Introductions to Books I and II of
David Hume’s Treatise of Human Nature
Thomas Hill Green
A Treatise of Human Nature, being an attempt to introduce the
Experimental Method of Reasoning into Moral Subjects and Dialogues
Concerning Natural Religion
by David Hume,
Edited, with preliminary dissertation and Notes, by T.H. Green
and T.H. Grose
London, Longmans Green & Co, 1874
Transcriber's Note:
The Introduction to Book I is taken from an 1898 reprint; that to
Book II from an 1882 reprint, both by Longmans.
The tables of contents have been changed to refer to paragraphs
instead of pages, as was done by R.L. Nettleship in his edition of
Green's _Philosophical Works_. The paragraph numbers are the same as
in the originals, and as in Nettleship's edition.
The Notes which were printed in the margins of the originals have
been placed as captions above the relevant paragraphs.
Green’s footnotes have been placed below the paragraphs to which they
relate. Because this book does not contain Hume’s text, where Green
cites Hume by page number, a reference to the relevant section has
been added in square brackets. Greek phrases are translated in
footnotes marked "Tr."
PREFACE.
In this edition we have sought to avoid the inconveniences which are
apt to attend commentaries on philosophical writers, by the plan
of putting together, in the form of continuous introductions, such
explanation and criticism as we had to offer, and confining the
footnotes almost entirely to references, which have been carefully
distinguished from Hume’s own notes. For the introductions to
the first and second volumes Mr. Green alone is responsible. The
introduction to the third is the work of Mr. Grose, who also has
undertaken the revision of Hume’s text.
Throughout the introductions to Volumes I. and II., except where
the contrary is stated, ‘Hume’ must be understood to mean Hume as
represented by the ‘Treatise on Human Nature.’ In taking this as
intrinsically the best representation of his philosophy, we may
be thought to have overlooked the well-known advertisement which
(in an edition posthumously published) he prefixed to the volume
containing his ‘Inquiries concerning the Human Understanding and
the Principles of Morals.’ In it, after stating that the volume,
is mainly a reproduction of what he had previously published in
the ‘Treatise,’ he expresses a hope that ‘some negligences in his
former reasoning, and more in the expression,’ have been corrected,
and desires ‘that the following Pieces may alone be regarded as
containing his philosophical sentiments and principles.’ Was not Hume
himself then, it may be asked, the best judge of what was an adequate
expression of his thoughts, and is there not an unbecoming assurance
in disregarding such a voice from his tomb?
Our answer is that if we had been treating of Hume as a great
literary character, or exhibiting the history of his individual
mind, due account must have been taken of it. Such, however, has not
been the object which, in the Introductions to Volumes I. and II.,
we have presented to ourselves, (See Introd. to Vol. I. § 4.) Our
concern has been with him as the exponent of a philosophical system,
and therefore specially with that statement of his system which
alone purports to be complete, and which was written when philosophy
was still his chief interest, without alloy from the disappointment
of literary ambition. Anyone who will be at the pains to read the
‘Inquiries’ alongside of the original ‘Treatise’ will find that their
only essential difference from it is in the way of omission. They
consist in the main of excerpts from the ‘Treatise,’ re-written in
a lighter style, and with the more difficult parts of it left out.
It is not that the difficulties which logically arise out of Hume’s
system are met, but that the passages which most obviously suggest
them have disappeared without anything to take their place. Thus in
the ‘Inquiry concerning the Human Understanding’ there is nothing
whatever corresponding to Parts II. and IV. of the first Book of the
‘Treatise.’ The effect of this omission on a hasty reader is, no
doubt, a feeling of great relief. Common-sense is no longer actively
repelled by a doctrine which seems to undermine the real world, and
can more easily put a construction on the account of the law of
causation, which remains, compatible with the ‘objective validity’ of
the law--such a construction as in fact forms the basis of Mr. Mill’s
Logic. How inconsistent this construction is with the principles
from which Hume started, and which he never gave up; how impossible
it would be to anyone who had assimilated his system as a whole; how
close is the organic connection between all the parts of this as he
originally conceived it--we must trust to the following introductions
to show. (See, in particular, Introd. to Vol. I. §§ 301 and 321.)
The only discussion in the ‘Inquiry concerning Human Understanding,’
to which nothing in his earlier publication corresponds, is that
on Miracles. On the relation in which this stands to his general
theory some remarks will be found in the Introduction to Vol. I. (§
324, note). The chief variations, other than in the way of omission,
between the later redaction of his ethical doctrine and the earlier,
are noticed in the Introduction to Vol. II. (§§ 31, 43, and 46, and
notes).
SUMMARY OF THE CONTENTS
of the
GENERAL INTRODUCTION TO VOL. I
1. How the history of philosophy should be studied.
2. Hume the last great English philosopher.
3. Kant his true successor.
4. Distinction between literary history and the history of
philosophical systems.
