A Treatise of Human Nature · David Hume
GENERAL INTRODUCTION TO VOL. I.
How the history of philosophy should be studied. 1. There is a view of the history of mankind, by this time familiarised to Englishmen, which detaches from the chaos of events a connected series of ruling actions and beliefs--the achievement of great men and great epochs, and assigns to these in a special sense the term ‘historical.’ According to this theory--which indeed, if there is to be a theory of History at all, alone gives the needful simplification--the mass of nations must be regarded as left in swamps and shallows outside the main stream of human development. They have either never come within the reach of the hopes and institutions which make history a progress instead of a cycle, or they have stiffened these into a dead body of ceremony and caste, or at some great epoch they have failed to discern the sign of the times and rejected the counsel of God against themselves. Thus permanently or for generations, with no principle of motion but unsatisfied want, without the assimilative ideas which from the strife of passions elicit moral results, they have trodden the old round of war, trade, and faction, adding nothing to the spiritual heritage of man. It would seem that the historian need not trouble himself with them, except so far as relation to them determines the activity of the progressive nations.
Hume the last great English philosopher. 2. A corresponding theory may with some confidence be applied to simplify the history of philosophical opinion. The common plan of seeking this history in compendia of the systems of philosophical writers, taken in the gross or with no discrimination except in regard to time and popularity, is mainly to blame for the common notion that metaphysical enquiry is an endless process of threshing old straw. Such enquiry is really progressive, and has a real history, but it is a history represented by a few great names. At rare epochs there appear men, or sets of men, with the true speculative impulse to begin at the beginning and go to the end, and with the faculty of discerning the true point of departure which previous speculation has fixed for them. The intervals are occupied by commentators and exponents of the last true philosopher, if it has been his mission to construct; if it has been sceptical, by writers who cannot understand the fatal question that he has asked, and thus still dig in the old vein which he had exhausted, and of which his final dilemma had shown the bottom.
Such an interval was that which in the growth of continental philosophy followed on the epoch of Leibnitz; an interval of academic exposition or formulation, in which the system, that had been to the master an incomplete enquiry, became in the hands of his disciples a one-sided dogmatism. In the line of speculation more distinctively English, a like _régime_ of ‘strenua inertia’ has prevailed since the time of Hume. In the manner of its unprofitableness, indeed, it has differed from the Wolfian period in Germany, just as the disinterested scepticism of Hume differed from the system-making for purposes of edification to which Leibnitz applied himself. It has been unprofitable, because its representatives have persisted in philosophising upon principles which Hume had pursued to their legitimate issue and had shown, not as their enemy but as their advocate, to render all philosophy futile. Adopting the premises and method of Locke, he cleared them of all illogical adaptations to popular belief, and experimented with them on the body of professed knowledge, as one only could do who had neither any twist of vice nor any bias for doing good, but was a philosopher because he could not help it. Kant his true successor.
3. As the result of the experiment, the method, which began with professing to explain knowledge, showed knowledge to be impossible. Hume himself was perfectly cognisant of this result, but his successors in England and Scotland would seem so far to have been unable to look it in the face. They have either thrust their heads again into the bush of uncriticised belief, or they have gone on elaborating Hume’s doctrine of association, in apparent forgetfulness of Hume’s own proof of its insufficiency to account for an intelligent, as opposed to a merely instinctive or habitual, experience. An enquiry, however, so thorough and passionless as the ‘Treatise of Human Nature,’ could not be in vain; and if no English athlete had strength to carry on the torch, it was transferred to a more vigorous line in Germany. It awoke Kant, as he used to say, from his ‘dogmatic slumber,’ to put him into that state of mind by some called wonder, by others doubt, in which all true philosophy begins. This state, with less ambiguity of terms, may be described as that of freedom from presuppositions.
It was because Kant, reading Hume with the eyes of Leibnitz and Leibnitz with the eyes of Hume, was able to a great extent to rid himself of the presuppositions of both, that he started that new method of philosophy which, as elaborated by Hegel, claims to set man free from the artificial impotence of his own false logic, and thus qualify him for a complete interpretation of his own achievement in knowledge and morality. Thus the ‘Treatise of Human Nature’ and the ‘Critic of Pure Reason,’ taken together, form the real bridge between the old world of philosophy and the new. They are the essential ‘Propaedeutik,’ without which no one is a qualified student of modern philosophy. The close correspondence between the two works becomes more apparent the more each is studied. It is such as to give a strong presumption that Kant had studied Hume’s doctrine in its original and complete expression, and not merely as it was made easy in the ‘Essays.’ The one with full and reasoned articulation asks the question, which the other with equal fulness seeks to answer. It is probably because the question in its complete statement has been so little studied among us, that the intellectual necessity of the Kantian answer has been so little appreciated. To trace the origin and bring out the points of the question, in order to the exhibition of that necessity, will be the object of the following treatise. To do this thoroughly, indeed, would carry us back through Hobbes to Bacon. But as present limits do not allow of so long a journey, we must be content with showing Hume’s direct filiation to Locke, who, indeed, sufficiently gathered up the results of the ‘empirical’ philosophy of his predecessors.
