[1] Already in Book II. (chap. xxxi. sec. 12), the simple idea, as abstract, is spoken of as a nominal essence.
[2] Cf. Book IV. chap. vi. sec. 5. ‘If we could certainly know (which is impossible) where a real essence, which we know not, is—e.g.in what parcels of matter the real essence of gold is; yet could we not be sure, that this or that quality could with truth be affirmed of gold; since it is impossible for us to know that this or that quality or idea has a necessary connexion with a real essence, of which we have no idea at all.’
Several passages, of course, can be adduced from Locke which are inconsistent with the statement in the text:e.g.Book IV. chap. iv. sec. 12. ‘To make knowledge real concerning substances, the ideas must be taken from the real existence of things. Whatever simple ideas have been found to coexist in any substance, these we may with confidence join together again, and so make abstract ideas of substances. For whatever have once had an union in nature, may be united again.’ In all such passages, however, as will appear below, the strict opposition between the real and the mental is lost sight of, the ‘nature’ or ‘substance,’ in which ideas ‘have a union,’ or are ‘found to coexist,’ being a system of relations which, according to Locke, it requires a mind to constitute, and thus itself a ‘nominal essence.’
[3] Cf. Book IV. chap. iii. sec. 29; Book IV. chap. vi. sec. 14; Book IV. chap. xi. sec. 11.
How then is science of nature possible?
83. We thus come upon the crucial antithesis between relations of ideas and matters of fact, with the exclusion of general certainty as to the latter, which was to prove such a potent weapon of scepticism in the hands of Hume. Of its incompatibility with recognized science we can have no stronger sign than the fact that, after more than a century has elapsed since Locke’s premisses were pushed to their legitimate conclusion, the received system of logic among us is one which, while professing to accept Locke’s doctrine of essence, and with it the antithesis in question, throughout assumes the possibility of general propositions as to matters of fact, and seeks in their methodical discovery and proof that science of nature which Locke already ‘suspected’ to be impossible. (Book IV. chap. xii. sec. 10.)
No ‘uniformities of phenomena’ can be known.
84. That, so far as any inference from past to future uniformities is necessary to the science of nature, his doctrine does more than justify such ‘suspicion,’ is plain enough. Does it, however, leave room for so much as a knowledge of past uniformities of fact, in which the natural philosopher, accepting the doctrine, might probably seek refuge? At first sight, it might seem to do so. ‘As, when our senses are actually employed about any object, we do know that it does exist; so by our memory we may be assured that heretofore things that affected our senses have existed—and thus we have knowledge of the past existence of several things, whereof our senses having informed us, our memories still retain the ideas.’ (Book IV. chap. xi. sec. 11.) Let us see, however, how this knowledge is restricted. ‘Seeing water at this instant, it is an unquestionable truth to me that water doth exist; and remembering that I saw it yesterday, it will also be always true, and as long as my memory retains it, always an undoubted proposition to me, that water did exist the 18th of July, 1688; as it will also be equally true that a certain number of very fine colours did exist, which at the same time I saw on a bubble of that water; but being now quite out of sight both of the water and bubbles too, it is no more certainly known to me that the water doth now exist, than that the bubbles and colours therein do so; it being no more necessary that water should exist to-day because it existed yesterday, than that the colours or bubbles exist to-day because they existed yesterday.’ (Ibid.)
Locke not aware of the full effect of his own doctrine …
85. The result is that though I may enumerate a multitude of past matters-of-fact about water, I cannot gather them up in any general statement about it as a real existence. So soon as I do so, I pass from water as a real existence to its ‘nominal essence,’i.e., to the ideas retained in my mind and put together in a fictitious substance, to which I have annexed the name ‘water.’ If we proceed to apply this doctrine to the supposed past matters-of-fact themselves, we shall find these too attenuating themselves to nonentity. Subtract in every case from the ‘particular existence’ of which we have ‘sensitive knowledge’ the qualification by ideas which, as retained in the mind, do not testify to a present real existence, and what remains? There is a certainty, according to Locke (Book IV. chap. xi. sec. 11), not, indeed, that water exists to-day because it existed yesterday—this is only ‘probable’—but that it has, as a past matter-of-fact, at this time and that ‘continued long in existence,’ because this has been ‘observed;’ which must mean (Book IV. chap. ii. secs. 1, 5, and 9), because there has been a continued ‘actual sensation’ of it. ‘Water,’ however, is a complex idea of a substance, and of the elements of this complex idea those only which at any moment are given in ‘actual sensation’ may be accounted to ‘really exist.’ First, then, must disappear from reality the ‘something,’ that unknown substratum of ideas, of which the idea is emphatically ‘abstract.’ This gone, we naturally fall back upon a fact of co-existence between ideas, as being a reality, though the ‘thing’ be a fiction. But if this co-existence is to be real or to represent a reality, the ideas between which it obtains must be ‘actual sensations.’ These, whatever they may be, are at least opposed by Locke to ideas retained in the mind, which only form a nominal essence. But it is the association of such nominal essence, in the supposed observation of water, with the actual sensation that alone gives the latter a meaning. Set this aside as unreal, and the reality, which the sensation reveals, is at any rate one of which nothing can be said. It cannot be a relation between sensations, for such relation implies a consideration of them by the mind, whereby, according to Locke, they must cease to be ‘real existences.’ (Book II. chap. xxv. sec. 1.) It cannot even be a single sensationas continuously observed, for every present moment of such observation has at the next become a past, and thus the sensation observed in it has lost its ‘actuality,’ and cannot,as a ‘real existence,’ qualify the sensation observed in the next. Restrict the ‘real existence,’ in short, as Locke does, to an ‘actual present sensation,’ which can only be defined by opposition to an idea retained in the mind, and at every instant of its existence it has passed into the mind and thus ceased really to exist. Reality is in perpetual process of disappearing into the unreality of thought. No point can be fixed either in the flux of time or in the imaginary process from ‘without’ to ‘within’ the mind, on the one side of which can be placed ‘real existence,’ on the other the ‘mere idea.’ It is only because Locke unawares defines to himself the ‘actual sensation’ as representative of a real essence, of which, however, according to him, as itself unknown, the presence is merely inferred from the sensation, that the ‘actual sensation’ itself is saved from the limbo of nominal essence, to which ideas, as abstract or in the mind, are consigned. Only, again, so far as it is thus illogically saved, are we entitled to that distinction between ‘facts’ and ‘things of the mind,’ which Locke once for all fixed for English philosophy.
… which is to make the real an abstract residuum of consciousness.
86. By this time we are familiar with the difficulties which this antithesis has in store for a philosophy which yet admits that it is only in the mind or in relation to consciousness—in one word, as ‘ideas’—that facts are to be found at all, while by the ‘mind’ it understands an abstract generalization from the many minds which severally are born and grow, sleep and wake, with each of us. The antithesis itself, like every other form in which the impulse after true knowledge finds expression, implies a distinction between the seeming and the real; or between that which exists for the consciousness of the individual and that which really exists. But outside itself consciousness cannot get. It is there that the real must, at any rate, manifest itself, if it is to be found at all. Yet the original antithesis between the mind and its unknown opposite still prevails, and in consequence that alone which, though indeed in the mind, is yet given to it by no act of its own, is held to represent the real. This is the notion which dominates Locke. He strips from the formed content of consciousness all that the mind seems to have done for itself, and the abstract residuum, that of which the individual cannot help being conscious at each moment of his existence, is or ‘reports’ the real, in opposition to the mind’s creation. This is Feeling; or more strictly—since it exists, and whatever does so must exist as one in a number (Book II. chap. vii. sec. 7)—it is the multitude of single feelings, ‘each perishing the moment it begins’ (Book II. chap, xxvii. sec. 2), from which all the definiteness that comes of composition and relation must be supposed absent. Thus, in trying to get at what shall be the mere fact in detachment from mental accretions, Locke comes to what is still consciousness, but the merely indefinite in consciousness. He seeks the real and finds the void. Of the real as outside consciousness nothing can be said; and of that again within consciousness, which is supposed to represent it, nothing can be said.
