substance, or ‘substratum of ideas,’ co-ordinate with the outward,
‘wherein they do subsist, and from which they do result.’ ‘Sensation
convinces that there are solid extended substances, and reflection
that there are thinking ones’ (Book II. chap, xxiii. sec. 29). We
have already seen how, without disturbance from his doctrine of the
fictitiousness of universals, he treats the simple idea as carrying
with it the distinction of outward and inward, or relations severally
to a ‘thing’ and to a ‘mind.’ It reports itself ambiguously as a
quality of each of these separate substances. It is now, or was to
begin with, the result of an outward thing ‘actually operating upon
us;’ for ‘of simple ideas the mind cannot make one to itself:’ on the
other hand, it is a ‘perception,’ and perception is an ‘operation
of the mind.’ In other words it is at once a modification of the
mind by something of which it is consciously not conscious, and a
modification of the mind by itself--the two sources of one and the
same modification being each determined only as the contradictory
of the other. Thus, when we come to probe the familiar metaphors
under which Locke describes Reflection, as a ‘fountain of ideas’
other than sensation, we find that the confusions which we have
already explored in dealing with the ideas of sensation recur under
added circumstances of embarrassment. Not only does the simple
idea of reflection, like that of sensation, turn out to be already
complicated in its simplicity with the superinduced ideas of cause
and relation, but the causal substance in question turns out to
be one which, from being actually nothing, becomes something by
acting upon itself; while all the time the result of this action is
indistinguishable from that ascribed to the opposite, the external,
cause.
Of which substance is perception the effect?
128. To a reader to whom Locke’s language has always seemed to be--as
indeed it is--simply that of common sense and life, in writing the
above we shall seem to be creating a difficulty where none is to be
found. Let us turn, then, to one of the less prolix passages, in
which the distinction between the two sources of ideas is expressed:
‘External objects furnish the mind with the ideas of sensible
qualities, which are all those different perceptions they produce in
us; and the mind furnishes the understanding with ideas of its own
operations’ (Book II. chap. i. sec. 5). We have seen already that
with Locke perception and idea are equivalent terms. It only needs
further to be pointed out that no distinction can be maintained
between his usage of ‘mind’ and of ‘understanding,’ [1] and that the
simple ideas of the mind’s own operations are those of perception
and power, which must be given in and with every idea of a sensible
quality.’ [2] Avoiding synonyms, then, and recalling the results of
our examination of the terms involved in the first clause of the
passage before us, we may re-write the whole thus: ‘Creations of the
mind, which yet are external to it, produce in it those perceptions
of their qualities which they do produce; and the mind produces in
itself the perception of these, its own, perceptions.’
[1] As becomes apparent on examination of such passages, as Book II.
chap. i. sec. 1, sub. fin.; and Book II. chap. i. sec. 23.
[2] See above, paragraphs 11, 12, 16.
That which is the source of substantiation cannot be itself a
substance.
129. This attempt to present Locke’s doctrine of the relation between
the mind and the world, as it would be without phraseological
disguises, must not be ascribed to any polemical interest in making
a great writer seem to talk nonsense, The greatest writer must fall
into confusions when he brings under the conceptions of cause and
substance the self-conscious thought which is their source; and
nothing else than this is involved in Locke’s avowed enterprise
of knowing that which renders knowledge possible as he might know
any other object. The enterprise naturally falls into two parts,
corresponding to that distinction of subject and object which
self-consciousness involves. Hitherto we have been dealing with
it on the objective side--with the attempt to know knowledge as a
result of experience received through the senses--and have found the
supposed source of thought already charged with its creations; with
the relations of inner and outer, of substance and attribute, of
cause and effect, of appearance and reality. The supposed ‘outward’
turns out to have its outwardness constituted by thought, and thus
to be inward. The ‘outer sense’ is only an outer sense at all so
far as feelings, by themselves neither outward nor inward, are by
the mind referred to a thing or cause which ‘the mind supposes;’
and only thus have its reports a prerogative of reality over the
‘fantasies,’ supposed merely of the mind. Meanwhile, unable to
ignore the subjective side of self-consciousness, Locke has to put
an inward experience as a separate, but co-ordinate, source of
knowledge alongside of the outer. But this inward experience, simply
as a succession of feelings, does not differ from the outer: it only
so differs as referred to that very ‘thinking thing,’ called the
mind, which by its supposition of causal substance has converted
feeling into an experience of an outer thing. ‘Mind’ thus, by
the relations which it ‘invents,’ constitutes both the inner and
outer, and yet is treated as itself the inner ‘substratum which it
accustoms itself to suppose.’ It thus becomes the creature of its
own suppositions. Nor is this all. This, indeed, is no more than the
fate which it must suffer at the hands of every philosopher who,
in Kantian language, brings the source of the Categories under the
Categories. But with Locke the constitution of the outer world by
mental supposition, however uniformly implied, is always ignored; and
thus mind, as the inward substance, is not only the creature of its
own suppositions, but stands over against a real existence, of which
the reality is held to consist just in its being the opposite of all
such suppositions: while, after all, the effect of these mutually
exclusive causes is one and the same experience, one and the same
system of sequent and co-existent ideas.
