from Locke’s own mouth is not easy, owing to the want of adjustment
between the several passages where he treats of the primary
qualities. They are originally enumerated as the ‘bulk, figure,
number, situation, and motion or rest of the solid parts of bodies’
(Book II. chap. viii. sec. 23), and, as we have seen, are treated
as all involved in that idea of solidity which is given in the
sensation of touch. We have no further account of them till we come
to the chapters on ‘simple modes of space and duration’ (Book II.
chaps. xiii. &c.), which are introduced by the remark, that in the
previous part of the book simple ideas have been treated ‘rather
in the way that they come into the mind than as distinguished from
others more compounded.’ As the simple idea, according to Locke,
is that which comes first into the mind, the two ways of treatment
ought to coincide; but there follows an explanation of the simple
modes in question, of which to a critical reader the plain result is
that the idea of body, which, according to the imaginary theory of
‘the way that it came into the mind’ is simple and equivalent to the
sensation of touch, turns out to be a complex of relations of which
the simplest is called space.
According to Locke’s account they are relations, and thus inventions
of the mind.
110. To know what space itself is, ‘we are sent to our senses’ of
sight and touch. It is ‘as needless to go to prove that men perceive
by their sight a distance between bodies of different colours,
or between the parts of the same body, as that they see colours
themselves; nor is it less obvious that they can do so in the dark by
feeling and touch.’ (Book II. chap. xiii. sec. 2.) Space being thus
explained by reference to distance, and distance _between bodies_,
it might be supposed that distance and body were simpler ideas. In
the next paragraph, however, distance is itself explained to be a
mode of space. It is ‘space considered barely in length between any
two beings,’ and is distinguished _(a)_ from ‘capacity’ or ‘space
considered in length, breadth, and thickness;’ _(b)_ from ‘figure,
which is nothing but the relation which the parts of the termination
of extension, or circumscribed space, have among themselves;’ _(c)_
from ‘place, which is the relation of distance between anything and
any two or more points which are considered as keeping the same
distance one with another, and so as at rest.’ It is then shown at
large (Book II. chap. xiii. sec. 11), as against the Cartesians,
that extension, which is ‘space in whatsoever manner considered,’ is
a ‘distinct idea from body.’ The ground of the distinction plainly
lies in the greater complexity of the idea of body. Throughout the
definition just given ‘space’ is presupposed as the simpler idea of
which capacity, figure, and place are severally modifications; and
these again, as ‘primary qualities,’ though with a slight difference
of designation, [1] are not only all declared inseparable from body,
but are involved in it under a further modification as ‘_qualities
of its solid parts_’ _i.e._, of parts so related to each other
that each will change its place sooner than admit another into it.
(Book II. chap. iv. sec. 2, and chap. viii. sec. 23.) Yet, though
body is thus a complex of relations--all, according to Locke’s
doctrine of relation, inventions of the mind--and though it must
be proportionately remote from the simple idea which ‘comes first
into the mind,’ yet, on the other hand, it is in body, as an object
previously given, that these relations are said to be found, and
found by the senses. (Book II. chap. xiii. secs. 2, 27.) [2]
[1] In the enumeration of primary qualities, ‘capacity’ is
represented by ‘bulk,’ ‘place’ by ‘situation.’
[2] In the second of the passages referred to, it will be seen that
‘matter’ is used interchangeably with ‘body.’
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?
111. It will readily be seen that ‘body’ here is a mode of the
idea of substance, and, like it, [1] appears in two inconsistent
positions as at once the beginning and the end of the process of
knowledge--as on the one hand that in which ideas are found and from
which they are abstracted, and on the other hand that which results
from their complication. As the attempt either to treat particular
qualities as given and substance as an abstraction gradually made,
or conversely to treat the ‘thing’ as given, and relations as
gradually superinduced, necessarily fails for the simple reason
that substance and relations each presuppose the other, so body
presupposes the primary qualities as so many relations which form
its essence or make it what it is, while these again presuppose body
as the matter which they determine, It is because Locke substitutes
for this intellectual order of mutual presupposition a succession of
sensations in time, that he finds himself in the confusion we have
noticed--now giving the priority to sensations in which the idea
of body is supposed to be conveyed, and from it deriving the ideas
of the primary qualities, now giving it to these ideas themselves,
and deriving the idea of body from their complication. This is just
such a contradiction as it would be to put to-day before yesterday.