Ground of distinction between actual sensation and ideas in the mind is itself a thing of the mind.
87. We have already seen how Locke, in his doctrine of secondary qualities of substances, practically gets over this difficulty; how he first projects out of the simple ideas, under relations which it requires a mind to constitute, a cognisable system of things, and then gives content and definiteness to the simple ideas in us by treating them as manifestations of this system of things. In the doctrine of propositions, the proper correlative to the reduction of the real to the present simple idea, as that of which we cannot get rid, would be the reduction of the ‘real proposition’ to the mere ‘it is now felt.’ If the matter-of-fact is to be that in consciousness which is independent of the ‘work of the mind’ in comparing and compounding, this is the only possible expression for it. It states the only possible ‘real essence,’ which yet is an essence of nothing, for any reference of it to a thing, if the thing is outside consciousness, is an impossibility; and if it is within consciousness, implies an ‘invention of the mind’ both in the creation of a thing, ‘always the same with itself,’ out of perishing feelings, and in the reference of the feelings to such a thing. Thus carried out, the antithesis between ‘fact’ and ‘creation of the mind’ becomes self-destructive, for, one feeling being as real as another, it leaves no room for that distinction between the real and fantastic, to the uncritical sense of which it owes its birth. To avoid this fusion of dream-land and the waking world, Locke avails himself of the distinction between the idea (i.e.feeling) as in the mind, which is not convertible with reality, and the idea as somewhere else, no one can say where—‘the actual sensation’—which is so convertible. The distinction, however, must either consist in degrees of liveliness, in which case there must be a corresponding infinity of degrees of reality or unreality, or else must presuppose a real existence from which the feeling, if ‘actual sensation,’is—if merely ‘in the mind’is not—derived. Such a real existence either is an object of consciousness, or is not. If it is not, no distinction between one kind of feeling and another can for consciousness be derived from it. If it is, then, granted the distinction between given feelings and creations of the mind, it must fall to the latter, and a ‘thing of the mind’ turns out to be the ground upon which ‘fact’ is opposed to ‘things of the mind.’
Two meanings of real essence.
88. It remains to exhibit briefly the disguises under which these inherent difficulties of his theory of essence appear in Locke. Throughout, instead of treating ‘essence’ altogether as a fiction of the mind—as it must be if feelings in simplicity and singleness are alone the real—he treats indeed as a merely ‘nominal essence’ every possible combination of ideas of which we can speak, but still supposes another essence which is ‘real.’ But a real essence of what? Clearly, according to his statements, of the same ‘thing’ of which the combination of ideas in the mind is the nominal essence. Indeed, there is no meaning in the antithesis unless the ‘something,’ of which the latter essence is so nominally, is that of which it is not so really. So says Locke, ‘the nominal essence of gold is that complex idea the word gold stands for; let it be, for instance, a body yellow, of a certain weight, malleable, fusible, and fixed. But the real essence is the constitution of the insensible partsof that body, on which those qualities and all the other properties of gold depend.’ (Book III. chap. vi. sec. 2.) Here the notion clearly is that of one and the same thing, of which we can only say that it is a ‘body,’ a certain complex of ideas—yellowness, fusibility, &c.—is the nominal, a certain constitution of insensible parts the real, essence. It is on the real essence, moreover, that the ideas which constitute the nominal depend. Yet while they are known, the real essence (as appears from the context) is wholly unknown. In this case, it would seem, the cause is not known from its effects.
According to one, it is a collection of ideas as qualities of a thing:
89. There are lurking here two opposite views of the relation between the nominal essence and the real thing. According to one view, which prevails in the later chapters of the Second Book and in certain passages of the third, the relation between them is that with which we have already become familiar in the doctrine of substance—that, namely, between ideas as in us and the same as in the thing. (Book II, chap. xxiii. secs. 9 and 10.) No distinction is made between the ‘idea in the mind’ and the ‘actual sensation.’ The ideas in the mind are also in the thing, and thus are called its qualities, though for the most part they are so only secondarily,i.e.as effects of other qualities, which, as copied directly in our ideas, are called primary, and relatively to these effects are called powers. These powers have yet innumerable effects to produce in us which they have not yet produced. (Book II. chap. xxxi. sec. 10.) Those which have been so far produced, being gathered up in a complex idea to which a name is annexed, form the ‘nominal essence’ of the thing. Some of them are of primary qualities, more are of secondary. The originals of the former, the powers to produce the latter, together with powers to produce an indefinite multitude more, will constitute the ‘real essence,’ which is thus ‘a standard made by nature,’ to which the nominal essence is opposed merely as the inadequate to the adequate. The ideas, that is to say, which are indicated by the name of a thing, have been really ‘found in it’ or ‘produced by it,’ but are only a part of those that remain to be found in it or produced by it. It is in this sense that Locke opposes the adequacy between nominal and real essence in the case of mixed modes to their perpetual inadequacy in the case of ideas of substances. The combination in the one case is artificially made, in the other is found and being perpetually enlarged. This he illustrates by imagining the processes which led Adam severally to the idea of the mixed mode ‘jealousy’ and that of the substance ‘gold.’ In the former process Adam ‘put ideas together only by his own imagination, not taken from the existence of anything … the standard there was of his own making.’ In the latter, ‘he has a standard made by nature; and therefore being to represent that to himself by the idea he has of it, even when it is absent, he puts no simple idea into his complex one, but what he has the perception of from the thing itself. He takes care that his idea be conformable to this archetype.’ (Book III. chap. vi. secs. 46, 47.) ‘It is plain,’ however, ‘that the idea made after this fashion by this archetype will be always inadequate.’
… about real essence in this sense there may be general knowledge.
90. The nominal essence of a thing, then, according to this view, being no other than the ‘complex idea of a substance,’ is a copy of reality, just as the simple idea is. It is a picture or representation in the mind of a thing that does exist by ideas of those qualities that are discoverable in it.’ (Book II. chap. xxxi. secs. 6, 8.) It only differs from the simple idea (which is itself, as abstract, a nominal essence) [1] in respect of reality, because the latter is a copy or effect produced singly and involuntarily, whereas we may put ideas together, as if in a thing, which have never been so presented together, and, on the other hand, never can put together all that exist together. (Book II. chap. xxx. sec. 5, and xxxi. 10.) So far as Locke maintains this view, the difficulty about general propositions concerning real existence need not arise. A statement which affirmed of gold one of the qualities included in the complex idea of that substance, would not express merely an analysis of an idea in the mind, but would represent a relation of qualities in the existing thing from which the idea ‘has been taken.’ These qualities, as in the thing, doubtless would not be, as in us, feelings (or, as Locke should rather have said in more recent phraseology, possibilities of feeling), but powers to produce feeling, nor could any relation between these, as in the thing, be affirmed but such as had produced its copy or effect in actual experience. No coexistence of qualities could be truly affirmed, which had not been found; but, once found—being a coexistence of qualities and not simply a momentary coincidence of feelings—it could be affirmed as permanent in a general proposition. That a relation can be stated universally between ideas collected in the mind, no one denies, and if such collection ‘is taken from a combination of simple ideasexisting together constantly in things’ (Book II. chap, xxxii. sec. 18), the statement will hold equally of such existence. Thus Locke contrasts mixed modes, which, for the most part, ‘being actions which perish in the birth, are not capable of a lasting duration,’ with ‘substances, which are the actors; and wherein the simple ideas that make up the complex ideas designed by the name have a lasting union.’ (Book III. chap. vi. sec. 42.)