Distinction between literary history and the history of philosophical systems. 4. Such a task is very different from an ordinary undertaking in literary history, and requires different treatment. To the historian of literature a philosopher is interesting, if at all, on account of the personal qualities which make a great writer, and have a permanent effect on letters and general culture. Locke and Hume undoubtedly had these qualities and produced such an effect--an effect in Locke’s case more intense upon the immediately following generations, but in Hume’s more remarkable as having reappeared after near a century of apparent forgetfulness. Each, indeed, like every true philosopher, was the mouth-piece of a certain system of thought determined for him by the stage at which he found the dialectic movement that constitutes the progress of philosophy, but each gave to this system the stamp of that personal power which persuades men. Their mode of expression had none of that academic or ‘ex cathedra’ character, which has made German philosophy almost a foreign literature in the country of its birth. They wrote as citizens and men of the world, anxious (in no bad sense) for effect; and even when their conclusions were remote from popular belief, still presented them in the flesh and blood of current terms used in the current senses.
It is not, however, in their human individuality and its effects upon literature, but as the vehicles of a system of thought, that it is proposed here to treat them; and this purpose will best be fulfilled if we follow the line of their speculation without divergence into literary criticism or history, without remarks either on the peculiarities of their genius or on any of the secondary influences which affected their writings or arose out of them. For a method of this sort, it would seem, there is some need among us. We have been learning of late to know much more about philosophers, but it is possible for knowledge about philosophers to flourish inversely as the knowledge of philosophy. The revived interest which is noticeable in the history of philosophy may be an indication either of philosophical vigour or of philosophical decay. In those whom intellectual indolence, or a misunderstood and disavowed metaphysic, has landed in scepticism there often survives a curiosity about the literary history of philosophy, and the writings which this curiosity produces tend further to spread the notion that philosophy is a matter about which there has been much guessing by great intellects, but no definite truth is to be attained. It is otherwise with those who see in philosophy a progressive effort towards a fully-articulated conception of the world as rational. To them its past history is of interest as representing steps in this progress which have already been taken for us, and which, if we will make them our own, carry us so far on our way towards the freedom of perfect understanding; while to ignore them is not to return to the simplicity of a pre-philosopic age, but to condemn ourselves to grope in the maze of ‘cultivated opinion,’ itself the confused result of those past systems of thought which we will not trouble ourselves to think out.
Object of the present enquiry. 5. The value of that system of thought, which found its clearest expression in Hume, lies in its being an effort to think to their logical issue certain notions which since then have become commonplaces with educated Englishmen, but which, for that reason, we must detach ourselves from popular controversy to appreciate rightly. We are familiar enough with these in the form to which adaptation to the needs of plausibility has gradually reduced them, but because we do not think them out with the consistency of their original exponents, we miss their true value. They do not carry us, as they will do if we restore their original significance, by an intellectual necessity to those truer notions which, in fact, have been their sequel in the development of philosophy, but have not yet found their way into the ‘culture’ of our time. An attempt to restore their value, however, if this be the right view of its nature, cannot but seem at first sight invidious. It will seem as if, while we talk of their value, we were impertinently trying to ‘pull them to pieces.’
But those who understand the difference between philosophical failures, which are so because they are anachronisms, and those which in their failure have brought out a new truth and compelled a step forward in the progress of thought, will understand that a process, which looks like pulling a great philosopher to pieces, may be the true way of showing reverence for his greatness. It is a Pharisaical way of building the sepulchres of philosophers to profess their doctrine or extol their genius without making their spirit our own. The genius of Locke and Hume was their readiness to follow the lead of Ideas: their spirit was the spirit of Rationalism--the spirit which, however baffled and forced into inconsistent admissions, is still governed by the faith that all things may ultimately be understood. We best do reverence to their genius, we most truly appropriate their spirit, in so exploring the difficulties to which their enquiry led, as to find in them the suggestion of a theory which may help us to walk firmly where they stumbled and fell. Locke’s problem and method.
6. About Locke, as about every other philosopher, the essential questions are, What was his problem, and what was his method? Locke, as a man of business, gives us the answers at starting. His problem was the origin of ‘ideas’ in the individual man, and their connection as constituting knowledge: his method that of simply ‘looking into his own understanding and seeing how it wrought.’ These answers commend themselves to common sense, and still form the text of popular psychology. If its confidence in their value, as explained by Locke, is at all beginning to be shaken, this is not because, according to a strict logical development, they issued in Hume’s unanswered scepticism, which was too subtle for popular effect, but because they are now open to a rougher battery from the physiologists. Our concern at present is merely to show their precise meaning, and the difficulties which according to this meaning they involve. His notion of the ‘thinking thing’.
