THE SCEPTICAL DOUBT: HUME.
We have seen that an innate tendency leads the human mind to connect
and set in relation,--to connect, it may be erroneously, or without
proper scrutiny, or under the influence of passions or prejudices,--but
at any rate to connect. Criticism occasionally has impatiently banned
this tendency as a mere fountain of errors. The human mind, says
Francis Bacon, always assumes a greater uniformity in things than it
finds; it expects symmetry, is bold in neglecting exceptional cases,
and would fain go beyond all limits in its everlasting cry, Why and To
what end. It varies in individuals between a passion for discovering
similarities and an intent acuteness to every shade of unlikeness. But
notwithstanding these warnings of the hen, the ugly duckling Reason
_will_ go beyond what is given: it knows no insuperable limitation.
It may be guilty of what Bacon calls 'anticipation'--an induction
on evidence insufficient--or it may subdue itself to the duty of
'interpretation' of nature by proper methods: in either case, it is
an act of association, synthesis, unification. For Nous _is_ archè,
and knows that it is: it will not yield to clamour or mere rebuke: it,
too, cannot be commanded, unless by first obeying it: and Bacon, having
duly objurgated the 'mind left to itself,' is obliged to let it go to
gather the grapes before they are quite ripe, and to indulge it with
a 'prerogative' of instances. As Mr. Herbert Spencer and many others
are never weary of telling us: 'We think in relations. This is truly
the form of all thought: and if there are any other forms they must be
derived from this[1].' Man used to be defined as a thinking or rational
animal: which means that man is a connecting and relation-giving
animal; and from this, Aristotle's definition, making him out to be
a 'political' animal, is only a corollary, most applicable in the
region of Ethics. Here is the ultimate point, from which the natural
consciousness, and the energies of science, art, and religion equally
start upon their special missions.
In ordinary life we attach but little importance to this machinery of
cognition. We incline to let the fact of synthesis drop out of sight,
as if it required no further study or notice, and we regard the things
connected as exclusively worth attending to. The interest centres
on the object--on the matter: the formal element--the connective
tissue--is _only_ an instrument of no importance, except in view of
the end it helps us to. We use general and half-explained terms, such
as development, evolution, continuity, as bridges from one thing to
another, without giving any regard to the means of locomotion on their
own account. Some one thing is the product of something else: we let
the term 'product' slip out of the proposition as unimportant: and
then read the statement so as to explain the one thing by turning it
into the other. Things, according to this opinion, are all-important:
the rest is mere words. These relations between things are not open
to further investigation or definition: they are each _sui generis,_
or peculiar: and even if the logician in his analysis of inference
finds it advisable to deal with them, he will be content, if he can
classify them in some approximate way, as a basis for his subdivision
of propositions. This is certainly one way of getting rid of
Metaphysics--for the time.
But there are epochs in life, and epochs in universal history, when the
mind withdraws from its immersion in active life, and reflects upon its
own behaviour as on the proceedings of some strange creature, of which
it is a mere spectator. At such seasons when we stop to reflect upon
the partial scene, and close our eyes to the totality, doubts begin to
arise, whether our procedure is justified when we unify and combine the
isolated phenomena. Have we any right to throw our own subjectivity,
the laws of our imagination and thought, into the natural world? Would
it not be more proper to refrain altogether from the use of such
conceptions?
Philosophy, said one of the ancients[2], begins in wonder, and ends in
wonder. It begins from the surprise that something could _be_ what it
purports to be: it ends in the marvel of our having _thought_ anything
else possible. Such a phrase well becomes the naive age in which the
soul goes freely forth, wandering from one novelty to another, curious
to find out all that can be known,--like the young wanderer on the
sea-shore whom fresh pebbles and new shells tempt endlessly to fill his
basket. But as the ages roll on, and the accumulations of the past grow
heavier in the receptacle, the need of a re-examination of the stores
becomes imperative. The bright colours have faded--and generally
they fade soon: there has been much picked up in the inexperience of
youthful enthusiasm which maturer reflection hardly can think worth
carrying further.
The duty of doubt and of re-examination of what tradition has
bequeathed has been enforced by philosophy in all ages. For it is the
cardinal principle of philosophy to be free--to possess its soul--never
to be a mere machine or mere channel of tradition. But, in some ages,
this assertion of its freedom has had for the soul a pre-eminently
negative aspect. It has meant only freedom _from_--and not also freedom
_in_ and _through_--its environing, or rather constituting, substance.
Such an epoch was seen in the ancient world when the _New Academy_,
with its sceptical abstention from all objective assertions, had to
protest against the dogmatism of the Stoic and Epicurean schoolmen.
