Not regarding the world as a system of intelligible relations, he could not regard God as the subject of it.
190. If such idealism were Berkeley’s, his inference from the ‘ideality’ of the real to spirit and God would be more valid than it is. To have got rid of the notion that the world first exists and then is thought of—to have seen that it only really exists as thought of—is to have taken the first step in the only possible ‘proof of the being of God,’ as the self-conscious subject in relation to which alone an intelligible world can exist, and the presence of which in us is the condition of our knowing it. [1] But there is nothing to show that in adopting coherence as one test, among others, of the reality of ideas, he attached to it any of the significance exhibited above. He adopted it from ordinary language without considering how it affected his view of the world as a succession of feelings. That still remained to him a sufficient account of the world, even when he treated it as affording intuitive certainty of a soul ‘naturally immortal,’ and demonstrative certainty of God. He is not aware, while he takes his doctrine of such certainty from Locke, that he has left out, and not replaced, the only solid ground for it which Locke’s system suggested.
[1] See above, paragraphs 146 and 149-152.
His view of the soul as ‘naturally immortal’.
191. The soul or self, as he describes it, does not differ from Locke’s ‘thinking substance,’ except that, having got rid of ‘extended matter’ altogether, he cannot admit with Locke any possibility of the soul’s being extended, and, having satisfied himself that ‘time was nothing abstracted from the succession of ideas in the mind,’ [1] he was clear that ‘the soul always thinks’—since the time at which it did not think, being abstracted from a succession of ideas, would be no time at all. A soul which is necessarily unextended and therefore ‘indiscerptible,’ and without which there would be no time, he reckons ‘naturally immortal.’
[1] ‘Principles of Human Knowledge,’ sec. 98.
Endless succession of feelings is not immortality in true sense.Berkeley’s doctrine of matter fatal to a true spiritualism;
192. Upon this the remark must occur that, if the fact of being unextended constituted immortality, all sounds and smells must be immortal, and that the inseparability of time from the succession of feelings may prove that succession endless, but proves no immortality of a soul unless there be one self-conscious subject of that succession, identical with itself throughout it. To the supposition of there being such a subject, which Berkeley virtually makes, his own mode of disposing of matter suggested ready objections. In Locke, as we have seen, the two opposite ‘things,’ thinking and material, always appear in strict correlativity, each representing (though he was not aware of this) the same logical necessity of substantiation. ‘Sensation convinces us that there are solid extended substances, and reflection that there are thinking ones.’ These are not two convictions, however, but one conviction, representing one and the same essential condition of knowledge. Such logical necessity indeed is misinterpreted when made a ground for believing the real existence either of a multitude of independent things, for everything is a ‘retainer’ to everything else; [1] or of a separation of the thinking from the material substance, since, according to Locke’s own showing, they at least everywhere overlap; [2] or of an absolutely last substance, which because last would be unknowable: but it is evidence of the action of a synthetic principle of self-consciousness without which all reference of feelings to mutually-qualified subjects and objects, and therefore all knowledge, would be impossible. It is idle, however, with Berkeley so to ignore the action of this principle on the one side as to pronounce the material world a mere succession of feelings, and so to take it for granted on the other as to assert that every feeling implies relation to a conscious substance. Upon such a method the latter assertion has nothing to rest on but an appeal to the individual’s consciousness—an appeal which avails as much or as little for material as for thinking substance, and, in face of the apparent fact that with a knock on the head the conscious independent substance may disappear altogether, cannot hold its own against the suggestion that the one substance no less than the other is reducible to a series of feelings, so closely and constantly sequent on each other as to seem to coalesce. We cannot substitute for this illusory appeal the valid method of an analysis of knowledge, without finding that substantiation in matter is just as necessary to knowledge as substantiation in mind. If this method had been Berkeley’s he would have found a better plan for dealing with the ‘materialism’ in vogue. Instead of trying to show that material substance was a fiction, he would have shown that it was really a basis of intelligible relations, and that thus all that was fictitious about it was its supposed sensibility and consequent opposition to the work of thought. Then his doctrine of matter would itself have established the necessity of spirit, not indeed as substance but as the source of all substantiation. As it was, misunderstanding the true nature of the antithesis between matter and mind, in his zeal against matter he took away the ground from under the spiritualism which he sought to maintain. He simply invited a successor in speculation, of colder blood than himself, to try the solution of spirit in the same crucible with matter.
[1] Above, paragraph 125.
[2] Above, paragraph 127.
… as well as to a true Theism. His inference to God from necessity of a power to produce ideas;
193. His doctrine of God is not only open to the same objection as his doctrine of spiritual substance, but to others which arise from the illogical restrictions that have to be put upon his notion of such substance, if it is to represent at once the God of received theology and the God whose agency the Berkeleian system requires as the basis of distinction between the real and unreal. Admitting the supposition involved in his certainty of the ‘natural immortality’ of the soul—the supposition that the succession of feelings which constitutes the world, and which at no time was not, implies one feeling substance—that substance we should naturally conclude was God. Such a God, it is true (as has been already pointed out [1]), would merely be the μέγα ζῶον [2] of the crudest Pantheism, but it is the only God logically admissible—if any be admissible—in an ‘ideal’ system of which the text is not ‘the world really exists only as thought of,’ but ‘the world only exists as a succession of feelings.’ It was other than afeelingsubstance, however, that Berkeley required not merely to satisfy his religious instincts, but to take the place held by ‘outward body’ with Locke as the efficient of real ideas. The reference to this feeling substance, if necessary for any idea, is necessary for all—for the ‘fantastic’ as well as for those of sense—and can therefore afford no ground for distinction between the real and unreal. Instead, however, of being thus led to a truer view of this distinction, as in truth a distinction between the complete and incomplete conception of an intelligible world, he simply puts the feeling substance, when he regards it as God, under an arbitrary limitation, making it relative only to those ideas of which with Locke ‘matter’ was the substance, as opposed to those which Locke had referred to the thinking thing. The direct consequence of this limitation, indeed, might seem to be merely to make God an animal of partial, instead of universal, susceptibility; but this consequence Berkeley avoids by dropping the ordinary notion of substance altogether, so as to represent the ideas of sense not as subsisting in God but as effects of His power—as related to Him, in short, just as with Locke ideas of sense are related to the primary qualities of matter. ‘There must be an active power to produce our ideas, which is not to be found in ideas themselves, for we are conscious that they are inert, nor in matter, since that is but a name for a bundle of ideas; which must therefore be in spirit, since of that we are conscious as active; yet not in the spirit of which we are conscious, since then there would be no difference between real and imaginary ideas; therefore in a Divine Spirit, to whom, however, may forthwith be ascribed the attributes of the spirit of which we are conscious.’ Such is the sum of Berkeley’s natural theology.
[1] Above, paragraph 180.
[2] [Greek μέγα ζῶον (mega zoon) = great being. Tr.]
… a necessity which Hume does not see. A different turn should have been given to his idealism, if it was to serve his purpose.
