[1] cf. Book II. chap. xxxi. sec. 3, and xxxii. sec. 17.
… when the knowledge concerns substances. In this case general truth must be merely verbal. Mathematical truths, since they concern not substances, may be both general and real.
117. But though the distinction between different kinds of knowledge in regard to reality cannot but rest on the same principle as that drawn between different kinds of ideas in the same regard, it is to be noticed that in the doctrine of the Fourth Book ‘knowledge concerning substances,’ in contrast with that in which ‘our thoughts terminate in the abstract ideas,’ has by itself to cover the ground which, in the Second and Third Book, simple ideas and complex ideas of substances cover together. This is to be explained by the observation, already set forth at large, [1] that the simple idea has in Locke’s Fourth Book become explicitly what in the previous books it was implicitly, not a feeling proper, but the conscious reference of a feeling to a thing or substance. Only because it is thus converted, as we have seen, can it constitute the beginning of a knowledge which is not a simple idea but a conscious relation between ideas, or have (what yet it must have if it can be expressed in a proposition) that capacity of being true or false, which implies ‘the reference by the mind of an idea to something extraneous to it.’ (Book II. chap, xxxii. sec. 4.) Thus, what is said of the ‘simple idea’ in the Second and Third Books, is in the Fourth transferred to one form of knowledge concerning substances, to that, namely, which consists in ‘particular experiment and observation,’ and is expressed in singular propositions, such as ‘this is yellow,’ ‘this gold is now solved in aqua regia.’ Such knowledge cannot but be real, the proposition which expresses it cannot but haverealcertainty, because it is the effect of a ‘body actually operating upon us’ (Book IV. chap. xi. sec. 1), just as the simple idea is an ectype directly made by an archetype. It is otherwise with complex ideas of substances and with general knowledge or propositions about them. A group of ideas, each of which, when first produced by a ‘body,’ has been real, when retained in the mind as representing the body, becomes unreal. The complex idea of gold is only a nominal essence or the signification of a name; the qualities which compose it are merely ideas in the mind, and that general truth which consists in a correct statement of the relation between one of them and another or the whole—e.g., ‘gold is soluble in aqua regia’—holds merely for the mind; [2] but it is not therefore to be classed with those other mental truths, which constitute mathematical and moral knowledge, and which, just because ‘merely ideal,’ are therefore real. Its merely mental character renders it in Locke’s language a ‘trifling proposition,’ but does not therefore save it from beingreallyuntrue. It is a ‘trifling proposition,’ for, unless solubility in aqua regia is included in the complex idea which the sound ‘gold’ stands for, the proposition which asserts it of gold is not certain, not a truth at all. If it is so included, then the proposition is but ‘playing with sounds.’ It may serve to remind an opponent of a definition which he has made but is forgetting, but ‘carries no knowledge with it but of the signification of a word, however certain it be.’ (Book IV. chap. viii. secs. 5 & 9.) Yet there is a real gold, outside the mind, of which the complex idea of gold in the mind must needs try to be a copy, though the conditions of real existence are such that no ‘complex idea in the mind’ can possibly be a copy of it. Thus the verbal truth, which general propositions concerning substances express, is under a perpetual doom of being really untrue. The exemption of mathematical and moral knowledge from this doom remains an unexplained mercy. Because merely mental, such knowledge is real—there being no reality for it to _mis_represent—and yet not trifling. The proposition that ‘the external angle of all triangles is bigger than either of the opposite internal angles,’ has that general certainty which is never to be found but in our ideas, yet ‘conveys instructive real knowledge,’ the predicate being ‘a necessary consequence of precise complex idea’ which forms the subject, yet ‘not contained in it.’ (Book IV. chap. viii. sec. 8.) [3] The same might be said apparently, according to Locke’s judgment (though he is not so explicit about this), of a proposition in morals, such as ‘God is to be feared and obeyed by man.’ (Book IV. chap. xi. sec. 13.) [4] But how are such propositions, at once abstract and real, general and instructive, to be accounted for? There is no ‘workmanship of the mind’ recognised by Locke but that which consists in compounding and abstracting (i.e., separating) ideas of which ‘it cannot originate one.’ The ‘abstract ideas’ of mathematics, the ‘mixed modes’ of morals, just as much as the ideas of substances, must be derived by such mental artifice from a material given in simple feeling, and ‘real’ because so given. Yet, while this derivation renders ideas of substances unreal in contrast with their real ‘originals,’ and general propositions about them ‘trifling,’ because, while ‘intimating an existence,’ they tell nothing about it, on the other hand it actually constitutes the reality of moral and mathematical ideas. Their relation to an original disappears; they are themselves archetypes, from which the mind, by its own act, can elicit other ideas not already involved in the meaning of their names. But this can only mean that the mind has some other function than that of uniting what it has ‘found’ in separation, and separating again what it has thus united—that it can itself originate.
[1] See above, paragraph 25.
[2] Book IV. chap. xi. sec. 13, xii. 9, &c.
[3] Just as according to Kant such a proposition expresses a judgment ‘synthetical,’ yet ‘á-priori.’
[4] Cf. Book IV. chap. iii. sec. 18, and Book III. chap, xi. sec. 16.
Significance of this doctrine.
118. A genius of such native force as Locke’s could not be applied to philosophy without determining the lines of future speculation, even though to itself they remained obscure. He stumbles upon truths when he is not looking for them, and the inconsistencies or accidents of his system are its most valuable part. Thus, in a certain sense, he may claim the authorship at once of the popular empiricism of the modern world, and of its refutation. He fixed the prime article of its creed, that thought has nothing to do with the constitution of facts, but only with the representation of them by signs and the rehearsal to itself of what its signs have signified—in brief, that its function is merely the analytical judgment; yet his admissions about mathematical knowledge rendered inevitable the Kantian question, ‘How are synthetic judgments á-priori possible?’—which was to lead to the recognition of thought as constituting the objective world, and thus to get rid of the antithesis between thought and reality. In his separation of the datum of experience from the work of thought he was merely following the Syllogistic Logic, which really assigns no work to the thought, whose office it professes to magnify, but the analysis of given ideas. Taking the work as that Logic conceived it (and as it must be conceived if the separation is to be maintained) he showed—conclusively as against Scholasticism— the ‘trifling’ character of the necessary and universal truths with which it dealt. Experience, the manifestation of the real, regarded as a series of events which to us are sensations, can only yield propositions singular as the events, and having a truth like them contingent. By consequence, necessity and universality of connection can only be found in what the mind does for itself, without reference to reality, when it analyses the complex idea which it retains as the memorandum of its past single experiences;i.e., in a relation between ideas or propositions of which one explicitly includes the other. Upon this relation syllogistic reasoning rests, and, except so far as it may be of use for convicting an opponent (or oneself) of inconsistency, it has nothing to say against such nominalism as the above. Hence, with those followers of Locke who have been most faithful to their master, it has remained the standing rule to make the generality of a truth consist in its being analytical of the meaning of a name, and its necessity in its being included in one previously conceded. Yet if such were the true account of the generality and necessity of mathematical propositions, their truth according to Locke’s explicit statement would be ‘verbal and trifling,’ not, as it is, ‘real and instructive.’
