of some animal pleasure, as desire either for the power in oneself to command such pleasure at will or for the pleasure incidental to the contemplation of the signs of such power. Hence his peculiar treatment of compassion and the other ‘social affections,’ which it is easier to show to be untrue to the facts of the case than to be other than the proper consequence of principles which Locke had rendered orthodox. [1] The counter-doctrine of Shaftesbury holds water just so far as it involves the rejection of the doctrine that pleasure is the sole ultimate motive. It becomes confused just because its author had no definite theory of reason, as constitutive of objects, that could justify this rejection.

[1] See ‘Leviathan,’ part 1, chap. 6.

Counter-doctrine of Shaftesbury. Vice is selfishness: But no clear account of selfishness.

22. He begins with a doctrine that directly contradicts Locke’s identification of the good with pleasure, and of the morally good with pleasure occurring in a particular way, ‘In a sensible creature that which is not done through any affection at all makes neither good nor ill in the nature of that creature; who then only is supposed good, when the good or ill of the system to which he has relation is the immediate object of some passion or affection moving him.’ [1] This, it will be seen, as against Locke, implies that the good of a man’s action lies not in any pleasure sequent upon it to him, but in the nature of the affection from which it proceeds; and that the goodness of this affection depends on its being determined by an object wholly different from imagined pleasure--the _conceived_ good of a system to which the man has relation, _i.e._, of human society, which in Shaftesbury’s language is the ‘public’ as distinct from the ‘private’ system. It is not enough that an action should result in good to this system; it must proceed from affection for it. ‘Whatever is done which happens to be advantageous to the species through an affection merely towards self-good does not imply any more goodness in the creature than as the affection itself is good. Let him in any particular act ever so well; if at the bottom it be that selfish affection alone which moves him, he is in himself still vicious.’ [2] Here, then, we seem to have a clear theory of moral evil as consisting in selfish, of moral good as consisting in unselfish affections. But what exactly constitutes a selfish affection, according to Shaftesbury? The answer that first suggests itself, is that as the unselfish affection is an affection for public good, so a selfish one is an affection for ‘self-good,’ the good of the ‘private system.’ Shaftesbury, however, does not give this answer. ‘Affection for private good’ with him is not, as such, selfish; it is so only when ‘excessive’ and ‘inconsistent with the interest of the species or public.’ [3] This qualification seems at once to efface the clear line of distinction previously drawn. It puts ‘self-affection’ on a level with public affection which, according to Shaftesbury, may equally err on the side of excess. It implies that an affection for self-good, if only it be advantageous to the species, may be good; which is just what had been previously denied. And not only so; although, when the self-affections are under view, they are only allowed a qualified goodness in virtue of their indirect contribution to the good of the species, yet conversely, the superiority of the affections, which have this latter good for their object, is urged specially on the ground of the greater amount of happiness or ‘self-good’ which they produce.

[1] ‘Inquiry concerning Virtue,’ Book I. part 2, sec. 1.

[2] Ibid., Book I., part 2, sec. 2.

[3] Ibid., Book II., part 1, sec. 3.

