A Treatise of Human Nature · David Hume
GENERAL INTRODUCTION TO VOL. I.
148. The value of the first step in Locke’s argument--the inference, namely, from there being something now to there having been something from eternity--must be differently estimated according to the meaning attached to ‘something’ and ‘from eternity.’ If the existence of something means the occurrence of an event, of this undoubtedly it can always be said that it follows another event, nor to this sequence can any limit be supposed, for a first event would not be an event at all. It would be a contingency contingent upon nothing. Thus understood, the argument from a something now to a something from eternity is merely a statement of the infinity of time according to that notion of infinity, as a ‘progressus ad indefinitum,’ which we have already seen to be Locke’s. [1] It is the exact reverse of an argument to a creation or a first cause. If we try to change its character by a supplementary consideration that infinity in the series of events is inconceivable, the rejoinder will be that a first event is not for that reason any less of a contradiction, and that the infinity which Locke speaks of only professes to be a negative idea, representing the impossibility of conceiving a first event (Book II. chap. xvii. sec. 13, &c.). In truth, however, when Locke speaks of ‘something from eternity’ he does not mean--what would clearly be no God at all--a series of events to which, because _of events_, and therefore in time, no limit can be supposed; but a being which is neither event nor series of events, to which there is no before or after. The inference to such a being is not of a kind with the transition from one event to another habitually associated with it; and if this be the true account of reasoning from effect to cause, no such reasoning can yield the result which Locke requires. As we have seen, however, this is not his account of it, [2] however legitimately it may follow from his general doctrine.
In its fulness, that is, it is simply that system of things, conceived explicitly, of which there must already have been an implicit conception in order that the event might be regarded as a change and thus start the search for a cause. An event in time, apart from reference to something not in time, could suggest no enquiry into the sum of its conditions. Upon occurrence of a certain feeling there might indeed be spontaneous recollection of a feeling usually precedent, spontaneous expectation of another usually sequent. But such association of feelings can never explain that conception of cause in virtue of which, when accounting for a phenomenon, we set aside the event which in our actual experience has usually preceded it, for one which we only find to precede it in the single case of a crucial experiment. That we do so shows that it is not because of antecedence in time, however apparently uniform, that an educated man reckons a certain event to be the cause of another, but that, because of its sole sufficiency under the sum of known conditions to account for the given event, he decides it to be its uniform antecedent, however much ordinary appearances may tell to the contrary.
Thus, though he may still strangely define cause as a uniformly antecedent event (in spite of its being a definition that would prevent him from speaking of gravity as the cause of the fall of a stone), it is clear that by such event he means one determined by a complex of conditions in an unchanging universe. These conditions, again, he may speak of as contingencies, _i.e._ as events contingent upon other events in endless series, but he must add ‘contingent in accordance with the uniformity of nature’--in other words, he must determine the contingencies by relation to what is not contingent; he must suppose nature unchanging, though our experience of it through sensation be a ‘progressus ad indefinitum’--if he is to allow a possibility of knowledge at all. In short, if events were merely events, feelings that happen to me now and next moment are over, no ‘law of causation’ and therefore no knowledge would be possible. If the knowledge founded on this law actually exists, then the ‘argumentum a contingentiâ mundi’ rightly understood--the ‘inference’ from nature to a being neither in time nor contingent but self-dependent and eternal, that constant reality of which events are the changing appearances--is valid because the conception of nature, of a world to be known, already implies such a being. To the rejoinder that implication in the conception of nature does not prove real existence, the answer must be the question. What meaning has real existence, the antithesis of illusion, except such as is equivalent to this conception?
This is because, in the Fourth Book, where the ‘proof’ occurs, following the new train of enquiry started by the definition of knowledge, Locke has for the time left in abeyance his fundamental doctrine that all simple ideas are types of reality, and is writing as if ‘my own real existence’ were the only one known with intuitive certainty. This, however, makes no essential difference in the effect of his argument. The given existence, from which the divine is proved, is treated expressly as _both_ ‘material and cogitative:’ nor, since according to Locke the world is both and man is both, and even the ‘thinking thing’ takes its content from impressions made by matter, could it be otherwise. To have taken thought by itself as the basis of the proof would have been to leave the other part of the world, as he conceived it, to be referred to another God. The difficulty then arises, either that there is no inference possible from the nature of the effect to the nature of the eternal being, its cause; in which case no attribute whatever can be asserted of the latter: or that to it too, like the effect, matter as well as thought must belong. Yes, according to the true notion of the relation between thought and matter.