_We_ may escape it by the consideration that in the case before us
it is not a succession of sensations in time that we have to do with
at all; that ‘the real’ is an intellectual order, or mind, in which
every element, being correlative to every other, at once presupposes
and is presupposed by every other; but that this order communicates
itself to us piecemeal, in a process of which the first condition on
our part is the conception that there _is_ an order, or something
related to something else; and that thus the conception of qualified
substance, which in its definite articulation is the end of all our
knowledge, is yet in another form, that may be called indifferently
either abstract or confused, [2] its beginning. This way of escape,
however, was not open to Locke, because with him it was the condition
of reality in the idea of the body and its qualities that they
should be ‘actually present sensations.’ The priority then of body
to the relations of extension, distance, &c., as of that in which
these relations are found, must, if body and extension are to be
more than nominal essences, be a priority of sensations in time.
But, on the other hand, the priority of the idea of space to the
ideas of its several modes, and of these again to the idea of body,
as of the simpler to the more complex, must no less than the other,
if the ideas in question are to be real, be one in time. Locke’s
contradiction, then, is that of supposing that of two sensations each
is actually present, of two impacts on the sensitive tablet each is
actually made, before the other.
[1] See above, paragraph 39.
[2] ‘Indifferently either abstract or confused,’ because of the
conception that is most confused the least can be said; and it is
thus most abstract.
Mathematical ideas, though ideas of ‘primary qualities of body,’ have
‘barely an ideal existence’.
112. From such a contradiction, even though he was not distinctly
aware of it, he could not but seek a way of escape, From his point
of view two ways might at first sight seem to be open--the priority
in sensitive experience, and with it reality, might be assigned
exclusively either to the idea of body or to that of space. To
whichever of the two it is assigned, the other must become a nominal
essence. If it is the idea of body that is conveyed to the mind
directly from without through sensation, then it must be by a process
in the mind that the spatial relations are abstracted from it; and
conversely, if it is the latter that are given in sensation, it must
be by a mental operation of compounding that the idea of body is
obtained from them. Now, according to Locke’s fundamental notion,
that the reality of an idea depends upon its being in consciousness
a copy _through impact_ of that which is not in consciousness, any
attempt to retain it in the idea of space while sacrificing it in
that of body would be obviously self-destructive. Nor, however we
might re-write his account of the relations of space as ‘found in
bodies,’ could we avoid speaking of them as relations of some sort;
and if relations, then derived from the ‘mind’s carrying its view
from one thing to another,’ and not ‘actually present sensations.’
We shall not, then, be surprised to find Locke tending to the other
alternative, and gradually forgetting his assertion that ‘a circle
or a square are the same whether in idea or in existence,’ and his
elaborate maintenance of the ‘real existence’ of a vacuum, _i.e._,
extension without body. (Book II. chap. xiii. secs. 21 and the
following, and xvii. 4.) In the Fourth Book it is body alone that has
real existence, an existence revealed by actually present sensation,
while all mathematical ideas, the ideas of the circle and the square,
have ‘barely an ideal existence’ (Book IV. chap. iv. sec. 6); and
this means nothing else than the reduction of the primary qualities
of body to a nominal essence. Our ideas of them are general (Book IV.
chap. iii. sec. 24), or merely in the mind. ‘There is no individual
parcel of matter, to which any of these qualities are so annexed as
to be essential to it or inseparable from it.’ (Book III. chap. vi.
sec. 6.) How should there be, when the ‘individual parcel’ means that
which copies itself by impact in the present sensation, while the
qualities in question are relations which cannot be so copied? Yet,
except as attaching to such a parcel, they have no ‘real existence;’
and, conversely, the ‘body,’ from which they _are_ inseparable, not
being an individual parcel of matter in the above sense, must itself
be unreal and belong merely to the mind. The ‘body’ which is real
has for us no qualities, and that reference to it of the ‘actually
present sensation’ by which such sensation is distinguished from
other feeling, is a reference to something of which nothing can be
said. It is a reference which cannot be stated in any proposition
_really_ true; and the difference which it constitutes between ‘bare
vision’ and the feeling to which reality corresponds, must be either
itself unreal or unintelligible.