Fatal to the notion that mathematical truths, though general, are got from experience:
119. The point of this, the most obvious, contradiction inherent in Locke’s empiricism, is more or less striking according to the fidelity with which the notion of matter-of-fact, or of the reality that is not of the mind, proper to that system, is adhered to. When the popular Logic derived from Locke has so far forgotten the pit whence it was digged as to hold that propositions of a certainty at once real and general can be derived from experience, and to speak without question of ‘general matters-of-fact’ in a sense which to Locke almost, to Hume altogether, would have been a contradiction in terms, it naturally finds no disturbance in regarding mathematical certainty as different not in kind, but only in degree, from that of any other ‘generalisation from experience.’ Not aware that the distinction of mathematical from empirical generality is the condition upon which, according to Locke, the former escapes condemnation as ‘trifling,’ it does not see any need for distinguishing the sources from which the two are derived, and hence goes on asserting against imaginary or insignificant opponents that mathematical truth is derived from ‘experience;’ which, if ‘experience’ be so changed from what Locke understood by it as to yield general propositions concerning matters-of-fact of other than analytical purport, no one need care to deny. That it can yield such propositions is, doubtless, the supposition of the physical sciences; nor, we must repeat, is it thecorrectnessof this supposition that is in question, but the validity, upon its admission, of that antithesis between experience and the work of thought, which is the ‘be-all and end-all’ of the popular Logic.
… and to received views of natural science: but Locke not so clear about this.
120. Locke, as we have seen, after all the encroachments made unawares by thought within the limits of that experience which he opposes to it—or, to put it conversely, after all that he allows ‘nature’ to take without acknowledgment from ‘mind’—is still so far faithful to the opposition as to ‘suspect a science of nature to be impossible.’ This suspicion, which is but a hesitating expression of the doctrine that general propositions concerning substances are merely verbal, is the exact counterpart of the doctrine pronounced without hesitation that mathematical truths, being at once real and general, do not concern nature at all. Real knowledge concerning nature being given by single impressions of bodies at single times operating upon us, and by consequence being expressible only in singular propositions, any reality which general propositions state must belong merely to the mind, and a mind which can originate a reality other than nature’s cannot be a passive receptacle of natural impressions. Locke admits the real generality of mathematical truths, but does not face its consequences. Hume, seeing the difficulty, will not admit the real generality. The modern Logic, founded on Locke, believing in the possibility of propositions at once real and general concerning nature. does not see the difficulty at all. It reckons mathematical to be the same in kind with natural knowledge, each alike being real notwithstanding its generality; not aware that by so doing, instead of getting rid, as it fancies, of the originative function of thought in respect of mathematical knowledge, it only necessitates the supposition of its being originative in respect of the knowledge of nature as well.
Ambiguity as to real essence causes like ambiguity as to science of nature. Particular experiment cannot afford general knowledge.
121. It may find some excuse for itself in the hesitation with which Locke pronounces the impossibility of real generality in the knowledge of nature—an hesitation which necessarily results from the ambiguities, already noticed, in his doctrine of real and nominal essence. So far as the opposition between the nominal and real essences of substances is maintained in its absoluteness, as that between every possible collection of ideas on the one side, and something wholly apart from thought on the other, this impossibility follows of necessity. But so far as the notion is admitted of the nominal essence being in some way, however inadequately, representative of the real, there is an opening, however indefinite, for general propositions concerning the latter. On the one hand we have the express statement that ‘universal propositions, of whose truth and falsehood we can have certain knowledge, concern not existence’ (Book IV. chap. ix. sec. 1). They are founded only on the ‘relations and habitudes of abstract ideas’ (Book IV. chap xii. sec. 7); and since it is the proper operation of the mind in abstraction to consider an idea under no other existence but what it has in the understanding, they represent no knowledge ofrealexistence at all (Book IV. chap. ix. sec. 1). Here Locke is consistently following his doctrine that the ‘particularity in time,’ of which abstraction is made when we consider ideas as in the understanding, is what specially distinguishes the real; which thus can only be represented by ‘actually present sensation.’ It properly results from this doctrine that the proposition representing particular experiment and observation is only true of real existence so long as the sensation, in which the experiment consists, continues present. Not only is the possibility excluded of such experiment yielding a certainty which shall be general as well as real, but the particular proposition itself can only bereallytrue so far as the qualities, whose co-existence it asserts, are present sensations. The former of these limitations to real truth we find Locke generally recognising, and consequently suspecting a science of nature to be impossible; but the latter, which would be fatal to the supposition of there being a real nature at all, even when he carries furthest the reduction of reality to present feeling, he virtually ignores. On the other hand, there keeps appearing the notion that, inasmuch as the combination of ideas which make up the nominal essence of a substance is taken from a combination in nature or reality, whenever the connexion between any of these is necessary, it warrants a propositionuniversallytrue in virtue of the necessary connexion between the ideas, andreallytrue in virtue of the ideas being taken from reality. According to this notion, though ‘the certainty of universal propositions concerning substances is very narrow and scanty,’ it is yet possible (Book IV. chap. vi. sec. 13). It is not recognised as involving that contradiction which it must involve if the antithesis between reality and ideas in the mind is absolutely adhered to. Nay, inasmuch as certain ideas of primary qualities,e.g.those of solidity and of the receiving or communicating motion upon impulse, are necessarily connected, it is supposed actually to exist (Book IV. chap iii. sec. 14). It is only because, as a matter of fact, our knowledge of the relation between secondary qualities and primary is so limited that it cannot be carried further. That they are related as effects and causes, it would seem, we know; and that the ‘causes work steadily, and effects constantly flow from them,’ we know also; but ‘their connexions and dependencies are not discoverable in our ideas’ (Book IV. chap. iii. sec. 29). That, if discoverable in our ideas, just because there discovered, the connexion would not be a real co-existence, Locke never expressly says. He does not so clearly articulate the antithesis between relations of ideas and matters of fact. If he had done so, he must also have excluded from real existence those abstract ideas of body which constitute the scanty knowledge of it that according to him we do possess (Book IV. chap. iii. sec. 24). He is more disposed to sigh for discoveries that would make physics capable of the same general certainty as mathematics, than to purge the former of those mathematical propositions—really true only because having no reference to reality—which to him formed the only scientific element in them.
What knowledge it can afford, according to Locke.
122. The ambiguity of his position will become clearer if we resort to his favourite ‘instances in gold.’ The proposition, ‘all gold is soluble in aqua regia,’ is certainly true, if such solubility is included in the complex idea which the word ‘gold’ stands for, and if such inclusion is all that the proposition purports to state. It is equally certain and equally trifling with the proposition, ‘a centaur is four-footed.’ But, in fact, as a proposition concerning substance, it purports to state more than this, viz. that a ‘body whose complex idea is made up of yellow, very weighty, ductile, fusible, and fixed,’ is always soluble in aqua regia. In other words, it states the invariable co-existence in a body of the complex idea, ‘solubility in aqua regia,’ with the group of ideas indicated by ‘gold.’ Thus understood—as instructive or synthetical—it has not the certainty which would belong to it if it were ‘trifling,’ or analytical, ‘since we can never, from the consideration of the ideas themselves, with certainty affirm’ their co-existence (Book IV. chap. vi. sec 9). If we see the solution actually going on, or can recall the sight of it by memory, we can affirm its co-existence with the ideas in question in that ‘bare instance;’ and thus, on the principle that ‘whatever ideas have once been united in nature may be so united again’ (Book IV. chap. iv. sec. 12), infer a capacity of co-existence between the ideas, but that is all. ‘Constant observation may assist our judgments in guessing’ an invariable actual co-existence (Book IV. chap. viii. sec. 9); but beyond guessing we cannot get. If our instructive proposition concerning co-existence is to be general it must remain problematical. It is otherwise with mathematical propositions. ‘If the three angles of a triangle were once equal to two right angles, it is certain that they always will be so;’ but only because such a proposition concerns merely ‘the habitudes and relations of ideas.’ ‘If the perception that the same ideas will eternally have the same habitudes and relations be not a sufficient ground of knowledge, there could be no knowledge of general propositions in mathematics; for no mathematical demonstration could be other than particular: and when a man had demonstrated any proposition concerning one triangle and circle, his knowledge would not reach beyond that particular diagram’ (Book IV. chap. i. sec. 9).
