A Treatise of Human Nature · David Hume
GENERAL INTRODUCTION TO VOL. I.
If he bears in mind, however, that with Hume the universe of our experience is the same when it is called ‘the universe of objects or of body’ and when it is called the ‘universe of thought or my impressions and ideas’, [2] he will see that on the score of consistency Hume is to be blamed, not for applying the same method to account for the fictions of material and spiritual identity, but for allowing himself, in his preference for physical, as against theological, pretension, to write as if the supposition of spiritual were really distinct from that of material identity, and might be more contemptuously disposed of. The original ‘mistake,’ out of which according to him the two fictitious suppositions arise, is one and the same; and though it is a ‘mistake’ without which, as we have found [3] from Hume’s own admissions, we could not speak even in singular propositions of the most ordinary ‘objects of sense’--this pen, this table, this chair--it is yet one that on his principles is logically impossible, since it consists in a confusion between ideas that we cannot have. Of this original ‘mistake’ the fictions of body and of its ‘continued and distinct existence’ are but altered expressions. They represent in truth the same logical category of substance and relation.
And of the Self according to Locke’s notion of it [4] (which was the only one that Hume had in view), as a ‘thinking thing’ within each man among a multitude of other thinking things, the same would have to be said. But in order to account for the ‘mistake,’ of which the suppositions of thinking and material substance are the correlative expressions, and which it is the net result of Hume’s speculation to exhibit at once as necessary and as impossible, we have found another notion of the self forced upon us--not as a double of body, but as the source of that ‘familiar theory’ which body in truth is, and without which there would be no universe of objects, whether ‘bodies’ or ‘impressions and ideas,’ at all. [1] Above, §§ 306-310. [2] Above, § 340. [3] Above, §§ 303 & 304. [4] Above, §§ 129-132. Possibility of such fictitious ideas implies refutation of Hume’s doctrine.
345. Thus the more strongly Hume insists that ‘the identity which we ascribe to the mind of man is only a fictitious one’, [1] the more completely does his doctrine refute itself. If he had really succeeded in reducing those ‘invented’ relations, which Locke had implicitly recognised as the framework of the universe, to what he calls ‘natural’ ones--to mere sequences of feeling--the case would have been different. With the disappearance of the conception of the world as a system of related elements, the necessity of a thinking subject, without whose presence to feelings they could not become such elements, would have disappeared likewise. But he cannot so reduce them. In all his attempts to do so we find that the relation, which has to be explained away, is pre-supposed under some other expression, and that it is ‘fictitious’ not in the sense which Hume’s theory requires--the sense, namely, that there is no such thing either really or in imagination, either as impression or idea--but in the sense that it would not exist if we did not think about our feelings.
Thus, whereas identity ought for Hume’s purpose to be either a ‘natural relation,’ or a propensity arising from such relation, or nothing, we find that according to his account, though neither natural relation nor propensity, it yet exists both as idea and as reality. He saves appearances indeed by saying [2] that natural relations of ideas ‘produce it,’ but they do so, according to his detailed account of the matter, in the sense that, the idea of an identical object being given, we mistake our successive and resembling feelings for such an object. In other words, the existence of numerically identical things is a ‘fiction,’ not as if there were no such things, but because it implies a certain operation of thought upon our feelings, a certain interpretation of impressions under direction of an idea not derived from impressions. By a like equivocal use of ‘fiction’ Hume covers the admission of real identity in its more complex forms--the identity of a mass, whose parts undergo perpetual change of distribution; of a body whose form survives not merely the redistribution of its materials, but the substitution of others; of animals and vegetables, in which nothing but the ‘common end’ of the changing members remains the same. The reality of such identity of mass, of form, of organism, he quietly takes for granted. [3] He calls it ‘fictitious’ indeed, but only either in the sense above given or in the sense that it is mistaken for mere numerical identity.
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