5. Object of the present enquiry.
6. Locke’s problem and method.
7. His notion of the ‘thinking thing’.
8. This he will passively observe.
9. Is such observation possible?
10. Why it seems so.
11. Locke’s account of origin of ideas.
12. Its ambiguities _(a)_ In regard to sensation.
13. _(b)_ In regard to ideas of reflection.
14. What is the ‘tablet’ impressed?
15. Does the mind make impressions on itself?
16. Source of these difficulties. The ‘simple’ idea, as Locke
describes it, is a complex idea of substance and relation.
17. How this contradiction is disguised.
18. Locke’s way of interchanging ‘idea’ and ‘quality’ and its effects.
19. Primary and secondary qualities of bodies.
20. ‘Simple idea’ represented as involving a theory of its own cause.
21. Phrases in which this is implied.
22. Feeling and felt thing confused.
23. The simple idea as ‘ectype’ other than mere sensation.
24. It involves a judgment in which mind and thing are distinguished.
25. And is equivalent to what he afterwards calls ‘knowledge of
identity’. Only as such can it be named.
26. The same implied in calling it an idea of an object.
27. made _for_, not _by_, us, and therefore according to Locke really
existent.
28. What did he mean by this?
30. Existence as the mere presence of a feeling.
31. Existence as reality.
32. By confusion of these two meanings, reality and its conditions
are represented as given in simple feeling.
33. Yet reality involves complex ideas which are made by the mind.
34. Such are substance and relation which must be found in every
object of knowledge.
35. Abstract idea of substance and complex ideas of particular sorts
of substance.
36. The abstract idea according to Locke at once precedes and follows
the complex.
37. Reference of ideas to nature or God, the same as reference to
substance.
38. But it is explicitly to substance that Locke makes them refer
themselves.
39. In the process by which we are supposed to arrive at complex
ideas of substances the beginning is the same as the end.
40. Doctrine of abstraction inconsistent with doctrine of complex
ideas.
41. The confusion covered by use of ‘particulars’.
42. Locke’s account of abstract general ideas.
43. ‘Things not general.’
44. Generality an invention of the mind.
45. The result is, that the feeling of each moment is alone real.
46. How Locke avoids this result.
47. The ‘particular’ was to him the individual qualified by general
relations.
48. This is the real thing from which abstraction is supposed to
start.
49. Yet, according to the doctrine of relation, a creation of thought.
50. Summary of the above contradictions.
51. They cannot be overcome without violence to Locke’s fundamental
principles.
52. As real existence, the simple idea carries with it ‘invented’
relation of cause.
53. Correlativity of cause and substance.
54. How do we know that ideas correspond to reality of things?
Locke’s answer.
55. It assumes that simple ideas are consciously referred to things
that cause them.
56. Lively ideas real, because they must be effects of things.
57. Present sensation gives knowledge of existence.
58. Reasons why its testimony must be trusted.
59. How does this account fit Locke’s definition of knowledge?
60. Locke’s account of the testimony of sense renders his question as
to its veracity superfluous.
61. Confirmations of the testimony turn upon the distinction between
‘impression’ and ‘idea’.
62. They depend on language which pre-supposes the ascription of
sensation to an outward cause.
63. This ascription means the clothing of sensation with invented
relations.
64. What is meant by restricting the testimony of sense to _present_
existence?
65. Such restriction, if maintained, would render the testimony
unmeaning.
66. But it is not maintained: the testimony is to operation of
permanent identical things.
67. Locke’s treatment of relations of cause and identity.
68. That from which he derives idea of cause pre-supposes it.
69. Rationale of this ‘petitio principii’.
70. Relation of cause has to be put into sensitive experience in
order to be got from it.
71. Origin of the idea of identity according to Locke.
72. Relation of identity not to be distinguished from idea of it.
73. This ‘invented’ relation forms the ‘very being of things’.
74. Locke fails to distinguish between identity and mere unity.
75. Feelings are the real, and do not admit of identity. How then can
identity be real?
76. Yet it is from reality that the idea of it is derived.
77. Transition to Locke’s doctrine of essence.
78. This repeats the inconsistency found in his doctrine of substance.
79. Plan to be followed.
80. What Locke understood by essence.
81. Only to nominal essences that general propositions relate, _i.e._
only to abstract ideas having no real existence.
82. An abstract idea may be a simple one.
83. How then is science of nature possible?
84. No ‘uniformities of phenomena’ can be known.
85. Locke not aware of the full effect of his own doctrine ...
86. ... which is to make the real an abstract residuum of
consciousness.
87. Ground of distinction between actual sensation and ideas in the
mind is itself a thing of the mind.
88. Two meanings of real essence.
89. According to one, it is a collection of ideas as qualities of a
thing:
90. ... about real essence in this sense there may be general
knowledge.
91. But such real essence a creature of thought.
92. Hence another view of real essence as unknown qualities of
unknown body.
93. How Locke mixes up these two meanings in ambiguity about body.
94. Body as ‘parcel of matter’ without essence.
95. In this sense body is the mere individuum.
96. Body as qualified by circumstances of time and place.
97. Such body Locke held to be subject of ‘primary qualities’: but
are these compatible with particularity in time?