To get rid of the inner source of ideas in favour of the outer would
be false to Locke.
130. Is it then a case of _joint_-effect? Do the outer and inner
substances combine, like mechanical forces, to produce the psychical
result? Against such a supposition a follower of Locke would find
not only the language of his master, with whom perception appears
_indifferently_ as the result of the outer or inner cause, but
the inherent impossibility of analysing the effect into separate
elements. The ‘Law of Parsimony,’ then, will dictate to him that
one or other of the causes must be dispensed with; nor, so long as
he takes Locke’s identification of the outward with the real for
granted, will he have much doubt as to which of the two must go.
To get rid of the causality of mind, however, though it might not
be untrue to the tendency of Locke, would be to lose sight of his
essential merit as a formulator of what everyone thinks, which is
that, at whatever cost of confusion or contradiction, he at least
formulates it fully. In him the ‘Dialectic,’ which popular belief
implicitly involves, goes on under our eyes. If the primacy of
self-conscious thought is never recognized, if it remains the victim
of its own misunderstood creations, there is at least no attempt
to disguise the unrest which attaches to it in this self-imposed
subjection.
The mind, which Locke opposes to matter, perpetually shifting.
131. We have already noticed how the inner ‘tablet,’ on which the
outer thing is supposed to act, is with Locke perpetually receding.
[1] It is first the brain, to which the ‘motion of the outward parts’
must be continued in order to constitute sensation (Book II. chap.
ix. sec. 3). Then perception is distinguished from sensation, and
the brain itself, as the subject of sensation, becomes the outward
in contrast with the understanding as the subject of perception. [2]
Then perception, from being simply a reception, is converted into an
‘operation,’ and thus into an efficient of ideas. The ‘understanding’
itself, as perceptive, is now the outward which makes on the ‘mind,’
as the inner ‘tablet,’ that impression of its own operation in
perception which is called an idea of reflection. [3] Nor does
the regressive process--the process of finding a mind within the
mind--stop here, though the distinction of inner and outer is not any
further so explicitly employed in it. From mind, as receptive of, and
operative about, ideas, _i.e._ consciousness, is distinguished mind
as the ‘substance within us’ of which consciousness is an ‘operation’
that it sometimes exercises, sometimes (_e.g._ when it sleeps) does
not (Book II. chap. i. secs. 10-12); and from this thinking substance
again is distinguished the man who ‘finds it in himself and carries
it about with him in a coach or on horseback (Book II. chap, xxiii.
sec. 20)--the person, ‘consisting of soul and body,’ who is prone to
sleep and in sound sleep is unconscious, but whose personal identity
strangely consists in sameness of consciousness, sameness of an
occasional operation of part of himself. [3]
[1] See above, paragraph 14.
[2] Book II., chap. i. sec. 23. ‘Sensation is such an impression
made in some part of the body, as produces some perception in the
understanding.’
[3] Locke speaks indifferently of the mind impressing the
understanding, and of the understanding impressing the mind, with
ideas of reflection, but as he specially defines ‘understanding’ as
the ‘perceptive power’ (Book II. chap. xxi. sec. 25.), I have written
as above.