Summary view of Locke’s difficulties in regard to the real.
113. We have now pursued the antithesis between reality and the work
of the mind along all the lines which Locke indicates, and find
that it everywhere eludes us. The distinction, which only appeared
incidentally in the doctrine of substance, between ‘the being and
the idea thereof--between substance as ‘found’ and substance as
that which ‘we accustom ourselves to suppose’--becomes definite and
explicit as that between real and nominal essence, but it does so
only that the essence, which is merely real, may disappear. Whether
we suppose it the quality of a mere sensation, as such, or of mere
body, as such, we find that we are unawares defining it by relations
which are themselves the work of the mind, and that after abstraction
of these nothing remains to give the antithesis to the work of the
mind any meaning. Meanwhile the attitude of thought, when it has
cleared the antithesis of disguise, but has not yet found that each
of the opposites derives itself from thought as much as the other,
is so awkward and painful that an instinctive reluctance to make
the clearance is not to be wondered at. Over against the world of
knowledge, which is the work of the mind, stands a real world of
which we can say nothing but that it is there, that it makes us aware
of its presence in every sensation, while our interpretation of what
it is, the system of relations which we read into it, is our own
invention. The interpretation is not even to be called a shadow, for
a shadow, however dim, still reflects the reality; it is an arbitrary
fiction, and a fiction of which the possibility is as unaccountable
as the inducement to make it. It is commonly presented as consisting
in abstraction from the concrete. But the concrete, just so far as
concrete, _i.e._, a complex world of relations, cannot be the real
if the separation of the real from the work of the mind is to be
maintained. It must itself be the work of the compounding mind, which
must be supposed again in ‘abstraction’ to decompose what it has
previously compounded. Now, it is of the essence of the doctrine in
question that it denies all power of origination to the mind except
in the way of compounding and abstracting given impressions. Its
supposition is, that whatever precedes the work of composition and
abstraction must be real [1] because the mind passively receives it:
a supposition which, if the mind could originate, would not hold.
How, then, does it come to pass that a ‘nominal essence,’ consisting
of definite qualities, is constructed by a mind, which originates
nothing, out of a ‘real’ matter, which, apart from such construction,
has no qualities at all? And why, granted the construction, should
the mind in ‘abstraction’ go through the Penelopean exercise of
perpetually unweaving the web which it has just woven?
[1] ‘Simple ideas, since the mind can by no means make them to
itself, must necessarily be the product of things operating on the
mind.’ (Book IV. chap. v. sec. 4.)
Why they do not trouble him more.
114. It is Hume’s more logical version of Locke’s doctrine that
first forces these questions to the front. In Locke himself they
are kept back by inconsistencies, which we have already dwelt upon.
For the real, absolutely void of intelligible qualities, because
these are relative to the mind, he is perpetually substituting a
real constituted by such qualities, only with a complexity which we
cannot exhaust. By so doing, though at the cost of sacrificing the
opposition between the real and the mental, he avoids the necessity
of admitting that the system of the sciences is a mere language,
well-or ill-constructed, but unaccountably and without reference
to things. Finally, he so far forgets the opposition altogether as
to find the reality of ‘moral and mathematical’ knowledge in their
‘bare ideality’ itself. (Book IV. chap. iv. sec. 6, &c.) Thus with
him the divorce between knowledge and reality is never complete,
and sometimes they appear in perfect fusion. A consideration of his
doctrine of propositions will show finally how the case between them
stands, as he left it.
They re-appear in his doctrine of propositions.
115. In the Fourth Book of the Essay the same ground has to be
thrice traversed under the several titles of ‘knowledge,’ ‘truth,’
and ‘propositions.’ Knowledge being the perception of agreement or
disagreement between ideas, the proposition is the putting together
or separation of words, as the signs of ideas, in affirmative or
negative sentences (Book IV. chap. v. sec. 5), and truth--the
expression of certainty [1]--consists in the correspondence between
the conjunction or separation of the signs and the agreement or
disagreement of the ideas. (Book IV. chap. v. sec. 2.) Thus, the
question between the real and the mental affects all these. Does this
or that perception of agreement between ideas represent an agreement
in real existence? Is its certainty a real certainty? Does such
or such a proposition, being a correct expression of an agreement
between ideas, also through this express an agreement between things?