In modern times the initial shudder before plunging in has been a
recurrent crisis. Each thinker--as he personally resolved to thread his
way through the wilderness of current opinion to the realm of certified
truth--has had to remind himself (and his contemporaries) that in
knowledge at least no possessions are secured property unless they have
been earned by the sweat of their owner's brow. This is the common
theme of Bacon's aphorisms in the beginning of the _Novum Organum_, of
Descartes' _Discourse of Method_, and of Spinoza's unfinished essay
on the _Emendation of the Intellect._ There is indeed a discrepancy
in these utterances as to the measure in which they severally think
it needful to insist as preliminary on a kind of moral and religious
consecration of life to the service of truth. But a more compelling
division arises. The maxim may be understood to say, 'Divest thy mind
of its ill-gotten gains, its evil habits, prejudices, and system,
and in childlike simplicity prepare thine eye and ear to receive in
pure vessels the stores of truth which are ready to stream in from
the world.' Or it may rather be held to say, 'Remember that thou art
a conscious, waking mind, and that every idea thou hast is thine by
thine own assent: insist upon thy right of free intelligence, and give
no place to any belief which thou hast not raised into full light of
consciousness, and found to be completely consistent with the whole
power and content of thy clearest thought.' And, we may add, if the
maxim be obeyed too exclusively in either way, it will be obeyed amiss.
With Locke the question comes into even greater prominence. On
what conditions can I have knowledge? How can I be certified that
my ideas--the subjective images in _my_ mind--have a reference to
something objective and real? Locke's answer is, not unnaturally
perhaps, somewhat prolix, and wanting in fundamental precision of
principles. After dismissing the view that, even before experience,
there are certain common ideas spontaneously and by original endowment
present in all human beings, he goes on to show how we can sufficiently
account for the ideas we actually find by supposing in us an almost
unlimited power of joining and disjoining, of comparing, relating,
and unifying the various elementary 'ideas' which make their way into
the empty chambers of our mind by the senses. As to the source, the
channel, and the nature of these sense-ideas, Locke is obscure and
apparently inconsistent: though clearly it should be all important
to know how an idea can be caused by, or spring from, a material
thing. When in his fourth book he comes to the question of what is the
reality, or the _meaning_ of our ideas, he does not really get beyond a
few--rather dubiously reasoned-out--conclusions that, although strictly
we cannot go beyond 'the present testimony of our senses employed
about the particular objects that do affect them,' we may for practical
purposes allow a good deal to the presumptions of general probability.
But Locke had also begun to criticise our ideas, in his account of
their formation out of the 'simple ideas'-- (which neither Locke
nor any other atomist of mind has succeeded in making clear)--which
the several senses give, and by observing or reflecting on what
goes on or is present in _our_ minds, _we_ 'form,' he says, various
ideas. In a style of discussion which is on the borderland between
vulgar and philosophical analysis-- (never quite false, but nearly
always inadequate, because it almost invariably assumes what it
ostensibly proposes to explain,) Locke tells us how we get one idea by
'enlarging,' another by 'repeating,' as we please, the bounteous data
of the touch and sight. But amongst the compounds there are some of
more disputable origin. There are some--e.g. ideas of punishable acts
or legalised states--which are 'voluntary collections of ideas put
together in the mind independent from any original patterns in nature,'
These, though entirely subjective, are entirely real, because they only
serve as patterns by which we may judge or designate things so and so.
It is worse with the idea of power, which we only 'collect' or 'infer,'
and that not from matter, where it is invisible, but only in a clear
light when we consider God and spirits. Still worse, perhaps, is it
with the idea of substance, which is a 'collection' of simple ideas
with the 'supposition' of an 'incomprehensible' something in which the
collection 'subsists.'
Hump put all this rather more pointedly. We have 'impressions,' i.
e. lively perceptions by sense. We have also 'ideas,' i. e. fainter
images of these, but otherwise identical. An idea _should_ be a copy
of an impression. If you cannot point out any such impression, you
may be certain you are mistaken when you imagine you have any such
idea. There is prevalent in the mental world a kind of association; a
'gentle force' connects ideas in our imagination according to certain
relations they possess. This 'mind' or this 'imagination' is only a
bundle or collection of impressions and ideas; but a collection which
is continually and rapidly changing in its constituents, and in the
scale of liveliness possessed by each constituent. When an idea is
particularly fresh and forcible, it is a _belief_ or it is believed in:
when faint, not so. Or, otherwise put, the object of an idea is _said_
to _exist_, when the idea itself is vividly _felt_[3]. Really there is
no such thing as 'external existence' taken literally. 'Our universe is
the universe of the imagination': all existence is for a consciousness.
Impressions arise in certain orders of sequence or co-existence. When
two impressions frequently recur and always in the same order, the
custom binds them so closely together, that, should one of them only be
given as impression, we cannot help having an idea of the other, which,
growing more vivid by the contagion of the contiguous impression,
creates, or is, a belief in its reality. Between the perceptions
as such, there is no connexion; they are distinct and independent
existences. They only get a connexion through _our feeling; we feel_
a 'determination' of our thought to pass from one to another. The
one impression has no power to produce the other; the one thing does
not cause the other. 'We never have any impression that contains any
power or efficacy[4],' Hence the power and necessity we attribute to
the so-called causal agent and to the connexion are an illegitimate
transference from our feeling, and a mistranslation of _our_
incapacity to resist the force of habitual association into a real
bond between the two impressions _themselves,_ The necessity is in the
mind--as a habit-caused compulsion--not in the objects.