Not the knowledge which is now supposed to be got by induction. Yet more than Locke was entitled to suppose it could give.
123. To a reader, fresh from our popular treatises on Logic, such language would probably at first present no difficulty. He would merely lament that Locke, as a successor of Bacon, was not better acquainted with the ‘Inductive methods,’ and thus did not understand how an observation of co-existence in the bare instance, if the instance be of the right sort, may warrant a universal affirmation. Or he may take the other side, and regard Locke’s restriction upon general certainty as conveying, not any doubt as to the validity of the inference from an observed case to all cases where the conditions are ascertainably the same, but a true sense of the difficulty of ascertaining in any other case that the conditions are the same. On looking closer, however, he will see that, so far from Locke’s doctrine legitimately allowing of such an adaptation to the exigencies of science, it is inconsistent with itself in admitting the reality of most of the conditions in the case supposed to be observed, and thus in allowing the real truth even of the singular proposition. This purports to state, according to Locke’s terminology, that certain ‘ideas’ do now or did once co-exist in a body. But the ideas, thus stated to co-exist, according to Locke’s doctrine that real existence is only testified to by actual present sensation, differ from each other as that whichreallyexists from that which does not. In the particular experiment of gold being solved in aqua regia, from the complex idea of solubility an indefinite deduction would have to be made for qualification by ideas retained in the understanding before we could reach the present sensation; and not only so, but the group of ideas indicated by ‘gold,’ to whose co-existence with solubility the experiment is said to testify, as Locke himself says, form merely a nominal essence, while the body to which we ascribe this essence is something which we ‘accustom ourselves to suppose,’ not any ‘parcel of matter’ having a real existence in nature. [1] In asserting the co-existence of the ideas forming such a nominal essence with the actual sensation supposed to be given in the experiment, we change the meaning of ‘existence,’ between the beginning and end of the assertion, from that according to which all ideas exist to that according to which existence has no ‘connexion with any other of our ideas but those of ourselves and God,’ but is testified to by present sensation. [2] This paralogism escapes Locke just as his equivocal use of the term ‘idea’ escapes him. The distinction, fixed in Hume’s terminology as that between impression and idea, forces itself upon him, as we have seen, in the Fourth book of the Essay, where the whole doctrine of real existence turns upon it, but alongside of it survives the notion that ideas, though ‘in the mind’ and forming a nominal essence, are yet, if rightly taken from things, ectypes of reality. Thus he does not see that the co-existence of ideas, to which the particular experiment, as he describes it, testifies, is nothing else than the co-existence of an event with a conception—of that which is in a particular time, and (according to him) only for that reason real, with that which is not in time at all but is an unreal abstraction of the mind’s making. [3] The reality given in the actual sensation cannot, as a matter of fact, be discovered to have a necessary connexion with the ideas that form the nominal essence, and therefore cannot be asserted universally to co-exist with them; but with better faculties, he thinks, the discovery might be made (Book IV. chap. iii. sec. 16). It does not to him imply such a contradiction as it must have done if he had steadily kept in view his doctrine that of particular (i.e.real) existence our ‘knowledge’ is not properly knowledge at all, but simply sensation—such a contradiction as was to Hume involved in the notion of deducing a matter of fact.
[1] See above, paragraphs 35, 94, &c.
[2] See above, paragraph 30 and the following.
[3] See above, paragraphs 45, 80, 85, 97.
With Locke mathematical truths, though ideal, true also of nature.
124. It results that those followers of Locke, who hold the distinction between propositions of mathematical certainty and those concerning real existence to be one rather of degree than of kind, though they have the express words of their master against them, can find much in his way of thinking on their side. This, however, does not mean that he in any case drops the antithesis between matters of fact and relations of ideas in favour of matters of fact, so as to admit that mathematical propositions concern matters of fact, but that he sometimes drops it in favour of relations of ideas, so as to represent real existence as consisting in such relations. If the matter of fact, or real existence, is to be found only in the event constituted or reported by present feeling, such a relation of ideas, by no manner of means reducible to an event, as the mathematical proposition states, can have no sort of connection with it. But if real existence is such that the relations of ideas, called primary qualities of matter, constitute it, and the qualities included in our nominal essences are its copies or effects, then, as on the one side our complex ideas of substances only fail of reality through want of fulness, or through mistakes in the process by which they are ‘taken from things,’ so, on the other side, the mental truth of mathematical propositions need only fail to be real because the ideas, whose relations they state, are considered in abstraction from conditions which qualify them in real existence. ‘If it is true of the idea of a triangle that its three angles equal two right ones, it is true also of a triangle, wherever it really exists’ (Book IV. chap. iv. sec. 6). There is, then, no incompatibility between the idea and real existence. Mathematical ideas might fairly be reckoned, like those of substances, to be taken from real existence; but though, like these, inadequate to its complexity, to be saved from the necessary infirmities which attach to ideas of substances because not considered as so taken, but merely as in the mind. There is language about mathematics in Locke that may be interpreted in this direction, though his most explicit statements are on the other side. It is not our business to adjust them, but merely to point out the opposite tendencies between which a clear-sighted operator on the material given by Locke would find that he had to choose.
Two lines of thought in Locke, between which a follower would have to choose.
125. On the one hand there is the identification of real existence with the momentary sensible event. This view, of which the proper result is the exclusion of predication concerning real existence altogether, appears in Locke’s restriction of such predication to the singular proposition, and in his converse assertion that propositions of mathematical certainty ‘concern not existence’ (Book IV. chap. iv. sec. 8). The embarrassment resulting from such a doctrine is that it leads round to the admission of the originativeness of thought and of the reality of its originations, with the denial of which it starts. [1] It leads Locke himself along a track, which his later followers scarcely seem to have noticed, when he treats the ‘never enough to be admired discoveries of Mr. Newton’ as having to do merely with the relations of ideas in distinction from things, and looks for a true extension of knowledge—neither in syllogism which can yield no instructive, nor in experiment which can yield no general, certainty—but only in a further process of ‘singling out and laying in order intermediate ideas,’ which are ‘real as well as nominal essences of their species,’ because they have no reference to archetypes elsewhere than in the mind (Book IV. chap. vii. sec. 11, and Book IV. chap. xii. sec. 7). On the other hand there is the notion that ideas, without distinction between ‘actual sensation’ and ‘idea in the mind,’ are taken from permanent things, and are real if correctly so taken. From this it results that propositions, universally true as representing a necessary relation between ideas of primary qualities, are true also of real existence; and that an extension of such real certainty through the discovery of a necessary connexion between ideas of primary and those of secondary qualities, though scarcely to be hoped for, has no inherent impossibility. It is this notion, again, that unwittingly gives even that limited significance to the particular experiment which Locke assigns to it, as indicating a co-existence between ideas present as sensations and those which can only be regarded as in the mind. Nor is it the intrinsic import so much as the expression of this notion that is altered when Locke substitutes an order of nature for substance as that in which the ideas co-exist. In his Fourth Book he so far departs from the doctrine implied in his chapters on the reality and adequacy of ideas and on the names of substances, as to treat the notion of several single subjects in which ideas co-exist (which he still holds to be the proper notion of substances), as a fiction of thought. There are no such single subjects. What we deem so are really ‘retainers to other parts of nature.’ ‘Their observable qualities, actions, and powers are owing to something without them; and there is not so complete and perfect a part that we know of nature, which does not owe the being it has, and the excellencies of it, to its neighbours’ (Book IV. chap. vi. sec. 11). As thus conceived of, the ‘objective order’ which our experience represents is doubtless other than that collection of fixed separate ‘things,’ implied in the language about substances which Locke found in vogue, but it remains an objective order still—an order of ‘qualities, actions, and powers’ which no multitude of sensible events could constitute, but apart from which no sensible event could have such significance as to render even a singular proposition of real truth possible.
