A Treatise of Human Nature · David Hume
GENERAL INTRODUCTION TO VOL. I.
160. So far, then, the conclusion merely is that body as external, and space as a relation between bodies or parts of a body, are not both seen and felt, but felt only; in other words, that it is only through the organs of touch that we receive, strictly speaking, impressions from without. This is all that the Essay on Vision goes to show; but according to the ‘Principles of Human Knowledge’ this conclusion was merely provisional. The object of touch does not, any more than the object of sight, ‘exist without the mind,’ nor is it ‘the image of an external thing.’ ‘In strict truth the ideas of sight, when by them we apprehend distance and things placed at a distance, do not suggest or mark out to us things actually existing at a distance, but only admonish us what ideas of touch will be imprinted in our minds at such and such distances of time, and in consequence of such and such actions’ (‘Principles of H. K.’ sec. 44). Whether, then, we speak of visible or tangible objects, the object _is_ the idea, its ‘esse is the percipi.’ Body is not a thing separate from the idea of touch, yet revealed by it; so far as it exists at all, it must either be that idea or be a succession of ideas of which that idea is suggestive. It follows that the notion of the real which identifies it with matter, as something external to and independent of consciousness, and which derives the reality of ideas from their relation to body as thus outward, must disappear. Must not, then, the distinction between the real and fantastic, between dreams and facts, disappear with it? What meaning is there in asking whether any given idea is real or not, unless a reference is implied to something other than the idea itself?
The real = ideas that God causes. 171. To eliminate the reference to matter might seem to be more easy than to substitute for it a reference to God. If the object of the idea is only the idea itself, does not all determination by relation logically disappear from the idea, except (perhaps) such as consists in the fact of its sequence or antecedence to other ideas? This issue was afterwards to be tried by Hume--with what consequences to science and religion we shall see. Berkeley avoids it by insisting that the ‘percipi,’ to which ‘esse’ is equivalent, implies reference to a mind. At first sight this reference, as common to all ideas alike, would not seem to avail much as a basis either for a distinction between the real and fantastic or for any Theism except such as would ‘entitle God to all our fancies.’ If it is to serve Berkeley’s purpose, we must suppose the idea to carry with it not merely a relation to mind but a relation to it as its effect, and the conscious subject to carry with him such a distinction between his own mind and God’s as leads him to refer his ideas to God’s mind as their cause when they are lively, distinct and coherent, but when they are otherwise, to his own. And this, in substance, is Berkeley’s supposition. To show the efficient power of mind he appeals to our consciousness of ability to produce at will ideas of imagination; to show that there is a divine mind, distinct from our own, he appeals to our consciousness of inability to produce ideas of sense.
Is it then a succession of feelings? 172. Even those least disposed to ‘vanquish Berkeley with a grin’ have found his doctrine of the real, which is also his doctrine of God, ‘unsatisfactory.’ By the real world they are accustomed to understand something which--at least in respect of its ‘elements’ or ‘conditions’ or ‘laws’--permanently is; though the combinations of the elements, the events which flow from the conditions, the manifestations of the laws, may never be at one time what they will be at the next. But according to the Berkeleian doctrine the permanent seems to disappear: the ‘is’ gives place to a ‘has been’ and ‘will be.’ If I say (δεικτικῶς) [1] ‘there is a body,’ I must mean according to it that a feeling has just occurred to me, which has been so constantly followed by certain other feelings that it suggests a lively expectation of these. The suggestive feeling alone _is_, and it is ceasing to be. If this is the true account of propositions suggested by everyone’s constantly-recurrent experience, what are we to make of scientific truths, _e.g._ ‘a body will change its place sooner than let another enter it,’ ‘planets move in ellipses,’ ‘the square on the hypotheneuse is equal to the squares on the sides.’