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

23. The truth is that the notions which Shaftesbury attached to the terms ‘affection for self-good’ and ‘affection for public good’ were not such as allowed of a consistent opposition between them. They can only be so opposed if, on the one hand, self-good is identified with pleasure; and on the other, affection for public good is carefully distinguished from desire for that sort of pleasure of which the gratification of others is a condition. But with Shaftesbury, affections for self-good do not represent merely those desires for pleasure determined by self-consciousness--for pleasure presented as one’s personal good--which can alone be properly reckoned sources of moral evil. They include equally mere natural appetites--hunger, the sexual impulse, &c.--which are morally neutral, and they do not clearly exclude any desire for an object which a man has so ‘made his own’ as to find his happiness--‘self-enjoyment’ or ‘self-good,’ according to Shaftesbury’s language--in attaining it, though it be as remote from imagined pleasure as possible. [1] On the other hand, ‘affections for public good,’ as he describes them, are not restricted to such desires for the good of others as are irrespective of pleasure to self. They include not only such natural instincts as ‘parental kindness and concern for the nurture and propagation of the young,’ which, morally, at any rate, are not to be distinguished from the appetites reckoned as affections for self-good, but also desires for sympathetic pleasure--the pleasure to oneself which arises on consciousness that another is pleased. Shaftesbury’s special antipathy, indeed, is the doctrine that benevolent affections are interested in the sense of having for their object a pleasure to oneself, apart from and beyond the pleasure of the person whom they move us to please; but unless he regards them as desires for the pleasure which the subject of them experiences in the pleasure of another, there is no purpose in enlarging, as he does with much unction, on the special pleasantness of the pleasures which they produce. With such vagueness in his notions of what he meant by affections for ‘self-good’ and for ‘public good,’ it is not strange that he should have failed to give any tenable account of the selfishness in which he conceived moral evil to consist. He could not apply such a term of reproach to the ‘self-affections’ in general, without condemning as selfish the man who ‘finds his own happiness in doing good,’ and who is in truth indistinguishable from one to whom ‘affection for public good’ has become, as we say, the law of his being. Nor could he identify selfishness, as he should have done, with all living for pleasure without a more complete rupture than he was capable of with the received doctrine of his time and without bringing affection for public good, in the form in which it was most generally conceived, and which was, at any rate, one of the forms under which he presented it to himself--as desire, namely, for sympathetic pleasure--into the same condemnation. His way out of the difficulty is, as we have seen, in violation of his own principle to find the characteristic of selfishness not in the motive of any affection but in its result; not in the fact that a man’s desire has his own good for its object, which is true of one to whom his neighbour’s good is as his own, nor in the fact that it has pleasure for its object, which Shaftesbury, as the child of his age, could scarcely help thinking was the case with every desire, but in the fact that it is stronger than is ‘consistent with the interest of the species or public.’

[1] Book II., part 2, sec. 2.

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

24. Neither Butler nor Hutcheson [1] can claim to have carried the ethical controversy much beyond the point at which Shaftesbury left it. Each took for granted that the object of the ‘self-affection’ was necessarily one’s own happiness, and neither made any distinction between living for happiness and living for pleasure. They could not then identify selfishness with the living for pleasure without condemning the self-affection, and with, it the best man’s pursuit of his own highest good in the service of others, altogether as evil. Nor in the absence of any better theory of the object of the self-affection could the social affections, which, according to Butler, are subject in the developed man to the direction of self-love, escape the suggestion that they are one mode of the general desire for pleasure. Butler and Hutcheson, indeed, are quite clear that they are ‘disinterested’ in the sense of ‘terminating upon their objects.’ [2] This means, what is sufficiently obvious when once pointed out, _(a)_ that a benevolent desire is not a desire for that particular pleasure, or rather ‘removal of uneasiness,’ which shall ensue when it is satisfied, and _(b)_ that it cannot originally arise from the general desire for happiness, since this creates no pleasures but merely directs us to the pursuit of objects found pleasant independently of it, and thus, if it directs us to benevolent acts, presupposes a pleasure previously found in them. This, however, as Butler points out, is equally true of all particular desires whatever--of those styled self-regarding, no less than of the social--and if it is not incompatible with the former being desires for pleasure, no more is it with the latter being so. Much confusion on the matter, it may be truly said, arises from the loose way in which the words ‘affection’ and ‘passion’ are used by Butler and his contemporaries, not excluding Hume himself, alike for appetite, desire, and emotion. In every case a pleasure other than satisfaction of desire must have been experienced before desire can be excited by the imagination of it. A pleasure incidental to the satisfaction of _appetite_ must have been experienced before imagination of it could excite the _desire_ of the glutton. In like manner, social affection, as _desire_, cannot be first excited by the pleasure which shall arise when it is satisfied; it must previously exist as the condition of that pleasure being experienced; but it does not follow that it is other than a desire for an imagined pleasure, for that sympathetic pleasure in the pleasure of another in which the social affection as _emotion_ consists. Now though Butler and Hutcheson sufficiently showed that it is no other pleasure than this which is the original object of benevolent desires, they did not attempt to show that it is not this; and failing such an attempt, the received doctrine that the object of all desire, social and self-regarding alike, is pleasure of one sort or another, would naturally be taken to stand. This admitted, there can be nothing in the fact that a certain pleasure depends on the pleasure of another, and that a certain other does not, to entitle an action moved by desire for the former sort of pleasure to be called unselfish in the way of praise, and one moved by desire for the latter sort selfish in the way of reproach. The motive--desire for his own pleasure--is the same to the doer in both cases. The distinction between the acts can only lie in that which Shaftesbury had said could not constitute moral good or ill--in the consequences by which society judges of them, but which do not form the motive of the agent. In other words, it will be a distinction fixed by that law of opinion or reputation, in which Locke had found the common measure of virtue and vice, though he had not entered on the question of the considerations by which that law is formed.