[1] See above, paragraph 117, sub. fin.
Transition to doctrine of God and the soul.
126. It remains to inquire how, with Locke, the ideas of self and God escape subjection to those solvents of reality which, with more or less of consistency and consciousness, he applied to the conceptions on which the science of nature rests. Such an enquiry forms the natural transition to the next stage in the history of his philosophy. It was Berkeley’s practical interest in these ideas that held him back from a development of his master’s principles, in which he would have anticipated Hume, and finally brought him to attach that other meaning to the ‘new way of ideas’ faintly adumbrated in the later sections of his ‘Siris,’ which gives to Reason the functions that Locke had assigned to Sense.
Thinking substance—source of the same ideas as outer substance.
127. The dominant notion of the self in Locke is that of the inward substance, or ‘substratum of ideas,’ co-ordinate with the outward, ‘wherein they do subsist, and from which they do result.’ ‘Sensation convinces that there are solid extended substances, and reflection that there are thinking ones’ (Book II. chap, xxiii. sec. 29). We have already seen how, without disturbance from his doctrine of the fictitiousness of universals, he treats the simple idea as carrying with it the distinction of outward and inward, or relations severally to a ‘thing’ and to a ‘mind.’ It reports itself ambiguously as a quality of each of these separate substances. It is now, or was to begin with, the result of an outward thing ‘actually operating upon us;’ for ‘of simple ideas the mind cannot make one to itself:’ on the other hand, it is a ‘perception,’ and perception is an ‘operation of the mind.’ In other words it is at once a modification of the mind by something of which it is consciously not conscious, and a modification of the mind by itself—the two sources of one and the same modification being each determined only as the contradictory of the other. Thus, when we come to probe the familiar metaphors under which Locke describes Reflection, as a ‘fountain of ideas’ other than sensation, we find that the confusions which we have already explored in dealing with the ideas of sensation recur under added circumstances of embarrassment. Not only does the simple idea of reflection, like that of sensation, turn out to be already complicated in its simplicity with the superinduced ideas of cause and relation, but the causal substance in question turns out to be one which, from being actually nothing, becomes something by acting upon itself; while all the time the result of this action is indistinguishable from that ascribed to the opposite, the external, cause.
Of which substance is perception the effect?
128. To a reader to whom Locke’s language has always seemed to be—as indeed it is—simply that of common sense and life, in writing the above we shall seem to be creating a difficulty where none is to be found. Let us turn, then, to one of the less prolix passages, in which the distinction between the two sources of ideas is expressed: ‘External objects furnish the mind with the ideas of sensible qualities, which are all those different perceptions they produce in us; and the mind furnishes the understanding with ideas of its own operations’ (Book II. chap. i. sec. 5). We have seen already that with Locke perception and idea are equivalent terms. It only needs further to be pointed out that no distinction can be maintained between his usage of ‘mind’ and of ‘understanding,’ [1] and that the simple ideas of the mind’s own operations are those of perception and power, which must be given in and with every idea of a sensible quality.’ [2] Avoiding synonyms, then, and recalling the results of our examination of the terms involved in the first clause of the passage before us, we may re-write the whole thus: ‘Creations of the mind, which yet are external to it, produce in it those perceptions of their qualities which they do produce; and the mind produces in itself the perception of these, its own, perceptions.’
[1] As becomes apparent on examination of such passages, as Book II. chap. i. sec. 1, sub. fin.; and Book II. chap. i. sec. 23.
[2] See above, paragraphs 11, 12, 16.
That which is the source of substantiation cannot be itself a substance.
129. This attempt to present Locke’s doctrine of the relation between the mind and the world, as it would be without phraseological disguises, must not be ascribed to any polemical interest in making a great writer seem to talk nonsense, The greatest writer must fall into confusions when he brings under the conceptions of cause and substance the self-conscious thought which is their source; and nothing else than this is involved in Locke’s avowed enterprise of knowing that which renders knowledge possible as he might know any other object. The enterprise naturally falls into two parts, corresponding to that distinction of subject and object which self-consciousness involves. Hitherto we have been dealing with it on the objective side—with the attempt to know knowledge as a result of experience received through the senses—and have found the supposed source of thought already charged with its creations; with the relations of inner and outer, of substance and attribute, of cause and effect, of appearance and reality. The supposed ‘outward’ turns out to have its outwardness constituted by thought, and thus to be inward. The ‘outer sense’ is only an outer sense at all so far as feelings, by themselves neither outward nor inward, are by the mind referred to a thing or cause which ‘the mind supposes;’ and only thus have its reports a prerogative of reality over the ‘fantasies,’ supposed merely of the mind. Meanwhile, unable to ignore the subjective side of self-consciousness, Locke has to put an inward experience as a separate, but co-ordinate, source of knowledge alongside of the outer. But this inward experience, simply as a succession of feelings, does not differ from the outer: it only so differs as referred to that very ‘thinking thing,’ called the mind, which by its supposition of causal substance has converted feeling into an experience of an outer thing. ‘Mind’ thus, by the relations which it ‘invents,’ constitutes both the inner and outer, and yet is treated as itself the inner ‘substratum which it accustoms itself to suppose.’ It thus becomes the creature of its own suppositions. Nor is this all. This, indeed, is no more than the fate which it must suffer at the hands of every philosopher who, in Kantian language, brings the source of the Categories under the Categories. But with Locke the constitution of the outer world by mental supposition, however uniformly implied, is always ignored; and thus mind, as the inward substance, is not only the creature of its own suppositions, but stands over against a real existence, of which the reality is held to consist just in its being the opposite of all such suppositions: while, after all, the effect of these mutually exclusive causes is one and the same experience, one and the same system of sequent and co-existent ideas.
To get rid of the inner source of ideas in favour of the outer would be false to Locke.
130. Is it then a case ofjoint-effect? Do the outer and inner substances combine, like mechanical forces, to produce the psychical result? Against such a supposition a follower of Locke would find not only the language of his master, with whom perception appearsindifferentlyas the result of the outer or inner cause, but the inherent impossibility of analysing the effect into separate elements. The ‘Law of Parsimony,’ then, will dictate to him that one or other of the causes must be dispensed with; nor, so long as he takes Locke’s identification of the outward with the real for granted, will he have much doubt as to which of the two must go. To get rid of the causality of mind, however, though it might not be untrue to the tendency of Locke, would be to lose sight of his essential merit as a formulator of what everyone thinks, which is that, at whatever cost of confusion or contradiction, he at least formulates it fully. In him the ‘Dialectic,’ which popular belief implicitly involves, goes on under our eyes. If the primacy of self-conscious thought is never recognized, if it remains the victim of its own misunderstood creations, there is at least no attempt to disguise the unrest which attaches to it in this self-imposed subjection.
The mind, which Locke opposes to matter, perpetually shifting.
131. We have already noticed how the inner ‘tablet,’ on which the outer thing is supposed to act, is with Locke perpetually receding. [1] It is first the brain, to which the ‘motion of the outward parts’ must be continued in order to constitute sensation (Book II. chap. ix. sec. 3). Then perception is distinguished from sensation, and the brain itself, as the subject of sensation, becomes the outward in contrast with the understanding as the subject of perception. [2] Then perception, from being simply a reception, is converted into an ‘operation,’ and thus into an efficient of ideas. The ‘understanding’ itself, as perceptive, is now the outward which makes on the ‘mind,’ as the inner ‘tablet,’ that impression of its own operation in perception which is called an idea of reflection. [3] Nor does the regressive process—the process of finding a mind within the mind—stop here, though the distinction of inner and outer is not any further so explicitly employed in it. From mind, as receptive of, and operative about, ideas,i.e.consciousness, is distinguished mind as the ‘substance within us’ of which consciousness is an ‘operation’ that it sometimes exercises, sometimes (e.g.when it sleeps) does not (Book II. chap. i. secs. 10-12); and from this thinking substance again is distinguished the man who ‘finds it in himself and carries it about with him in a coach or on horseback (Book II. chap, xxiii. sec. 20)—the person, ‘consisting of soul and body,’ who is prone to sleep and in sound sleep is unconscious, but whose personal identity strangely consists in sameness of consciousness, sameness of an occasional operation of part of himself. [3]
[1] See above, paragraph 14.