[1] Book II. chap. xxxi. sec. 12.
But such real essence a creature of thought.
91. In such a doctrine Locke, starting whence he did, could not remain at rest. We need not here repeat what has been said of it above in the consideration of his doctrine of substance. Taken strictly, it implies that ‘real existence’ consists in a permanent relation of ideas, said to be of secondary qualities, to each other in dependence on other ideas, said to be of primary qualities. In other words, in order to constitute reality, it takes ideas out of that particularity in time and place, which is yet pronounced the condition of reality, to give them an ‘abstract generality’ which is fictitious, and then treats them as constituents of a system of which the ‘invented’ relations of cause and effect and of identity are the framework. In short, it brings reality wholly within the region of thought, distinguishing it from the system of complex ideas or nominal essences which constitute our knowledge, not as the unknown opposite of all possible thought, but only as the complete from the incomplete. To one who logically carried out this view, the ground of distinction between fact and fancy would have to be found in the relation between thought as ‘objective,’ or in the world, and thought as so far communicated to us. Here, however, it could scarcely be found by Locke, with whom ‘thought’ meant simply a faculty of the ‘thinking thing,’ called a ‘soul,’ which might ride in a coach with him from Oxford to London. (Book II. chap, xxiii. sec. 20.) Was the distinction then to disappear altogether?
Hence another view of real essence as unknown qualities of unknown body.
92. It is saved, though at the cost of abandoning the ‘new way of ideas,’ as it had been followed in the Second Book, by the transfer of real existence from the thing in which ideas are found, and whose qualities the complex of ideas in us, though inadequate, represents, to something called ‘body,’ necessarily unknown, because no ideas in us are in any way representative of it. To such an unknown body unknown qualities are supposed to belong under the designation ‘real essence.’ The subject of the nominal essence, just because its qualities, being matter of knowledge, are ideas in our minds, is a wholly different and a fictitious thing.
How Locke mixes up these two meanings in ambiguity about body.
93. This change of ground is of course not recognized by Locke himself. It is the perpetual crossing of the inconsistent doctrines that renders his ‘immortal Third Book’ a web of contradictions. As was said above, he constantly speaks as if the subject of the real essence were the same with that of the nominal, and never explicitly allows it to be different. The equivocation under which the difference is disguised lies in the use of the term ‘body.’ A ‘particular body’ is the subject both of the nominal and real essence ‘gold’ But ‘body,’ as that in which ‘ideas are found,’ and in which they permanently coexist according to a natural law, is one thing; ‘body,’ as the abstraction of the unknown, is quite another. It is body in the former sense that is the real thing when nominal essence (the complex of ideas in us) is treated as representative, though inadequately so, of the real thing; it is body in the latter sense that is the real thing when this is treated as wholly outside possible consciousness, and its essence as wholly unrepresented by possible ideas. By a jumble of the two meanings Locke obtains an amphibious entity which is at once independent of relation to ideas, as is body in the latter sense, and a source of ideas representative of it, as is body in the former sense—which thus carries with it that opposition to the mental which is supposed necessary to the real, while yet it seems to manifest itself in ideas. Meanwhile a third conception of the real keeps thrusting itself upon the other two—the view, namely, that body in both senses is a fiction of thought, and that the mere present feeling is alone the real.
Body as ‘parcel of matter’ without essence.
94. Where Locke is insisting on the opposition between the real essence and any essence that can be known, the former is generally ascribed either to a ‘particular being’ or to a ‘parcel of matter.’ The passage which brings the opposition into the strongest relief is perhaps the following:—‘I would ask any one, what is sufficient to make an essential difference in nature between any two particular beings, without any regard had to some abstract idea, which is looked upon as the essence and standard of a species? All such patterns and standards being quite laid aside, particular beings, considered barely in themselves, will be found to have all their qualities equally essential; and everything, in each individual, will be essential to it, or, which is more, nothing at all. For though it may be reasonable to ask whether obeying the magnet be essential to iron; yet I think it is very improper and insignificant to ask whether it be essential to the particular parcel of matter I cut my pen with, without considering it under the nameiron, or as being of a certain species.’ (Book III. chap. vi. sec. 5.) [1] Here, it will be seen, the exclusion of the abstract idea from reality carries with it the exclusion of that ‘standard made by nature,’ which according to the passages already quoted, is the ‘thing itself from which the abstract idea is taken, and from which, if correctly taken, it derives reality. This exclusion, again, means nothing else than the disappearance from ‘nature’ (which with Locke is interchangeable with ‘reality’) of all essential difference. There remain, however, as the ‘real,’ ‘particular beings,’ or ‘individuals,’ or ‘parcels of matter.’ In each of these, ‘considered barely in itself, everything will be essential to it, or, which is more, nothing at all.’
[1] To the same purpose is a passage in Book III. chap. x. sec. 19, towards the end.
In this sense body is the mere individuum.
95. We have already seen, [1] that if by a ‘particular being’ is meant the mereindividuum, as it would be upon abstraction of all relations which according to Locke are fictitious, and constitute a community or generality, it certainly can have no essential qualities, since it has no qualities at all. It is a something which equals nothing. The notion of this bareindividuumbeing the real is the ‘protoplasm’ of Locke’s philosophy to which, though he never quite recognized it himself, after the removal of a certain number of accretions we may always penetrate. It is so because his unacknowledged method of finding the real consisted in abstracting from the formed content of consciousness till he came to that which could not be got rid of. This is the momentarily present relation of subject and object, which, considered on the side of the object, gives the mere atom, and on the side of the subject, the mere ‘it is felt.’ Even in this ultimate abstraction the ‘fiction of thought’ still survives, for the atom is determined to its mere individuality by relation to other individuals, and the feeling is determined to the present moment or ‘the now’ by relation to other ‘nows.’
[1] See above, paragraph 45.
Body as qualified by circumstances of time and place.
96. To this ultimate abstraction, however, Locke, though constantly on the road to it, never quite penetrates. He is farthest from it—indeed, as far from it as possible—where he is most acceptable to common sense, as in his ordinary doctrine of abstraction, where the real, from which the process of abstraction is supposed to begin, is already the individual in the fullness of its qualities, James and John, this man or this gold. He is nearest to it when the only qualification of the ‘particular being,’ which has to be removed by thought in order to its losing its reality and becoming an abstract idea, is supposed to consist in ‘circumstances of time and place.’
Such body Locke held to be subject of ‘primary qualities’: but are these compatible with particularity in time?