98. How Locke avoids this question.
99. Body and its qualities supposed to be outside consciousness.
100. How can primary qualities be outside consciousness, and yet
knowable?
101. Locke answers that they copy themselves in ideas--Berkeley’s
rejoinder. Locke gets out of the difficulty by his doctrine of
solidity.
102. In which he equivocates between body as unknown opposite of mind
and body as a ‘nominal essence’.
103. Rationale of these contradictions.
104. What knowledge can feeling, even as referred to a ‘solid’ body,
convey?
105. Only the knowledge that something is, not _what_ it is.
106. How it is that the real essence of things, according to Locke,
perishes with them, yet is immutable.
107. Only about qualities of matter, as distinct from matter itself,
that Locke feels any difficulty.
108. These, as knowable, must be our ideas, and therefore not a ‘real
essence’.
109. Are the ‘primary qualities’ then, a ‘nominal essence’?
110. According to Locke’s account they are relations, and thus
inventions of the mind.
111. Body is the complex in which they are found. Do we derive the
idea of body from primary qualities, or the primary qualities from
idea of body?
112. Mathematical ideas, though ideas of ‘primary qualities of body,’
have ‘barely an ideal existence’.
113. Summary view of Locke’s difficulties in regard to the real.
114. Why they do not trouble him more.
115. They re-appear in his doctrine of propositions.
116. The knowledge expressed by a proposition, though certain, may
not be real ...
117. ... when the knowledge concerns substances. In this case general
truth must be merely verbal. Mathematical truths, since they concern
not substances, may be both general and real.
118. Significance of this doctrine.
119. Fatal to the notion that mathematical truths, though general,
are got from experience:
120. ... and to received views of natural science: but Locke not so
clear about this.
121. Ambiguity as to real essence causes like ambiguity as to science
of nature. Particular experiment cannot afford general knowledge.
122. What knowledge it can afford, according to Locke.
123. Not the knowledge which is now supposed to be got by induction.
Yet more than Locke was entitled to suppose it could give.
124. With Locke mathematical truths, though ideal, true also of
nature.
125. Two lines of thought in Locke, between which a follower would
have to choose.
126. Transition to doctrine of God and the soul.
127. Thinking substance--source of the same ideas as outer substance.
128. Of which substance is perception the effect?
129. That which is the source of substantiation cannot be itself a
substance.
130. To get rid of the inner source of ideas in favour of the outer
would be false to Locke.
131. The mind, which Locke opposes to matter, perpetually shifting.
132. Two ways out of such difficulties. ‘Matter’ and ‘mind’ have the
same source in self-consciousness.
133. Difficulties in the way of ascribing reality to substance as
matter, re-appear in regard to substance as mind.
134. We think not always, yet thought constitutes the self.
135. Locke neither disguises these contradictions, nor attempts to
overcome them.
136. Is the idea of God possible to a consciousness given in time?
137. Locke’s account of this idea.
138. ‘Infinity,’ according to Locke’s account of it, only applicable
to God, if God has parts.
139. Can it be applied to him ‘figuratively’ in virtue of the
indefinite number of His acts?
140. An act, finite in its nature, remains so, however often repeated.
141. God only infinite in a sense in which time is _not_ infinite,
and which Locke could not recognize
142. --the same sense in which the self is infinite.
143. How do I know my own real existence?--Locke’s answer.
144. It cannot be known consistently with Locke’s doctrine of real
existence.
145. But he ignores this in treating of the self.
146. Sense in which the self is truly real.
147. Locke’s proof of the real existence of God. There must have been
something from eternity to cause what now is.
148. How ‘eternity’ must be understood if this argument is to be
valid:
149. ... and how ‘cause’.
150. The world which is to prove an eternal God must be itself
eternal.
151. But will the God, whose existence is so proven, be a thinking
being?
152. Yes, according to the true notion of the relation between
thought and matter.
153. Locke’s antinomies--Hume takes one side of them as true.
154. Hume’s scepticism fatal to his own premises. This derived from
Berkeley.
155. Berkeley’s religious interest in making Locke consistent.
156. What is meant by relation of mind and matter?
157. Confusions involved in Locke’s materialism.
158. Two ways of dealing with it. Berkeley chooses the most obvious.
159. His account of the relation between visible and tangible
extension. We do not see bodies without the mind ...
160. ... nor yet feel them. The ‘esse’ of body is the ‘percipi’.
170. What then becomes of distinction between reality and fancy?
171. The real = ideas that God causes.
172. Is it then a succession of feelings?
173. Berkeley goes wrong from confusion between thought and feeling.
174. Which, if idea = feeling, does away with space and body.
175. He does not even retain them as ‘abstract ideas’.
176. On the same principle all permanent relations should disappear.
177. By making colour = relations of coloured points, Berkeley
represents relation as seen.
178. Still he admits that space is constituted by a succession of
feelings.
179. If so, it is not space at all; but Berkeley thinks it is only
not ‘pure’ space. _Space_ and _pure_ space stand or fall together.
