A Treatise of Human Nature · David Hume
GENERAL INTRODUCTION TO VOL. I.
42. ‘General and universal belong not to the real existence of things, but are the inventions and creatures of the understanding, made by it for its own use, and concern only signs, whether words or ideas. Words are general when used for signs of general ideas, and so are applicable indifferently to many particular things; and ideas are general, when they are set up as the representatives of many particular things; but universality belongs not to things themselves, which are all of them particular in their existence, even those words and ideas which in their signification are general. When therefore we quit particulars, the generals that rest are only creatures of our own making, their general nature being nothing but the capacity they are put into by the understanding, of signifying or representing many particulars. For the signification they have is nothing but a relation that by the mind of man is added to them. ... The sorting of things under names is the workmanship of the understanding, taking occasion from the similitude it observes among them to make abstract general ideas, and set them up in the mind, with names annexed to them, as patterns or forms (for in that sense the word form has a very proper signification), to which as particular things are found to agree, so they come to be of that species, have that denomination, or are put into that classis. For when we say this is a man, that a horse; this justice, that cruelty, what do we else but rank things under different specific names, as agreeing to those abstract ideas, of which we have made those names the signs? And what are the essences of those species, set out and marked by names, but those abstract ideas in the mind; which are, as it were, the bonds between particular things that exist, and the names they are to be ranked under?’ (Book III. chap. iii. secs. 11 and 13.)
‘Things not general.’ 43. In the first of these remarkable passages we begin with the familiar opposition between ideas as ‘the creatures of the mind’ and real things. Ideas, and the words which express them, may be general, but things cannot. ‘They are all of them particular in their existence.’ Then the ideas and words themselves appear as things, and as such ‘in their existence’ can only be particular. It is only in its signification, _i.e._ in its relation to other ideas which it represents, that an idea, particular itself, becomes general, and this relation does not belong to the ‘existence’ of the idea or to the idea in itself, but ‘by the mind of man is added to it.’ The relation being thus a fictitious addition to reality, ‘general and universal are mere inventions and creatures of the understanding.’ The next passage, in spite of the warning that all ideas are particular in their existence, still speaks of general ideas, but only as ‘set up in the mind.’ To these ‘particular things existing are found to agree,’ and the agreement is expressed in such judgments as ‘this is a man, that a horse; this is justice, that cruelty;’ the ‘this’ and ‘that’ representing ‘particular existing things,’ ‘horse’ and ‘cruelty’ abstract general ideas to which these are found to agree.
Generality an invention of the mind. 44. One antithesis is certainly maintained throughout these passages--that between ‘real existence which is always particular, and the workmanship of the mind,’ which ‘invents’ generality. Real existence, however, is ascribed _(a)_ to things themselves, _(b)_ to words and ideas, even those which become of general signification, _(c)_ to mixed modes, for in the proposition ‘this is justice,’ the ‘this’ must represent a mixed mode. (Cf. II. xii. 5.) The characteristic of the ‘really existent,’ which distinguishes it from the workmanship of the mind, would seem to be mere individuality, exclusive of all relation. The simple ‘this’ and ‘that,’ apart from the relation expressed in the judgment, being mere individuals, are really existent; and conversely, ideas, which in themselves have real existence, when a relation, in virtue of which they become significant, has been ‘added to them by the mind,’ become ‘inventions of the understanding.’ This consists with the express statement in the chapter on ‘relation’ (II. xxv. 8), that it is ‘not contained in the existence of things, but is something extraneous and superinduced.’ Thus generality, as a relation between any one of a multitude of _single_ (not necessarily _simple_) ideas, _e.g._ single ideas of horses, and all the rest--a relation which belongs not to any one of them singly--is superinduced by the understanding upon their _real_, _i.e._ their _single_ existence. Apart from this relation, it would seem, or in their mere singleness, even ideas of mixed modes, _e.g._ _this act_ of justice, may have real existence.
The result is, that the feeling of each moment is alone real. 45. The result of Locke’s statement, thus examined, clearly is that real existence belongs to the present momentary act of consciousness, and to that alone. Ascribed as it is to the ‘thing itself,’ to the idea which, _as general_, has it not, and to the mixed mode, it is in each case the momentary presence to consciousness that constitutes it. To a thing itself, as distinct from the presentation to consciousness, it cannot belong, for such a ‘thing’ means that which remains identical with itself under manifold appearances, and both identity and appearance imply relation, _i.e._ ‘an invention of the mind.’ As little can it belong to the _content_ of any idea, since this is in all cases constituted by relation to other ideas. Thus if I judge ‘this is sweet,’ the real existence lies in the simple ‘this,’ in the mere form of presentation at an individual _now_, not in the relation of this to other flavours which constitutes the determinate sweetness, or to a sweetness at other times tasted.