97. It is of these circumstances, as the constituents of the real, that he is thinking in the passage last quoted. As qualified by ‘circumstances of place’ the real is a parcel of matter, and under this designation Locke thought of it as a subject of ‘primary qualities of body.’ [1] These, indeed, as he enumerates them, may be shown to imply relations going far beyond that of simple distinctness between atoms, and thus to involve much more of the creative action of thought; but we need be the less concerned for this usurpation on the part of the particular being, since that which he illegitimately conveys to it as derived from ‘circumstances of place,’ he virtually takes away from it again by limitation in time. The ‘particular being’ has indeed on the one hand a real essence, consisting of certain primary qualities, but on the other it has no continued identity. It is only real as present to feeling at this or that time. The particular being of one moment is not the particular being of the next. Thus the primary qualities which are a real essence,i.e.an essence of a particular being, at one moment, are not its real essence at the next, because, while they as represented in the mind remain the same, the ‘it,’ the particular being is different. Animmutableessence for that very reason cannot be real. The immutability can only lie in a relation between a certain abstract (i.e.unreal) idea and a certain sound. (Book III. chap. iii. sec. 19.) ‘The real constitution of things,’ on the other hand, ‘begin and perish with them. All things that exist are liable to change.’ (Ibid.) Locke, it is true (as is implied in the termchange[2]) never quite drops the notion of there being a real identity in some unknown background, but this makes no difference in the bearing of his doctrine upon the possibility of ‘real’ knowledge. It only means that for an indefinite particularity of ‘beings’ there is substituted one ‘being’ under an indefinite peculiarity of forms. Though the reality of the thingin itselfbe immutable, yet its realityfor usis in perpetual flux. ‘In itself’ it is a substance without an essence, a ‘something we know not what’ without any ideas to ‘support;’ a ‘parcel of matter,’ indeed, but one in which no quality is really essential, because its real essence, consisting in its momentary presentation to sense, changes with the moments. [3]
[1] According to Locke’s ordinary usage of the terms, no distinction appears between ‘matter’ and ‘body.’ In Book III. chap. X. sec. 15, however, he distinguishes matter from body as the less determinate conception from the more. The one implies solidity merely, the other extension and figure also, so that we may talk of the ‘matter of bodies,’ but not of the ‘body of matters.’ But since solidity, according to Locke’s definition, involves the other ‘primary qualities,’ this distinction does not avail him much.
[2] See above, paragraph 69.
[3] Cf. Book III. chap. vi. sec. 4: ‘Take but away the abstract ideas by which we sort individuals and rank them under common names, and then the thought of anything essential to any of them instantly vanishes,’ &c.
How Locke avoids this question.
98. We have previously noticed [1] Locke’s pregnant remark, that ‘things whose existence is in succession’ do not admit of identity. (Book II. chap, xxvii. sec. 2.) So far, then, as the ‘real,’ in distinction from the ‘abstract,’ is constituted by particularity in time, or has its existence in succession, it excludes the relation of identity. ‘It perishes in every moment that it begins.’ Had Locke been master of this notion, instead of being irregularly mastered by it, he might have anticipated all that Hume had to say. As it is, even in passages such as those to which reference has just been made, where he follows its lead the farthest, he is still pulled up by inconsistent conceptions with which common sense, acting through common language, restrains the most adventurous philosophy. Thus, even from his illustration of the liability of all existence to change—‘that which was grass to-day is to-morrow the flesh of a sheep, and within a few days after will become part of a man’ [2]—we find that, just as he does not pursue the individualization of the real in space so far but that it still remains ‘a constitution of parts,’ so he does not pursue it in time so far but that a coexistence of real elements over a certain duration is possible. To a more thorough analysis, indeed, there is no alternative between finding reality in relations of thought, which, because relations of thought, are not in time and therefore are immutable, and submitting it to such subdivision of time as excludes all real coexistence because what is real, as present, at one moment is unreal, as past, at the next. This alternative could not present itself in its clearness to Locke, because, according to his method of interrogating consciousness, he inevitably found in its supposed beginning, which he identified with the real, those products of thought which he opposed to the real, and thus read into the simple feeling of the moment that which, if it were the simple feeling of the moment, it could not contain. Thus throughout the Second Book of the Essay the simple idea is supposed to represent either as copy or as effect a permanent reality, whether body or mind: and in the later books, even where therepresentationof such reality in knowledge comes in question, its existence as constituted by ‘primary qualities of body’ is throughout assumed, though general propositions with regard to it are declared impossible. It is a feeling referred to body, or, in the language of subsequent psychology, a feeling of theoutwardsense, [3] that Locke means by an ‘actual present sensation,’ and it is properly in virtue of this reference that such sensation is supposed to be, or to report, the real.
[1] See above, paragraph 75.
[2] Book III. chap. iii. sec. 10.
[3] For the germs of the distinction between outer and inner sense, see Locke’s Essay, Book II. chap. i. sec. 14: ‘This source of ideas (the perception of the operations of the mind) every man has wholly in himself; and though it be not sense, as having nothing to do with external objects, yet it is very like it, and might properly enough be called internal sense.’ For the notion of outer sense cf. Book II. chap. ix. sec. 6, where he is distinguishing the ideas of hunger and warmth, which he supposes children to receive in the womb from the ‘innate principles which some contend for.’ ‘These (the ideas of hunger and warmth) being the effects of sensation, are only from some affections of the body which happen to them there, and so depend on something exterior to the mind, not otherwise differing in their manner of production from other ideas derived from sense, but only in the precedency of time.’
Body and its qualities supposed to be outside consciousness.
99. According to the doctrine of primary qualities, as originally stated, the antithesis lies between body as it is in itself and body as it is for us, not between body as it is for us in ‘actual sensation,’ and body as it is for us according to ‘ideas in the mind.’ The primary qualities ‘are in bodies whether we perceive them or no.’ (Book II. chap. viii. sec. 23.) As he puts it elsewhere (Book II. chap. xxxi. sec. 2), it is just because ‘solidity and extension and the termination of it, figure, with motion and rest, whereof we have the ideas, would be really in the world as they are whether there were any sensible being to perceive them or no,’ that they are to be looked on as therealmodifications of matter. A change in them, unlike one in the secondary qualities, or such as is relative to sense, is arealalterationin body. ‘Pound an almond, and the clear white colour will be altered into a dirty one, and the sweet taste into an oily one. What alteration can the beating of the pestle make in any body, but an alteration of the texture of it?’ (Book II. chap. viii. sec. 20.) It is implied then in the notion of the real as body that it should be outside consciousness. It is that which seems to remain when everything belonging to consciousness has been thought away. Yet it is brought within consciousness again by the supposition that it has qualities which copy themselves in our ideas and are ‘the exciting causes of all our various sensations from bodies.’ (Book II. chap. xxxi. sec. 3.) Again, however, the antithesis between the real and consciousness prevails, and the qualities of matter or body having been brought within the latter, are opposed to a ‘substance of body’—otherwise spoken of as ‘the nature, cause, or manner of producing the ideas of primary qualities’—which remains outside it, unknown and unknowable. (Book II. chap, xxiii. sec. 30, &c.)
How can primary qualities be outside consciousness, and yet knowable?
100. The doctrine of primary qualities was naturally the one upon which the criticism of Berkeley and Hume first fastened, as the most obvious aberration from the ‘new way of ideas.’ That the very notion of the senses as ‘reporting’ anything, under secondary no less than under primary qualities, implies the presence of ‘fictions of thought’ in the primitive consciousness, may become clear upon analysis; but it lies on the surface and is avowed by Locke himself (Book II. chap. viii. secs. 2, 7), that the conception of primary qualities is only possible upon distinction being made between ideas as in our minds, and the ‘nature of things existing without us,’ which cannot be given in the simple feeling itself. This admitted, the distinction might either be traced to the presence within intelligent consciousness of another factor than simple ideas, or be accounted for as a gradual ‘invention of the mind.’ In neither way, however, could Locke regard it and yet retain his distinction between fact and fancy, as resting upon that between the nature of things and the mind of man. The way of escape lay in a figure of speech, the figure of the wax or the mirror. ‘The ideas of primary qualities are resemblances of them.’ (Book II. chap, viii. sec. 15.) These qualities then may be treated, according to occasion, either as primitive data of consciousness, or as the essence of that which is the unknown opposite of consciousness—in the latter way when the antithesis between nature and mind is in view, in the former when nature has yet to be represented as knowable.
Locke answers that they copy themselves in ideas—Berkeley’s rejoinder. Locke gets out of the difficulty by his doctrine of solidity.