180. Berkeley disposes of space for fear of limiting God.
181. How he deals with possibility of general knowledge.
182. His theory of universals ...
183. ... of value, as implying that universality of ideas lies in
relation.
184. But he fancies that each idea has a positive nature apart from
relation.
185. Traces of progress in his idealism.
186. His way of dealing with physical truths.
187. If they imply permanent relations, his theory properly excludes
them. He supposes a divine decree that one feeling shall follow
another.
188. Locke had explained reality by relation of ideas to outward
body. Liveliness in the idea evidence of this relation.
189. Berkeley retains this notion, only substituting ‘God’ for ‘body’.
190. Not regarding the world as a system of intelligible relations,
he could not regard God as the subject of it.
191. His view of the soul as ‘naturally immortal’.
192. Endless succession of feelings is not immortality in true sense.
Berkeley’s doctrine of matter fatal to a true spiritualism:
193. ... as well as to a true Theism. His inference to God from
necessity of a power to produce ideas;
194. ... a necessity which Hume does not see. A different turn should
have been given to his idealism, if it was to serve his purpose.
195. Hume’s mission. His account of impressions and ideas. Ideas are
fainter impressions.
196. ‘Ideas’ that cannot be so represented must be explained as mere
words.
197. Hume, taken strictly, leaves no distinction between impressions
of reflection and of sensation.
198. Locke’s theory of sensation disappears. Physiology won’t answer
the question that Locke asked.
199. Those who think it will don’t understand the question.
200. Hume’s psychology will not answer it either.
201. It only seems to do so by assuming the ‘fiction’ it has to
account for; by assuming that impression represents a real world.
202. So the ‘Positivist’ juggles with ‘phenomena’.
203. Essential difference, however, between Hume and the ‘Positivist’.
204. He adopts Berkeley’s doctrine of ideas, but without Berkeley’s
saving suppositions,
205. ... in regard to ‘spirit’,
206. ... in regard to relations. His account of these.
207. It corresponds to Locke’s account of the sorts of agreement
between ideas.
208. Could Hume consistently admit idea of relation at all?
210. Only in regard to identity and causation that he sees any
difficulty. These he treats as fictions resulting from ‘natural
relations’ of ideas: _i.e._ from resemblance and contiguity.
212. Is resemblance then an impression?
213. Distinction between resembling feelings and idea of resemblance.
214. Substances = collections of ideas.
215. How can ideas ‘in flux’ be collected?
216. Are there general ideas? Berkeley said, ‘yes and no’.
217. Hume ‘no’ simply. How he accounts for the appearance of there
being such.
219. His account implies that ‘ideas’ are conceptions, not feelings.
220. He virtually yields the point in regard to the _predicate_ of
propositions.
221. As to the subject, he equivocates between singleness of feeling
and individuality of conception.
222. Result is a theory which admits predication, but only as
singular.
223. All propositions restricted in same way as Locke’s propositions
about real existence.
224. The question, how the _singular_ proposition is possible, the
vital one.
225. Not relations of resemblance only, but those of quantity also,
treated by Hume as feelings.
226. He draws the line between certainty and probability at the same
point as Locke; but is more definite as to probability,
227. ... and does not admit opposition of mathematical to physical
certainty--here following Berkeley.
228. His criticisms of the doctrine of primary qualities.
229. It will not do to oppose bodies to our feeling when only feeling
can give idea of body.
230. Locke’s shuffle of ‘body,’ ‘solidity,’ and ‘touch,’ fairly
exposed.
231. True rationale of Locke’s doctrine.
232. With Hume ‘body’ logically disappears. What then?
233. Can space survive body? Hume derives idea of it from sight and
feeling. Significance with him of such derivation.
234. It means, in effect, that colour and space are the same, and
that feeling may be extended.
235. The parts of space are parts of a perception.
236. Yet the parts of space are co-existent not successive.
237. Hume cannot make space a ‘perception’ without being false to his
own account of perception;
238. ... as appears if we put ‘feeling’ for ‘perception’ in the
passages in question.
239. To make sense of them, we must take perception to mean perceived
thing,
240. ... which it can only mean as the result of certain ‘fictions’.
241. If felt thing is no more than feeling, how can it have qualities?
242. The thing will have ceased before the quality begins to be.
243. Hume equivocates by putting ‘coloured points’ for colour.
245. Can a ‘disposition of coloured points’ be an impression?
246. The points must be themselves impressions, and therefore not
co-existent.
247. A ‘compound impression’ excluded by Hume’s doctrine of time.
248. The fact that colours mix, not to the purpose.
249. How Hume avoids appearance of identifying space with colour, and
accounts for the abstraction of space.
250. In so doing, he implies that space is a relation, and a relation
which is not a possible impression.
251. No logical alternative between identifying space with colour,
and admitting an idea not copied from an impression.
252. In his account of the idea as _abstract_, Hume really introduces
distinction between feeling and conception;
253. ... yet avoids appearance of doing so, by treating
‘consideration’ of the relations of a felt thing as if it were itself
the feeling.