[2] Book II., chap. i. sec. 23. ‘Sensation is such an impression made in some part of the body, as produces some perception in the understanding.’
[3] Locke speaks indifferently of the mind impressing the understanding, and of the understanding impressing the mind, with ideas of reflection, but as he specially defines ‘understanding’ as the ‘perceptive power’ (Book II. chap. xxi. sec. 25.), I have written as above.
[4] Cf. II. chap. i. secs. 11 and 14, with II. chap, xxvii. sec. 9. It is difficult to see what ingenuity could reconcile the doctrine stated in Book II. chap. xxvii. sec. 9, that personal identity is identity of consciousness, with the doctrine implied in Book II. chap. i. sec. 11, that the waking Socrates is the same person with Socrates asleep,i.e.(according to Locke) not conscious at all.
Two ways out of such difficulties. ‘Matter’ and ‘mind’ have the same source in self-consciousness.
132. In the history of subsequent philosophy two typical methods have appeared of dealing with this chaos of antinomies. One, which we shall have to treat at large in writing of Hume, affects to dispose of both the outward and the inward synthesis—both of the unity of feelings in a subject matter and of their unity in a subject mind—as ‘fictions of thought.’ This method at once suggests the vital question whether a mind which thus invents has been effectively suppressed—whether, indeed, the theory can be so much as stated without a covert assumption of that which it claims to have destroyed. The other method, of which Kant is the parent, does not attempt to efface the apparent contradictions which beset the ‘relation between mind and matter;’ but regarding them as in a certain sense inevitable, traces them to their source in the application to the thinking Ego itself of conceptions, which it does indeed constitute in virtue of its presence to phenomena given under conditions of time, but under which for that very reason it cannot itself be known. It is in virtue of the presence of the self-conscious unit to the manifold of feeling, according to this doctrine, that the latter becomes an order of definite things, each external to the other; and it is only by a false inclusion within this order of that which constitutes it that the Ego itself becomes a ‘thinking thing’ with other things outside it. The result of such inclusion is that the real world, which it in the proper sense makes, becomes a reality external to it, yet apart from which it would not be actually anything. Thus with Locke, though the mind has a potential existence of its own, it is experience of ‘things without it’ that ‘furnishes’ it or makes it what it actually is. But the relation of such outer things to the mind cannot be spoken of without contradiction. If supposed outward as bodies, they have to be brought within consciousness as objects of sensation; if supposed outward as sensation, they have to be brought within consciousness—to find a home in the understanding—as ideas of sensation. Meanwhile the consideration returns that after all the ‘thinking thing’ contributes something to that which it thinks about; and, this once admitted, it is as impossible to limit its work on one side as that of the outer thing on the other. Each usurps the place of its opposite. Thus with Locke the understanding produces effects on itself, but the product is one and the same ‘perception’ otherwise treated as an effect of the outer world. One and the same self-consciousness, in short, [1] involving the correlation of subject and object, becomes the result of two separate ‘things,’ each exclusive of the other, into which the opposite poles of this relation have been converted—the extended thing or ‘body’ on the one side, and the thinking thing or ‘mind’ on the other.
[1] For the equivalence of perception with self-consciousness in Locke, see above, paragraph 24, et infra.
Difficulties in the way of ascribing reality to substance as matter, re-appear in regard to substance as mind.
133. To each of these supposed ‘things’ thought transfers its own unity and self-containedness, and thereupon finds itself in new difficulties. These, so far as they concern the outward thing, have already been sufficiently noticed. We have seen how the single self-contained thing on the one hand attenuates itself to the bare atom, presented in a moment of time, which in its exclusiveness is actually nothing: [1] how, on the other, it spreads itself, as everything which for one moment we regard as independent turns out in the next to be a ‘retainer’ to something else, into a series that cannot be summed. [2] A like consequence follows when the individual man, conceiving of the thought, which is not mine but me, and which is no less the world without which I am not I, as a thinking thing within him, limited by the limitations of his animal nature, seeks in this thinking thing, exclusive of other things, that unity and self-containedness, which only belong to the universal ‘I.’ He finds that he ‘thinks not always;’ that during a fourth part of his time he neither thinks nor perceives at all; and that even in his waking hours his consciousness consists of a succession of separate feelings, whose recurrence he cannot command. [3] Thought being thus broken and dependent, substantiality is not to be found in it. It is next sought in the ‘thing’ of which thought is an occasional operation—a thing of which it may readily be admitted that its nature cannot be known (Book II. chap, xxiii. sec. 29, etc.), since it has no nature, being merely that which remains of the thinking thing upon abstraction of its sole determination. It is in principle nothing else than the supposed basis of sensible qualities remaining after these have been abstracted—the ‘parcel of matter’ which has no essence—with which accordingly Locke sometimes himself tends to identify it. [4] But meanwhile, behind this unknown substance, whether of spirit or of body, the self-consciousness, which has been treated as its occasional unessential operation, re-asserts itself as the self which claims both body and spirit, the immaterial no less than the material substance, as its own, and throughout whatever diversity in these maintains its own identity.
[1] See above, paragraph 94 and the following.
[2] See above, paragraph 125.
[3] Locke, Essay ii. chap. i. sec. 10, etc.
[4] See above, paragraph 106, near the end.
We think not always, yet thought constitutes the self.
134. Just, then, as Locke’s conception of outward reality grows under his hands into a conception of nature as a system of relations which breaks through the limitations of reality as constituted by mereindividua, so it is with the self, as he conceived it. It is not a simple idea. It is not one of the train that is for ever passing, ‘one going and another coming,’ for it looks on this succession as that which it experiences, being itself the same throughout the successive differences (Book II. chap. vii. sec. 9, and chap. xxvii. sec. 9). As little can it be adjusted to any of the conditions of real ‘things,’ thinking or unthinking, which he ordinarily recognises. It has no ‘particularity in space and time.’ That which is past in ‘reality’ is to it present. It is ‘in its nature indifferent to any parcel of matter.’ It is the same with itself yesterday and to-day, here and there. That ‘with which its consciousness can join itself is one self with it,’ and it can so join itself with substances apart in space and remote in time (Book II. chap, xxvii. secs. 9, 13, 14, 17). For speaking of it as eternal, indeed, we could find no warrant in Locke. He does not so clearly distinguish it from the ‘thinking thing’ supposed to be within each man, that has ‘had its determinate time and place of beginning to exist, relation to which determines its identity so long as it exists’ (Book II. chap. xxvii. sec. 2). Hence he supposed an actual limit to the past which it could make present—a limit seemingly fixed for each man at the farthest by the date of his birth—though he talks vaguely of the possibility of its range being extended (Book II. chap. xxvii. sec. 16). In the discussion of personal identity, however, the distinction gradually forces itself upon him, and he at last expressly says (sec. 16), that if the same Socrates, sleeping and waking, do not partake of the same consciousness (as according to Book II. chap. i. sec. 11 he certainly does not), ‘Socrates sleeping and waking is not the same person;’ whereas the ‘thinking thing’—the substance of which consciousness is a power sometimes exercised, sometimes not—is the same in the sleeping as in the waking Socrates. This is a pregnant admission, but it brings nothing to the birth in Locke himself. The inference which it suggests to his reader, that a self which does not slumber or sleep is not one which is born or dies, does not seem to have occurred to him. Taking for his method the imaginary process of ‘looking into his own breast,’ instead of the analysis of knowledge and morality, he could not find the eternal self which knowledge and morality pre-suppose, but only the contradiction of a person whose consciousness is not the same for two moments together, and often ceases altogether, but who yet, in virtue of an identity of this very consciousness, is the same in childhood and in old age.