101. How, asked Berkeley, can an idea be like anything that is not an idea? Put the question in its proper strength—How can an idea be like that of which the sole and simple determination is just that it is not an idea (and such with Locke is body ‘in itself’ or as the real)—and it is clearly unanswerable. The process by which Locke was prevented from putting it to himself is not difficult to trace. ‘Body’ and ‘the solid’ are with him virtually convertible terms. Each indifferently holds the place of the substance, of which the primary qualities are so many determinations. [1] It is true that where solidity has to be defined, it is defined as an attribute of body, but conversely body itself is treated as a ‘texture of solid parts,’i.e.as a mode of the solid. Body, in short, so soon as thought of, resolves itself into a relation of bodies, and the solid into a relation of solids, but Locke, by a shuffle of the two terms—representing body as a relation between solids and the solid as a relation between bodies—gains the appearance of explaining each in turn by relation to a simpler idea. Body, as the unknown, is revealed to us by the idea of solidity, which sense conveys to us; while solidity is explained by reference to the idea of body. The idea of solidity, we are told, is a simple idea which comes into the mind solely by the sense of touch. (Book II. chap. iii. sec. 1.) But no sooner has he thus identified it with an immediate feeling than, in disregard of his own doctrine, that ‘an idea which has no composition’ is undefinable (see Book III. chap. iv. sec. 7.), he converts it into a theory of the cause of that feeling. ‘It arises from the resistance which we find in body to the entrance of any other body into the place it possesses till it has left it;’ and he at once proceeds to treat it as the consciousness of such resistance. ‘Whether we move or rest, in what posture soever we are, we always feel something under us that supports us, and hinders our farther sinking downwards: and the bodies which we daily handle make us perceive that whilst they remain between them, they do by an insurmountable force hinder the approach of the parts of our hands that press them. That which then hinders the approach of two bodies, when they are moving one towards another, I call solidity.’ [2]
[1] See Book II. chap. viii. sec. 23: The primary ‘qualities that are in bodies, are the bulk, figure, number, situation, and motion or rest,of their solid parts.’ Cf. Book II. chap. xiii. sec. 11: ‘Solidity is so inseparable an idea from body, that upon that depends its filling of space, its contact, impulse, and communication of motion upon impulse.’
[2] Book II. chap. iv. sec 7.
In which he equivocates between body as unknown opposite of mind and body as a ‘nominal essence’.
102. Now ‘body’ in this theory is by no means outside consciousness. It is emphatically ‘in the mind,’ a ‘nominal essence,’ determined by the relation which the theory assigns to it, and which, like every relation according to Locke, is a ‘thing of the mind.’ This relation is that of outwardness to other bodies, and among these to the sensitive body through which we receive ‘ideas of sensation’—a body which, on its side, as determined by the relation, has its essence from the mind. It is, then, not as the unknown opposite of the mind, but as determined by an intelligible relation which the mind constitutes, and of which the members are each ‘nominal essences,’ that body is outward to the sensitive subject. But to Locke, substituting for body as a nominal essence body as the unknown thing in itself, and identifying the sensitive subject with the mind, outwardness in the above sense—an outwardness constituted by the mind—becomes outwardness to the mind of an unknown opposite of the mind. Solidity, then, and the properties which its definition involves (and it involves all the ‘primary qualities’), become something wholly alien to the mind, which ‘would exist without any sensible being to perceive them.’ As such, they do duty as a real essence, when the opposition of this to everything in the mind has to be asserted. Yet must they be in some sort ideas, for of these alone (as Locke fully admits) can we think and speak; and if ideas, in the mind. How is this contradiction to be overcome? By the notion that though not in or of the mind, they yet copy themselves upon it in virtue of an impulse in body, correlative to that resistance of which touch conveys the idea. (Book II. chap. viii. sec. 11). [1] This explanation, however, is derived from the equivocation between the two meanings of mind and body respectively. The problem to be explained is the relation between the mind and that which is only qualified as the negation of mind; and the explanation is found in a relation, only existing for the mind, between a sensitive and a non-sensitive body.
[1] Cf. also the passage from Book II. chap. xiii. sec. 11, quoted above, paragraph 101, note [1].
Rationale of these contradictions.
103. The case then stands as follows. All that Locke says of body as the real thing-in-itself, and of its qualities as the essence of such thing, comes according to his own showing of an action of the mind which he reckons the source of fictions. ‘Body in itself’ is a substratum of ideas which the mind ‘accustoms itself to suppose.’ It perpetually recedes, as what was at first a substance becomes in turn a complex of qualities for which a more remote substratum has to be supposed—a ‘substance of body,’ a productive cause of matter. But the substance, however remote, is determined by the qualities to which it is correlative, as the cause by its effects; and every one of these—whether the most primary, solidity, or those which ‘the mind finds inseparable from every particle of matter,’i.e.from the ‘solid parts of a body,’ [1]—as defined by Locke, is a relation such as the mind, ‘bringing one thing to and setting it by another’ (Book II. chap. xxv. sec. 1), can alone constitute. To Locke, however, overcome by the necessity of intelligence, as gradually developing itself in each of us, to regard the intelligible world as there before it is known, the real must be something which would be what it is if thought were not. Strictly taken, this must mean that it is that of which nothing can be said, and some expression must be found by means of which it may do double duty as at once apart from consciousness and in it. This is done by converting ‘the primary qualities of body, though obviously complex ideas of relation, into simple feelings of touch,’ [2] and supposing the subject of this sensation to be related to its object as wax to the seal. If we suppose this relation, again, which is really within the mind and constituted by it, to be one between the mind itself, as passive, and the real, we obtain a ‘real’ which exists apart from the mind, yet copies itself upon it. The mind, then, so far as it takes such a copy, becomes an ‘outer sense,’ as to which it may be conveniently forgotten that it is a mode of mind at all. Thus every modification of it, as an ‘actual present sensation,’ comes to be opposed to every idea of memory or imagination, as that which is not of the mind to that which is; though there is no assignable difference between one and the other, except an indefinite one in degree of vivacity, that is not derived from the action of the mind in referring the one to an object, constituted by itself, to which it does not refer the other.
[1] Cf Book II. chap. viii. sec. 9. The primary qualities of body are ‘such as sense constantly finds in every particle of matter, which has bulk enough to be perceived, and the mind finds inseparable from every particle of matter, though less than to make itself singly be perceived by our senses.’
[2] I write advisedly ‘touch’ only, not ‘sight and touch,’ because, though Locke (Book II. chap, v.) speaks of the ideas of extension, figure, motion, and rest of bodies, as received both by sight and touch, these are all involved in the previous definition of solidity, of which the idea is ascribed to touch only.
What knowledge can feeling, even as referred to a ‘solid’ body, convey?