254. Summary of contradictions in his account of extension.
255. He gives no account of quantity as such.
256. His account of the relation between Time and Number.
257. What does it come to?
258. Unites alone really exist: number a ‘fictitious denomination’.
Yet ‘unites’ and ‘number’ are correlative; and the supposed fiction
unaccountable.
259. Idea of time even more unaccountable on Hume’s principles.
260. His ostensible explanation of it.
261. It turns upon equivocation between feeling and conception of
relations between felt things.
262. He fails to assign any impression or compound of impressions
from which idea of time is copied.
263. How can he adjust the exact sciences to his theory of space and
time?
264. In order to seem to do so, he must get rid of ‘Infinite
Divisibility’.
265. Quantity made up of impressions, and there must be a least
possible impression.
266. Yet it is admitted that there is an idea of number not made up
of impressions. A finite division into impressions no more possible
than an infinite one.
267. In Hume’s instances it is not really a feeling, but a conceived
thing, that appears as finitely divisible.
268. Upon true notion of quantity infinite divisibility follows of
course.
269. What are the ultimate elements of extension? If not extended,
what are they?
270. Colours or coloured points? What is the difference?
271. True way of dealing with the question.
272. ‘If the point were divisible, it would be no termination of a
line.’ Answer to this.
273. What becomes of the exactness of mathematics according to Hume?
274. The universal propositions of geometry either untrue or
unmeaning.
275. Distinction between Hume’s doctrine and that of the hypothetical
nature of mathematics.
276. The admission that no relations of quantity are data of sense
removes difficulty as to general propositions about them.
277. Hume does virtually admit this in regard to numbers.
278. With Hume idea of vacuum impossible, but logically not more so
than that of space.
279. How it is that we talk as if we had idea of vacuum according to
Hume.
280. His explanation implies that we have an idea virtually the same.
281. By a like device that he is able to explain the appearance of
our having such ideas as Causation and Identity.
283. Knowledge of relation in way of Identity and Causation excluded
by Locke’s definition of knowledge.
284. Inference a transition from an object perceived or remembered to
one that is not so.
285. Relation of cause and effect the same as this transition.
286. Yet seems other than this. How this appearance is to be
explained.
287. Inference, resting on supposition of necessary connection, to be
explained before that connection.
288. Account of the inference given by Locke and Clarke rejected.
289. Three points to be explained in the inference according to Hume.
290. _a_. The original impression from which the transition is made
_b_. The transition to inferred idea
291. _c_. The qualities of this idea.
292. It results that necessary connection is an impression of
reflection, _i.e._, a propensity to the transition described.
293. The transition not to anything beyond sense.
294. Nor determined by any objective relation.
295. Definitions of cause: _a_. As a ‘philosophical’ relation.
296. Is Hume entitled to retain ‘philosophical’ relations as distinct
from ‘natural’?
297. Examination of Hume’s language about them.
298. Philosophical relation consists in a comparison, but no
comparison between cause and effect.
299. The comparison is between present and past experience of
succession of objects.
300. Observation of succession already goes beyond sense.
301. As also does the ‘observation concerning identity,’ which the
comparison involves.
302. Identity of objects an unavoidable crux for Hume. His account of
it.
303. Properly with him it is a fiction, in the sense that we have no
such idea. Yet he implies that we have such idea, in saying that we
mistake something else for it.
304. Succession of like feelings mistaken for an identical object:
but the feelings, as described, are already such objects.
305. Fiction of identity thus implied as source of the propensity
which is to account for it.
306. With Hume continued existence of perceptions a fiction different
from their identity. Can perceptions exist when not perceived?
307. Existence of objects, distinct from perceptions, a further
fiction still.
308. Are these several ‘fictions’ really different from each other?
309. Are they not all involved in the simplest perception?
310. Yet they are not possible ideas, because copied from no
impressions.
311. Comparison of present experience with past, which yields
relation of cause and effect, pre-supposes judgment of identity;
312. ... without which there could be no recognition of an object as
one observed before.
313. Hume makes conceptions of identity and cause each come before
the other. Their true correlativity.
314. Hume quite right in saying that we do not go _more_ beyond sense
in reasoning than in perception.
315. How his doctrine might have been developed. Its actual outcome.
316. No philosophical relation admissible with Hume that is not
derived from a natural one.
317. Examination of his account of cause and effect as ‘natural
relation’.
318. Double meaning of natural relation. How Hume turns it to account.
319. If an effect is merely a constantly observed sequence, how can
an event be an effect the first time it is observed? Hume evades this
question;
320. Still, he is a long way off the Inductive Logic, which supposes
an objective sequence.
321. Can the principle of uniformity of nature be derived from
sequence of feelings?
322. With Hume the only uniformity is in expectation, as determined
by habit; but strength of such expectation must vary indefinitely.
323. It could not serve the same purpose as the conception of
uniformity of nature.