In these cases, too, does the present reality lie merely in a feeling experienced by this or that scientific man, and to him suggestive of other feelings? Does the proposition that ‘planets move in ellipses’ mean that to some watcher of the skies, who understands Kepler’s laws, a certain perception of ‘visible extension’ (_i.e._ of colour or light and shade) not only suggests, as to others, a particular expectation of other feelings, which expectation is called a planet, but a further expectation, not shared by the multitude, of feelings suggesting successive situations of the visible extension, which further expectation is called elliptical motion? Such an explanation of general propositions would be a form of the doctrine conveniently named after Protagoras--‘ἀληθὲς ὃ ἑκάστῳ ἑκάστοτε δοκεῖ’ [2]--a doctrine which the vindicators of Berkeley are careful to tell us we must not confound with his. The question, however, is not whether Berkeley himself admits the doctrine, but whether or no it is the logical consequence of the method which he uses for the overthrow of materialists and ‘mathematical Atheists’? [1] [Greek δεικτικῶς (deiktikos) = “affirmatively” or “capable of being proven” _i.e._ not merely hypothetically. Tr.] [2] [Greek ἀληθὲς ὃ ἑκάστῳ ἑκάστοτε δοκεῖ (alethes ho hekasto hekastote dokei) = the truth for each man is as it appears to him. Tr.] Berkeley goes wrong from confusion between thought and feeling. For Locke’s ‘idea of a thing’ he substitutes ‘idea’ simply.
173. His purpose was the maintenance of Theism, and a true instinct told him that pure Theism, as distinct from nature-worship and daemonism, has no philosophical foundation, unless it can be shown that there is nothing real apart from thought. But in the hurry of theological advocacy, and under the influence of a misleading terminology, he failed to distinguish this true proposition--there is nothing real apart from thought--from this false one, its virtual contradictory--there is nothing other than feeling. The confusion was covered, if not caused, by the ambiguity, often noticed, in the use of the term ‘idea.’ This to Berkeley’s generation stood alike for feeling proper, which to the subject that merely feels is neither outer nor inner, because not referring itself to either mind or thing, and for conception, or an object thought of under relations. According to Locke, pain, colour, solidity, are all ideas equally with each other and equally with the _idea of_ pain, _idea of_ colour, _idea of_ solidity. If all alike, however, were feelings proper, there would be no world either to exist or be spoken of. Locke virtually saves it by two suppositions, each incompatible with the equivalence of idea to feeling, and implying the conversion of it into conception as above defined.
One is that there are abstract ideas; the other that there are primary qualities of which ideas are copies, but which do not come and go with our feelings. The latter supposition gives a world that ‘really exists,’ the former a world that may be known and spoken of; but neither can maintain itself without a theory of conception which is not forthcoming in Locke himself. We need not traverse again the contradictions which according to his statement they involve--contradictions which, under whatever disguise, must attach to every philosophy that admits a reality either in things as apart from thought or in thought as apart from things, and only disappear when the thing as thought of, and through thought individualised by the relations which constitute its community with the universe, is recognised as alone the real. Misled by the phrase ‘idea of a thing,’ we fancy that idea and thing have each a separate reality of their own, and then puzzle ourselves with questions as to how the idea can represent the thing--how the ideas of primary qualities can be copies of them, and how, if the real thing of experience be merely individual, a general idea can be abstracted from it. These questions Berkeley asked and found unanswerable. There were then two ways of dealing with them before him.
One was to supersede them by a truer view of thought and its object, as together in essential correlation constituting the real; but this way he did not take. The other was to avoid them by merging both thing and idea in the indifference of simple feeling. For a merely sentient being, it is true--for one who did not think upon his feelings--the oppositions of inner and outer, of subjective and objective, of fantastic and real, would not exist; but neither would knowledge or a world to be known. That such oppositions, misunderstood, may be a heavy burden on the human spirit, the experience of current controversy and its spiritual effects might alone suffice to convince us; but the philosophical deliverance can only lie in the recognition of thought as their author, not in the attempt to obliterate them by the reduction of thought and its world to feeling--an attempt which contradicts itself, since it virtually admits their existence while it renders them unaccountable. Which, if idea = feeling, does away with space and body.