152. As we have seen, neither of these alternative views is really met by Locke. To the former we may reply that the relation between two events, of which neither has anything in common with the other, but which we improperly speak of as effect and cause (_e.g._ death and a sunstroke), has no likeness to that which we have explained between the world in its contingency and the world as an eternal system--a relation according to which the cause is the effect in unity. Whatever is part of the reality of the world must belong, it would seem, to the ‘ens realissimum,’ its cause. We are thus thrown back on the other horn of the dilemma. Is not matter part of the reality of the world? This is a question to which the method of observing the individual consciousness can give none but a delusive answer. A true answer cannot be given till for this method has been substituted the enquiry, How knowledge is possible, and it has been found that it is only possible as the progressive actualisation in us of a self-consciousness in itself complete, and which in its completeness includes the world as its object.
From the point of view thus attained the question as to matter will be, How is it related to this self-consciousness?--a question to which the answer must vary according to what is understood by ‘matter.’ If it means the abstract opposite of thought--that which is supposed void of all determination that comes of thinking--we must pronounce it simply a delusion, the creation of self-consciousness in one stage of its communication to us. If it means the world as in space and time, this we may allow to be real enough as a stage in the process by which self-consciousness constitutes reality. Thus understood, we may speak of it roughly as part of the ‘ens realissimum’ which the complete self-consciousness, or God, includes as its object, without any limitation of the divine perfectness. The limitation only seems to arise so far as we, being ourselves (as our knowledge and morality testify), though formally self-conscious, yet parts of this partial world, interpret it amiss and ascribe to it a reality, in abstraction from the self-conscious subject, which it only derives from relation to it. Thus while on the one hand it is the presence in us of God, as the self-conscious source of reality, that at once gives us the idea of God and of an eternal self, and renders superfluous the further question as to their real existence; on the other hand it is because, for all this presence, we are but emerging from nature, of which as animals we are parts, that to us there must seem an incompatibility of existence between God and matter, between the self and the flux of events which makes our life. This necessary illusion is our bondage, but when the source of illusion is known, the bondage is already being broken.
Locke’s antinomies--Hume takes one side of them as true. 153. We have now sufficiently explored the system which it was Hume’s mission to try to make consistent with itself. We have found that it is governed throughout by the antithesis between what is given to consciousness--that in regard to which the mind is passive--as the supposed real on the one side, and what is ‘invented,’ ‘created,’ ‘superinduced’ by the mind on the other: while yet this ‘real’ in all its forms, as described by Locke, has turned out to be constituted by such ideas as, according to him, are not given but invented. Stripped of these superinductions, nothing has been found to remain of it but that of which nothing can be said--a chaos of unrelated, and therefore unmeaning, _individua_. Turning to the theory of the mind itself, the source of the superinduction, we have found this to be a reduplication of the prolonged inconsistency which forms the theory of the ‘real.’ It impresses itself with that which, according to the other theory, is the impress of matter, and it really exists as that which it itself invents. The value of Hume’s philosophy lies in its being an attempt to carry out the antithesis more rigorously--to clear the real, whether under the designation of mind or of its object, of all that could not be reckoned as given in feelings which occur to us ‘whether we will or no.’ The consequence is a splendid failure, a failure which it might have been hoped would have been taken as a sufficient proof that a theory, which starts from that antithesis, cannot even be stated without implicitly contradicting itself.
Hume’s scepticism fatal to his own premises. This derived from Berkeley. 154. Such a doctrine--a doctrine founded on the testimony of the senses, which ends by showing that the senses testify to nothing--cannot be criticised step by step according to the order in which its author puts it, for its characteristic is that, in order to state itself, it has to take for granted popular notions which it afterwards shows to be unmeaning. Its power over ordinary thinkers lies just in this, that it arrives at its destructive result by means of propositions which every one believes, but to the validity of which its result is really fatal. An account of our primitive consciousness, which derives its plausibility from availing itself of the conceptions of cause and substance, is the basis of the argument which reduces these conceptions to words misunderstood. It cannot, therefore, be treated by itself, as it stands in the first part of the Treatise on the Understanding, but must be taken in connection with Part IV., especially with the section on ‘Scepticism with regard to the Senses;’ not upon the plan of discrediting a principle by reference to the ‘dangerous’ nature of its consequences, but because the final doctrine brings out the inconsistencies lurking in that assumed to begin with. On this side of his scepticism Hume mainly followed the orthodox Berkeley, of whose criticism of Locke, made with a very different purpose, some account must first be given. The connection between the two authors is instructive in many ways; not least as showing that when the most pious theological purpose expresses itself in a doctrine resting on an inadequate philosophical principle, it is the principle and not the purpose that will regulate the permanent effect of the doctrine.