104. Let us now consider whether by this reference to body, feeling becomes any the more a source of general knowledge concerning matters of fact. As we have seen, if we identify the real with feeling simply, its distinction from ‘bare vision’ disappears. This difficulty it is sought to overcome by distinguishing feeling as merely in the mind from actually present sensation. But on reflection we find that sensation after all is feeling, and that one feeling is as much present as another, though present only to become at the next moment past, and thus, if it is the presence that is the condition of reality, unreal. The distinction then must lie in theactualityof the sensation. But does not this actuality mean simply derivation from the real,i.e.derivation from the idea which has to be derived from it? If, in the spirit of Locke, we answer, ‘No, it means that the feeling belongs to the outer sense’; the rejoinder will be that this means either that it is a feeling of touch—and what should give the feeling of touch this singular privilege over other feelings of not being in the mind while they are in it?—or that it is a feeling referred to body, which still implies the presupposition of the real, only under the special relations of resistance and impulse. The latter alternative is the one which Locke virtually adopts, and in adopting it he makes the actuality, by which sensation is distinguished from ‘feelings in the mind,’ itself a creation of the mind. But though it is by an intellectual interpretation of the feeling of touch, not by the feeling itself, that there is given that idea of body, by reference to which actual sensation is distinguished from the mere idea, still with Locke the feeling of touch is necessary to the interpretation. Thus, supposing his notion to be carried out consistently, the actual present sensation, as reporting the real, must either be a feeling of touch, or, if of another sort,e.g., sight or hearing, must be referable to an object of touch. In other words, the real will exist for us so long only as it is touched, and ideas in us will constitute a real essence so long only as they may be referred to an object now touched. Let the object cease to be touched, and the ideas become a nominal essence in the mind, the knowledge which they constitute ceases to be real, and the proposition which expresses it ceases to concern matter of fact. Truth as to matters of fact or bodies, then, must be confined to singular propositions such as ‘this is touched now,’ ‘that was touched then;’ ‘what is touched now is bitter,’ ‘what was then touched was red.’ [1]
[1] Thus the conviction that an object seen is not ‘bare fancy,’ which is gained by ‘putting the hand to it’ (Book IV. chap. xi. sec. l7), as it conveys the idea of solidity, is properly, according to Locke’s doctrine, not one among other ‘confirmations of the testimony of the senses,’ but the source of all such testimony, as a testimony to the real,i.e.to body. See above, paragraph 62.
Only the knowledge that something is, not what it is.
105. All that is gained, then, by the conversion of the feeling of touch, pure and simple, into the idea of a body touched, is the supposition thatthere isa real existence which does not come and go with the sensations. As towhatthis existence is, as to its real essence, we can have no knowledge but such as is given in a present sensation. [1] Any essence of it, otherwise known, could only be a nominal essence, a relation of ideas in our minds: it would lack the condition in virtue of which alone a datum of consciousness can claim to be representative of reality, that of being an impression made by a body now operating upon us. (Book III. chap. v. sec. 2, and Book IV. chap. xi. sec. 1.) The memory of such impression, however faithful, will still only report apastreality. It will itself be merely ‘an idea in the mind.’ Neither it nor its relation to any present sensation result from the immediate impact of body, and in consequence neither ‘really exists.’ All that can be known, then, of the real, in other words, the whole real essence of body, as it is for us, reduces itself to that which can at any moment be ‘revealed’ in a single sensation apart from all relation to past sensations; and this, as we have seen, is nothing at all.
[1] Cf. Book III. chap. vi. sec. 6: ‘As to the real essences of substances, we only suppose their being, without precisely knowing what they are.’ The appearance of the qualification ‘precisely,’ as we shall see below, marks an oscillation from the view, according to which ‘real essence’ is the negation of the knowable to the view according to which our knowledge of it is merely inadequate.
How it is that the real essence of things, according to Locke, perishes with them, yet is immutable.
106. Thus that reduction of reality to that of which nothing can be said, which follows from its identification with particularity in time, follows equally from its identification with the resistance of body, or (which comes to the same) from the notion of an ‘outer sense’ being its organ; since it is only that whichnowresists, not a general possibility of resistance nor a relation between the resistances of different times, that can be regarded as outside the mind. In Locke’s language, it is only a particular parcel of matter that can be so regarded. Of such a parcel, as he rightly says, it is absurd to ask what is its essence, for it can have none at all. (See above, paragraph 94.) As real, it has no quality save that of being a body or of being now touched—a quality, which as all things real have it and have none other, cannot be adifferentiaof it. When we consider that this quality may be regarded equally as immutable and as changing from moment to moment, we shall see the ground of Locke’s contradiction of himself in speaking of the real thing sometimes as indestructible, sometimes as in continual dissolution. ‘The real constitutions of things begin and perish with them.’ (Book III. chap. iii. sec. 19.) That is, the thing at one moment makes an impact on the sensitive tablet—in the fact that it does so lie at once its existence and its essence—but the next moment the impact is over, and with it thing and essence,as real, have disappeared. Another impact, and thus another thing, has taken its place. But of this the real essence is just the same as that of the previous thing, namely, that it may be touched, or is solid, or a body, or a parcel of matter; nor can this essence be really lost, since than it there is no other reality, all difference of essence, as Locke expressly says, [1] being constituted by abstract ideas and the work of the mind. It follows thatrealchange is impossible. A parcel of matter at one time is a parcel of matter at all times. Thus we have only to forget that the relation of continuity between the parcels, not being an idea caused by impact, should properly fall to the unreal—though only on the same principle as should that of distinctness between the times—and we find the real in a continuity of matter, unchangeable because it has no qualities to change. It may seem strange that when this notion of the formless continuity of the real being gets the better of Locke, a man should be the real being which he takes as his instance. ‘Nothing I have is essential to me. An accident or disease may very much alter my colour or shape; a fever or fall may take away my reason or memory, or both; and an apoplexy leave neither sense nor understanding, no, nor life.’ (Book III. chap. vi. sec. 4.) But as the sequel shows, the man or the ‘I’ is here considered simply as ‘a particular corporeal being,’i.e.as the ‘parcel of matter’ which alone (according to the doctrine of reality now in view) can be the real in man, and upon which all qualities are ‘superinductions of the mind.’ [2]
[1] Book III. chap. vi. sec. 4: ‘Take but away the abstract ideas by which we sort individuals, and then the thought of anything essential to any of them instantly vanishes.’
[2] See a few lines below the passage quoted: ‘So that if it be asked, whether it be essential to me, or any other particular corporeal being, to have reason? I say, no; no more than it is essential to this white thing I write on to have words in it.’
Only about qualities of matter, as distinct from matter itself, thatLocke feels any difficulty.
107. We may now discern the precise point where the qualm as to clothing reality with such superinductions commonly returns upon Locke. The conversion of feeling into body felt and of the particular time of the feeling into an individuality of the body, and, further, the fusion of the individual bodies, manifold as the times of sensation, into one continued body, he passes without scruple. So long as these are all the traces of mental fiction which ‘matter,’ or ‘body,’ or ‘nature’ bears upon it, he regards it undoubtingly as the pure ‘privation’ of whatever belongs to the mind. But so soon as cognisable qualities, forming an essence, come to be ascribed to body, the reflection arises that these qualities are on our side ideas, and that so far as they are permanent or continuous they are not ideas of the sort which can alone represent body as the ‘real’ opposite of mind; they are not the result of momentary impact; they are not ‘actually present sensations.’ Suppose them, however, to have no permanence—suppose their reality to be confined to the fleeting ‘now’—and they are no qualities, no essence, at all. There is then for us norealessence of body or nature; what we call so is a creation of the mind.
These, as knowable, must be our ideas, and therefore not a ‘real essence’.
108. This implies the degradation of the ‘primary qualities of body’ from the position which they hold in the Second Book of the Essay, as the real,par excellence, to that of a nominal essence. In the Second Book, just as the complex of ideas, received and to be received from a substance, is taken for the real thing without disturbance from the antithesis between reality and ‘ideas in the mind,’ so the primary qualities of body are taken not only as real, but as the sources of all other reality. Body, the real thing, copying itself upon the mind in an idea of sensation (that of solidity), carries with it from reality into the mind those qualities which ‘the mind finds inseparable from it,’ with all their modes. ‘A piece of manna of a sensible bulk is able to produce in us the idea of a round or square figure, and, by being removed from one place to another, the idea of motion. This idea of motion represents it, as it really is in the manna, moving; a circle or square are the same, whether in idea or existence, in the mind or in the manna; and this both motion and figure are really in the manna, whether we take notice of them or no.’ (Book II. chap. viii. sec. 18.) To the unsophisticated man, taking for granted that the ‘sensible bulk’ of the manna is a ‘real essence,’ this statement will raise no difficulties. But when he has learnt from Locke himself that the ‘sensible bulk,’ so far as we can think and speak of it, must consist in the ideas which it is said to produce, the question as to the real existence of these must arise. It turns out that they ‘really exist,’ so far as they represent the impact of a body copying itself in actually present sensation, and that from their reality, accordingly, must be excluded all qualities that accrue to the present sensation from its relation to the past. Can the ‘primary qualities’ escape this exclusion?