If I judge ‘this is a horse,’ a present vision really exists, but not so its relation to other sensations of sight or touch, closely precedent or sequent, which make up the ‘total impression;’ much less its relation to other like impressions thought of, in consideration of which a common name is applied to it. If, again, I judge ‘this is an act of justice,’ the present thought of the act, as present, really exists; not so those relations of the act which either make it just, or make me apply the name to it. It is true that according to this doctrine the ‘really existent’ is the unmeaning, and that any statement about it is impossible. We cannot judge of it without bringing it into relation, in which it ceases to be what in its mere singleness it is, and thus loses its reality, overlaid by the ‘invention of the understanding.’ Nay, if we say that it is the mere ‘this’ or ‘that,’ as such--the simple ‘here’ and ‘now’--the very ‘this,’ in being mentioned or judged of, becomes related to other things which we have called ‘this,’ and the ‘now’ to other ‘nows.’ Thus each acquires a generality, and with it becomes fictitious. As Plato long ago taught--though the lesson seems to require to be taught anew to each generation of philosophers--a consistent sensationalism must be speechless. Locke, himself, in one of the passages quoted, implicitly admits this by indicating that only through relations or in their generality are ideas ‘significant.’
How Locke avoids this result. 46. He was not the man, however, to become speechless out of sheer consistency. He has a redundancy of terms and tropes for disguising from himself and his reader the real import of his doctrine. In the latter part of the passage quoted we find that the relation or community between ideas, which the understanding invents, is occasioned by a ‘similitude which it observes among things.’ The general idea having been thus invented, ‘things are found to agree with it’--as is natural since they suggested it. Hereupon we are forced to ask how, if all relation is superinduced upon real existence by the understanding, an _observed_ relation of similitude among things can occasion the superinduction; and again how it happens, if all generality of ideas is a fiction of the mind, that ‘things are found to agree with general ideas.’ How can the real existence called ‘this’ or ‘that,’ which only really exists so far as nothing can be said of it but that it is ‘this’ or ‘that,’ agree with anything whatever? Agreement implies some content, some determination by properties, _i.e._ by relations, in the things agreeing, whereas the really existent excludes relation. How then can it agree with the abstract general idea, the import of which, according to Locke’s own showing, depends solely on relation?
The ‘particular’ was to him the individual qualified by general relations. 47. Such questions did not occur to Locke, because while asserting the mere individuality of things existent, and the simplicity of all ideas as _given_, _i.e._ as real, he never fully recognised the meaning of his own assertion. Under the shelter of the ambiguous ‘particular’ he could at any time substitute for the _mere_ individual the _determinate_ individual, or individual qualified by community with other things; just as, again, under covering of the ‘simple idea’ he could substitute for the mere momentary consciousness the perception of a definite thing. Thus when he speaks of the judgment ‘this is gold’ as expressing the agreement of a real (_i.e._ individual) thing with a general idea, he thinks of ‘this’ a& already having, apart from the judgment, the determination which it first receives in the judgment. He thinks of it, in other words, not as the mere ‘perishing’ sensation [1] or individual void of relation, but as a sensation symbolical of other possibilities of sensation which, as so many relations of a _thing_ to us or to other things, are connoted by the common noun ‘gold.’ It thus ‘agrees’ with the abstract idea or conception of qualities, _i.e._ because it is already the ‘creature of the understanding,’ determined by relations which constitute a generality and community between it and other things.
Such a notion of the really existent thing--wholly inconsistent with his doctrine of relation and of the general--Locke has before him when he speaks of general ideas as formed by abstraction of certain qualities from real things, or of certain ideas from other ideas that accompany them in real existence. ‘When some one first lit on a parcel of that sort of substance we denote by the word _gold_, ... its peculiar colour, perhaps, and weight were the first he abstracted from it, to make the complex idea of that species ... another perhaps added to these the ideas of fusibility and fixedness ... another its ductility and solubility in aqua regia. These, or part of these, put together, usually make the complex idea in men’s minds of that sort of body we call _gold_.’ (Book II. chap. xxxi. sec. 9.) Here the supposition is that a thing, multitudinously qualified, is given apart from any action of the understanding, which then proceeds to act in the way of successively detaching (‘abstracting’) these qualities and recombining them as the idea of a species. Such a recombination, indeed, would seem but wasted labour. The qualities are assumed to be already found by the understanding and found as in a thing; otherwise the understanding could not abstract them from it. Why should it then painfully put together in imperfect combination what has been previously given to it complete? Of the complex idea which results from the work of abstraction, nothing can be said but a small part of what is predicable of the known thing which the possibility of such abstraction presupposes.