Locke neither disguises these contradictions, nor attempts to overcome them.
135. Here as elsewhere we have to be thankful that the contradiction had not been brought home so strongly to Locke as to make him seek the suppression of either of its alternatives. He was aware neither of the burden which his philosophy tended to put upon the self which ‘can consider itself as itself in different times and places’—the burden of replacing the stable world, when ‘the new way of ideas’ should have resolved the outward thing into a succession of feelings—nor of the hopelessness of such a burden being borne by a ‘perishing’ consciousness, ‘of which no two parts exist together, but follow each other in succession.’ [1] When he ‘looked into himself,’ he found consciousness to consist in the succession of ideas, ‘one coming and another going:’ he also found that ‘consciousness alone makes what we call self,’ and that he was the same self at any different points in the succession. He noted the two ‘facts of consciousness’ at different stages of his enquiry, and was apparently not struck by their contradiction. He could describe them both, and whatever he could describe seemed to him to be explained. Hence they did not suggest to him any question either as to the nature of the observed object or as to the possibility of observing it, such as might have diverted philosophy from the method of self-observation. He left them side by side, and, far from disguising either, put alongside of them another fact—the presence among the perpetually perishing ideas of that of a consciousness identical with itself, not merely in different times and places, but in all times and places. Such an idea, under the designation of an eternal wise Being, he was ‘sure he had’ (Book II. chap. xvii. sec. 14).
[1] Cf. Book II. chap. xiv. sec. 32—‘by observing what passes in our minds, how our ideas there in train constantly some vanish and others begin to appear, we come by the idea of succession; and by observing a distance in the parts of this succession, we get the idea of duration’—with chap. xv. sec. 12. ‘Duration is the idea we have of perishing distance, of which no two parts exist together, but follow each other in succession.’
Is the idea of God possible to a consciousness given in time?
136. The remark will at once occur that the question concerning the relation between our consciousness, as in succession, and the idea of God, is essentially different from that concerning the relation between this consciousness and the self identical throughout it, inasmuch as the relation in the one case is between a fact and an idea, in the other between conflicting facts. The identity of the self, which Locke asserts, is one of ‘real being,’ and this is found to lie in consciousness, in apparent conflict with the fact that consciousness is a succession, of which ‘no two parts exist together.’ There is no such conflict, it will be said, between theideaof a conscious being, who is the same yesterday, to-day, and for ever—the correspondence to which of any reality is a farther question—and thefactof our consciousness being in succession. Allowing for the moment the validity of this distinction, we will consider first the difficulties that attach to Locke’s account of the idea of God, as an idea.
Locke’s account of this idea.
137. This idea, with him, is a ‘complex idea of substance.’ It is the idea each man has of the ‘thinking thing within him, enlarged to infinity.’ It is beset then in the first place with all the difficulties which we have found to belong to his doctrine of substance generally and of the thinking substance in particular. [1] These need not be recalled in detail. When God is the thinking substance they become more obvious. It is the antithesis to ‘material substance,’ as the source of ideas of sensation, that alone with Locke gives a meaning to ‘thinking substance,’ as the source of ideas of reflection: and if, as we have seen, the antithesis is untenable when it is merely the source of human ideas that is in question, much more must it be so in regard to God, to whom any opposition of material substance must be a limitation of his perfect nature. Of the generic element in the above definition, then, no more need here be said. It is the qualification of ‘enlargement to infinity,’ by which the idea of man as a thinking substance is represented as becoming the idea of God, that is the special difficulty now before us. Of this Locke writes as follows:—‘The complex idea we have of God is made up of the simple ones we receive from reflection. If I find that I know some few things, and some of them, or all perhaps, imperfectly, I can frame an idea of knowing twice as many: which I can double again as often as I can add to number, and thus enlarge my ideas of knowledge by extending its comprehension to all things existing or possible. The same I can do of knowing them more perfectly,i.e.all their qualities, powers, causes, consequences, and relations; and thus frame the idea of infinite or boundless knowledge. The same also may be done of power till we come to that we call infinite; and also of the duration of existence without beginning or end; and so frame the idea of an eternal being. … All which is done by enlarging the simple ideas we have taken from the operation of our own minds by reflection, or by our senses from exterior things, to that vastness to which infinity can extend them. For it is infinity which joined to our ideas of existence, power, knowledge, &c., makes that complex idea whereby we represent to ourselves the supreme being’ (Book II. chap. xxiii. sec. 33—35). What is meant by this ‘joining of infinity’ to our ideas?
[1] See above, paragraph 35 and the following, and 127 and the following.
‘Infinity,’ according to Locke’s account of it, only applicable toGod, if God has parts.
138. ‘Finite and infinite,’ says Locke, ‘are looked upon by the mind as the modes of quantity, and are to be attributed primarily only to those things that have parts and are capable of increase by the addition of any the least part’ (Book II. chap. xvii. sec. 1). Such are ‘duration and expansion.’ The applicability then of the term ‘infinite’ in its proper sense to God implies that he has expansion or duration; and it is characteristic of Locke that though he was clear about the divisibility of expansion and duration, as the above passage shows, he has no scruple about speaking of them as attributes of God, of whom as being ‘in his own essence simple and uncompounded’ he would never have spoken as ‘having parts.’ ‘Duration is the idea we have of perishing distance, of which no parts exist together but follow each other in succession; as expansion is the idea of lasting distance, all whose parts exist together.’ Yet of duration and expansion, thus defined, he says that ‘in their full extent’ (i.e.as severally ‘eternity and immensity’) ‘they belong only to the Deity’ (Book II. chap. xv. secs. 8 and 12). ‘A full extent’ of them, however, is in the nature of the case impossible. With a last moment duration would cease to be duration; without another space beyond it space would not be space. Locke is quite aware of this. When his conception of infinity is not embarrassed by reference to God, it is simply that of unlimited ‘addibility’—a juxtaposition of space to space, a succession of time upon time, to which we can suppose no limit so long as we consider space and time ‘as having parts, and thus capable of increase by the addition of parts,’ and which therefore excludes the very possibility of a totality or ‘full extent’ (Book II. chap. xvi. sec. 8, and xvii. sec. 13). The question, then, whether infinity of expansion and duration in this, its only proper, sense can be predicated of the perfect God, has only to be asked in order to be answered in the negative. Nor do we mend the matter if, instead of ascribing such infinity to God, we substitute another phrase of Locke’s, and say that He ‘fills eternity and immensity’ (Book II. chap. xv. sec. 8). Put for eternity and immensity their proper equivalents according to Locke, viz. unlimited ‘addibility’ of times and spaces, and the essential unmeaningness of the phrase becomes apparent.
Can it be applied to him ‘figuratively’ in virtue of the indefinite number of His acts?
139. In regard to any other attributes of God than those of his duration and expansion, [1] Locke admits that the term ‘infinite’ is applied ‘figuratively’ (Book II. chap. xvii. sec. 1). ‘When we call them (e.g.His power, wisdom, and goodness) infinite, we have no other idea of this infinity but what carries with it some reflection on, or intimation of, that number or extent of the acts or objects of God’s wisdom, &c., which can never be supposed so great or so many which these attributes will not always surmount, let us multiply them in our thoughts as far as we can with all the infinity of endless number.’ What determination, then, according to this passage, of our conception of God’s goodness is represented by calling it infinite? Simply its relation to a number of acts and objects of which the sum can always be increased, and which, just for that reason, cannot represent the perfect God. Is it then, it may be asked, of mere perversity that when thinking of God under attributes that are not quantitative, and therefore do not carry with them the necessity of incompleteness, we yet go out of our way by this epithet ‘infinite’ to subject them to the conditions of quantity and its ‘progressus ad infinitum?’