7. There are two propositions on which Locke is constantly insisting: one, that the object of his investigation is _his own_ mind; the other, that his attitude towards this object is that of mere observation. He speaks of his own mind, it is to be noticed, just as he might of his own body. It meant something born with, and dependent on, the particular animal organism that first saw the light at Wrington on a particular day in 1632. It was as exclusive of other minds as his body of other bodies, and he could only infer a resemblance between them and it. With all his animosity to the coarse spiritualism of the doctrine of innate ideas, he was the victim of the same notion which gave that doctrine its falsehood and grotesqueness. He, just as much as the untutored Cartesian, regarded the ‘minds’ of different men as so many different things; and his refutation of the objectionable hypothesis proceeds wholly from this view. Whether the mind is put complete into the body, or is born and grows with it; whether it has certain characters stamped upon it to begin with, or receives all its ideas through the senses; whether it is simple and therefore indiscerptible, or compound and therefore perishable--all these questions to Locke, as to his opponents, concern a multitude of ‘thinking things’ in him and them, merely individual, but happening to be pretty much alike.
This he will passively observe. 8. This ‘thinking thing,’ then, as he finds it in himself, the philosopher, according to Locke, has merely and passively to observe, in order to understand the nature of knowledge. ‘I could look into nobody’s understanding but my own to see how it wrought,’ he says, but ‘I think the intellectual faculties are made and operate alike in most men. But if it should happen not to be so, I can only make it my humble request, in my own name and in the name of those that are of my size, who find their minds work, reason, and know in the same low way that mine does, that the men of a more happy genius will show us the way of their nobler flights.’ (Second Letter to Bishop of Worcester.) As will appear in the sequel, it is from this imaginary method of ascertaining the origin and nature of knowledge by passive observation of what goes on in one’s own mind that the embarrassments of Locke’s system flow. It was the function of Hume to exhibit the radical flaw in his master’s method by following it with more than his master’s rigour. Is such observation possible?
9. As an observation of the ‘thinking thing,’ the ‘philosophy of mind’ seems to assume the character of a natural science, and thus at once acquires definiteness, and if not certainty, at least plausibility. To deny the possibility of such observation, in any proper sense of the word, is for most men to tamper with the unquestioned heritage of all educated intelligence. Hence the unpalatability of a consistent Positivism; hence, too, on the other side, the general conviction that the Hegelian reduction of Psychology to Metaphysics is either an intellectual juggle, or a wilful return of the philosophy, which psychologists had washed, to the mire of scholasticism. It is the more important to ascertain what the observation in question precisely means. What observes, and what is observed? According to Locke (and empirical psychology has never substantially varied the answer) the matter to be observed consists for each man firstly in certain impressions of his own individual mind, by which this mind from being a mere blank has become furnished--by which, in other words, his mind has become actually a mind; and, secondly, in certain operations, which the mind, thus constituted, performs upon the materials which constitute it. The observer, all the while, is the constituted mind itself. The question at once arises, how the developed man can observe in himself (and it is only to himself, according to Locke, that he can look) that primitive state in which his mind was a ‘tabula rasa.’ In the first place, that only can be observed which is present; and the state in question to the supposed observer is past. If it be replied that it is recalled by memory, there is the farther objection that memory only recalls what has been previously known, and how is a man’s own primitive consciousness, as yet void of the content which is supposed to come to it through impressions, originally known to him? How can the ‘tabula rasa’ be cognisant of itself?
Why it seems so. 10. The cover under which this difficulty was hidden from Locke, as from popular psychologists ever since, consists in the implicit assumption of certain ideas, either as possessed by or acting upon the mind in the supposed primitive state, which are yet held to be arrived at by a gradual process of comparison, abstraction, and generalisation. This assumption, which renders the whole system resting upon the interrogation of consciousness a paralogism, is yet the condition of its apparent possibility. It is only as already charged with a content which is yet (and for the individual, truly) maintained to be the gradual acquisition of experience, that the primitive consciousness has any answer to give to its interrogator. Locke’s account of origin of ideas. 11. Let us consider the passage where Locke sums up his theory of the ‘original of our ideas.’ (Book II. chap. i. sec. 23, 24.) ‘Since there appear not to be any ideas in the mind, before the senses have conveyed any in, I conceive that ideas in the understanding are coeval with sensation; which is such an impression, made in some part of the body, as produces some perception in the understanding. It is about these impressions made on our senses by outward objects, that the mind seems first to employ itself in such operations as we call perception, remembering, consideration, reasoning, &c. In time the mind comes to reflect on its own operations about the ideas got by sensation, and thereby stores itself with a new set of ideas, which I call ideas of reflection. These impressions that are made on our senses by outward objects, that are extrinsical to the mind; and its own operations, proceeding from powers intrinsical and proper to itself, which, when reflected on by itself, become also objects of its contemplation, are, as I have said, the original of all knowledge.’
