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 knowablefacts, 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 uniformityin 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 thenisthis ‘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 (orvice 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, asmiraculous, 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 beenmiraculous,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 thesame train of objectsto which we have been accustomed.’ These words in effect imply that it isnothabit, 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 animmediate impressionof the senses, or a repetition of that impression in the memory. But in the following section the characteristic of belief is placed in thederivedliveliness of anideaas 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 areality. 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 ofrealities. 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 inferencein 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 constantde factosequence 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 italmoston a level with sense; which implies that in every case of inference the inferred object isnota uniform relation—for how can there be an image of uniform relation?—and that itissomething 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 merelyex 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 experienceenoughto 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 beenuniform. 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, bydiscoveryof any necessary connexion or law of causation, for the perfect habit of transition, the imagination enlivened to the maximum by custom,isthe 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 asoulandself, andsubstance, 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 adefinition 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