As with the relation of cause and effect, so it is with others. The
identity of continued existence is only another name--an objective
transcript--of the feeling of smooth uninterrupted succession of
impressions in which our thought glides along from one in easy
transition to another. And here the coherence and continuity of
perceptions need not be absolute. A vivid impression of unbroken
connexion in a part will, if predominant, by association fill up the
gaps and weak points, and behind the admitted breaks in the line of
our ideas will suppose--invent--or create an imperceptible but _real_
continuity in the supposed things. And by this fiction of a continuous
existence of our perceptions, we easily lapse into the doctrine that
our perceptions have an independent existence as objects or things in
themselves:--a doctrine which according to Hume is contrary to the
plainest experience.
But if the world is always the world of imagination--of
_Vorstellung_--of mental representation, Hume is aware that we must
admit two orders or grades of such representation. We must distinguish,
he remarks[5], 'in the imagination betwixt the principles which
are permanent, irresistible and universal (such as the customary
transition from causes to effects and from effects to causes), and the
principles which are changeable, weak and irregular. The former are
the foundation of all our thoughts and actions,' There are, in other
words, normal and general laws of association--such as the relation
of cause and effect--which persuade us of real existence. By its own
laws, therefore, within the realm of _Vorstellung_ or Mental idea,
there grows up a permanent, objective world for all, contrasted with
the temporary, accidental perception of the individual and of the
moment; and this serves as the standard or the one common measure by
which occasional perturbations are to be measured. Within the limits of
the subjective in general there arises a subjective of higher order,
which is truly objective. This same change of front--as it may be
called--Hume makes in morals. There the mind can modify and control
its passions according as it can feel the objects of them near or far;
and though each of us has his 'peculiar position,' we can--so creating
the ethical basis--'fix on some steady and general points of view, and
always in our thoughts place ourselves in them, whatever may be our
present situation[6]': we can 'choose some common point of view,' and
from the vantage-ground of a permanent principle, however distant, we
have a chance of gaining the victory over our passion, however near.
Thus far Hume had gone in the development of idealism,' Whether his
theory is consistent from end to end, need not be here discussed. But
it is evident that Hume was not lost in the quagmire of subjective
idealism. The objective and the subjective are with him akin: the
objective is the subjective, which is universal, permanent, and normal.
The causal relation has, in the first instance, only a subjective
necessity; but through that subjective necessity or its irresistible
belief, it generates an objective world. But it has been and is the
fortune of philosophers to be known in the philosophical world by some
conspicuous red rag of their system which first caught the eye of the
bull-like leaders of the human herd. It was so notably with Hobbes
and Spinoza; and most of the thinkers whose names appear in the pages
of Kant suffer from this curtailment. Descartes, Locke, Leibniz,
Berkeley, Hume, are _there_ not the real philosophers, discoverable in
their works, but the creatures of historic reputation and of popular
simplification who do duty for them.
Kant's Hume is therefore a somewhat imaginary being: the product,
partly of imperfect knowledge of Hume's writings, partly of
prepossessions derived from a long previous training in German
rationalism. Such a Hume was--or would have been, had he existed--a
philosopher who 'took the objects of experience for things in
themselves,' who 'treated the conception of cause as a false and
deceptive illusion,' who did not indeed venture to assail the certainty
of mathematics, but held--as regards all knowledge about the existence
of things-- 'empiricism to be the sole source of principles,' founding
his conclusion mainly on an examination of the causal nexus[7]. This
'note of warning' sounded against the claims of pure reason--as he
calls Hume's _Enquiry_ was what about 1762 broke Kant's dogmatic
slumber and forced him to give his researches in speculative philosophy
a new direction. His first step was to generalise Hume's problem from
an inquiry into the origin of the causal idea into a general study
of the synthetic principles in knowledge. His next was to attempt to
fix the number of these concepts and synthetic principles. And his
third was to 'deduce' them: i. e., to prove the reciprocal implication
between experience or knowledge and the concepts or categories of
intelligence.
[Footnote 1: _First Principles_, p. 162. It may be as well to remark
that Relation is scarcely an adequate description of the nature of
thought as a whole. We shall see when we come to the theory of logic,
that the term is applicable--and then somewhat imperfectly--only to the
second phase of thought, the categories of reflection, which are the
favourite categories of science and popular metaphysics.]
[Footnote 2: Arist. _Metaph._ i. 2. 26.]
[Footnote 3: _Treatise of Human Nature_ (Understanding), iii. 7 and ii.
6.]
[Footnote 4: Ibid. iii. 14.]
[Footnote 5: _Treatise of Human Nature_ (Understanding iv. 4.)]
[Footnote 6: _Treatise of Human Nature_ (Morals), iii. i.]
[Footnote 7: Kant, _Prolegomena_ to Metaph. Introduction and _Crit. of
Practical Reason_ (on the Claim of Pure Reason, _Werke,_ viii. 167).]