174. That Berkeley’s was such an attempt, looking merely to his treatment of primary qualities and abstract ideas, we certainly could not doubt: though, since language does not allow of its consistent statement, and Berkeley was quite ready to turn the exigencies of language to account, passages logically incompatible with it may easily be found in him. The hasty reader, when he is told that body or distance are suggested by feelings of sight and touch rather than immediately seen, accepts the doctrine without scruple, because he supposes that which is suggested to be a present reality, though not at present felt. But if not at present felt it is not according to Berkeley an idea, therefore ‘without the mind,’ therefore an impossibility. [1] That which is suggested, then, must itself be a feeling which consists in the expectation of other feelings. Distance, and body, _as suggested_, can be no more than such an expectation; and as _actually existing_, no more than the actual succession of the expected feelings--a succession of which, as of every succession, ‘no two parts exist together.’ [2] There is no time, then, at which it can be said that distance and body exist. [1] Reference is here merely made to the doctrine by which Berkeley disposes of ‘matter,’ the consideration of its reconcilability with his doctrine of ‘spirits’ and ‘relations’ as objects of knowledge being postponed.
On the same principle all permanent relations should disappear. 176. Berkeley, then, as a consequence of the methods by which he disposes at once of the ‘real existence’ and ‘abstract idea of matter,’ has to meet the following questions:--How are either reality or knowledge possible without permanent relations? and, How can feelings, of which one is over before the next begins, constitute or represent a world of permanent relations? The difficulty becomes more obvious, though not more serious, when the relations in question are not merely themselves permanent, as are those between natural phenomena, but are relations between permanent parts like those of space. It is for this reason that its doctrine of geometry is the most easily assailable point of the ‘sensational’ philosophy. Locke distinguishes the ideas of space and of duration as got, the one from the permanent parts of space, the other ‘from the fleeting and perpetually perishing parts of succession.’ [1] He afterwards prefers to oppose the term ‘expansion’ to ‘duration,’ as bringing out more clearly than ‘space’ the opposition of relation between permanent facts to that between ‘fleeting successive facts which never exist together.’ How, then, can a consciousness, consisting simply of ‘fleeting successive facts,’ either be or represent that of which the differentia is that its facts are permanent and co-exist? [1] Book II. chap. xiv. sec. 1.
By making colour = relations of coloured points, Berkeley represents relation as seen. 177. This crucial question in regard to extension does not seem even to have suggested itself to Berkeley. The reason why is not far to seek. Professor Fraser, in his valuable edition, represents him as meaning by visible extension ‘coloured experience in sense,’ and by tangible extension ‘resistent experience in sense.’ [1] No fault can be found with this interpretation, but the essential question, which Berkeley does not fairly meet, is whether the experience in each case is complete in a single feeling or consists in a succession of feelings. If in a single feeling, it clearly is not extension, as a relation between parts, at all; if in a succession of feelings, it is only extension because a synthetic principle, which is not itself one of the feelings, but equally present to them all, transforms them into permanent parts of which each qualifies the other by outwardness to it. Berkeley does not see the necessity of such a principle, because he allows himself to suppose extension--at any rate visible extension--to be constituted by a single feeling.