194. From a follower of Hume it of course invites the reply that he does not see the necessity of an active power at all, to which, since, according to Berkeley’s own showing, it is no possible ‘idea’ or object of an idea, all his own polemic against the ‘absolute idea’ of matter is equally applicable; that the efficient power, of which we profess to be conscious in ourselves, is itself only a name for a particular feeling or impression which precedes certain other of our impressions; that, even if it were more than this, the transition from the spiritual efficiency of which we are conscious to another, of which it is the special differentia that we are not conscious of it, would be quite illegitimate, and that thus in saying that certain feelings are real because, being lively and involuntary, they must be the work of this unknown spirit, we in effect say nothing more than that they are real because lively and involuntary. Against a retort of this kind Berkeley’s theistic armour is even less proof than Locke’s. His ‘proof of the being of God’ is in fact Locke’s with the solenervus probandileft out. The value of Locke’s proof, as an argument from their being something now to their having been something from eternity, lay, we saw, in its convertibility into an argument from the world as a system of relations to a present and eternal subject of those relations. For its being so convertible there was this to be said, that Locke, with whatever inconsistency, at least recognised the constitution of reality by permanent relations, though he treated the mere relation of external efficiency—that in virtue of which we say of nature that it consists of bodies outward to and acting on each other—as if it alone constituted the reality of the world. Berkeley’s reduction of the ‘primary qualities of matter’ to a succession of feelings logically effaces this relation, and puts nothing intelligible, nothing but a name, in its place. The effacement of the distinction between the real and unreal, which would properly ensue, is only prevented by bringing back relation to something under the name of God, either wholly unknown and indeterminate, or else, under a thin disguise, determined by that very relation of external efficiency which, when ascribed to something only nominally different, had been pronounced a gratuitous fiction. If Berkeley had dealt with the opposition of reality to thought by showing the primary qualities to be conceived relations, and the distinction between the real and unreal to be one between the fully and the defectively conceived, the case would have been different. The real and God would alike have been logically saved. The peculiar embarrassment of Locke’s doctrine we have found to be that it involves the unreality of every object, into the constitution of which there enters any idea of reflection, or any idea retained in the mind, as distinct from the present effect of a body acting upon us—i.e.of every object of which anything can be said. With the definite substitution of full intelligibility of relations for present sensibility, as the true account of the real, this embarrassment would have been got rid of. At the same time there would have been implied an intelligent subject of these relations; the ascription to whom, indeed, of moral attributes would have remained a further problem, but who, far from being a ‘Great Unknown,’ would be at least determined by relation to that order of nature which is as necessary to Him as He to it. But in fact, as we have seen, the notion of the reality of relations, not felt but understood, only appears in Berkeley’s developed philosophy as an after-thought, and the notion of an order of nature, other than our feelings, which enables us to infer what feelings that have never been felt would be, is an unexplained intrusion in it. The same is true of the doctrine, which struggles to the surface in the Third Dialogue, that the ‘sensible world’ is to God not felt at all, but known; that to Him it is precisely not that which according to Berkeley’s refutation of materialism it really is—a series or collection of sensations. These ‘after-thoughts,’ when thoroughly thought out, imply a complete departure from Berkeley’s original interpretation of ‘phenomena’ as simple feelings; but with him, so far from being thought out, they merely suggested themselves incidentally as the conceptions of God and reality were found to require them. In other words, that interpretation of phenomena, which is necessary to any valid ‘collection’ from them of the existence of God, only appears in him as a consequence of that ‘collection’ having been made. To pursue the original interpretation, so that all might know what it left of reality, was the best way of deciding the question of its compatibility with a rational belief in God—a question of too momentous an interest to be fairly considered in itself. Thus to pursue it was the mission of Hume.
Hume’s mission. His account of impressions and ideas. Ideas are fainter impressions.
195. Hume begins with an account of the ‘perceptions of the human mind,’ which corresponds to Locke’s account of ideas with two main qualifications, both tending to complete that dependence of thought on something other than itself which Locke had asserted, but not consistently maintained. He distinguishes ‘perceptions’ (equivalent to Locke’s ideas) into ‘impressions’ and ‘ideas’ accordingly as they are originally produced in feeling or reproduced by memory and imagination, and he does not allow ‘ideas of reflection’ any place in theoriginal‘furniture of the mind.’ ‘An impression first strikes upon the senses, and makes us perceive heat or cold, thirst or hunger, pleasure or pain, of some kind or other. Of this impression there is a copy taken by the mind, which remains after the impression ceases; and this we call an idea. This idea of pleasure or pain, when it returns upon the soul, produces the new impressions of desire and aversion, hope and fear, which may properly be called impressions of reflection, because derived from it. These, again, are copied by the memory and imagination, and become ideas; which, perhaps, in their turn give rise to other impressions and ideas; so that the impressions are only antecedent to their correspondent ideas, but posterior to those of sensation and derived from them’ (Part I. §2). He is at the same time careful to explain that the causes from which the impressions of sensation arise are unknown (ibid.), and that by the term ‘impression’ he is not to be ‘understood to express the manner in which our lively perceptions are produced in the soul, but merely the perceptions themselves’. [1] The distinction between impression and idea he treats as equivalent to that between feeling and thinking, which, again, lies merely in the different degrees of ‘force and liveliness’ with which the perceptions, thus designated, severally ‘strike upon the mind.’ [2] Thus the rule which he emphasises [3] ‘that all our simple ideas in their first appearance are derived from simple impressions which are correspondent to them and which they exactly represent,’ strictly taken, means no more than that a feeling must be more lively before it becomes less so. As the reproduced perception, or ‘idea,’ differs in this respect from the original one, so, according to the greater or less degree of secondary liveliness which it possesses, is it called ‘idea of memory,’ or ‘idea of imagination.’ The only other distinction noticed is that, as might be expected, the comparative faintness of the ideas of imagination is accompanied by a possibility of their being reproduced in a different order from that in which the corresponding ideas were originally presented. Memory, on the contrary, ‘is in a manner tied down in this respect, without any power of variation’; [4] which must be understood to mean that, when the ideas are faint enough to allow of variation in the order of reproduction, they are not called ‘ideas of memory.’
[1] p. 312, note [Introduction to the Treatise of Human Nature]
[2] See pp. 327 and 375 [Book I, part I., sec. II. and part III. sec. II.]
[3] p. 310 [Introduction to the Treatise of Human Nature]
[4] p. 318 [Book I, part I., sec. III.]
‘Ideas’ that cannot be so represented must be explained as mere words.
196. All, then, that Hume could find in his mind, when after Locke’s example he ‘looked into it,’ were, according to his own statement, feelings with their copies, dividing themselves into two main orders—those of sensation and those of reflection, of which the latter, though results of the former, are not their copies. The question, then, that he had to deal with was, to what impressions he could reduce those conceptions of relation—of cause and effect, substance and attribute, and identity—which all knowledge involves. Failing the impressions of sensation he must try those of reflection, and failing both he must pronounce such conceptions to be no ‘ideas’ at all, but words misunderstood, and leave knowledge to take its chance. The vital nerve of his philosophy lies in his treatment of the ‘association of ideas’ as a sort of process of spontaneous generation, by which impressions of sensation issue in such impressions of reflection, in the shape of habitual propensities,’ [1] as will account, not indeed for there being—since there really are not—but for there seeming to be, those formal conceptions which Locke, to the embarrassment of his philosophy, had treated as at once real and creations of the mind.
[1] Pp. 460 and 496 [Book I, part III., sec. XIV. and part IV., sec. II.]
Hume, taken strictly, leaves no distinction between impressions of reflection and of sensation.