Its ambiguities _(a)_ In regard to sensation. 12. Can we from this passage elicit a distinct account of the beginning of intelligence? In the first place it consists in an ‘idea,’ and an idea is elsewhere (Introduction, sec. 8) stated to be ‘whatsoever is the object of the understanding, when a man thinks.’ But the primary idea is an ‘idea of sensation.’ Does this mean that the primary idea _is_ a sensation, or is a distinction to be made between the sensation and the idea thereof? The passage before us would seem to imply such a distinction. Looking merely to it, we should probably say that by _sensation_ Locke meant ‘an impression or motion in some part of the body;’ by the _idea of sensation_ ‘a perception in the understanding,’ which this impression produces. The account of perception itself gives a different result. (Book II. chap. ix. sec. 3.) ‘Whatever impressions are made on the outward parts, if they are not taken notice of within, there is no perception. Fire may burn our bodies with no other effect than it does a billet, unless the motion be continued to the brain, and there the _sense_ of heat or _idea_ of pain be produced in the mind, wherein consists actual _perception_.’ Here sensation is identified at once with the idea and with perception, as opposed to the impression on the bodily organs. [1] To confound the confusion still farther, in a passage immediately preceding the above, ‘Perception,’ here identified with the idea of sensation, has been distinguished from it, as ‘exercised about it.’ ‘Perception, as it is the first faculty of the mind exercised about our ideas, so it is the first and simplest idea we have from reflection.’ Taking Locke at his word, then, we find the beginning of intelligence to consist in having an idea of sensation. This idea, however, we perceive, and to perceive is to have an idea; _i.e._ to have an idea of an idea of sensation. But of perception again we have a simple or primitive idea. Therefore the beginning of intelligence consists in having an idea of an idea of an idea of sensation.
What is the ‘tablet’ impressed? 14. Meanwhile a perpetual equivocation is kept up between a supposed impression on the ‘outward parts,’ and a supposed impression on the ‘tablet of the mind.’ It is not the impression upon, or a motion in, the outward parts, as Locke admits, that constitutes the idea of sensation. It is not an agitation in the tympanum of the ear, or a picture on the retina of the eye, that we are conscious of when we see a sight or hear a sound. [1] The motion or impression, however, has only, as he seems to suppose, to be ‘continued to the brain,’ and it becomes an idea of sensation. Notwithstanding the rough line of distinction between soul and body, which he draws elsewhere, his theory was practically governed by the supposition of a cerebral something, in which, as in a third equivocal tablet, the imaginary mental and bodily tablets are blended. If, however, the idea of sensation, as an object of the understanding when a man thinks, differs absolutely from ‘a motion of the outward parts,’ it does so no less absolutely, however language and metaphor may disguise the difference, from such motion as ‘continued to the brain.’ An instructed man, doubtless, may come to think about a motion in his brain, as about a motion of the earth round the sun, but to speak of such motion as an idea of sensation or an immediate object of intelligent sense, is to confuse between the object of consciousness and a possible physical theory of the conditions of that consciousness. It is only, however, by such an equivocation that any idea, according to Locke’s account of the idea, can be described as an ‘impression’ at all, or that the representation of the mind as a tablet, whether born blank or with characters stamped on it, has even an apparent meaning. A metaphor, interpreted as a fact, becomes the basis of his philosophical system.
Source of these difficulties. The ‘simple’ idea, as Locke describes it, is a complex idea of substance and relation. 16. The real source of these embarrassments in Locke’s theory, it must be noted, lies in the attempt to make the individual consciousness give an answer to its interrogator as to the beginning of knowledge. The individual looking back on an imaginary earliest experience pronounces himself in that experience to have been simply sensitive and passive. But by this he means consciously sensitive _of something_ and consciously passive _in relation to something_. That is, he supposes the primitive experience to have involved consciousness of a self on the one hand and of a thing on the other, as well as of a relation between the two. In the ‘idea of sensation’ as Locke conceived it, such a consciousness is clearly implied, notwithstanding his confusion of terms. The idea is a perception, or consciousness _of a thing_, as opposed to a sensation proper or affection of the bodily organs. Of the perception, again, there is an idea, _i.e._ a consciousness by the man, in the perception, of himself in negative relation to the thing that is his object, and this consciousness (if we would make Locke consistent in excluding an unperceived perception) must be taken to go along with the perceptive act itself.
Text from Project Gutenberg, public domain in the United States.