324. Hume changes the meaning of this expectation by his account
of the ‘remembrance’ which determines it. Bearing of his doctrine
of necessary connexion upon his argument against miracles. This
remembrance, as he describes it, supposes conception of a system of
nature.
326. This explains his occasional inconsistent ascription of an
objective character to causation.
327. Reality of remembered ‘system’ transferred to ‘system of
judgment’.
328. Reality of the former ‘system’ other than vivacity of
impressions.
329. It is constituted by relations, which are not impressions at
all; and in this lies explanation of the inference from it to ‘system
of judgment’.
330. Not seeing this, Hume has to explain inference to latter system
as something forced upon us by habit.
331. But if so, ‘system of judgment’ must consist of feelings
constantly experienced;
332. ... which only differ from remembered feelings inasmuch as their
liveliness has faded. But how can it have faded, if they have been
constantly repeated?
333. Inference then can give no new knowledge.
334. Nor does this merely mean that it cannot constitute new
phenomena, while it can prove relations, previously unknown, between
phenomena. Such a distinction inadmissible with Hume.
335. His distinction of probability of causes from that of chances
might seem to imply conception of nature, as determining inference.
336. But this distinction he only professes to adopt in order to
explain it away.
337. Laws of nature are unqualified habits of expectation.
338. Experience, according to his account of it, cannot be a parent
of knowledge.
339. His attitude towards doctrine of thinking substance.
340. As to Immateriality of the Soul, he plays off Locke and Berkeley
against each other, and proves Berkeley a Spinozist.
341. Causality of spirit treated in the same way.
342. Disposes of ‘personal’ identity by showing contradictions in
Locke’s account of it.
343. Yet can only account for it as a ‘fiction’ by supposing ideas
which with him are impossible.
344. In origin this ‘fiction’ the same as that of ‘Body’.
345. Possibility of such fictitious ideas implies refutation of
Hume’s doctrine.
SUMMARY OF THE CONTENTS
of the
GENERAL INTRODUCTION TO VOL. II.
1. Hume’s doctrine of morals parallel to his doctrine of nature.
2. Its relation to Locke: Locke’s account of freedom, will, and
desire.
3. Two questions: Does man always act from the strongest motive?
and, What constitutes his motive? The latter the important question.
Distinction between desires that are, and those that are not,
determined by the conception of self.
4. Effect of this conception on the objects of human desire.
5. Objects so constituted Locke should consistently exclude: But he
finds room for them by treating every desire for an object, of which
the attainment gives pleasure, as a desire for pleasure.
6. Confusion covered by calling ‘happiness’ the general object of
desire.
7. ‘Greatest sum of pleasure’ and ‘Pleasure in general’ unmeaning
expressions.
8. In what sense of happiness is it true that it ‘is really just as
it appears?’ In what sense that it is every one’s object?
9. No real object of human desire can ever be just as it appears.
10. Can Locke consistently allow the distinction between true
happiness and false? Or responsibility?
11. Objections to the Utilitarian answer to these questions.
12. According to Locke present pleasures may be compared with future,
and desire suspended till comparison has been made.
13. What is meant by ‘present’ and ‘future’ pleasure? By the supposed
comparison Locke ought only to have meant the competition of
pleasures equally present in imagination:
14.... and this could give no ground for responsibility. In order to
do so, it must be understood as implying determination by conception
of self.
15. Locke finds moral freedom in necessity of pursuing happiness.
16. If an action is moved by desire for an object, Locke asks no
questions about origin of the object. But what is to be said of
actions, which we only do because we ought?
17. Their object is pleasure, but pleasure given not by nature but by
law.
18. Conformity to law not the moral good, but a means to it.
19. Hume has to derive from ‘impressions’ the objects which Locke
took for granted.
20. Questions which he found at issue, _a_. Is virtue interested?
_b_. What is conscience?
21. Hobbes’ answer to first question.
22. Counter-doctrine of Shaftesbury. Vice is selfishness; but no
clear account of selfishness.
23. Confusion in his notions of self-good and public good; Is all
living for pleasure, or only too much of it, selfish?
24. What have Butler and Hutcheson to say about it? Chiefly that
affections terminate upon their objects; but this does not exclude
the view that all desire is for pleasure.
25. Of moral goodness Butler’s account circular. Hutcheson’s
inconsistent with his doctrine that reason gives no end.
26. Source of the moral judgment: received notion of reason
incompatible with true view. Shaftesbury’s doctrine of rational
affection; spoilt by doctrine of ‘moral sense’.
27. Consequences of the latter.
28. Is an act done for ‘virtue’s sake’ done for pleasure of moral
sense?
29. Hume excludes every object of desire but pleasure.
30. His account of ‘direct passions’: all desire is for pleasure.
31. Yet he admits ‘passions’ which produce pleasure, but proceed not
from it.
32. Desire for objects, as he understands it, excluded by his theory
of impressions and ideas.
33. Pride determined by reference to self.
34. This means that it takes its character from that which is not a
possible ‘impression’.
35. Hume’s attempt to represent idea of self as derived from
impression.