197. Such a method meets at the outset with the difficulty that the impressions of sensation and those of reflection, if Locke’s determination of the former by reference to an impressive matter is excluded, are each determined only by reference to the other. What is an impression of reflection? It is one that can only come after an impression of sensation. What is an impression of sensation? It is one that comes before any impression of reflection. An apparent determination, indeed, is gained by speaking of the original impressions as ‘conveyed to us by our senses;’ but this really means determination by reference to the organs of our body as affected by outward bodies—in short, by a physical theory. But of the two essential terms of this theory, ‘our own body,’ and ‘outward body,’ neither, according to Hume, expresses anything present to the original consciousness. ‘Properly speaking, it is not our body we perceive when we regard our limbs and members, but certain impressions which enter by the senses.’ Nor do any of our impressions ‘inform us of distance and outness (so to speak) immediately, and without a certain reasoning and experience’. [1] In such admissions Hume is as much a Berkeleian as Berkeley himself, and they effectually exclude any reference to body from those original impressions, by reference to which all other modes of consciousness are to be explained.
[1] p. 481 [Book I, part IV., sec. II.]
Locke’s theory of sensation disappears. Physiology won’t answer the question that Locke asked.
198. He thus logically cuts off his psychology from the support which, according to popular conceptions, its primary truths derive from physiology. We have already noticed how with Locke metaphysic begs defence of physic; [1] how, having undertaken to answer by the impossible method of self-observation the question as to what consciousness is to itself at its beginning, he in fact tells us what it is to the natural philosopher, who accounts for the production of sensation by the impact of matter ‘on the outward parts, continued to the brain.’ To those, of course, who hold that the only possible theory of knowledge and of the human spirit is physical, it must seem that this was his greatest merit; that, an unmeaning question having been asked, it was the best thing to give an answer which indeed is no answer to the question, but has some elementary truth of its own. According to them, though he may have been wrong in supposing consciousness to be to itself what the physiologist explains it to be—since any supposition at all about it except as a phenomenon, to which certain other phenomena are invariably antecedent, is at best superfluous—he was not wrong in taking the physiological explanation to be the true and sufficient one. To such persons we can but respectfully point out that they have not come in sight of the problem which Locke and his followers, on however false a method, sought to solve; that, however certain may be the correlation between the brain and thought, in the sense that the individual would be incapable of the processes of thought unless he had brain and nerves of a particular sort, yet it is equally certain that every theory of the correlation must presuppose a knowledge of the processes, and leave that knowledge exactly where it was before; that thus their science, valuable like every other science within its own department, takes for granted just what metaphysic, as a theory of knowledge, seeks to explain. When the origin, for instance, of the conception of body or of that of an organic structure is in question, it is in the strictest sense preposterous to be told that body makes the conception of body, and that unless the brain were organic to thought I should not now be thinking. ‘The brain is organic to thought;’ here is a proposition involving conceptions within conceptions—a whole hierarchy of ideas. How am I enabled to re-think these in order, to make my way from the simpler to the more complex, by any iteration or demonstration of the proposition, which no one disputes, or by the most precise examination of the details of the organic structure itself?
[1] See above, paragraph 17.
Those who think it will don’t understand the question.
199. The quarrel of the physiologist with the metaphysician is, in fact, due to anignorantia elenchion the part of the former, for which the behaviour of English ‘metaphysicians,’ in attempting to assimilate their own procedure to that of the natural philosophers, and thus to win the popular acceptance which these alone can fairly look for, has afforded too much excuse. The question really at issue is not between two co-ordinate sciences, as if a theory of the human body were claiming also to be a theory of the human soul, and the theory of the soul were resisting the aggression. The question is, whether the conceptions which all the departmental sciences alike presuppose shall have an account given of them or no. For dispensing with such an account altogether (life being short) there is much to be said, if only men would or could dispense with it; but the physiologist, when he claims that his science should supersede metaphysic, is not dispensing with it, but rendering it in a preposterous way. He accounts for the formal conceptions in question, in other words for thought as it is common to all the sciences, as sequent upon the antecedent facts which his science ascertains—the facts of the animal organisation. But these conceptions—the relations of cause and effect, &c.—are necessary to constitute the facts. They are not anex post factointerpretation of them, but an interpretation without which there would be no ascertainable facts at all. To account for them, therefore, as the result of the facts is to proceed as a geologist would do, who should treat the present conformation of the earth as the result of a certain series of past events, and yet, in describing these, should assume the present conformation as a determining element in each.
Hume’s psychology will not answer it either.
200. ‘Empirical psychology,’ however, claims to have a way of its own for explaining thought, distinct from that of the physiologist, but yet founded on observation, though it is admitted that the observation takes place under difficulties. Its method consists in a history of consciousness, as a series of events or successive states observed in the individual by himself. By tracing such a chain ofde factosequence it undertakes to account for the elements common to all knowledge. Its first concern, then, must be, as we have previously put it, to ascertain what consciousness is to itself at its beginning. No one with Berkeley before him, and accepting Berkeley’s negative results, could answer this question in Locke’s simple way by making the primitive consciousness report itself as an effect of the operation of body. To do so is to transfer a later and highly complex form of consciousness, whose growth has to be traced, into the earlier and simple form from which the growth is supposed to begin. This, upon the supposition that the process of consciousness by which conceptions are formed is a series of psychical events—a supposition on which the whole method of empirical psychology rests—is in principle the same false procedure as that which we have imagined in the case of a geologist above. But the question is whether, by any procedure not open to this condemnation, the theory could seem to do what it professes to do—explain thought or ‘cognition by means of conceptions’ as something which happens in sequence upon previous psychical events. Does it not, however stated, carry with it an implication of the supposed later state in the earlier, and is it not solely in virtue of this implication that it seems to be able to trace the genesis of the later? No one has pursued it with stricter promises, or made a fairer show of being faithful to them, than Hume. He will begin with simple feeling, as first experienced by the individual—unqualified by complex conceptions, physical or metaphysical, of matter or of mind—and trace the process by which it generates the ‘ideas of philosophical relation.’ If it can be shown, as we believe it can be, that, even when thus pursued, its semblance of success is due to the fact that, by interpreting the earliest consciousness in terms of the latest, it puts the latter in place of the former, some suspicion may perhaps be created that a natural history of self-consciousness, and of the conceptions by which it makes the world its own, is impossible, since such a history must be of events, and self-consciousness is not reducible to a series of events; being already at its beginning formally, or potentially, or implicitly all that it becomes actually or explicitly in developed knowledge.
It only seems to do so by assuming the ‘fiction’ it has to account for; by assuming that impression represents a real world.