Berkeley’s religious interest in making Locke consistent. 155. Berkeley’s treatises, we must remember, though professedly philosophical, really form a theological polemic. He wrote as the champion of orthodox Christianity against ‘mathematical atheism,’ and, like others of his order, content with the demolition of the rival stronghold, did not stay to enquire whether his own untempered mortar could really hold together the fabric of knowledge and rational religion which he sought to maintain. He found practical ungodliness and immorality excusing themselves by a theory of ‘materialism’--a theory which made the whole conscious experience of man dependent upon ‘unperceiving matter.’ This, whatever it might be, was not an object which man could love or reverence, or to which he could think of himself as accountable. Berkeley, full of devout zeal for God and man, and not without a tincture of clerical party-spirit (as appears in his heat against Shaftesbury, whom he ought to have regarded as a philosophical yoke-fellow), felt that it must be got rid of. He saw, or thought he saw, that the ‘new way of ideas’ had only to be made consistent with itself, and the oppressive shadow must vanish. Ideas, according to that new way (or, to speak less ambiguously, feelings) make up our experience, and they are not matter.
Let us get rid, then, of the self-contradictory assumption that they are either copies of matter--copies of that, of which it is the sole and simple differentia that it is not an idea, or its effects--effects of that which can only be described as the unknown opposite of the only efficient power with which we are acquainted--and what becomes of the philosopher’s blind and dead substitute for the living and knowing God? It was one thing, however, to show the contradictions involved in Locke’s doctrine of matter, another effectively to replace it. To the latter end Berkeley cannot be said to have made any permanent contribution. That explicit reduction of ideas to feelings ‘particular in time,’ which was his great weapon of destruction, was incompatible with his doing so. He adds nothing to the philosophy, which he makes consistent with itself, while by making it consistent he empties it of three parts of its suggestiveness. His doctrine, in short, is merely Locke purged, and Locke purged is no Locke. What is meant by relation of mind and matter?
156. The question which he mainly dealt with may be stated in general terms as that of the relation between the mind and the external world. Under this general statement, however, are covered several distinct questions, the confusion between which has been a great snare for philosophers--questions as to the relations _(a)_ between a sensitive and non-sensitive body, _(b)_ between thought and its object, _(c)_ between thought and something only qualified as the negation of thought. The last question, it will be observed, is what the second becomes upon a certain notion being formed of what the object of thought must be. Upon this notion being discarded a further question _(d)_, also covered by the above general statement, must still remain as to the relation between thought, as in each man, and the world which he does not make, but which, in some sort, makes him what he is. In what follows, these questions, for the sake of brevity, will be referred to symbolically. Confusions involved in Locke’s materialism.
157. Locke’s doctrine of matter, as we have seen, involves a confusion between _(a)_ and _(b)_. The feeling of touch in virtue of an intellectual interpretation--_intellectual_ because implying the action of the mind as (according to Locke) the source of ideas of relation--becomes the idea of solidity, _i.e._ the idea of a relation between bodies in the way of impulse and resistance. But the function of the intellect in constituting the relation is ignored. Under cover of the ambiguous ‘idea,’ which stands alike for a nervous irritation and the intellectual interpretation thereof, the feeling of touch and conception of solidity are treated as one and the same. Thus the true _conceived_ outwardness of body to body--an outwardness which thought, as the source of relations, can alone constitute--becomes first an imaginary _felt_ outwardness of body to the organs of touch, and then, by a further fallacy--these organs being confused with the mind--an outwardness of body to mind, which we need only kick a stone to be sure of.
Meanwhile the consideration of question _(d)_ necessitates the belief that the real world does not come and go with each man’s fleeting consciousness, and no distinction being recognised between consciousness as fleeting and consciousness as permanent, or between feeling and thought, the real world comes to be regarded as the absolute opposite of thought and its work. This opposition combines with the supposed externality of body to mind to give the notion that body is the real. The qualities which ‘the mind finds inseparable from body’ thus become qualities which would exist all the same ‘whether there were a perceiving mind or no,’ and are primarily real; while such as consist in our feelings, though real in so far as, ‘not being of our own making, they imply the action of things without us,’ are yet only secondarily so because this action is relative to something which is not body. Then, finally, by a renewed confusion of the relation between thought and its object with that between body and body, qualities, which are credited with a primary reality as independent of and antithetical to the mind, are brought within it again as ideas. They are supposed to copy themselves upon it by impact and impression; and that not in touch merely, but (visual feelings being interpreted by help of the same conception) in sight also.