Having first pronounced that the proper object of sight is colour, he quietly substitutes for this _situations_ of colour, degrees of strength and faintness in colour, and quantities of coloured points, as if these, interchangeably with mere colour, were properly objects of sight and perceived in single acts of vision. Now if by object of sight were meant something other than the sensation itself--something which to a thinking being it suggests as its cause--there would be no harm in this language, but neither would there be any ground for saying that the proper object of sight is colour, for distinguishing visible from tangible extension, or for denying that the outwardness of body to body is seen. Such restrictions and distinctions have no meaning, unless by sight is meant the nervous irritation, the affection of the visual organ, as it is to a merely feeling subject; yet in the very passages where he makes them, by saying that we see situations and degrees of colour, and quantities of coloured points, Berkeley converts sight into a judgment of extensive and intensive quantity. He thus fails to discern that the transition from colour to coloured extension cannot be made without on the one hand either the presentation of successive pictures or (which comes to the same) successive acts of attention to a single picture, and on the other hand a synthesis of the successive presentations as mutually qualified parts of a whole. In other words, he ignores the work of thought involved in the constitution alike of coloured and tangible extension, and in virtue of which alone either is extension at all.
Pure space, or ‘vacuum,’ to him means space that can not be touched--a tangible extension that is not tangible--and is therefore a contradiction in terms. The notion that, though not touched, it might be seen, he excludes, [1] apparently for the same reason which prevents him from allowing _visible_ extension to be space at all; the reason, namely, that there is no ‘outness’ or relation of externality between the parts of such extension. The fact that there can be no such relation between the successive feelings which alone, according to him, constitute ‘tangible extension,’ he did not see to be equally fatal to the latter being in any true sense space. In other words, he did not see that the test of reduction to feeling, by which he disposed of the _vacuum_, disposed of space altogether. If he had, he would have understood that space and body were intelligible relations, which can be thought of apart from the feelings which through them become the world that we know, since it is they that are the conditions of these feelings becoming a knowledge, not the feelings that are the condition of the relations being known. Whether they can be thought of apart from each other--whether the simple relation of externality between parts of a whole can be thought of without the parts being considered as solid--is of course a further question, and one which Berkeley cannot be said properly to discuss at all, since the abstraction of space from body to him meant its abstraction from feelings of touch. The answer to it ceases to be difficult as soon as the question is properly stated.
In its existence, as in the consideration of it, the relations indicated by the terms ‘equilateral, equicrural and scalene,’ presuppose the relation of triangularity, not it them; and for that reason it can be considered apart from them, though not they apart from it, without any breach between that which is considered and that which really exists. Thus, too, it becomes explicable that a single experiment should warrant a universal affirmation; that the mathematician, having once found as the result of a certain comparison of magnitudes that the square on the hypothenuse is equal to the square on the sides, without waiting for repeated experience at once substitutes for the singular proposition, which states his discovery, a general one. If the singular proposition stated a sensible event or the occurrence of a feeling, such substitution would be inexplicable: for if that were the true account of the singular proposition, a general one could but express such expectation of the recurrence of the event as repeated experience of it can alone give. But a relation is not contingent with the contingency of feeling. It is permanent with the permanence of the combining and comparing thought which alone constitutes it; and for that reason, whether it be recognised as the result of a mathematical construction or of a crucial experiment in physics, the proposition which states it must already be virtually universal.
Traces of progress in his idealism. 185. Of such a doctrine Berkeley is rather the unconscious forerunner than the intelligent prophet. It is precisely upon the question whether, or how far, he recognised the constitution of things by intelligible relations, that the interpretation of his early (which is his only developed) idealism rests. Is it such idealism as Hume’s, or such idealism as that adumbrated in some passages of his own ‘Siris’? Is the idea, which is real, according to him a feeling or a conception? Has it a nature of its own, consisting simply in its being felt, and which we afterwards for purposes of our own consider in various relations; or does the nature consist only in relations, which again imply the action of a mind that is eternal--present to that which is in succession, but not in succession itself? The truth seems to be that this question in its full significance never presented itself to Berkeley, at least during the period represented by his philosophical treatises. His early idealism, as we learn from the commonplace-book brought to light by Professor Fraser, was merely a cruder form of Hume’s. By the time of the publication of the ‘Principles of Human Knowledge’ he had learnt that, unless this doctrine was to efface ‘spirit’ as well as ‘matter,’ he must modify it by the admission of a ‘thing’ that was not an ‘idea,’ and of which the ‘esse’ was ‘percipere’ not ‘percipi.’ This admission carried with it the distinction between the object felt and the object known, between ‘idea’ and ‘notion’--a distinction which was more clearly marked in the ‘Dialogues.’ Of ‘spirit’ we could have a ‘notion,’ though not an ‘idea.’ But it was only in the second edition of the ‘Principles’ that ‘relation’ was put along with ‘spirit,’ as that which could be known but which was no ‘idea:’ and then without any recognition of the fact that the whole reduction of primary qualities to mere ideas was thereby invalidated. The objects, with which the mathematician deals, are throughout treated as in their own nature ‘particular ideas,’ into the constitution of which relation does not enter at all; in other words, as successive feelings.