201. If Hume were consistent in allowing no other determination to the impression than that of its having the maximum of vivacity, or to other modes of consciousness than the several degrees of their removal from this maximum, he would certainly have avoided the difficulties which attend Locke’s use of the metaphor of impression, while at the same time he would have missed the convenience, involved in this use, of being able to represent the primitive consciousness as already a recognition of a thing impressing it, and thus an ‘idea of a quality of body.’ But at the outset he remarks that ‘the examination of our sensations’ (i.e.our impressions of sensation) ‘belongs more to anatomists and natural philosophers than to moral,’ and that for that reason he shall begin not with them but with ideas. [1] Now this virtually means that he will begin, indeed, with the feelings he finds in himself, but with these as determined by the notion that they are results of something else, of which the nature is not for the present explained. Thus, while he does not, like Locke, identify our earliest consciousness with a rough and ready physical theory of its cause, he gains the advantage of this identification in the mind of his reader, who from sensation, thus apparently defined, transfers a definiteness to the ideas and secondary impressions as derived from it, though in the sequel the theory turns out, if possible at all, to be at best a remote result of custom and association. We shall see this more clearly if we look back to the general account of impressions and ideas quoted above. ‘An impression first strikes upon the senses and makes us perceive pleasure or pain, of which a copy is taken by the mind,’ called an idea. Now if we set aside the notion of a body making impact upon a sensuous, and through it upon a mental, tablet, pleasure or painisthe impression, which, again, is as much or as little in the mind as the idea. Thus the statement might be re-written as follows:—‘Pleasure or pain makes the mind perceive pleasure or pain, of which a copy is taken by the mind.’ This, of course, is nonsense; but between this nonsense and the plausibility of the statement as it stands, the difference depends on the double distinction understood in the latter—the distinction(a)between the producing cause of the impression and the impression produced; and(b)between the impression as produced on the senses, and the idea as preserved by the mind. This passage, as we shall see, is only a sample of many of the same sort. Throughout, however explicitly Hume may give warning that the difference between impression and idea is only one of liveliness, however little he may scruple in the sequel to reduce body and mind alike to the succession of feelings, his system gains the benefit of the contrary assumption which the uncritical reader is ready to make for him. As often as the question returns whether a phrase, purporting to express an ‘abstract conception,’ expresses any actual idea or no, his test is, ‘Point out the impression from which the idea, if there be any, is derived’—a test which has clearly no significance if the impression is merely the idea itself at a livelier stage (for a person, claiming to have the idea, would merely have to say that he had never known it more lively, and that, therefore, it was itself an impression, and the force of the test would be gone), but which seems so satisfactory because the impression is regarded as the direct effect of outward things, and thus as having a prerogative of reality over any perception to which the mind contributes anything of its own. By availing himself alternately of this popular conception of the impression of sensation and of his own account of it, he gains a double means of suppressing any claim of thought to originate. Every idea, by being supposed in a more lively state, can be represented as derived from an impression, and thus (according to the popular notion) as an effect of something which, whatever it is, is not thought. If thereupon it is pointed out that this outward something is a form of substance which, according to Hume’s own showing, is a fiction of thought, there is an easy refuge open in the reply that ‘impression’ is only meant to express a lively feeling, not any dependence upon matter of which we know nothing.
[1] p. 317 [Book I, part I., sec. III.]
So the ‘Positivist’ juggles with ‘phenomena’.
202. Thus the way is prepared for the juggle which the modern popular logic performs with the word ‘phenomenon’—a term which gains acceptance for the theory that turns upon it because it conveys the notion of a relation between a real order and a perceiving mind, and thus gives to those who avail themselves of it the benefit of an implication of the ‘noumena’ which they affect to ignore. Hume’s inconsistency, however, stops far short of that of his later disciples. For the purpose of detraction from the work of thought he availed himself, indeed, of that work as embodied in language, but only so far as was necessary to his destructive purpose. He did not seriously affect to be reconstructing the fabric of knowledge on a basis of fact. There occasionally appears in him, indeed, something of the charlatanry of common sense in passages, more worthy of Bolingbroke than himself, where he writes as a champion of facts against metaphysical jargon. But when we get behind the mask of concession to popular prejudice, partly ironical, partly due to his undoubted vanity, we find much more of the ancient sceptic than of the ‘positive philosopher.’
Essential difference, however, between Hume and the ‘Positivist’.
203. The ancient sceptic (at least as represented by the ancient philosophers), finding knowledge on the basis of distinction between the real and apparent to be impossible, discarded the enterprise of arriving at general truth in opposition to what appears to the individual at any particular instant, and satisfied himself with noting such general tendencies of expectation and desire as would guide men in the conduct of life and enable them to get what they wanted by contrivance and persuasion. [1] Such a state of mind excludes all motive to the ‘interrogation of nature,’ for it recognises no ‘nature’ but the present appearance to the individual; and this does not admit of being interrogated. The ‘positive philosopher’ has nothing in common with it but the use, in a different sense, of the word ‘apparent.’ He plumes himself, indeed, on not going in quest of any ‘thing-in-itself’ other than what appears to the senses; but he distinguishes between a real and apparent in the order of appearance, and considers the real order of appearance, having a permanence and uniformity which belong to no feeling as the individual feels it, to be the true object of knowledge. No one is more severe upon ‘propensities to believe,’ however spontaneously suggested by the ordinary sequence of appearances, if they are found to conflict with the order of nature as ascertained by experimental interrogation;i.e.with a sequence observed (it may be) in but a single instance. Which of the two attitudes of thought is the more nearly Hume’s, will come out as we proceed. It was just with the distinction between the ‘real and fantastic,’ as Locke had left it, that he had to deal; and, as will appear, it is finally by a ‘propensity to feign,’ not by a uniform order of natural phenomena, that he replaces the real which Locke, according to his first mind, had found in archetypal things and their operations on us.
[1] Cf. Plato’s ‘Protagoras,’ 323, and ‘Theaetetus,’ 167, with the concluding paragraphs of the last part of the first book of Hume’s ‘Treatise on Human Nature.’
He adopts Berkeley’s doctrine of ideas, but without Berkeley’s saving suppositions,
204. We have seen that Berkeley, having reduced ‘simple ideas’ to their simplicity by showing the illegitimacy of the assumption that they report qualities of a matter which is itself a complex idea, is only able to make his constructive theory march by the supposition of the reality and knowability of ‘spirit’ and relations. ‘Ideas’ are ‘fleeting, perishable passions;’ but the relations between them are uniform, and in virtue of this uniformity the fleeting idea may be interpreted as a symbol of a real order. But such relations, as real, imply the presence of the ideas to the constant mind of God, and, as knowable, their presence to a like mind in us. We have further seen how little Berkeley, according to the method by which he disposed of ‘abstract general ideas,’ was entitled to such a supposition. Hume sets it aside; but the question is, whether without a supposition virtually the same he can represent the association of ideas as doing the work that he assigned to it.
… in regard to ‘spirit’,
205. His exclusion of Berkeley’s supposition with regard to ‘spirit’ is stated without disguise, though unfortunately not till towards the end of the first book of the ‘Treatise on Human Nature,’ which could not have run so smoothly if the statement had been made at the beginning. It follows legitimately from the method, which he inherited, of ‘looking into his mind to see how it wrought.’ ‘From what impression,’ he asks, ‘could the idea of self be derived? It must be some one impression that gives rise to every real idea. But self or person is not any impression, but that to which our several impressions and ideas are supposed to have a reference. If any impression gives rise to the idea of self, that impression must continue invariably the same through the whole course of our lives, since self is supposed to exist after that manner. But there is no impression constant and invariable. Pain and pleasure, grief and joy, passions and sensations succeed each other, and never all exist at the same time. It cannot, therefore, be from any of these impressions, or from any other, that the idea of self is derived; and, consequently, there is no such idea.’ Again: ‘When I enter most intimately into what is called myself, I always stumble on some particular perception of heat or cold, light or shade, love or hatred, pain or pleasure. I never can catch myself at any time without a perception, and never can observe anything but the perception. When my perceptions are removed for any time, as by sound sleep, so long am I insensible of myself, and may truly be said not to exist.’ Thus ‘men are nothing but a bundle or collection of different perceptions that succeed each other with inconceivable rapidity, and are in a perpetual flux or movement. Our eyes cannot turn in their sockets without varying our perceptions. Our thought is still more variable than our sight. … nor is there any single power of the soul which remains unalterably the same perhaps for one moment…. There is properly no simplicity in the mind at one time nor identity at different’. [1]
[1] pp. 533 and 534 [Book I., part IV., sec. VI.]