[4] Cf. II. chap. i. secs. 11 and 14, with II. chap, xxvii. sec. 9.
It is difficult to see what ingenuity could reconcile the doctrine
stated in Book II. chap. xxvii. sec. 9, that personal identity is
identity of consciousness, with the doctrine implied in Book II.
chap. i. sec. 11, that the waking Socrates is the same person with
Socrates asleep, _i.e._ (according to Locke) not conscious at all.
Two ways out of such difficulties. ‘Matter’ and ‘mind’ have the same
source in self-consciousness.
132. In the history of subsequent philosophy two typical methods
have appeared of dealing with this chaos of antinomies. One, which
we shall have to treat at large in writing of Hume, affects to
dispose of both the outward and the inward synthesis--both of
the unity of feelings in a subject matter and of their unity in
a subject mind--as ‘fictions of thought.’ This method at once
suggests the vital question whether a mind which thus invents has
been effectively suppressed--whether, indeed, the theory can be so
much as stated without a covert assumption of that which it claims
to have destroyed. The other method, of which Kant is the parent,
does not attempt to efface the apparent contradictions which beset
the ‘relation between mind and matter;’ but regarding them as in
a certain sense inevitable, traces them to their source in the
application to the thinking Ego itself of conceptions, which it
does indeed constitute in virtue of its presence to phenomena given
under conditions of time, but under which for that very reason it
cannot itself be known. It is in virtue of the presence of the
self-conscious unit to the manifold of feeling, according to this
doctrine, that the latter becomes an order of definite things, each
external to the other; and it is only by a false inclusion within
this order of that which constitutes it that the Ego itself becomes
a ‘thinking thing’ with other things outside it. The result of such
inclusion is that the real world, which it in the proper sense makes,
becomes a reality external to it, yet apart from which it would
not be actually anything. Thus with Locke, though the mind has a
potential existence of its own, it is experience of ‘things without
it’ that ‘furnishes’ it or makes it what it actually is. But the
relation of such outer things to the mind cannot be spoken of without
contradiction. If supposed outward as bodies, they have to be brought
within consciousness as objects of sensation; if supposed outward
as sensation, they have to be brought within consciousness--to find
a home in the understanding--as ideas of sensation. Meanwhile the
consideration returns that after all the ‘thinking thing’ contributes
something to that which it thinks about; and, this once admitted, it
is as impossible to limit its work on one side as that of the outer
thing on the other. Each usurps the place of its opposite. Thus with
Locke the understanding produces effects on itself, but the product
is one and the same ‘perception’ otherwise treated as an effect of
the outer world. One and the same self-consciousness, in short, [1]
involving the correlation of subject and object, becomes the result
of two separate ‘things,’ each exclusive of the other, into which the
opposite poles of this relation have been converted--the extended
thing or ‘body’ on the one side, and the thinking thing or ‘mind’ on
the other.
[1] For the equivalence of perception with self-consciousness in
Locke, see above, paragraph 24, et infra.
Difficulties in the way of ascribing reality to substance as matter,
re-appear in regard to substance as mind.
133. To each of these supposed ‘things’ thought transfers its own
unity and self-containedness, and thereupon finds itself in new
difficulties. These, so far as they concern the outward thing, have
already been sufficiently noticed. We have seen how the single
self-contained thing on the one hand attenuates itself to the bare
atom, presented in a moment of time, which in its exclusiveness
is actually nothing: [1] how, on the other, it spreads itself, as
everything which for one moment we regard as independent turns out
in the next to be a ‘retainer’ to something else, into a series that
cannot be summed. [2] A like consequence follows when the individual
man, conceiving of the thought, which is not mine but me, and which
is no less the world without which I am not I, as a thinking thing
within him, limited by the limitations of his animal nature, seeks
in this thinking thing, exclusive of other things, that unity and
self-containedness, which only belong to the universal ‘I.’ He
finds that he ‘thinks not always;’ that during a fourth part of his
time he neither thinks nor perceives at all; and that even in his
waking hours his consciousness consists of a succession of separate
feelings, whose recurrence he cannot command. [3] Thought being
thus broken and dependent, substantiality is not to be found in it.