Two ways of dealing with it. Berkeley chooses the most obvious. 158. Such ‘materialism’ invites two different methods of attack. On the one hand its recognised principle, that all intellectual ‘superinduction’ upon simple feeling is a departure from the real, may be insisted on, and it may be shown that it is only by such superinduction that simple feeling becomes a feeling of body. Matter, then, with all its qualities, is a fiction except so far as these can be reduced to simple feelings. Such in substance was Berkeley’s short method with the materialists. In his early life it seemed to him sufficient for the purposes of orthodox ‘spiritualism,’ because, having posed the materialist, he took the moral and spiritual attributes of God as ‘revealed,’ without enquiring into the possibility of such revelation to a merely sensitive consciousness. As he advanced, other questions, fatal to the constructive value of his original method, began to force themselves upon him. Granting that intellectual superinduction = fiction, how is the fiction possible to a mind which cannot originate? Exclude from reality all that such fiction constitutes, and what remains to be real? These questions, however, though their effect on his mind appears in the later sections of his ‘Siris,’ he never systematically pursued. He thus missed the true method of attack on materialism--the only one that does not build again that which it destroys--the method which allows that matter is real but only so in virtue of that intellectual superinduction upon feeling without which there could be for us no reality at all: that thus it is indeed opposed to thought, but only by a position which is thought’s own act. For the development of such views Berkeley had not patience in his youth nor leisure in his middle life. Whatever he may have suggested, all that he logically achieved was an exposure of the equivocation between feeling and felt body; and of this the next result, as appears in Hume, was a doctrine which indeed delivers mind from dependence on matter, but only by reducing it in effect to a succession of feelings which cannot know themselves.
His account of the relation between visible and tangible extension. We do not see bodies without the mind ... 159. It was upon the extension of the metaphor of impression to sight as well as touch, and the consequent notion that body, with its inseparable qualities, revealed itself through both senses, that Berkeley first fastened. Is it evident, as Locke supposed it to be, that men ‘perceive by their sight’ not colours merely, but ‘a distance between bodies of different colours and between parts of the same body’; [1] in other words, situation and magnitude? To show that they do not is the purpose of Berkeley’s ‘Essay towards a new Theory of Vision.’ He starts from two principles which he takes as recognised: one, that the ‘proper and immediate object of sight is colour’; the other, that distance from the eye, or distance in the line of vision, is not immediately seen. If, then, situation and magnitude are ‘properly and immediately’ seen, they must be qualities of colour. Now in one sense, according to Berkeley, they are so: in other words, there is such a thing as _visible_ extension. We see lights and colours in ‘sundry situations’ as well as ‘in degrees of faintness and clearness, confusion and distinctness.’ (_Theory of Vision_, sec. 77.) We also see objects as made up of certain ‘quantities of coloured points,’ _i.e._ as having visible magnitude.
(Ibid. sec. 54.) But situation and magnitude _as visible_ are not external, not ‘qualities of body,’ nor do they represent by any _necessary_ connection the situation and magnitude that are truly qualities of body, the mind, ‘without the mind and at a distance.’ These are tangible. Distance in all its forms--as distance from the eye; as distance between parts of the same body, or magnitude; and as distance of body from body, or situation--is tangible. What a man means when he says that ‘he sees this or that thing at a distance’ is that ‘what he sees suggests to his understanding that after having passed a certain distance, to be measured by the motion of his body which is perceivable by touch, he shall come to perceive such and such tangible ideas which have been usually connected with such and such visible ideas’ (Ibid. sec. 45). On the same principle we are said to see the magnitude and situation of bodies. Owing to long experience of the connection of these tangible ideas with visible ones, the magnitude of the latter and their degrees of faintness and clearness, of confusion and distinctness, enable us to form a ‘sudden and true’ estimate of the magnitude of the former (_i.e._ of bodies); even as visible situation enables us to form a like estimate of the ‘situation of things outward and tangible’ (Ibid. secs. 56 and 99). The connection, however, between the two sets of ideas, Berkeley insists, is habitual only, not necessary. As Hume afterwards said of the relation of cause and effect, it is not constituted by the nature of the ideas related. [2] The visible ideas, that as a matter of fact ‘suggest to us the various magnitudes of external objects before we touch them, might have suggested no such thing.’
That would really have been the case had our eyes been so framed as that the _maximum visibile_ should be less than the _minimum tangibile_; and, as a matter of constant experience, the greater visible extension suggests sometimes a greater, sometimes a less, tangible extension according to the degree of its strength or faintness, ‘being in its own nature equally fitted to bring into our minds the idea of small or great or no size at all, just as the words of a language are in their own nature indifferent to signify this or that thing, or nothing at all.’ (Ibid. secs. 62-64.) [1] Locke, Essay Book II. chap. xiii. sec. 2. [2] See below, paragraph 283 ... nor yet feel them. The ‘esse’ of body is the ‘percipi’.
Text from Project Gutenberg, public domain in the United States.