… in regard to relations. His account of these.
206. His position in regard to ideas of relation cannot be so summarily exhibited. It is from its ambiguity, indeed, that his system derives at once its plausibility and its weakness. In the first place, it is necessary, according to him, to distinguish between ‘natural’ and ‘philosophical relation.’ The latter is one of which the idea is acquired by the comparison of objects, as distinct from natural relation or ‘the quality by which two ideas are connected together in the imagination, and the one naturally’ (i.e.according to the principle of association) ‘introduces the other’. [1] Of philosophical relation—or, according to another form of expression, of ‘qualities by which the ideas of philosophical relation are produced’—seven kinds are enumerated; viz. ‘resemblance, identity, relations of time and place, proportion in quantity and number, degrees in quality, contrariety, and causation’. [2] Some of these do, some do not,apparentlycorrespond to the qualities by which the mind isnaturally‘conveyed from one idea to another;’ or which, in other words, constitute the ‘gentle force’ that determines the order in which the imagination habitually puts together ideas. Freedom in the conjunction of ideas, indeed, is implied in the term ‘imagination,’ which is only thus differenced from ‘memory;’ but, as a matter of fact, it commonly only connects ideas which are related to each other in the way either of resemblance, or of contiguity in time and place, or of cause and effect. Other relations of the philosophical sort are the opposite ofnatural. Thus, ‘distance will be allowed by philosophers to be a true relation, because we acquire an idea of it by the comparing of objects; but in a common way we say, “that nothing can be more distant than such or such things from each other; nothing can have less relation”’ (ibid.).
[1] p. 322 [Book I, part I., sec. V.]
[2] ibid., and p. 372 [Book I., part III., sec. I.]
It corresponds to Locke’s account of the sorts of agreement between ideas.
207. Hume’s classification of philosophical relations evidently serves the same purpose as Locke’s, of the ‘four sorts of agreement or disagreement between ideas,’ in the perception of which knowledge consists; [1] but there are some important discrepancies. Locke’s second sort, which he awkwardly describes as ‘agreement or disagreement in the way of relation,’ may fairly be taken to cover three of Hume’s kinds; viz. relations of time and place, proportion in quantity or number, and degrees in any quality. About Locke’s first sort, ‘identity and diversity,’ there is more difficulty. Under ‘identity,’ as was pointed out above, he includes the relations which Hume distinguishes as ‘identity proper’ and ‘resemblance.’ ‘Diversity’ at first sight might seem to correspond to ‘contrariety;’ but the latter, according to Hume’s usage, is much more restricted in meaning. Difference of number and difference of kind, which he distinguishes as the opposites severally of identity and resemblance, though they come under Locke’s ‘diversity,’ are not by Hume considered relations at all, on the principle that ‘no relation of any kind can subsist without some degree of resemblance.’ They are ‘rather a negation of relation than anything real and positive.’ ‘Contrariety’ he reckons only to obtain between ideas of existence and non-existence, ‘which are plainly resembling as implying both of them an idea of the object; though the latter excludes the object from all times and places in which it is supposed not to exist’. [2] There remain ‘cause and effect’ in Hume’s list; ‘co-existence’ and ‘real existence’ in Locke’s. ‘Co-existence’ is not expressly identified by Locke with the relation of cause and effect, but it is with ‘necessary connection.’ It means specially, it will be remembered [3], the co-existence of ideas, not as constituents of a ‘nominal essence,’ but as qualities of real substances in nature; and our knowledge of this depends on our knowledge of necessary connection between the qualities, either as one supposing the other (which is the form of necessary connection between primary qualities), or as one being the effect of the other (which is the form of necessary connection between the ideas of secondary qualities and the primary ones). Having no knowledge of necessary connection as in real substances, we have none of ‘co-existence’ in the above sense, but only of the present union of ideas in any particular experiment. [4] The parallel between this doctrine of Locke’s and Hume’s of cause and effect will appear as we proceed. To ‘real existence,’ since the knowledge of it according to Locke’s account is not a perception of agreement between ideas at all, it is not strange that nothing should correspond in Hume’s list of relations.
[1] See above, paragraph 25 and the passages from Locke there referred to.
[2] p. 323 [Book I, part I., sec. V.]
[3] See above, paragraph 122.
[4] Locke, Book IV. sec. iii. chap. xiv.; and above, paragraph 121 and 122.
Could Hume consistently admit idea of relation at all?
208. It is his method of dealing with these ideas of philosophical relation that is specially characteristic of Hume, Let us, then, consider how the notion of relation altogether is affected by his reduction of the world of consciousness to impressions and ideas. What is an impression? To this, as we have seen, the only direct answer given by him is that it is a feeling which must be more lively before it becomes less so. [1] For a further account of what is to be understood by it we must look to the passages where the governing terms of ‘school-metaphysics’ are, one after the other, shown to be unmeaning, because not taken from impressions. Thus, when the idea of substance is to be reduced to an ‘unintelligible chimaera,’ it is asked whether it ‘be derived from the impressions of sensation or reflection? If it be conveyed to us by our senses, I ask, which of them, and after what manner? If it be perceived by the eyes, it must be a colour; if by the ears, a sound; if by the palate, a taste; and so of the other senses. But I believe none will assert that substance is either a colour, or a sound, or a taste. The idea of substance must therefore be derived from an impression of reflection, if it really exist. But the impressions of reflection resolve themselves into our passions and emotions’. [2] From the polemic against abstract ideas we learn further that ‘the appearance of an object to the senses’ is the same thing as an ‘impression becoming present to the mind’. [3] That is to say, when we talk of an impression of an object, it is not to be understood that the feeling is determined by reference to anything other than itself: it is itself the object. To the same purpose, in the criticism of the notion of an external world, we are told that ‘the senses are incapable of giving rise to the notion of the continued existence of their objects, after they no longer appear to the senses; for that is a contradiction in terms’ (since the appearanceisthe object); and that ‘they offer not their impressions as the images of something distinct, or independent, or external, because they convey to us nothing but a single perception, and never give us the least intimation of anything beyond’. [4] The distinction between impression of sensation and impression of reflection, then, cannot, any more than that between impression and idea, be regarded as either really or apparently a distinction between outer and inner. ‘All impressions are internal and perishing existences’; [5] and, ‘everything that enters the mind being in reality as the impression, ’tis impossible anything should to feeling appear different’. [6]
[1] See above, paragraphs 195 and 197.
[2] p. 324 [Book I, part I., sec. VI.]
[3] p. 327 [Book I, part I., sec. VII.]
[4] p. 479 [Book I, part IV., sec. II.]
[5] p. 483 [Book I, part IV., sec. II.]
[6] p. 480 [Book I, part IV., sec. II.]