It is next sought in the ‘thing’ of which thought is an occasional
operation--a thing of which it may readily be admitted that its
nature cannot be known (Book II. chap, xxiii. sec. 29, etc.), since
it has no nature, being merely that which remains of the thinking
thing upon abstraction of its sole determination. It is in principle
nothing else than the supposed basis of sensible qualities remaining
after these have been abstracted--the ‘parcel of matter’ which has
no essence--with which accordingly Locke sometimes himself tends
to identify it. [4] But meanwhile, behind this unknown substance,
whether of spirit or of body, the self-consciousness, which has been
treated as its occasional unessential operation, re-asserts itself as
the self which claims both body and spirit, the immaterial no less
than the material substance, as its own, and throughout whatever
diversity in these maintains its own identity.
[1] See above, paragraph 94 and the following.
[2] See above, paragraph 125.
[3] Locke, Essay ii. chap. i. sec. 10, etc.
[4] See above, paragraph 106, near the end.
We think not always, yet thought constitutes the self.
134. Just, then, as Locke’s conception of outward reality grows
under his hands into a conception of nature as a system of relations
which breaks through the limitations of reality as constituted
by mere _individua_, so it is with the self, as he conceived it.
It is not a simple idea. It is not one of the train that is for
ever passing, ‘one going and another coming,’ for it looks on this
succession as that which it experiences, being itself the same
throughout the successive differences (Book II. chap. vii. sec. 9,
and chap. xxvii. sec. 9). As little can it be adjusted to any of
the conditions of real ‘things,’ thinking or unthinking, which he
ordinarily recognises. It has no ‘particularity in space and time.’
That which is past in ‘reality’ is to it present. It is ‘in its
nature indifferent to any parcel of matter.’ It is the same with
itself yesterday and to-day, here and there. That ‘with which its
consciousness can join itself is one self with it,’ and it can so
join itself with substances apart in space and remote in time (Book
II. chap, xxvii. secs. 9, 13, 14, 17). For speaking of it as eternal,
indeed, we could find no warrant in Locke. He does not so clearly
distinguish it from the ‘thinking thing’ supposed to be within each
man, that has ‘had its determinate time and place of beginning to
exist, relation to which determines its identity so long as it
exists’ (Book II. chap. xxvii. sec. 2). Hence he supposed an actual
limit to the past which it could make present--a limit seemingly
fixed for each man at the farthest by the date of his birth--though
he talks vaguely of the possibility of its range being extended (Book
II. chap. xxvii. sec. 16). In the discussion of personal identity,
however, the distinction gradually forces itself upon him, and he at
last expressly says (sec. 16), that if the same Socrates, sleeping
and waking, do not partake of the same consciousness (as according to
Book II. chap. i. sec. 11 he certainly does not), ‘Socrates sleeping
and waking is not the same person;’ whereas the ‘thinking thing’--the
substance of which consciousness is a power sometimes exercised,
sometimes not--is the same in the sleeping as in the waking Socrates.
This is a pregnant admission, but it brings nothing to the birth in
Locke himself. The inference which it suggests to his reader, that
a self which does not slumber or sleep is not one which is born or
dies, does not seem to have occurred to him. Taking for his method
the imaginary process of ‘looking into his own breast,’ instead
of the analysis of knowledge and morality, he could not find the
eternal self which knowledge and morality pre-suppose, but only the
contradiction of a person whose consciousness is not the same for two
moments together, and often ceases altogether, but who yet, in virtue
of an identity of this very consciousness, is the same in childhood
and in old age.
Locke neither disguises these contradictions, nor attempts to
overcome them.