Is its truth real, or merely verbal?
[1] All knowledge is certain according to Locke (Cf. IV. chap. vi.
sec. 13, ‘certainty is requisite to knowledge’), though the knowledge
must be expressed before the term ‘certainty’ is naturally applied to
it. (Book IV. chap. vi. sec. 3.) ‘Certainty of knowledge’ is thus a
pleonastic phrase, which only seems not to be so because we conceive
knowledge to have a relation to things which Locke’s definition
denies it, and by ‘certainty,’ in distinction from this, understand
its relation to the subject.
‘Certainty of truth’ is, in like manner, a pleonastic phrase, there
being no difference between the definition of it (Book IV. chap. vi.
sec. 3) and that of ‘truth’ simply, given in Book IV. chap. V. sec. 2.
The knowledge expressed by a proposition, though certain, may not be
real ...
116. To answer these questions, according to Locke, we must consider
whether the knowledge, or the proposition which expresses it,
concerns substances, _i.e._, ‘the co-existence of ideas in nature,’
on the one hand; or, on the other, either the properties of a
mathematical figure or ‘moral ideas.’ If it is of the latter sort,
the agreement of the ideas in the mind is itself their agreement
in reality, since the ideas themselves are archetypes. (Book IV.
chap. iv. secs. 6, 7.) It is only when the ideas are ectypes, as is
the case when the proposition concerns substances, that the doubt
arises whether the agreement between them represents an agreement
in reality. The distinction made here virtually corresponds to that
which appears in the chapters on the reality and adequacy of ideas in
the Second Book, and again in those on ‘names’ in the Third. There
the ‘complex ideas of modes and relation’ are pronounced necessarily
real adequate and true, because, ‘being themselves archetypes, they
cannot differ from their archetypes.’ (Book II. chap. XXX. sec.
4.) [1] With them are contrasted simple ideas and complex ideas of
substances, which are alike ectypes, but with this difference from
each other, that the simple ideas cannot but be faithful copies
of their archetypes, while the ideas of substances cannot but be
otherwise. (Book II. chap. xxxi. secs. 2, 11, &c.) Thus, ‘the names
of simple ideas and substances, with the abstract ideas in the mind
which they immediately signify, intimate also some real existence,
from which was derived their original pattern. But the names of
mixed modes terminate in the idea that is in the mind.’ (Book III.
chap. iv. sec. 2.) ‘The names of simple ideas and modes,’ it is
added, ‘signify always the real as well as nominal essence of their
species’--a statement which, if it is to express Locke’s doctrine
strictly, must be confined to names of simple ideas, while in respect
of modes it should run, that ‘the nominal essence which the names of
these signify is itself the real.’
[1] cf. Book II. chap. xxxi. sec. 3, and xxxii. sec. 17.
... 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.
117. But though the distinction between different kinds of knowledge
in regard to reality cannot but rest on the same principle as that
drawn between different kinds of ideas in the same regard, it is
to be noticed that in the doctrine of the Fourth Book ‘knowledge
concerning substances,’ in contrast with that in which ‘our thoughts
terminate in the abstract ideas,’ has by itself to cover the ground
which, in the Second and Third Book, simple ideas and complex
ideas of substances cover together. This is to be explained by the
observation, already set forth at large, [1] that the simple idea
has in Locke’s Fourth Book become explicitly what in the previous
books it was implicitly, not a feeling proper, but the conscious
reference of a feeling to a thing or substance. Only because it is
thus converted, as we have seen, can it constitute the beginning
of a knowledge which is not a simple idea but a conscious relation
between ideas, or have (what yet it must have if it can be expressed
in a proposition) that capacity of being true or false, which implies
‘the reference by the mind of an idea to something extraneous to it.’