209. This amounts to a full acceptance of Berkeley’s doctrine of sense; and the question necessarily arises—such being the impression, and all ideas being impressions grown weaker, can there be an idea of relation at all? Is it not open to the same challenge which Hume offers to those who talk of an idea of substance or of spirit? ‘It is from some one impression that every real idea is derived.’ What, then, is the one impression from which the idea of relation is derived? ‘If it be perceived by the eyes, it must be a colour; if by the ears, a sound; if by the palate, a taste; and so of the other senses.’ There remain ‘our passions and emotions;’ but what passion or emotion is a resemblance, or a proportion, or a relation of cause and effect?
Only in regard to identity and causation that he sees any difficulty. These he treats as fictions resulting from ‘natural relations’ of ideas:i.e.from resemblance and contiguity.
210. Respect for Hume’s thoroughness as a philosopher must be qualified by the observation that he does not attempt to meet this difficulty in its generality, but only as it affects the relations of identity and causation. The truth seems to be that he wrote with Berkeley steadily before his mind; and it was Berkeley’s treatment of these two relations in particular as not sensible but intelligible, and his assertion of a philosophic Theism on the strength of their mere intelligibility, that determined Hume, since it would have been an anachronism any longer to treat them as sensible, to dispose of them altogether. The condition of his doing so with success was that, however unwarrantably, he should treat the other relations as sensible. The language, which seems to express ideas of the two questionable relations, he has to account for as the result of certain impressions of reflection, called ‘propensities to feign,’ which in their turn have to be accounted for as resulting from thenaturalrelations of ideas according to the definition of these quoted above, [1] as ‘the qualities by which one idea habitually introduces another.’ Among these, as we saw, he included not only resemblance and contiguity in time or place, but ‘cause and effect.’ ‘There is no relation,’ he says, ‘which produces a stronger connection in the fancy than this.’ But in this, as in much of the language which gives the first two Parts their plausibility, he is taking advantage of received notions on the part of the reader, which it is the work of the rest of the book to set aside. In any sense, according to him, in which it differs from usual contiguity, the relation of cause and effect is itself reducible to a ‘propensity to feign’ arising from the other natural relations; but when the reader is told of its producing ‘a strong connection in the fancy,’ he is not apt to think of it as itself nothing more than the product of such a connection. For the present, however, we have only to point out that Hume, when he co-ordinates it with the other natural relations, must be understood to do so provisionally. According to him it is derived, while they are primary. Upon them, then, rested the possibility of filling the gap between the occurrence of single impressions, none ‘determined by reference to anything other than itself,’ and what we are pleased to call our knowledge, with its fictions of mind and thing, of real and apparent, of necessary as distinct from usual connection.
[1] See above, paragraph 206.
211. We will begin with Resemblance. As to this, it will be said, it is an affectation of subtlety to question whether there can be an impression of it or no. The difficulty only arises from our regarding the perception of resemblance as different from, and subsequent to, the resembling sensations; whereas, in fact, the occurrence of two impressions of sense, such as (let us say) yellow and red, is itself the impression of their likeness and unlikeness. Hume himself, it may be further urged, at any rate in regard to resemblance, anticipates this solution of an imaginary difficulty by his important division of philosophical relations into two classes [1]—‘such as depend entirely on the ideas which we compare together, and such as may be changed without any change in the ideas’—and by his inclusion of resemblance in the former class.
[1] p. 372 [Book I, part III., sec. I.]
Is resemblance then an impression?
212. Now we gladly admit the mistake of supposing that sensations undetermined by relation first occur, and that afterwards we become conscious of their relation in the way of likeness or unlikeness. Apart from such relation, it is true, the sensations would be nothing. But this admission involves an important qualification of the doctrine that impressions are single, and that the mind (according to Hume’s awkward figure) is a ‘bundle or collection of these,’ succeeding each other ‘in a perpetual flux or movement.’ It implies that the single impression in its singleness is what it is through relation to another, which must therefore be present along with it; and that thus, though they may occur in a perpetual flux of succession—every turn of the eyes in their sockets, as Hume truly says, giving a new one—yet, just so far as they are qualified by likeness or unlikeness to each other, they must be taken out of that succession by something which is not itself in it, but is indivisibly present to every moment of it. This we may call soul, or mind, or what we will; but we must not identify it with the brain [1] either directly or by implication (as we do when we ‘refer to the anatomist’ for an account of it), since by the brain is meant something material,i.e.divisible, which the unifying subject spoken of, as feeling no less than as thinking, cannot be. In short, any such modification of Hume’s doctrine of the singleness and successiveness of impressions as will entitle us to speak of their carrying with them, though single and successive, the consciousness of their resemblance to each other, will also entitle us to speak of their carrying with them a reference to that which is not itself any single impression, but is permanent throughout the impressions; and the whole ground of Hume’s polemic against the idea of self or spirit is removed. [2]
[1] It is, of course, quite a different thing to say that the brain (or, more properly, the whole body) is organic to it.
[2] See above, paragraph 205.
Distinction between resembling feelings and idea of resemblance.
213. The above admission, however, does not dispose of the question about ideas of resemblance. A feeling qualified by relation of resemblance to other feelings is a different thing from an idea of that relation—different with all the difference which Hume ignores between feeling and thought, between consciousness and self-consciousness. The qualification of successive feelings by mutual relation implies, indeed, the presence to them of a subject permanent and immaterial (i.e.not in time or space); but it does not imply that this subject presents them to itself as related objects, permanent with its own permanence, which abide and may be considered apart from ‘the circumstances in time’ of their occurrence. Yet such presentation is supposed by all language other than interjectional. It is it alone which can give us names of things, as distinct from noises prompted by the feelings as they occur. Of course it is open to any one to say that by an idea of resemblance he does not mean any thought involving the self-conscious presentation spoken of, but merely a feeling qualified by resemblance, and not at its liveliest stage. Thus Hume tells us that by ‘idea’ he merely means a feeling less lively than it has been, and that by ideaof anythinghe implies no reference to anything other than the idea, [1] but means just a related idea,i.e.a feeling qualified by ‘natural relation’ to other feelings. It is by this thoughtful abnegation of thought, as we shall find, that he arrives at his sceptical result. But language (for the reason mentioned) would not allow him to be faithful to the abnegation. He could not make such a profession without being false to it. This appears already in his account of ‘complex’ and ‘abstract’ ideas.
[1] See above, paragraph 208.
Substances = collections of ideas.
214, His account of the idea of a substance [1] is simply Locke’s, as Locke’s would become upon elimination of the notion that there is a real ‘something’ in which the collection of ideas subsist, and from which they result. It thus avoids all difficulties about the relation between nominal and real essence. Just as Locke says that in the case of a ‘mixed mode’ the nominal essenceisthe real, so Hume would say of a substance. The only difference is that while the collection of ideas, called a mixed mode, does not admit of addition without a change of its name, that called a substance does. Upon discovery of the solubility of gold in aqua regia we add that idea to the collection, to which the name ‘gold’ has previously been assigned, without disturbance in the use of the name, because the name already covers not only the ideas of certain qualities, but also the idea of a ‘principle of union’ between them, which will extend to any ideas presented along with them. As this principle of union, however, is not itself any ‘real essence,’ but ‘part of the complex idea,’ the question, so troublesome to Locke, whether a proposition about gold asserts real co-existence or only the inclusion of an idea in a nominal essence, will be superfluous. How the ‘principle of union’ is to be explained, will appear below. [2]
[1] p. 324 [Book I, part I., sec. VI.]