36. Another device is to suggest a physiological account of pride.
37. Fallacy of this: it does not tell us what pride is to the subject
of it.
38. Account of love involves the same difficulties; and a further one
as to nature of sympathy.
39. Hume’s account of sympathy.
40. It implies a self-consciousness not reducible to impressions.
41. Ambiguity in his account of benevolence: it is a desire and
therefore has pleasure for its object. What pleasure?
42. Pleasure of sympathy with the pleasure of another.
43. All ‘passions’ equally interested or disinterested. Confusion
arises from use of ‘passion’ alike for desire and emotion. Of this
Hume avails himself in his account of active pity.
44. Explanation of apparent conflict between reason and passion.
45. A ‘reasonable’ desire means one that excites little emotion.
Enumeration of possible motives.
46. If pleasure sole motive, what is the distinction of self-love?
Its opposition to disinterested desires, as commonly understood,
disappears. It is desire for pleasure in general.
47. How Hume gives meaning to this otherwise unmeaning definition.
‘Interest,’ like other motives described, implies determination by
reason.
48. Thus Hume, having degraded morality for the sake of consistency,
after all is not consistent.
49. If all good is pleasure, what is moral good? Ambiguity in Locke’s
view.
50. Development of it by Clarke, which breaks down for want of true
view of reason.
51. With Hume, moral good is pleasure excited in a particular way,
viz.; in the spectator of the ‘good’ act and by the view of its
tendency to produce pleasure.
53. Moral sense is thus sympathy with pleasure qualified by
consideration of general tendencies.
54. In order to account for the facts it has to become sympathy with
unfelt feelings.
55. Can the distinction between the ‘moral’ and ‘natural’ be
maintained by Hume? What is ‘artificial virtue’?
56. No ground for such distinction in relation between motive and act.
57. Motive to artificial virtues.
58. How artificial virtues become moral.
59. Interest and sympathy account for all obligations civil and moral.
60. What is meant by an action which ought to be done.
61. Sense of morality no motive: when it seems so the motive is
really pride.
62. Distinction between virtuous and vicious motive does not exist
for person moved.
63. ‘Consciousness of sin’ disappears.
64. Only respectability remains: and even this not consistently
accounted for.
GENERAL INTRODUCTION TO VOL. I.
How the history of philosophy should be studied.
1. There is a view of the history of mankind, by this time
familiarised to Englishmen, which detaches from the chaos of events
a connected series of ruling actions and beliefs--the achievement of
great men and great epochs, and assigns to these in a special sense
the term ‘historical.’ According to this theory--which indeed, if
there is to be a theory of History at all, alone gives the needful
simplification--the mass of nations must be regarded as left in
swamps and shallows outside the main stream of human development.
They have either never come within the reach of the hopes and
institutions which make history a progress instead of a cycle, or
they have stiffened these into a dead body of ceremony and caste, or
at some great epoch they have failed to discern the sign of the times
and rejected the counsel of God against themselves. Thus permanently
or for generations, with no principle of motion but unsatisfied want,
without the assimilative ideas which from the strife of passions
elicit moral results, they have trodden the old round of war, trade,
and faction, adding nothing to the spiritual heritage of man. It
would seem that the historian need not trouble himself with them,
except so far as relation to them determines the activity of the
progressive nations.
Hume the last great English philosopher.
2. A corresponding theory may with some confidence be applied to
simplify the history of philosophical opinion. The common plan of
seeking this history in compendia of the systems of philosophical
writers, taken in the gross or with no discrimination except in
regard to time and popularity, is mainly to blame for the common
notion that metaphysical enquiry is an endless process of threshing
old straw. Such enquiry is really progressive, and has a real
history, but it is a history represented by a few great names.
At rare epochs there appear men, or sets of men, with the true
speculative impulse to begin at the beginning and go to the end, and
with the faculty of discerning the true point of departure which
previous speculation has fixed for them. The intervals are occupied
by commentators and exponents of the last true philosopher, if it has
been his mission to construct; if it has been sceptical, by writers
who cannot understand the fatal question that he has asked, and
thus still dig in the old vein which he had exhausted, and of which
his final dilemma had shown the bottom. Such an interval was that
which in the growth of continental philosophy followed on the epoch
of Leibnitz; an interval of academic exposition or formulation, in
which the system, that had been to the master an incomplete enquiry,
became in the hands of his disciples a one-sided dogmatism. In the
line of speculation more distinctively English, a like _régime_
of ‘strenua inertia’ has prevailed since the time of Hume. In the
manner of its unprofitableness, indeed, it has differed from the
Wolfian period in Germany, just as the disinterested scepticism of
Hume differed from the system-making for purposes of edification to
which Leibnitz applied himself. It has been unprofitable, because
its representatives have persisted in philosophising upon principles
which Hume had pursued to their legitimate issue and had shown,
not as their enemy but as their advocate, to render all philosophy
futile. Adopting the premises and method of Locke, he cleared them of
all illogical adaptations to popular belief, and experimented with
them on the body of professed knowledge, as one only could do who
had neither any twist of vice nor any bias for doing good, but was a
philosopher because he could not help it.