[1] The works of Hutcheson, published before Hume’s treatise was written, and which strongly affected it, were the ‘Enquiry into the Original of our Ideas of Beauty and Virtue’ (1725), and the ‘Essay on the Nature and Conduct of the Passions and Affections’ (1728). In what follows I wrote with direct reference to his posthumous work, not published till after Hume’s treatise, but which only reproduces more systematically his earlier views.

[2] See in Preface to Butler’s Sermons, the part relating to Sermon XI., ‘Besides, the only idea of an interested pursuit’ &c.; also the early part of Sermon XI., ‘Every man hath a general desire,’ &c.

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

25. Such a conclusion would lie ready to hand for such a reader of Butler and Hutcheson as we may suppose Hume to have been, but it is needless to say that it is not that at which they themselves arrive. Butler, indeed, distinctly refuses to identify moral good and evil respectively with disinterested and interested action, [1] but neither does he admit that desire for pleasure or aversion from pain is the uniform motive of action in such a way as to compel the conclusion that moral good and ill represent a distinction, not of motives, but of consequences of action contemplated by the onlooker. An act is morally good, according to him, when it is approved by the ‘reflex faculty of approbation,’ bad when it is disapproved, but what it is that this ‘faculty’ approves he never distinctly tells us. The good is what ‘conscience’ approves, and conscience is what approves the good--that is the circle out of which he never escapes. If we insist on extracting from him any more satisfactory conclusion as to the object of moral approbation, it must be that it is the object which ‘self-love’ pursues, _i.e._, the greatest happiness of the individual, a conclusion which in some places he certainly adopts. [2] Hutcheson, on the other hand, gives a plain definition of the object which this faculty approves. It consists in ‘affections tending to the happiness of others and the moral perfection of the mind possessing them.’ If in this definition by ‘tending to’ may be understood ‘of which the motive is’--an interpretation which the general tenor of Hutcheson’s view would justify--it implies in effect that the morally good lies in desires of which the object is not pleasure. That desire for moral perfection, if there is such a thing, is not desire for pleasure is obvious enough; nor could desire for the happiness of others be taken to be so except through confusion between determination by the conception of another’s good, to which his apparent pleasure is rightly or wrongly taken as a guide, and by the imagination of a pleasure to be experienced by oneself in sympathy with the pleasure of another. Nor is it doubtful that Hutcheson himself, though he might have hesitated to identify moral evil, as selfishness, with the living for pleasure, yet understood by the morally good the living for objects wholly different from pleasure. The question is whether the recognition of such motives is logically compatible with his doctrine that reason gives no ends, but is only a ‘subservient power’ of calculating means. If feeling, undetermined by thought or reason, can alone supply motives, and of feeling, thus undetermined, nothing can be said but that it is pleasant or painful, what motive can there be but imagination of one’s own pleasure or pain--_one’s own_, for if imagination is merely the return of feeling in fainter form, no one can imagine any feeling, any more than he can originally feel it, except as his own?

[1] See preface to Sermons (about four pages from the end in most editions):-‘The goodness or badness of actions does not arise hence,’ &c. The conclusion he there arrives at is that a good action is one which ‘becomes such creatures as we are’; and this, read in the light of the second sermon, must be understood to mean an action ‘suitable to our whole nature,’ as containing a principle of ‘reflex approbation.’ In other words, the good action is so because approved by conscience.

[2] See a passage towards the end of Sermon III., ‘Reasonable self-love and conscience are the chief,’ &c. &c.; also a passage towards the end of Sermon XI., ‘Let it be allowed though virtue,’ &c. &c.