[2] Paragraph 303, and the following.
How can ideas ‘in flux’ be collected?
215. There are names, then, which represent ‘collections of ideas.’ How can we explain such collection if ideas are merely related feelings grown’ fainter? Do we, when we use one of these names significantly, recall, though in a fainter form, a series of feelings that we have experienced in the process of collection? Does the chemist, when he says that gold is soluble in aqua regia, recall the visual and tactual feeling which he experienced when he found it soluble? If so, as that feeling took its character from relation to a multitude of other ‘complex ideas,’ he must on the same principle recall in endless series the sensible occurrences from which each constituent of each constituent of these was derived; and a like process must be gone through when gold is pronounced ductile, malleable, &c. But this would be, according to the figure which Hume himself adopts, to recall a ‘perpetual flux.’ The very term ‘collection of ideas,’ indeed, if this be the meaning of ideas, is an absurdity, for how can a perpetual flux be collected? If we turn for a solution of the difficulty to the chapter where Hume expressly discusses the significance of general names, we shall find that it is not the question we have here put, and which flows directly from his account of ideas, that he is there treating, but an entirely different one, and one that could not be raised till for related feeling had been substituted the thought of an object under relations.
Are there general ideas? Berkeley said, ‘yes and no’.
216. The chapter mentioned concerns the question which arises out of Locke’s pregnant statement that words and ideas are ‘particular in their existence’ even when ‘general in their signification.’ From this statement we saw [1] that Berkeley derived his explanation of the apparent generality of ideas—the explanation, namely, which reduces it to a relation, yet not such a one as would affect the nature of the idea itself, which is and remains ‘particular,’ but a symbolical relation between it and other particular ideas for which it is taken to stand. An idea, however, that carries with it a consciousness of symbolical relation to other ideas, cannot but be qualified by this relation. The generality must become part of its ‘nature,’ and, accordingly, the distinction between idea and thing being obliterated, of the nature of things. Thus Berkeley virtually arrives at a result which renders unmeaning his preliminary exclusion of universality from ‘the absolute, positive nature or conception of anything.’ Hume seeks to avoid it by putting ‘custom’ in the place of the consciousness of symbolical relation. True to his vocation of explaining away all functions of thought that will not sort with the treatment of it as ‘decaying sense,’ he would resolve that idea of a relation between certain ideas, in virtue of which one is taken to stand for the rest, into thede factosequence upon one of them of the rest. Here, as everywhere else, he would make related feelings do instead of relations of ideas; but whether the related feelings, as he is obliged to describe them, do not already presuppose relations of ideas in distinction from feelings, remains to be seen.
[1] Above, paragraphs 182 and 183.
Hume ‘no’ simply. How he accounts for the appearance of there being such.
217. The question about ‘generality of signification,’ as he puts it, comes to this. In every proposition, though its subject be a common noun, we necessarily present to ourselves some one individual object ‘with all its particular circumstances and proportions.’ How then can the proposition be general in denotation and connotation? How can it be made with reference to a multitude of individual objects other than that presented to the mind, and how can it concern only such of the qualities of the latter as are common to the multitude? The first part of the question is answered as follows:-‘When we have found a resemblance among several objects that often occur to us, we apply the same name to all of them … whatever differences may appear among them. After we have acquired a custom of this kind, the hearing of that name revives the idea of one of these objects, and makes the imagination conceive it with all its particular circumstances and proportions. But as the same word is supposed to have been frequently applied to other individuals, that are different in many respects from that idea which is immediately present to the mind, the word not being able to revive the idea of all these individuals, only touches the soul and revives that custom which we have acquired by surveying them. They are not really and in fact present to the mind, but only in power. … The word raises up an individual idea along with a certain custom, and that custom produces any other individual one for which we may have occasion. … Thus, should we mention the word triangle and form the idea of a particular equilateral one to correspond to it, and should we afterwards assertthat the three angles of a triangle are equal to each other, the other individuals of a scalenum and isosceles, which we overlooked at first, immediately crowd in upon us and make us perceive the falsehood of this proposition, though it be true with relation to that idea which we had formed’. [1]
[1] p. 328 [Book I, part I., sec. VII.]
218. Next, as to the question concerning connotation:—‘The mind would never have dreamed of distinguishing a figure from the body figured, as being in reality neither distinguishable nor different nor separable, did it not observe that even in this simplicity there might be contained many different resemblances and relations. Thus, when a globe of white marble is presented, we receive only the impression of a white colour disposed in a certain form, nor are we able to distinguish and separate the colour from the form. But observing afterwards a globe of black marble and a cube of white, and comparing them with our former object, we find two separate resemblances in what formerly seemed, and really is, perfectly inseparable. After a little more practice of this kind, we begin to distinguish the figure from the colour by adistinction of reason;—i.e.we consider the figure and colour together, since they are, in effect, the same and indistinguishable; but still view them in different aspects according to the resemblances of which they are susceptible. … A person who desires us to consider the figure of a globe of white marble without thinking on its colour, desires an impossibility; but his meaning is, that we should consider the colour and figure together, but still keep in our eye the resemblance to the globe of black marble or that to any other globe whatever’. [1]
[1] p. 333 [Book I, part I., sec. VII.]
His account implies that ‘ideas’ are conceptions, not feelings.
219. It is clear that the process described in these passages supposes ‘ab initio’ the conversion of a feeling into a conception; in other words, the substitution of the definite individuality of a thing, thought of under attributes, for the mere singleness in time of a feeling that occurs after another and before a third. The ‘finding of resemblances and differences among objects that often occur to us’ implies that each object is distinguished as one and abiding from manifold occurrences, in the way of related feelings, in which it is presented to us, and that these accordingly are regarded as representing permanent relations or qualities of the object. Thus from being related feelings, whether more or less ‘vivacious,’ they have become, in the proper sense, ideas of relation. The difficulty about the use of general names, as Hume puts it, really arises just from the extent to which this process of determination by ideas of relation, and with it the removal of the object of thought from simple feeling, is supposed to have gone. It is because the idea is so complex in its individuality, and because this qualification is not understood to be the work of thought, by comparison and contrast accumulating attributes on an object which it itself constitutes, but is regarded as given ready-made in an impression (i.e.a feeling), that the question arises whether a general proposition is really possible or no. To all intents and purposes Hume decides that it is not. The mind is so tied down to the particular collection of qualities which is given to it or which it ‘finds,’ that it cannot present one of them to itself without presenting all. Having never found a triangle that is not equilateral or isosceles or scalene, we cannot imagine one, for ideas can only be copies of impressions, and the imagination, though it has a certain freedom in combining what it finds, can invent nothing that it does not find. Thus the idea, represented by a general name and of which an assertion, general in form, is made, must always have a multitude of other qualities besides those common to it with the other individuals to which the name is applicable. If any of these, however, were included in the predicate of the proposition, the sleeping custom, which determines the mind to pass from the idea present to it to the others to which the name has been applied, would be awakened, and it would be seen at once that the predicate is not true of them. When I make a general statement about ‘the horse,’ there must be present to my mind some particular horse of my acquaintance, but if on the strength of this I asserted that ‘the horse is a grey-haired animal,’ the custom of applying the name without reference to colour would return upon me and correct me—as it would not if the predicate were ‘four-footed.’
He virtually yields the point in regard to thepredicateof propositions.