Are the ‘primary qualities’ then, a ‘nominal essence’?
109. To obtain a direct and compendious answer to this question from Locke’s own mouth is not easy, owing to the want of adjustment between the several passages where he treats of the primary qualities. They are originally enumerated as the ‘bulk, figure, number, situation, and motion or rest of the solid parts of bodies’ (Book II. chap. viii. sec. 23), and, as we have seen, are treated as all involved in that idea of solidity which is given in the sensation of touch. We have no further account of them till we come to the chapters on ‘simple modes of space and duration’ (Book II. chaps. xiii. &c.), which are introduced by the remark, that in the previous part of the book simple ideas have been treated ‘rather in the way that they come into the mind than as distinguished from others more compounded.’ As the simple idea, according to Locke, is that which comes first into the mind, the two ways of treatment ought to coincide; but there follows an explanation of the simple modes in question, of which to a critical reader the plain result is that the idea of body, which, according to the imaginary theory of ‘the way that it came into the mind’ is simple and equivalent to the sensation of touch, turns out to be a complex of relations of which the simplest is called space.
According to Locke’s account they are relations, and thus inventions of the mind.
110. To know what space itself is, ‘we are sent to our senses’ of sight and touch. It is ‘as needless to go to prove that men perceive by their sight a distance between bodies of different colours, or between the parts of the same body, as that they see colours themselves; nor is it less obvious that they can do so in the dark by feeling and touch.’ (Book II. chap. xiii. sec. 2.) Space being thus explained by reference to distance, and distancebetween bodies, it might be supposed that distance and body were simpler ideas. In the next paragraph, however, distance is itself explained to be a mode of space. It is ‘space considered barely in length between any two beings,’ and is distinguished(a)from ‘capacity’ or ‘space considered in length, breadth, and thickness;’(b)from ‘figure, which is nothing but the relation which the parts of the termination of extension, or circumscribed space, have among themselves;’(c)from ‘place, which is the relation of distance between anything and any two or more points which are considered as keeping the same distance one with another, and so as at rest.’ It is then shown at large (Book II. chap. xiii. sec. 11), as against the Cartesians, that extension, which is ‘space in whatsoever manner considered,’ is a ‘distinct idea from body.’ The ground of the distinction plainly lies in the greater complexity of the idea of body. Throughout the definition just given ‘space’ is presupposed as the simpler idea of which capacity, figure, and place are severally modifications; and these again, as ‘primary qualities,’ though with a slight difference of designation, [1] are not only all declared inseparable from body, but are involved in it under a further modification as ‘qualities of its solid parts’i.e., of parts so related to each other that each will change its place sooner than admit another into it. (Book II. chap. iv. sec. 2, and chap. viii. sec. 23.) Yet, though body is thus a complex of relations—all, according to Locke’s doctrine of relation, inventions of the mind—and though it must be proportionately remote from the simple idea which ‘comes first into the mind,’ yet, on the other hand, it is in body, as an object previously given, that these relations are said to be found, and found by the senses. (Book II. chap. xiii. secs. 2, 27.) [2]
[1] In the enumeration of primary qualities, ‘capacity’ is represented by ‘bulk,’ ‘place’ by ‘situation.’
[2] In the second of the passages referred to, it will be seen that ‘matter’ is used interchangeably with ‘body.’
Body is the complex in which they are found. Do we derive the idea of body from primary qualities, or the primary qualities from idea of body?
111. It will readily be seen that ‘body’ here is a mode of the idea of substance, and, like it, [1] appears in two inconsistent positions as at once the beginning and the end of the process of knowledge—as on the one hand that in which ideas are found and from which they are abstracted, and on the other hand that which results from their complication. As the attempt either to treat particular qualities as given and substance as an abstraction gradually made, or conversely to treat the ‘thing’ as given, and relations as gradually superinduced, necessarily fails for the simple reason that substance and relations each presuppose the other, so body presupposes the primary qualities as so many relations which form its essence or make it what it is, while these again presuppose body as the matter which they determine, It is because Locke substitutes for this intellectual order of mutual presupposition a succession of sensations in time, that he finds himself in the confusion we have noticed—now giving the priority to sensations in which the idea of body is supposed to be conveyed, and from it deriving the ideas of the primary qualities, now giving it to these ideas themselves, and deriving the idea of body from their complication. This is just such a contradiction as it would be to put to-day before yesterday.Wemay escape it by the consideration that in the case before us it is not a succession of sensations in time that we have to do with at all; that ‘the real’ is an intellectual order, or mind, in which every element, being correlative to every other, at once presupposes and is presupposed by every other; but that this order communicates itself to us piecemeal, in a process of which the first condition on our part is the conception that thereisan order, or something related to something else; and that thus the conception of qualified substance, which in its definite articulation is the end of all our knowledge, is yet in another form, that may be called indifferently either abstract or confused, [2] its beginning. This way of escape, however, was not open to Locke, because with him it was the condition of reality in the idea of the body and its qualities that they should be ‘actually present sensations.’ The priority then of body to the relations of extension, distance, &c., as of that in which these relations are found, must, if body and extension are to be more than nominal essences, be a priority of sensations in time. But, on the other hand, the priority of the idea of space to the ideas of its several modes, and of these again to the idea of body, as of the simpler to the more complex, must no less than the other, if the ideas in question are to be real, be one in time. Locke’s contradiction, then, is that of supposing that of two sensations each is actually present, of two impacts on the sensitive tablet each is actually made, before the other.
[1] See above, paragraph 39.
[2] ‘Indifferently either abstract or confused,’ because of the conception that is most confused the least can be said; and it is thus most abstract.
Mathematical ideas, though ideas of ‘primary qualities of body,’ have ‘barely an ideal existence’.
112. From such a contradiction, even though he was not distinctly aware of it, he could not but seek a way of escape, From his point of view two ways might at first sight seem to be open—the priority in sensitive experience, and with it reality, might be assigned exclusively either to the idea of body or to that of space. To whichever of the two it is assigned, the other must become a nominal essence. If it is the idea of body that is conveyed to the mind directly from without through sensation, then it must be by a process in the mind that the spatial relations are abstracted from it; and conversely, if it is the latter that are given in sensation, it must be by a mental operation of compounding that the idea of body is obtained from them. Now, according to Locke’s fundamental notion, that the reality of an idea depends upon its being in consciousness a copythrough impactof that which is not in consciousness, any attempt to retain it in the idea of space while sacrificing it in that of body would be obviously self-destructive. Nor, however we might re-write his account of the relations of space as ‘found in bodies,’ could we avoid speaking of them as relations of some sort; and if relations, then derived from the ‘mind’s carrying its view from one thing to another,’ and not ‘actually present sensations.’ We shall not, then, be surprised to find Locke tending to the other alternative, and gradually forgetting his assertion that ‘a circle or a square are the same whether in idea or in existence,’ and his elaborate maintenance of the ‘real existence’ of a vacuum,i.e., extension without body. (Book II. chap. xiii. secs. 21 and the following, and xvii. 4.) In the Fourth Book it is body alone that has real existence, an existence revealed by actually present sensation, while all mathematical ideas, the ideas of the circle and the square, have ‘barely an ideal existence’ (Book IV. chap. iv. sec. 6); and this means nothing else than the reduction of the primary qualities of body to a nominal essence. Our ideas of them are general (Book IV. chap. iii. sec. 24), or merely in the mind. ‘There is no individual parcel of matter, to which any of these qualities are so annexed as to be essential to it or inseparable from it.’ (Book III. chap. vi. sec. 6.) How should there be, when the ‘individual parcel’ means that which copies itself by impact in the present sensation, while the qualities in question are relations which cannot be so copied? Yet, except as attaching to such a parcel, they have no ‘real existence;’ and, conversely, the ‘body,’ from which theyareinseparable, not being an individual parcel of matter in the above sense, must itself be unreal and belong merely to the mind. The ‘body’ which is real has for us no qualities, and that reference to it of the ‘actually present sensation’ by which such sensation is distinguished from other feeling, is a reference to something of which nothing can be said. It is a reference which cannot be stated in any propositionreallytrue; and the difference which it constitutes between ‘bare vision’ and the feeling to which reality corresponds, must be either itself unreal or unintelligible.