135. Here as elsewhere we have to be thankful that the contradiction
had not been brought home so strongly to Locke as to make him
seek the suppression of either of its alternatives. He was aware
neither of the burden which his philosophy tended to put upon the
self which ‘can consider itself as itself in different times and
places’--the burden of replacing the stable world, when ‘the new way
of ideas’ should have resolved the outward thing into a succession of
feelings--nor of the hopelessness of such a burden being borne by a
‘perishing’ consciousness, ‘of which no two parts exist together, but
follow each other in succession.’ [1] When he ‘looked into himself,’
he found consciousness to consist in the succession of ideas,
‘one coming and another going:’ he also found that ‘consciousness
alone makes what we call self,’ and that he was the same self at
any different points in the succession. He noted the two ‘facts of
consciousness’ at different stages of his enquiry, and was apparently
not struck by their contradiction. He could describe them both, and
whatever he could describe seemed to him to be explained. Hence they
did not suggest to him any question either as to the nature of the
observed object or as to the possibility of observing it, such as
might have diverted philosophy from the method of self-observation.
He left them side by side, and, far from disguising either, put
alongside of them another fact--the presence among the perpetually
perishing ideas of that of a consciousness identical with itself, not
merely in different times and places, but in all times and places.
Such an idea, under the designation of an eternal wise Being, he was
‘sure he had’ (Book II. chap. xvii. sec. 14).
[1] Cf. Book II. chap. xiv. sec. 32--‘by observing what passes in our
minds, how our ideas there in train constantly some vanish and others
begin to appear, we come by the idea of succession; and by observing
a distance in the parts of this succession, we get the idea of
duration’--with chap. xv. sec. 12. ‘Duration is the idea we have of
perishing distance, of which no two parts exist together, but follow
each other in succession.’
Is the idea of God possible to a consciousness given in time?
136. The remark will at once occur that the question concerning the
relation between our consciousness, as in succession, and the idea
of God, is essentially different from that concerning the relation
between this consciousness and the self identical throughout it,
inasmuch as the relation in the one case is between a fact and an
idea, in the other between conflicting facts. The identity of the
self, which Locke asserts, is one of ‘real being,’ and this is
found to lie in consciousness, in apparent conflict with the fact
that consciousness is a succession, of which ‘no two parts exist
together.’ There is no such conflict, it will be said, between the
_idea_ of a conscious being, who is the same yesterday, to-day, and
for ever--the correspondence to which of any reality is a farther
question--and the _fact_ of our consciousness being in succession.
Allowing for the moment the validity of this distinction, we will
consider first the difficulties that attach to Locke’s account of the
idea of God, as an idea.
Locke’s account of this idea.
137. This idea, with him, is a ‘complex idea of substance.’ It is
the idea each man has of the ‘thinking thing within him, enlarged
to infinity.’ It is beset then in the first place with all the
difficulties which we have found to belong to his doctrine of
substance generally and of the thinking substance in particular.
[1] These need not be recalled in detail. When God is the thinking
substance they become more obvious. It is the antithesis to ‘material
substance,’ as the source of ideas of sensation, that alone with
Locke gives a meaning to ‘thinking substance,’ as the source of ideas
of reflection: and if, as we have seen, the antithesis is untenable
when it is merely the source of human ideas that is in question,
much more must it be so in regard to God, to whom any opposition
of material substance must be a limitation of his perfect nature.
Of the generic element in the above definition, then, no more need
here be said. It is the qualification of ‘enlargement to infinity,’
by which the idea of man as a thinking substance is represented as
becoming the idea of God, that is the special difficulty now before
us. Of this Locke writes as follows:--‘The complex idea we have
of God is made up of the simple ones we receive from reflection.
If I find that I know some few things, and some of them, or all
perhaps, imperfectly, I can frame an idea of knowing twice as many:
which I can double again as often as I can add to number, and thus
enlarge my ideas of knowledge by extending its comprehension to all
things existing or possible. The same I can do of knowing them more
perfectly, _i.e._ all their qualities, powers, causes, consequences,
and relations; and thus frame the idea of infinite or boundless
knowledge. The same also may be done of power till we come to that
we call infinite; and also of the duration of existence without
beginning or end; and so frame the idea of an eternal being. ...
All which is done by enlarging the simple ideas we have taken from
the operation of our own minds by reflection, or by our senses from
exterior things, to that vastness to which infinity can extend them.
For it is infinity which joined to our ideas of existence, power,
knowledge, &c., makes that complex idea whereby we represent to
ourselves the supreme being’ (Book II. chap. xxiii. sec. 33--35).
What is meant by this ‘joining of infinity’ to our ideas?