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.
[1] ‘All impressions are perishing existences.’--Hume. See below,
paragraph 208.
This is the real thing from which abstraction is supposed to start.
48. ‘The complex idea of a species,’ spoken of in the passage last
quoted, corresponds to what, in Locke’s theory of substance, is
called the ‘idea of a particular sort of substance.’ In considering
that theory we saw that, according to his account, the beginning of
the process by which the ‘abstract idea of substance’ was formed,
was either that abstract idea itself, the mere ‘something,’ or by
a double contradiction the ‘complex idea of a particular sort of
substance’ which yet we only come to have _after_ the abstract idea
has been formed. In the passage now before us there is no direct
mention of the abstraction of the ‘substratum,’ as such, but only of
the quality, and hence there is no ambiguity about the paralogism. It
is not a mere ‘something’ that the man ‘lights upon,’ and thus it is
not this that holds the place at once of the given and the derived
but a something having manifold qualities to be abstracted. In other
words, it is the ‘idea of a particular sort of substance’ that he
starts from, and it is just this again to which as a ‘complex idea
of a species,’ his understanding is supposed gradually to lead him.
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.
[1] Locke only states this explicitly of comparison, ‘an operation
of the mind about its ideas, upon which depends all that large tribe
of ideas, comprehended under relation.’ (Book II. chap. xi. sec.
4.) It is clear, however, that the same remark must apply to the
‘discernment of ideas,’ which is strictly correlative to comparison,
and to their composition, which means that they are brought into
relation as constituents of a whole.
That these three processes are necessary to constitute the beginnings
of knowledge, according to Locke, appears from Book II. chap. xi.
sec. 15, taken in connection with what precedes in that chapter.
As real existence, the simple idea carries with it ‘invented’
relation of cause.
52. Thus invested, it is already substance or symbolical of
substance, not a mere feeling but a felt thing, recognised either
under that minimum of qualification which enables us merely to say
that it is ‘something,’ or (in Locke’s language) abstract substance,
or under the greater complication of qualities which constitutes
a ‘particular sort of substance’--gold, horse, water, &c. Real
existence thus means substance. It is not the simple idea or
sensation by itself that is real, but this idea as caused by a thing.
It is the thing that is primarily the real; the idea only secondarily
so, because it results from a power in the thing. As we have seen,
Locke’s doctrine of the necessary adequacy, reality, and truth of
the simple idea turns upon the supposition that it is, and announces
itself as, an ‘ectype’ of an ‘archetype.’ But there is not a
different archetype to each sensation; if there were, in ‘reporting’
it the sensation would do no more than report itself. It is the
supposed single cause of manifold different sensations or simple
ideas, to which a single name is applied. ‘If sugar produce in us the
ideas which we call whiteness and sweetness, we are sure there is a
power in sugar to produce those ideas in our minds. ... And so each
sensation answering the power that operates on any of our senses, the
idea so produced is a real idea (and not a fiction of the mind, which
has no power to produce any single idea), and cannot but be adequate
... and so all simple ideas are adequate.’ (Book II. chap. xxxi.
sec. 2.) The sugar, which is here the ‘archetype’ and the source of
reality in the idea, is just what Locke elsewhere calls ‘a particular
sort of substance,’ as the ‘something’ from which a certain set of
sensations result, and in which, as sensible qualities, they inhere.
Strictly speaking, however, according to Locke, that which inheres in
the thing is not the quality, as it is to us, but a power to produce
it. (Book II. chap. viii. sec. 28, and c. xxiii. 37.)
Correlativity of cause and substance.