220. It would seem then that the predicate may, though the subject cannot, represent either a single quality, or a set of qualities which falls far short even of those common to the class, much more of those which characterise any individual. If I can think these apart, or have an idea of them, as the predicate of a proposition, why not (it may be asked) as the subject? It may be said, indeed, with truth, that it is a mistake to think of the subject as representing one idea and the predicate another; that the proposition as a whole represents one idea, in the sense of a conception of relation between attributes, and that at bottom this account of it is consistent with Locke’s definition of knowledge as a perception of relation between ‘ideas,’ since with him ‘ideas’ and ‘qualities’ are used interchangeably. [1] It is no less true, however, that the relation between attributes, which the proposition states, is a relation between them in an individual subject. It is the nature of the individuality of this subject, then, that is really in question. Must it, as Hume supposed, be ‘considered’ under other qualities than those to which the predicate relates? When the proposition only concerns the relation between certain qualities of a spherical figure, must the figure still be considered as of a certain colour and material?
[1] See above, paragraph 17.
As to the subject, he equivocates between singleness of feeling and individuality of conception.
221. The possibility of such a question being raised implies that the step has been already taken, which Hume ignored, from feeling to thought. His doctrine on the matter arises from that mental equivocation, of which the effects on Locke have been already noticed, [1] between the mere singleness of a feeling in time and the individuality of the object of thought as a complex of relations. If the impression is the single feeling which disappears with a turn of the head, and the idea a weaker impression, every idea must indeed be in one sense ‘individual,’ but in a sense that renders all predication impossible because it empties the idea of all content. Really, according to Hume’s doctrine of general names, it is individual in a sense which is the most remote opposite of this, as a multitude of ‘different resemblances and relations’ in ‘simplicity.’ It is just such an individual as Locke supposed to be found (so to speak) ready-made in nature, and from which he supposed the mind successively to abstract ideas less and less determinate. Such an object Hume, coming after Berkeley, could not regard in Locke’s fashion as a separate material existence outside consciousness. The idea with him is a ‘copy’ not of a thing but of an ‘impression,’ but to the impression he transfers all that individualization by qualities which Locke had ascribed to the substance found in nature; and from the impression again transfers it to the idea which ‘is but the weaker impression.’ Thus the singleness in time of the impression becomes the ‘simplicity’ of an object ‘containing many different resemblances and relations,’ and the individuality of the subject of a proposition, instead of being regarded in its true light as a temporary isolation from other relations of those for the time under view—an individuality which is perpetually shifting its limits as thought proceeds—becomes an individuality fixed once for all by what is given in the impression. Because, as is supposed, I can only ‘see’ a globe as of a certain colour and material, I can only think of it as such. If the ‘sight’ of it had been rightly interpreted as itself a complex work of thought, successively detaching felt things from the ‘flux’ of feelings and determining these by relations similarly detached, the difficulty of thinking certain of these—e.g.those designated as ‘figure’—apart from the rest would have disappeared. It would have been seen that this was merely to separate in reflective analysis what had been gradually put together in the successive synthesis of perception. But such an interpretation of the supposeddatumof sense would have been to elevate thought from the position which Hume assigned to it, as a ‘decaying sense,’ to that of being itself the organizer of the world which it knows. [2]
[1] See above, paragraphs 47, 95, &c.
[2] The phrase ‘decaying sense’ belongs to Hobbes, but its meaning is adopted by Hume.
Result is a theory which admits predication, but only as singular.
222. Here, then, as elsewhere, the embarrassment of Hume’s doctrine is nothing which a better statement of it could avoid. Nay, so dexterous is his statement, that only upon a close scrutiny does the embarrassment disclose itself. To be faithful at once to his reduction of the impression to simple feeling, and to his account of the idea as a mere copy of the impression, was really impossible. If he had kept his word in regard to the impression, he must have found thought filling the void left by the disappearance, under Berkeley’s criticism, of that outward system of things which Locke had commonly taken for granted. He preferred fidelity to his account of the idea, and thus virtually restores the fiction which represents the real world as consisting of so many, materially separate, bundles of qualities—a fiction which even Locke in his better moments was beginning to outgrow—with only the difference that for the separation of ‘substances’ in space he substitutes a separation of ‘impressions’ in time. That thought (the ‘idea’) can but faintly copy feeling (the ‘impression’) he consistently maintains, but he avails himself of the actual determination of feeling by reference to an object of thought—the determination expressed by such phrases as impression of a man, impression of a globe, &c.—to charge the feeling with a content which it only derives from such determination, while yet he denies it. By this means predication can be accounted for, as it could not be if our consciousness consisted of mere feelings and their copies, but only in the form of the singular proposition; because the object of thought determined by relations, being identified with a single feeling, must be limited by the ‘this’ or ‘that’ which expresses this singleness of feeling. It is reallythisorthatglobe,thisorthatman, that is the subject of the proposition, according to Hume, even when in form it is general. It is true that the general name ‘globe’ or ‘man’ not merely represents a ‘particular’ globe or man, though that is all that is presented to the mind, but also ‘raises up a custom which produces any other individual idea for which we may have occasion.’ As this custom, however, is neither itself an idea nor affects the singleness of the subject idea, it does not constitute any distinction between singular and general propositions, but only between two sorts of the singular proposition according as it does, or does not, suggest an indefinite series of other singular propositions, in which the same qualities are affirmed of different individual ideas to which the subject-name has been applied.
All propositions restricted in same way as Locke’s propositions about real existence.
223. A customary sequence, then, of individual ideas upon each other is the reality, which through the delusion of words (as we must suppose) has given rise to the fiction of there being such a thing as general knowledge. We say ‘fiction,’ for with the possibility of general propositions, as the Greek philosophers once for all pointed out, stands or falls the possibility of science. Locke was so far aware of this that, upon the same principle which led him to deny the possibility of general propositions concerning real existence, he ‘suspected’ a science of nature to be impossible, and only found an exemption for moral and mathematical truth from this condemnation in its ‘bare ideality.’ Hume does away with the exemption. He applies to all propositions alike the same limitation which Locke applies to those concerning real existence. With Locke there may very well be a proposition which to the mind, as well as in form, is general—one of which the subject is an ‘abstract general idea’—but such proposition ‘concerns not existence.’ As knowledge of real existence is limited to the ‘actual present sensation,’ so a proposition about such existence is limited to what is given in such sensation. It is a real truth that this piece of gold is now being dissolved in aqua regia, when the ‘particular experiment’ is going on under our eyes, but the general proposition ‘gold is soluble’ is only an analysis of a nominal essence. With Hume the distinction between propositions that do, and those that do not, ‘concern existence’ disappears. Every proposition is on the same footing in this respect, since it must needs be a statement about an ‘idea,’ and every idea exists. ‘Every object that is presented must necessarily be existent. … Whatever we conceive, we conceive to be existent. Any idea we please to form is the idea of a being; and the idea of a being is any idea we please to form’. [1] But since, according to him, the idea cannot be separated, as Locke supposed it could, from the conditions ‘that determine it to this or that particular existence,’ propositions of the sort which Locke understood by ‘general propositions concerning substances,’ though if they were possible they would ‘concern existence’ as much as any, are simply impossible. Hume, in short, though he identifies the real and nominal essences which Locke had distinguished, yet limits the nominal essence by the same ‘particularity in space and time’ by which Locke had limited the real.