The understanding, indeed, according to Locke, is never adequate to nature, and accordingly the qualities abstracted and recombined in the complex idea always fall vastly short of the fulness of those given in the real thing; or as he states it in terms of the multiplication table (Book II. chap. xxxi. sec. 10), ‘some who have examined this species more accurately could, I believe, enumerate ten times as many properties in gold, all of them as inseparable from its internal constitution, as its colour or weight; and it is probable if any one knew all the properties that are by divers men known of this metal, there would an hundred times as many ideas go to the complex idea of gold, as any one man has yet in his; and yet perhaps that would not be the thousandth part of what is to be discovered in it.’ These two million properties, and upwards, which await abstraction in gold, are all, it must be noted, according to Locke’s statement elsewhere (Book II. chap xxiii. sec. 37), ‘nothing but so many relations to other substances.’ It is just on account of these multitudinous relations of the real thing that the understanding is inadequate to its comprehension. Yet according to Locke’s doctrine of relation these must all be themselves ‘superinductions of the mind,’ and the greater the fulness which they constitute, the further is the distance from the _mere_ individuality which elsewhere, in contrast with the fictitiousness of ‘generals,’ appears as the equivalent of real existence.
Yet, according to the doctrine of relation, a creation of thought. 49. The real thing and the creation of the understanding thus change places. That which is given to the understanding as the real, which it finds and does not make, is not now the bare atom upon which relations have to be artificially superinduced. Nor is it the mere present feeling, which has ‘by the mind of man’ to be made ‘significant,’ or representative of past experience. It is itself an inexhaustible complex of relations, whether they are considered as subsisting between it and other things, or between the sensations which it is ‘fitted to produce in us.’ These are the real, which is thus a system, a community; and if the ‘general,’ as Locke says, is that which ‘has the capacity of representing many particulars,’ the real thing itself is general, for it represents--nay, is constituted by--the manifold particular feelings which, mediately or immediately, it excites in us. On the other hand, the invention of the understanding, instead of giving ‘significance’ or content to the mere individuality of the real, as it does according to Locke’s theory of ‘generals,’ now appears as detaching fragments from the fulness of the real to recombine them in an ‘abstract essence’ of its own. Instead of adding complexity to the simple, it subtracts from the complex.
Summary of the above contradictions. 50. To gather up, then, the lines of contradiction which traverse Locke’s doctrine of real existence as it appears in his account of general and complex ideas:--The idea of substance is an abstract general idea, not given directly in sensation or reflection, but ‘invented by the understanding,’ as by consequence must be ideas of particular sorts of substances which presuppose the abstract idea. On the other hand, the ideas of sensation and reflection, from which the idea of substance is abstracted, and to which as _real_ it as an _invention_ is opposed, are ideas of ‘something,’ and are only real as representative of something. But this idea of something = the idea of substance. Therefore the idea of substance is the presupposition, and the condition of the reality, of the very ideas from which it is said to be derived. Again, if the general idea of substance is got by abstraction, it must be originally given in conjunction with the ideas of sensation or reflection from which it is afterwards abstracted, _i.e._ separated. But in such conjunction it constitutes the ideas of particular sorts of substances. Therefore these latter ideas, which yet we ‘come to have’ after the general idea of substance, form the prior experience from which this general idea is abstracted.
Further, this original experience, from which abstraction starts, being of ‘sorts of substances,’ and these sorts being constituted by relations, it follows that relation is given in the original experience. But that which is so given is ‘real existence’ in opposition to the invention of the understanding. Therefore these relations, and the community which they constitute, really exist. On the other hand, mere individuals alone really exist, while relations between them are superinduced by the mind. Once more, the simple idea given in sensation or reflection, as it is made _for_ not _by_ us, has or results from real existence, whereas general and complex ideas are the workmanship of the mind. But this workmanship consists in the abstraction of ideas from each other, and from that to which they are related as qualities. It thus presupposes at once the general idea of ‘something’ or substance, and the complex idea of qualities of the something. Therefore it must be general and complex ideas that are real, as made for and not by us, and that afford the inventive understanding its material. Yet if so--if they are _given_--why make them over again by abstraction and recomplication? They cannot be overcome without violence to Locke’s fundamental principles.
51. We may get over the last difficulty, indeed, by distinguishing between the complex and confused, between abstraction and analysis. We may say that what is originally given in experience is the confused, which to us is simple, or in other words has no definite content, because, till it has been analysed, nothing can be said of it, though in itself it is infinitely complex; that thus the process, which Locke roughly calls abstraction, and which, as he describes it, consists merely in taking grains from the big heap that is given in order to make a little heap of one’s own, is yet, rightly understood, the true process of knowledge--a process which may be said at once to begin with the complex and to end with it, to take from the concrete and to constitute it, because it begins with that which is in itself the fulness of reality, but which only becomes so for us as it is gradually spelt out by our analysis. To put the case thus, however, is not to correct Locke’s statement, but wholly to change his doctrine.