Summary view of Locke’s difficulties in regard to the real.
113. We have now pursued the antithesis between reality and the work of the mind along all the lines which Locke indicates, and find that it everywhere eludes us. The distinction, which only appeared incidentally in the doctrine of substance, between ‘the being and the idea thereof—between substance as ‘found’ and substance as that which ‘we accustom ourselves to suppose’—becomes definite and explicit as that between real and nominal essence, but it does so only that the essence, which is merely real, may disappear. Whether we suppose it the quality of a mere sensation, as such, or of mere body, as such, we find that we are unawares defining it by relations which are themselves the work of the mind, and that after abstraction of these nothing remains to give the antithesis to the work of the mind any meaning. Meanwhile the attitude of thought, when it has cleared the antithesis of disguise, but has not yet found that each of the opposites derives itself from thought as much as the other, is so awkward and painful that an instinctive reluctance to make the clearance is not to be wondered at. Over against the world of knowledge, which is the work of the mind, stands a real world of which we can say nothing but that it is there, that it makes us aware of its presence in every sensation, while our interpretation of what it is, the system of relations which we read into it, is our own invention. The interpretation is not even to be called a shadow, for a shadow, however dim, still reflects the reality; it is an arbitrary fiction, and a fiction of which the possibility is as unaccountable as the inducement to make it. It is commonly presented as consisting in abstraction from the concrete. But the concrete, just so far as concrete,i.e., a complex world of relations, cannot be the real if the separation of the real from the work of the mind is to be maintained. It must itself be the work of the compounding mind, which must be supposed again in ‘abstraction’ to decompose what it has previously compounded. Now, it is of the essence of the doctrine in question that it denies all power of origination to the mind except in the way of compounding and abstracting given impressions. Its supposition is, that whatever precedes the work of composition and abstraction must be real [1] because the mind passively receives it: a supposition which, if the mind could originate, would not hold. How, then, does it come to pass that a ‘nominal essence,’ consisting of definite qualities, is constructed by a mind, which originates nothing, out of a ‘real’ matter, which, apart from such construction, has no qualities at all? And why, granted the construction, should the mind in ‘abstraction’ go through the Penelopean exercise of perpetually unweaving the web which it has just woven?
[1] ‘Simple ideas, since the mind can by no means make them to itself, must necessarily be the product of things operating on the mind.’ (Book IV. chap. v. sec. 4.)
Why they do not trouble him more.
114. It is Hume’s more logical version of Locke’s doctrine that first forces these questions to the front. In Locke himself they are kept back by inconsistencies, which we have already dwelt upon. For the real, absolutely void of intelligible qualities, because these are relative to the mind, he is perpetually substituting a real constituted by such qualities, only with a complexity which we cannot exhaust. By so doing, though at the cost of sacrificing the opposition between the real and the mental, he avoids the necessity of admitting that the system of the sciences is a mere language, well-or ill-constructed, but unaccountably and without reference to things. Finally, he so far forgets the opposition altogether as to find the reality of ‘moral and mathematical’ knowledge in their ‘bare ideality’ itself. (Book IV. chap. iv. sec. 6, &c.) Thus with him the divorce between knowledge and reality is never complete, and sometimes they appear in perfect fusion. A consideration of his doctrine of propositions will show finally how the case between them stands, as he left it.
They re-appear in his doctrine of propositions.
115. In the Fourth Book of the Essay the same ground has to be thrice traversed under the several titles of ‘knowledge,’ ‘truth,’ and ‘propositions.’ Knowledge being the perception of agreement or disagreement between ideas, the proposition is the putting together or separation of words, as the signs of ideas, in affirmative or negative sentences (Book IV. chap. v. sec. 5), and truth—the expression of certainty [1]—consists in the correspondence between the conjunction or separation of the signs and the agreement or disagreement of the ideas. (Book IV. chap. v. sec. 2.) Thus, the question between the real and the mental affects all these. Does this or that perception of agreement between ideas represent an agreement in real existence? Is its certainty a real certainty? Does such or such a proposition, being a correct expression of an agreement between ideas, also through this express an agreement between things? Is its truth real, or merely verbal?
[1] All knowledge is certain according to Locke (Cf. IV. chap. vi. sec. 13, ‘certainty is requisite to knowledge’), though the knowledge must be expressed before the term ‘certainty’ is naturally applied to it. (Book IV. chap. vi. sec. 3.) ‘Certainty of knowledge’ is thus a pleonastic phrase, which only seems not to be so because we conceive knowledge to have a relation to things which Locke’s definition denies it, and by ‘certainty,’ in distinction from this, understand its relation to the subject.
‘Certainty of truth’ is, in like manner, a pleonastic phrase, there being no difference between the definition of it (Book IV. chap. vi. sec. 3) and that of ‘truth’ simply, given in Book IV. chap. V. sec. 2.
The knowledge expressed by a proposition, though certain, may not be real …
116. To answer these questions, according to Locke, we must consider whether the knowledge, or the proposition which expresses it, concerns substances,i.e., ‘the co-existence of ideas in nature,’ on the one hand; or, on the other, either the properties of a mathematical figure or ‘moral ideas.’ If it is of the latter sort, the agreement of the ideas in the mind is itself their agreement in reality, since the ideas themselves are archetypes. (Book IV. chap. iv. secs. 6, 7.) It is only when the ideas are ectypes, as is the case when the proposition concerns substances, that the doubt arises whether the agreement between them represents an agreement in reality. The distinction made here virtually corresponds to that which appears in the chapters on the reality and adequacy of ideas in the Second Book, and again in those on ‘names’ in the Third. There the ‘complex ideas of modes and relation’ are pronounced necessarily real adequate and true, because, ‘being themselves archetypes, they cannot differ from their archetypes.’ (Book II. chap. XXX. sec. 4.) [1] With them are contrasted simple ideas and complex ideas of substances, which are alike ectypes, but with this difference from each other, that the simple ideas cannot but be faithful copies of their archetypes, while the ideas of substances cannot but be otherwise. (Book II. chap. xxxi. secs. 2, 11, &c.) Thus, ‘the names of simple ideas and substances, with the abstract ideas in the mind which they immediately signify, intimate also some real existence, from which was derived their original pattern. But the names of mixed modes terminate in the idea that is in the mind.’ (Book III. chap. iv. sec. 2.) ‘The names of simple ideas and modes,’ it is added, ‘signify always the real as well as nominal essence of their species’—a statement which, if it is to express Locke’s doctrine strictly, must be confined to names of simple ideas, while in respect of modes it should run, that ‘the nominal essence which the names of these signify is itself the real.’