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

26. The work of reason in constituting the moral judgment (‘I ought’), as well as the moral motive (‘I must, because I ought’), could not find due recognition in an age which took its notion of reason from Locke. The only theory then known which found the source of moral distinctions in reason was Clarke’s, and Clarke’s notion of reason was essentially the same as that which appears in Locke’s account of demonstrative knowledge. [1] It was in truth derived from the procedure of mathematics, and only applicable to the comparison of quantities. Clarke talks loftily about the Eternal Reason of things, but by this he means nothing definite except the laws of proportion, and when he finds the virtue of an act to consist in conformity to this Eternal Reason, the inevitable rejoinder is the question--Between what quantities is this virtue a proportion? [2] In Shaftesbury first appears a doctrine of moral sense. Over and above the social and self-regarding affections proper to a ‘sensible’ creature, the characteristic of man is a ‘rational affection’ for goodness as consisting in the proper adjustment of the two orders of ‘sensible’ affection. This rational affection is not only a possible motive to action--it is the only motive that can make that character good of which human action is the expression; for with Shaftesbury, though a balance of the social and self-affections constitutes the goodness of those affections, yet the man is only good as actuated by affection for this goodness, and ‘should the _sensible_ affections stand ever so much amiss, yet if they prevail not because of those other rational affections spoken of, the person is esteemed virtuous.’ [3] Such a notion, it is clear, if it had met with a psychology answering it, had only to be worked out in order to become Kant’s doctrine of the rational will as determined by reverence for law; but Shaftesbury had no such psychology, nor, with his aristocratic indifference to completeness of system, does he seem ever to have felt the want of it. He never asked himself what precisely was the theory of reason implied in the admission of an affection ‘rational’ in the sense, not that reason calculates the means to its satisfaction, but that it is determined by an object only possible for a rational as distinct from a ‘sensible’ creature; and just because he did not do so, he slipped into adaptations to the current view of the good as pleasure and of desire as determined by the pleasure incidental to its own satisfaction. Thus, to a disciple, who wished to extract from Shaftesbury a more definite system than Shaftesbury had himself formed, the ‘rational affection’ would become desire for a specific feeling of pleasure supposed to arise on the view of good actions as exhibiting a proper balance between social and self-regarding affections. This pleasure is the ‘moral sense,’ [4] with which Shaftesbury’s name has become specially associated, while the doctrine of rational affection, with which he certainly himself connected it, but which it essentially vitiates, has been forgotten.

[1] See Clarke’s Boyle Lectures, Vol. II., proposition 1. The germ of Clarke’s doctrine of morals is to be found in Locke’s occasional assimilation of moral to mathematical truth and certainty. (Cf. Essay, Book IV, ch. 4, sec. 7, and ch. 12, sec. 8).

[2] Cf. Hume, Vol. II., p. 238. [Book III., part I., sec. I.]

[3] ‘Inq. concerning Virtue,’ Book I., pt. 2. sec. 4. Cf. Sec. 3 sub init.

[4] In using the term ‘moral sense,’ Shaftesbury himself, no doubt, meant to convey the notion that the moral faculty was one of ‘intuition,’ in Locke’s sense of the word, as opposed to reason, the faculty of demonstration, rather than that it was a susceptibility of pleasure and pain.

Consequences of the latter.

27. That doctrine is of value as maintaining that those actions only are morally good of which the rational affection is the motive, in the sense that they spring from a character which this affection has fashioned. But if the rational affection is desire for the pleasure of moral sense, we find ourselves in the contradiction of supposing that the only motive which can produce good acts is one that cannot operate till after the good acts have been done. It is desire for a pleasure which yet can only have been experienced as a consequence of the previous existence of the desire. Shaftesbury himself, indeed, treats the moral sense of pleasure in the contemplation of good actions as a pleasure in the view of the right adjustment between the social and self-affections. If, however, on the strength of this, we suppose that certain actions are first done, not from the rational affection, but yet good, and that then remembrance of the pleasure found in the view of their goodness, exciting desire, becomes motive to another set of acts which are thus done from rational affection, we contradict his statement that only the rational affection forms the goodness of man, and are none the nearer to an account of what does form it. To say that it is the ‘right adjustment’ of the two orders of affection tells us nothing. Except as suggesting an analogy from the world of art, really inapplicable, but by which Shaftesbury was much influenced, this expression means no more than that goodness is a good state of the affections. From such a circle the outlet most consistent with the spirit of that philosophy, which had led Shaftesbury himself to bring down the rational affection to the level of a desire for pleasure, would lie in the notion that a state of the affections is good in proportion as it is productive of pleasure; which again would suggest the question whether the specific pleasure of moral sense itself, the supposed object of rational affection, is more than pleasure in that indefinite anticipation of pleasure which the view of affections so ordered tends to raise in us.