It renders futile his easy method of ‘sending a man to his senses’ for the discovery of reality, and destroys the supposition that the elements of knowledge can be ascertained by the interrogation of the individual consciousness. Such consciousness can tell nothing of its own beginning, if of this beginning, as of the purely indefinite, nothing can be said; if it only becomes defined through relations, which in its state of primitive potentiality are not actually in it. The senses again, so far from being, in that mere passivity which Locke ascribes to them, organs of ready-made reality, can have nothing to tell, if it is only through the active processes of ‘discerning, comparing, and compounding,’ that they acquire a definite content. But to admit this is nothing else than, in order to avoid a contradiction of which Locke was not aware, to efface just that characteristic of his doctrine which commends it to ‘common sense’--the supposition, namely, that the simple datum of sense, as it is for sense or in its mere individuality, is the real, in opposition to the ‘invention of the mind.’ That this supposition is to make the real the unmeaning, the empty, of which nothing can be said, he did not see because, under an unconscious delusion of words, even while asserting that the names of simple ideas are undefinable (Book III. chap. iv. sec. 4), which means that nothing can be said of such ideas, and while admitting that the processes of discerning, comparing, and compounding ideas, which mean nothing else than the bringing them into relation [1] or the superinduction upon them of fictions of the mind, are necessary to constitute even the beginnings of knowledge, he yet allows himself to invest the simple idea, as the real, with those definite qualities which can only accrue to it, according to his showing, from the ‘inventive’ action of the understanding.
Correlativity of cause and substance. 53. In calling a sensation or idea the product of a power, substance is presupposed just as much as in calling it a sensible quality; only that with Locke ‘quality’ conveyed the notion of inherence in the substance, power that of relation to an effect not _in_ the substance itself. ‘Secondary qualities are nothing but the powers which _substances_ have to produce several ideas in us by our senses, which ideas are not in the things themselves, otherwise than as anything is in its cause.’ (Book II. chap, xxiii. sec. 9.) ‘Most of the simple ideas, that make up our complex ideas of substances, are only powers ... or relations to other substances (or, as he explains elsewhere, ‘relations to our perceptions,’ [1]), and are not really in the substance considered barely in itself.’ (Book II. chap, xxiii. sec. 37, and xxxi. 8.) That this implies the inclusion of the idea of cause in that of substance, appears from Locke’s statement that ‘whatever is considered by us to operate to the producing any particular simple idea which did not before exist, hath thereby in our minds the relation of a cause.’ (Book II. chap. xxvi. sec. 1.) Thus to be conscious of the reality of a simple idea, as that which is not made by the subject of the idea, but results from a power in a thing, is to have the idea of substance as cause. This latter idea must be the condition of the consciousness of reality. If the consciousness of reality is implied in the beginning of knowledge, so must the correlative ideas be of cause and substance.
Simple ideas are not fictions of our fancies, but the natural and regular productions of things without us, really operating upon us; and so carry with them all the conformity which is intended, or which our state requires, for they represent to us things under those appearances which they are fitted to produce in us; whereby we are enabled to distinguish the sorts of particular substances,’ &c. &c. (Book IV. chap. iv. sec. 4.) The whole force of this passage depends on the notion that simple ideas are already to the subject of them not his own making, but the product of a thing, which in its relation to these ideas is a ‘particular sort of substance.’ It is the reception of such ideas, so related, that Locke calls ‘sensitive knowledge of particular existence,’ or a ‘perception of the mind, employed about the particular existence of finite beings without us.’ (Book IV. chap. ii. sec. 14.) This, however, he distinguishes from two other ‘degrees of knowledge or certainty,’ ‘intuition’ and ‘demonstration,’ of which the former is attained when the agreement or disagreement of two ideas is perceived immediately, the latter when it is perceived mediately through the intervention of certain other agreements or disagreements (less or more), each of which must in turn be perceived immediately.
Demonstration, being thus really but a series of intuitions, carries the same certainty as intuition, only it is a certainty which it requires more or less pains and attention to apprehend. (Book IV. chap. ii. sec. 4.) Of the ‘other perception of the mind, employed about the particular existence of finite beings without us,’ which ‘passes under the name of knowledge,’ he explains that although ‘going beyond bare probability, it reaches not perfectly to either of the foregoing degrees of certainty.’ ‘There can be nothing more certain,’ he proceeds, ‘than that the idea we receive from an external object is in our minds; this is intuitive knowledge. But whether there be anything more than barely that idea in our minds, whether we can thence certainly infer the existence of anything without us which corresponds to that idea, is that whereof some men think there may be a question made; because men may have such ideas in their minds, when no such thing exists, no such object affects their senses.’ (Book IV. chap. ii. sec. 14.) It assumes that simple ideas are consciously referred to things that cause them.
Text from Project Gutenberg, public domain in the United States.