(Book II. chap, xxxii. sec. 4.) Thus, what is said of the ‘simple
idea’ in the Second and Third Books, is in the Fourth transferred to
one form of knowledge concerning substances, to that, namely, which
consists in ‘particular experiment and observation,’ and is expressed
in singular propositions, such as ‘this is yellow,’ ‘this gold is
now solved in aqua regia.’ Such knowledge cannot but be real, the
proposition which expresses it cannot but have _real_ certainty,
because it is the effect of a ‘body actually operating upon us’
(Book IV. chap. xi. sec. 1), just as the simple idea is an ectype
directly made by an archetype. It is otherwise with complex ideas of
substances and with general knowledge or propositions about them.
A group of ideas, each of which, when first produced by a ‘body,’
has been real, when retained in the mind as representing the body,
becomes unreal. The complex idea of gold is only a nominal essence
or the signification of a name; the qualities which compose it are
merely ideas in the mind, and that general truth which consists in a
correct statement of the relation between one of them and another or
the whole--_e.g._, ‘gold is soluble in aqua regia’--holds merely for
the mind; [2] but it is not therefore to be classed with those other
mental truths, which constitute mathematical and moral knowledge,
and which, just because ‘merely ideal,’ are therefore real. Its
merely mental character renders it in Locke’s language a ‘trifling
proposition,’ but does not therefore save it from being _really_
untrue. It is a ‘trifling proposition,’ for, unless solubility in
aqua regia is included in the complex idea which the sound ‘gold’
stands for, the proposition which asserts it of gold is not certain,
not a truth at all. If it is so included, then the proposition is
but ‘playing with sounds.’ It may serve to remind an opponent of
a definition which he has made but is forgetting, but ‘carries no
knowledge with it but of the signification of a word, however certain
it be.’ (Book IV. chap. viii. secs. 5 & 9.) Yet there is a real gold,
outside the mind, of which the complex idea of gold in the mind must
needs try to be a copy, though the conditions of real existence are
such that no ‘complex idea in the mind’ can possibly be a copy of
it. Thus the verbal truth, which general propositions concerning
substances express, is under a perpetual doom of being really untrue.
The exemption of mathematical and moral knowledge from this doom
remains an unexplained mercy. Because merely mental, such knowledge
is real--there being no reality for it to _mis_represent--and yet
not trifling. The proposition that ‘the external angle of all
triangles is bigger than either of the opposite internal angles,’
has that general certainty which is never to be found but in our
ideas, yet ‘conveys instructive real knowledge,’ the predicate
being ‘a necessary consequence of precise complex idea’ which forms
the subject, yet ‘not contained in it.’ (Book IV. chap. viii. sec.
8.) [3] The same might be said apparently, according to Locke’s
judgment (though he is not so explicit about this), of a proposition
in morals, such as ‘God is to be feared and obeyed by man.’ (Book
IV. chap. xi. sec. 13.) [4] But how are such propositions, at once
abstract and real, general and instructive, to be accounted for?
There is no ‘workmanship of the mind’ recognised by Locke but that
which consists in compounding and abstracting (_i.e._, separating)
ideas of which ‘it cannot originate one.’ The ‘abstract ideas’
of mathematics, the ‘mixed modes’ of morals, just as much as the
ideas of substances, must be derived by such mental artifice from
a material given in simple feeling, and ‘real’ because so given.
Yet, while this derivation renders ideas of substances unreal in
contrast with their real ‘originals,’ and general propositions about
them ‘trifling,’ because, while ‘intimating an existence,’ they
tell nothing about it, on the other hand it actually constitutes
the reality of moral and mathematical ideas. Their relation to an
original disappears; they are themselves archetypes, from which the
mind, by its own act, can elicit other ideas not already involved
in the meaning of their names. But this can only mean that the mind
has some other function than that of uniting what it has ‘found’ in
separation, and separating again what it has thus united--that it can
itself originate.
[1] See above, paragraph 25.
[2] Book IV. chap. xi. sec. 13, xii. 9, &c.
[3] Just as according to Kant such a proposition expresses a judgment
‘synthetical,’ yet ‘á-priori.’
[4] Cf. Book IV. chap. iii. sec. 18, and Book III. chap, xi. sec. 16.
Significance of this doctrine.