His way of dealing with physical truths. 186. If the truths of mathematics seemed to Berkeley explicable on this supposition, those of the physical sciences were not likely to seem less so. As long as the relations with which these sciences deal are relations between ‘sensible objects,’ he does not notice that they _are_ relations, and therefore not feelings or felt, at all. He treats felt things as if the same as feelings, and ignores the relations altogether. Thus a so-called ‘sensible’ motion causes him no difficulty. He would be content to say that it was a succession of ideas, not perceiving that motion implies a relation between spaces or moments as successively occupied by something that remains one with itself--a relation which a mere sequence of feelings could neither constitute nor of itself suggest. It is only about a motion which does not profess to be ‘seen,’ such as the motion of the earth, that any question is raised--a question easily disposed of by the consideration that in a different position we should see it. ‘The question whether the earth moves or not amounts in reality to no more than this, to wit, whether we have reason to conclude from what hath been observed by astronomers, that if we were placed in such and such circumstances, and such or such a position and distance both from the earth and sun, we should perceive the former to move among the choir of the planets, and appearing in all respects like one of them: and this by the established rules of nature, which we have no reason to mistrust, is reasonably collected from the phenomena’ (‘Principles of Human Knowledge,’ sec. 58). [1]
That such relation--merely intelligible, or according to his phraseology not an idea or object of an idea at all, as he must have admitted it to be--gives to our successive feelings the only ‘nature’ that they possess, he never recognised. By the relation of idea to idea, as he repeatedly tells us, he meant not a ‘necessary connexion,’ _i.e._ not a relation without which, neither idea would be what it is, but such _de facto_ sequence of one upon the other as renders the occurrence of one the unfailing but arbitrary sign that the other is coming. It is thus according to him (and here Hume merely followed suit) that feelings are symbolical--symbolical not of an order other than the feelings and which accounts for them, but simply of feelings to follow. To Berkeley, indeed, unlike Hume, the sequence of feelings symbolical of each other is also symbolical of something farther, viz. the mind of God: but when we examine what this ‘mind’ means, we find that it is not an intelligible order by which our feelings may be interpreted, or the spiritual subject of such an order, but simply the arbitrary will of a creator that this feeling shall follow that. Locke had explained reality by relation of ideas to outward body. Liveliness in the idea evidence of this relation.
188. Such a doctrine could not help being at once confused in its account of reality, and insecure in its doctrine alike of the human spirit and of God. On the recognition of relations as constituting the _nature_ of ideas rests the possibility of any tenable theory of their reality. An isolated idea could be neither real nor unreal. Apart from a definite order of relation we may suppose (if we like) that it would _be_, but it would certainly not be real; and as little could it be unreal, since unreality can only result from the confusion in our consciousness of one order of relation with another. It is diversity of relations that distinguishes, for instance, these letters as they now appear on paper from the same as I imagine them with my eyes shut, giving each sort its own reality: just as upon confusion with the other each alike becomes unreal. Thus, though with Locke simple ideas are necessarily real, we soon find that even according to him they are not truly so in their simplicity, but only as related to an external thing producing them. He is right enough, however inconsistent with himself, in making relation constitute reality; wrong in limiting this prerogative to the one relation of externality.
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