[1] In the passages referred to, Locke speaks of ‘duration andubiquity.’ The proper counterpart, however, of ‘duration’ according to him is ‘expansion’—this being to space what duration is to time. Under the embarrassment, however, which necessarily attends the ascription of expansion to God, he tacitly substitutes for it ‘ubiquity,’ a term which does not match ‘duration,’ and can only mean presence throughout thewholeof expansion, presence throughout the whole of that which does not admit of a whole.
An act, finite in its nature, remains so, however often repeated.
140. Retaining Locke’s point of view, our answer of course must be that our ideas of the Divine attributes, being primarily our own ideas of reflection, are either ideas of the single successive acts that constitute our inward experience or formed from these by abstraction and combination. In parts our experience is given, in parts only can we recall it. Our complex or abstract ideas are symbols which only take a meaning so far as we resolve them into the detached impressions which in the sum they represent, or recall the objects, each with its own before and after, from which they were originally taken. So it is with the ideas of wisdom, power, and goodness, which from ourselves we transfer to God. They represent an experience given in succession and piece-meal—a numerable series of acts and events, which like every other number is already infinite in the only sense of the word of which Locke can give a clear account, as susceptible of indefinite repetition (Book II. chap. vi. sec. 8.) When we ‘join infinity’ to these ideas, then, unless some other meaning is given to infinity, we merely state explicitly what was originally predicable of the experience they embody. Nor will it avail us much to shift the meaning of infinite, as Locke does when he applies it to the divine attributes, from that of indefinite ‘addibility’ to that of exceeding any sum which indefinite multiplication can yield us. Let us suppose an act of consciousness, from which we have taken an abstract idea of an attribute—say of wisdom—to be a million times repeated; our idea of the attribute will not vary with the repetition. Nor if, having supposed a limit to the repetition, we then suppose the act indefinitely repeated beyond this limit and accordingly speak of the attribute as infinite, will our idea of the attribute vary at all from what it was to begin with. Its content will be the same. There will be nothing to be said of it which could not have been said of the experience from which it was originally abstracted, and of which the essential characteristic—that it is one of a series of events of which no two can be present together—is incompatible with divine perfection.
God only infinite in a sense in which time isnotinfinite, and which Locke could not recognize …
141. It appears then that it is the subjection of our experience to the form of time which unfits the ideas derived from it for any combination into an idea of God; nor by being ‘joined with an infinity,’ which itself merely means the absence of limit to succession in time, is their unfitness in any way modified. On the contrary, by such conjunction from being latent it becomes patent. In one important passage Locke becomes so far aware of this that, though continuing to ascribe infinite duration to God, he does it under qualifications inconsistent with the very notion of duration. ‘Though we cannot conceive any duration without succession, nor put it together in our thoughts that any being does now exist to-morrow or possess at once more than the present moment of duration; yet we can conceive the eternal duration of the Almighty far different from that of man, or any other finite being: because man comprehends not in his knowledge or power all past and future things … what is once past he can never recall, and what is yet to come he cannot make present. … God’s infinite duration being accompanied with infinite knowledge and power, he sees all things past and to come’ (Book II. chap. xv. sec 12). It is clear that in this passage ‘infinite’ changes its meaning; that it is used in one sense—the proper sense according to Locke—when applied to duration, and in some wholly different sense, not a figurative one derived from the former, when applied to knowledge and power; and that the infinite duration of God, as ‘accompanied by infinite power and knowledge,’ is no longer in any intelligible sense duration at all. It is no longer ‘the idea we have of perishing distance,’ derived from our fleeting consciousness in which ‘what is once past can never be recalled,’ but the attribute of a consciousness of which, if it is to be described in terms of time at all, in virtue of its ‘seeing all things past and to come’ at once, it can only be said that it ‘does now exist to-morrow.’ If it be asked, What meaning can we have in speaking of such a consciousness? into what simple ideas can it be resolved when all our ideas are determined by a before and after?—the answer must be, Just as much or as little meaning as we have when, in like contradiction to the successive presentation of ideas, we speak of a self, constituted by consciousness, as identical with itself throughout the years of our life.
… the same sense in which the self is infinite.
142. A more positive answer it is not our present business to give. Our concern is to show that ‘eternity and immensity,’ according to any meaning that Locke recognises, or that the observation of our ideas could justify, do not express any conception that can carry us beyond the perpetual incompleteness of our experience; but that in his doctrine of personal identity he does admit a conception which no observation of our ideas of reflection—since these are in succession and could not be observed if they were not—can account for; and that it is just this conception, the conception of a constant presence of consciousness to itself incompatible with conditions of space and time, that can alone give such meaning to ‘eternal and infinite’ as can render them significant epithets of God. Such a conception (we say it with respect) Locke admits when it is wanted without knowing it. It must indeed always underlie the idea of God, however alien to it may be attempted adaptations of the other ‘infinite’—theprogressus ad indefinitumin space and time—by which, as with Locke, the idea is explained. But it is one for which the psychological method of observing what happens in oneself cannot account, and which therefore this method, just so far as it is thoroughly carried out, must tend to discard. That which happens, whether we reckon it an inward or an outward, a physical or a psychical event—and nothing but an event can, properly speaking, be observed—is as such in time. But the presence of consciousness to itself, though, as the true ‘punctum stans,’ [1] it is the condition of the observation of events in time, is not such an event itself. In the ordinary and proper sense of ‘fact,’ it is not a fact at all, nor yet a possible abstraction from facts. To the method, then, which deals with phrases about the mind by ascertaining the observable ‘mental phenomena’ which they represent, it must remain a mere phrase, to be explained as the offspring of other phrases whose real import has been misunderstood. It can only recover a significance when this method, as with Hume, has done its worst, and is found to leave the possibility of knowledge, without such ‘punctum stans,’ still unaccounted for.
[1] Locke, Essay II. chap. xvii. sec. 16.
How do I know my own real existence?—Locke’s answer.
143. We have finally to notice the way in which Locke maintains our knowledge of the ‘real existence’ of thinking substance, both as that which ‘we call our mind,’ and as God. Of the former first. ‘Experience convinces us that we have an intuitive knowledge of our own existence…. If I know I feel pain, it is evident I have as certain perception of my own existence as of the pain I feel. If I know I doubt, I have as certain perception of the existence of the thing doubting as of that thought which I call doubt’ (Book IV. chap. ix. sec. 3). Upon this the remark must occur that the existence of a painful feeling is one thing; the existence of a permanent subject, remaining the same with itself, when the feeling is over, and through the succession of other feelings, quite another. The latter is what is meant by my own existence, of which undoubtedly there is a ‘certain perception,’ if the feeling of pain has become the ‘knowledge that I feel pain,’ and if by the ‘I’ is understood such a permanent subject. That the feeling, as ‘simple idea,’ is taken to begin with by Locke for the knowledge that I feel something, we have sufficiently seen. [1] Just as, in virtue of this conversion, it gives us ‘assurance’ of the real existence of the outer thing or material substance on the one side, so of the thinking substance on the other. It carries with it the certainty at once that I have a feeling, and that something makes me feel. But whereas, after the conversion of feeling into a felt thing has been throughout assumed—as indeed otherwise feeling could not be spoken of—a further question is raised, which causes much embarrassment, as to the real existence of such thing; on the contrary, the reference of the feeling to thethinkingthing is taken as carrying with it the real existence of such thing. The question whether it really exists or no is only once raised, and then summarily settled by the sentence we have quoted, while the reality whether of existence or of essence on the part of the outward thing, as we have found to our cost, is the main burden of the Third and Fourth Books.