Kant his true successor.
3. As the result of the experiment, the method, which began with
professing to explain knowledge, showed knowledge to be impossible.
Hume himself was perfectly cognisant of this result, but his
successors in England and Scotland would seem so far to have been
unable to look it in the face. They have either thrust their
heads again into the bush of uncriticised belief, or they have
gone on elaborating Hume’s doctrine of association, in apparent
forgetfulness of Hume’s own proof of its insufficiency to account
for an intelligent, as opposed to a merely instinctive or habitual,
experience. An enquiry, however, so thorough and passionless as the
‘Treatise of Human Nature,’ could not be in vain; and if no English
athlete had strength to carry on the torch, it was transferred to a
more vigorous line in Germany. It awoke Kant, as he used to say, from
his ‘dogmatic slumber,’ to put him into that state of mind by some
called wonder, by others doubt, in which all true philosophy begins.
This state, with less ambiguity of terms, may be described as that of
freedom from presuppositions. It was because Kant, reading Hume with
the eyes of Leibnitz and Leibnitz with the eyes of Hume, was able to
a great extent to rid himself of the presuppositions of both, that he
started that new method of philosophy which, as elaborated by Hegel,
claims to set man free from the artificial impotence of his own false
logic, and thus qualify him for a complete interpretation of his own
achievement in knowledge and morality. Thus the ‘Treatise of Human
Nature’ and the ‘Critic of Pure Reason,’ taken together, form the
real bridge between the old world of philosophy and the new. They are
the essential ‘Propaedeutik,’ without which no one is a qualified
student of modern philosophy. The close correspondence between the
two works becomes more apparent the more each is studied. It is
such as to give a strong presumption that Kant had studied Hume’s
doctrine in its original and complete expression, and not merely as
it was made easy in the ‘Essays.’ The one with full and reasoned
articulation asks the question, which the other with equal fulness
seeks to answer. It is probably because the question in its complete
statement has been so little studied among us, that the intellectual
necessity of the Kantian answer has been so little appreciated.
To trace the origin and bring out the points of the question, in
order to the exhibition of that necessity, will be the object of
the following treatise. To do this thoroughly, indeed, would carry
us back through Hobbes to Bacon. But as present limits do not allow
of so long a journey, we must be content with showing Hume’s direct
filiation to Locke, who, indeed, sufficiently gathered up the results
of the ‘empirical’ philosophy of his predecessors.
Distinction between literary history and the history of philosophical
systems.
4. Such a task is very different from an ordinary undertaking in
literary history, and requires different treatment. To the historian
of literature a philosopher is interesting, if at all, on account
of the personal qualities which make a great writer, and have a
permanent effect on letters and general culture. Locke and Hume
undoubtedly had these qualities and produced such an effect--an
effect in Locke’s case more intense upon the immediately following
generations, but in Hume’s more remarkable as having reappeared
after near a century of apparent forgetfulness. Each, indeed, like
every true philosopher, was the mouth-piece of a certain system
of thought determined for him by the stage at which he found the
dialectic movement that constitutes the progress of philosophy, but
each gave to this system the stamp of that personal power which
persuades men. Their mode of expression had none of that academic
or ‘ex cathedra’ character, which has made German philosophy almost
a foreign literature in the country of its birth. They wrote as
citizens and men of the world, anxious (in no bad sense) for effect;
and even when their conclusions were remote from popular belief,
still presented them in the flesh and blood of current terms used in
the current senses. It is not, however, in their human individuality
and its effects upon literature, but as the vehicles of a system of
thought, that it is proposed here to treat them; and this purpose
will best be fulfilled if we follow the line of their speculation
without divergence into literary criticism or history, without
remarks either on the peculiarities of their genius or on any of the
secondary influences which affected their writings or arose out of
them. For a method of this sort, it would seem, there is some need
among us. We have been learning of late to know much more about
philosophers, but it is possible for knowledge about philosophers
to flourish inversely as the knowledge of philosophy. The revived
interest which is noticeable in the history of philosophy may be
an indication either of philosophical vigour or of philosophical
decay. In those whom intellectual indolence, or a misunderstood and
disavowed metaphysic, has landed in scepticism there often survives a
curiosity about the literary history of philosophy, and the writings
which this curiosity produces tend further to spread the notion that
philosophy is a matter about which there has been much guessing by
great intellects, but no definite truth is to be attained. It is
otherwise with those who see in philosophy a progressive effort
towards a fully-articulated conception of the world as rational. To
them its past history is of interest as representing steps in this
progress which have already been taken for us, and which, if we will
make them our own, carry us so far on our way towards the freedom of
perfect understanding; while to ignore them is not to return to the
simplicity of a pre-philosopic age, but to condemn ourselves to grope
in the maze of ‘cultivated opinion,’ itself the confused result of
those past systems of thought which we will not trouble ourselves to
think out.
Object of the present enquiry.