A Treatise of Human Nature · David Hume
GENERAL INTRODUCTION TO VOL. I.
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.
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.
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, _apparently_ correspond to the qualities by which the mind is _naturally_ ‘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 of _natural_. 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.).
‘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.
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 appearance _is_ the 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]
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 the _natural_ relations 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]
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 the _de facto_ sequence 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.
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 the _predicate_ of 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?
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 supposed _datum_ of 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]
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 really _this_ or _that_ globe, _this_ or _that_ man, 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.
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