[1] See above, paragraphs 26 and following, and 59 and following.
It cannot be known consistently with Locke’s doctrine of real existence.
144. In principle, indeed, the answer to both questions, as given by Locke, is the same: for the reasons which he alleges for being assured of the ‘existence of a thing without us corresponding to the idea of sensation’ reduce themselves, as we have seen, to the reiteration of that reference of the idea to a thing, which according to him is originally involved in it, and which is but the correlative of its reference to a subject. This, however, is what he was not himself aware of. To him the outer and the inner substance were separate and independent things, for each of which the question of real existence had to be separately settled. To us, according to the view already indicated, it is the presence of self-consciousness, or thought as an object-to-itself, to feeling that converts it into a relation between feeling thing and felt thing, between ‘cogitative and incogitative substance.’ The source of substantiation upon each side being the same, the question as to the real existence of either substance must be the same, and equally so the answer to it. It is an answer that must be preceded by a counter question.—Does real existence mean existence independent of thought? To suppose such existence is to suppose an impossibility—one which is not the less so though the existence be supposed material, if ‘material’ means in ‘space’ and space itself is a relation constituted by the mind, ‘bringing things to and setting them by one another.’ Yet is the supposition itself but a mode of the logical substantiation we have explained, followed by an imaginary abstraction of the work of the mind from this, its own creation. Does real existence mean a possible feeling? If so, it is as clear that what converts feeling into a relation between felt thing and feeling subject cannot in this sense be real, as it is that without such conversion no distinction between real and fantastic would be possible. Does it, finally, mean individuality, in such a sense that unless I can say this or that is substance, thinking or material, substance does not really exist? If it does, the answer is that substance, being constituted by a relation by which self-conscious thought is for ever determining feelings, and which every predication represents, cannot be identified with any ‘this or that,’ though without it there could be no ‘this or that’ at all.
But he ignores this in treating of the self.
145. We have already found that Locke accepts each of the above as determinations of real existence, and that, though in spite of them he labours to maintain the real existence of outward things, he is so far faithful to them as to declare real essence unknowable. In answering the question as to ‘his own existence’ he wholly ignores them. He does not ask how the real existence of the thinking Ego sorts with his ordinary doctrine that the real is what would be in the world whether there were a mind or no; or its real identity, present throughout the particulars of experience, with his ordinary doctrine of the fictitiousness of ‘generals.’ A real existence of the mind, however, founded on the logical necessity of substantiation, rests on a shifting basis, so long as by the mind is understood a thinking thing, different in each man, to which his inner experience is referred as accidents to a substance. The same law of thought which compels such reference requires that the thinking thing in its turn, as that which is born grows and dies, be referred as an accident to some ulterior substance. ‘A fever or fall may take away my reason or memory, or both; and an apoplexy leave neither sense nor understanding, no, nor life.’ [1] Just as each outer thing turns out to be a ‘retainer to something else,’ so is it with the inner thing. Such a dependent being cannot be an ultimate substance; nor can any natural agents to which we may trace its dependence really be so either. The logical necessity of further substantiation would affect them equally, appearing in the supposition of an unknown something beyond, which makes them what they are. It is under such logical necessity that Locke, in regard to all the substances which he commonly speaks of as ultimate—God, spirit, body—from time to time gives warning of something still ulterior and unknowable, whether under the designation of substance or real essence (Book II. chap. xxiii. secs. 30 and 36). If, then, it will be said, substance is but the constantly-shifting result of a necessity of thought—so shifting that there is nothing of which we can finally say, ‘This is substance, not accident’—there can be no evidence of the ‘real existence’ of a permanent Ego in the necessary substantiation therein of my inner experience.
[1] Locke, Book III. chap. vi. sec. 4.
Sense in which the self is truly real.
146. The first result of such a consideration in a reader of Locke will naturally be an attempt to treat the inner synthesis as a fiction of thought or figure of speech, and to confine real existence to single feelings in the moments of their occurrence. This, it will seem, is to be faithful to Locke’s own clearer mind, as it frequently emerges from the still-returning cloud of scholasticism. The final result will rather be the discovery that the single feeling is nothing real, but that the synthesis of appearances, which alone for us constitutes reality, is never final or complete: that thus absolute reality, like ultimate substance, is never to be found by us—in a thinking as little as in a material thing—belonging as it does only to that divine self-consciousness, of which the presence in us is the source and bond of the ever-growing synthesis called knowledge, but which, because it is the source of that synthesis and not one of its partial results, is neither real nor knowable in the same sense as is any other object. It is this presence which alone gives meaning to ‘proofs of the being of God;’ to Locke’s among the rest. For it is in a sense true, as he held, that ‘my own real existence’ is evidence of the existence of God, since the self, in the only sense in which it is absolutely real or an ultimate subject, is already God. [1]
[1] See below, paragraph 152.
Locke’s proof of the real existence of God. There must have been something from eternity to cause what now is.
147. Our knowledge of God’s existence, according to him, is ‘demonstrative,’ based on the ‘intuitive’ knowledge of our own. Strictly taken, according to his definitions, this must mean that the agreement of the idea of God with existence is perceived mediately through the agreement of the idea of self with existence, which is perceived immediately; that thus the idea of God and the idea of self ‘agree’. [1] We need not, however, further dwell either on the contradiction implied in the knowledge of real existence, if knowledge is a perception of agreement between ideas and if real existence is the antithesis of ideas; or on the embarrassments which follow when a definition of reasoning, only really applicable to the comparison of quantities, is extended to other regions of knowledge. Locke virtually ignores his definitions in the passage before us. ‘If we know there is some real being’ (as we do know in the knowledge of our own existence) ‘and that non-entity cannot produce any real being, it is an evident demonstration that from eternity there has been something; since what was not from eternity had a beginning, and what had a beginning must be produced by something else’ (Book IV. chap. x. sec. 3). Next as to the qualities of this something else. ‘What had its being and beginning from another must also have all that which is in, and belongs to, its being from another too’ (Ibid, sec. 4.). From this is deduced the supreme power and perfect knowledge of the eternal being upon the principle that whatever is in the effect must also be in the cause—a principle, however, which has to be subjected to awkward limitations in order that, while proving enough, it may not prove too much, it might seem that, according to it, since the real being, from which as effect the eternal being as cause is demonstrated, is ‘both material and cogitative’ or ‘made up of body and spirit,’ matter as well as thought must belong to the eternal being too. That thought must belong to him, Locke is quite clear. It is as impossible, he holds, that thought should be derived from matter, or from matter and motion together, as that something should be derived from nothing. ‘If we will suppose nothing first or eternal, matter can never begin to be: if we suppose bare matter without motion eternal, motion can never begin to be: if we suppose only matter and motion first or eternal, thought can never begin to be’ (Book IV. chap. x. sec. 10). The objection which is sure to occur, that it must be equally impossible for matter to be derived from thought, he can scarcely be said to face. He takes refuge in the supreme power of the eternal being, as that which is able to create matter out of nothing. He does not anticipate the rejoinder to which he thus lays himself open, that this power in the eternal being to produce one effect not homogeneous with itself, viz. matter, may extend to another effect, viz. thought, and that thus the argument from thought in the effect to thought in the cause becomes invalid, and nothing but blind power, we know not what, remains as the attribute of the eternal being. Nor does he remember, when he meets the objection drawn from the inconceivability of matter being made out of nothing by saying that what is inconceivable is not therefore impossible (ibid. sec. 19), that it is simply the inconceivability of a sequence of something upon nothing that has given him his ‘evident demonstration’ of an eternal being.