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

28. Here, again, neither Butler nor Hutcheson, while they avoid the most obvious inconsistency of Shaftesbury’s doctrine, do much for its positive development. With each the ‘moral faculty,’ though it is said to approve and disapprove, is still a ‘sense’ or ‘sentiment,’ a specific susceptibility of pleasure in the contemplation of goodness; and each again recognises a ‘reflex affection’ for--a desire to have--the goodness of which the view conveys this pleasure. But they neither have the merit of stating so explicitly as Shaftesbury does that this rational affection alone constitutes the goodness of man, as man; nor, on the other hand, do they lapse, as he does, into the representation of it as a desire for the pleasure which the view of goodness causes. Butler, indeed, having no account to give of the goodness which is approved or morally pleasing, but the fact that it is so pleasing, could logically have nothing to say against the view that this reflex affection is merely a desire for this particular sort of pleasure; but by representing it as equivalent in its highest form to the love of God, to the longing of the soul after Him as the perfectly good, he in effect gives it a wholly different character. Hutcheson, by his definition of the object of moral approbation, [1] which is also a definition of the object of the reflex affection, is fairly entitled to exclude, as he does, along with the notion that the goodness which we morally approve is the quality of exciting the pleasure of such approval, the notion that ‘affection for goodness’ means desire for this or any other pleasure. But, in spite of his express rejection of this view, the question will still return, how either a faculty of consciousness of which we only know that it is ‘a kind of taste or relish,’ or a desire from the determination of which reason is expressly excluded, can have any other object than pleasure or pain.

[1] See above, sec. 25.

Hume excludes every object of desire but pleasure.

29. In contrast with these well-meant efforts to derive that distinction between the selfish and unselfish, between the pleasant and the morally good, which the Christian conscience requires, from principles that do not admit of it, Hume’s system has the merit of relative consistency. He sees that the two sides of Locke’s doctrine--one that thought originates nothing, but takes its objects as given in feeling, the other that the good which is object of desire is pleasant feeling--are inseparable. Hence he decisively rejects every notion of rational or unselfish affections, which would imply that they are other than desires for pleasure; of virtue, which would imply that it antecedently determines, rather than is constituted by, the specific pleasure of moral sense; and of this pleasure itself, which would imply that anything but the view of tendencies to produce pleasure can excite it. But here his consistency stops. The principle which forbade him to admit any object of desire but pleasure is practically forgotten in his account of the sources of pleasure, and its being so forgotten is the condition of the desire for pleasure being made plausibly to serve as a foundation for morals. It is the assumption of pleasures determined by objects only possible for reason, made in the treatise on the Passions, that prepares the way for the rejection of reason, as supplying either moral motive or moral standard, in the treatise on Morals.

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

30. ‘The passions’ is Hume’s generic term for ‘impressions of reflection’--appetites, desires, and emotions alike. He divides them into two main orders, ‘direct and indirect,’ both ‘founded on pain and pleasure.’ The _direct_ passions are enumerated as ‘desire and aversion, grief and joy, hope and fear, along with volition’ or will. These ‘arise from good and evil’ (which are the same as pleasure and pain) ‘most naturally and with least preparation.’ ‘Desire arises from good, aversion from evil, considered simply.’ They become will or volition, ‘when the good may be attained or evil avoided by any action of the mind or body’--will being simply ‘the internal impression we feel and are conscious of when we knowingly give rise to any new motion of our body or new perception of our mind.’ ‘When good is certain or probable it produces joy’ (which is described also as a pleasure produced by pleasure or by the imagination of pleasure); ‘when it is uncertain, it gives rise to hope.’ To these the corresponding opposites are grief and fear. We must suppose them to be distinguished from desire and aversion as being what he elsewhere calls ‘pure emotions’; such as do not, like desires, ‘immediately excite us to action.’ Given such an immediate impression of pleasure or pain as excites a ‘distinct passion’ of one or other of these kinds, and supposing it to ‘arise from an object related to ourselves or others,’ it excites mediately, through this relation, the new impressions of pride or humility, love or hatred--pride when the object is related to oneself, love when it is related to another person. These are _indirect_ passions. They do not tend to displace the immediate impression which is the condition of their excitement, but being themselves agreeable give it additional force. ‘Thus a suit of fine clothes produces pleasure from their beauty; and this pleasure produces the direct passions, or the impressions of volition and desire. Again, when these clothes are considered as belonging to oneself, the double relation conveys to us the sentiment of pride, which is an indirect passion; and the pleasure which attends that passion returns back to the direct affections, and gives new force to our desire or volition, joy or hope.’ [1]

[1] Vol. II., pp. 214, 215. Cf. pp. 76, 90, 153 and 203. [Book II.,