following.
‘Infinity,’ according to Locke’s account of it, only applicable to
God, if God has parts.
138. ‘Finite and infinite,’ says Locke, ‘are looked upon by the mind
as the modes of quantity, and are to be attributed primarily only
to those things that have parts and are capable of increase by the
addition of any the least part’ (Book II. chap. xvii. sec. 1). Such
are ‘duration and expansion.’ The applicability then of the term
‘infinite’ in its proper sense to God implies that he has expansion
or duration; and it is characteristic of Locke that though he was
clear about the divisibility of expansion and duration, as the above
passage shows, he has no scruple about speaking of them as attributes
of God, of whom as being ‘in his own essence simple and uncompounded’
he would never have spoken as ‘having parts.’ ‘Duration is the idea
we have of perishing distance, of which no parts exist together
but follow each other in succession; as expansion is the idea of
lasting distance, all whose parts exist together.’ Yet of duration
and expansion, thus defined, he says that ‘in their full extent’
(_i.e._ as severally ‘eternity and immensity’) ‘they belong only to
the Deity’ (Book II. chap. xv. secs. 8 and 12). ‘A full extent’ of
them, however, is in the nature of the case impossible. With a last
moment duration would cease to be duration; without another space
beyond it space would not be space. Locke is quite aware of this.
When his conception of infinity is not embarrassed by reference to
God, it is simply that of unlimited ‘addibility’--a juxtaposition
of space to space, a succession of time upon time, to which we can
suppose no limit so long as we consider space and time ‘as having
parts, and thus capable of increase by the addition of parts,’ and
which therefore excludes the very possibility of a totality or
‘full extent’ (Book II. chap. xvi. sec. 8, and xvii. sec. 13). The
question, then, whether infinity of expansion and duration in this,
its only proper, sense can be predicated of the perfect God, has
only to be asked in order to be answered in the negative. Nor do we
mend the matter if, instead of ascribing such infinity to God, we
substitute another phrase of Locke’s, and say that He ‘fills eternity
and immensity’ (Book II. chap. xv. sec. 8). Put for eternity and
immensity their proper equivalents according to Locke, viz. unlimited
‘addibility’ of times and spaces, and the essential unmeaningness of
the phrase becomes apparent.
Can it be applied to him ‘figuratively’ in virtue of the indefinite
number of His acts?
139. In regard to any other attributes of God than those of his
duration and expansion, [1] Locke admits that the term ‘infinite’ is
applied ‘figuratively’ (Book II. chap. xvii. sec. 1). ‘When we call
them (_e.g._ His power, wisdom, and goodness) infinite, we have no
other idea of this infinity but what carries with it some reflection
on, or intimation of, that number or extent of the acts or objects of
God’s wisdom, &c., which can never be supposed so great or so many
which these attributes will not always surmount, let us multiply them
in our thoughts as far as we can with all the infinity of endless
number.’ What determination, then, according to this passage, of our
conception of God’s goodness is represented by calling it infinite?
Simply its relation to a number of acts and objects of which the sum
can always be increased, and which, just for that reason, cannot
represent the perfect God. Is it then, it may be asked, of mere
perversity that when thinking of God under attributes that are not
quantitative, and therefore do not carry with them the necessity of
incompleteness, we yet go out of our way by this epithet ‘infinite’
to subject them to the conditions of quantity and its ‘progressus ad
infinitum?’
[1] In the passages referred to, Locke speaks of ‘duration and
_ubiquity_.’ The proper counterpart, however, of ‘duration’ according
to him is ‘expansion’--this being to space what duration is to
time. Under the embarrassment, however, which necessarily attends
the ascription of expansion to God, he tacitly substitutes for it
‘ubiquity,’ a term which does not match ‘duration,’ and can only mean
presence throughout the _whole_ of expansion, presence throughout the
whole of that which does not admit of a whole.
An act, finite in its nature, remains so, however often repeated.
140. Retaining Locke’s point of view, our answer of course must
be that our ideas of the Divine attributes, being primarily our
own ideas of reflection, are either ideas of the single successive
acts that constitute our inward experience or formed from these
by abstraction and combination. In parts our experience is given,
in parts only can we recall it. Our complex or abstract ideas are
symbols which only take a meaning so far as we resolve them into
the detached impressions which in the sum they represent, or recall
the objects, each with its own before and after, from which they
were originally taken. So it is with the ideas of wisdom, power, and
goodness, which from ourselves we transfer to God. They represent an
experience given in succession and piece-meal--a numerable series of
acts and events, which like every other number is already infinite
in the only sense of the word of which Locke can give a clear
account, as susceptible of indefinite repetition (Book II. chap.
vi. sec. 8.) When we ‘join infinity’ to these ideas, then, unless
some other meaning is given to infinity, we merely state explicitly
what was originally predicable of the experience they embody. Nor
will it avail us much to shift the meaning of infinite, as Locke
does when he applies it to the divine attributes, from that of
indefinite ‘addibility’ to that of exceeding any sum which indefinite
multiplication can yield us. Let us suppose an act of consciousness,
from which we have taken an abstract idea of an attribute--say of
wisdom--to be a million times repeated; our idea of the attribute
will not vary with the repetition. Nor if, having supposed a limit
to the repetition, we then suppose the act indefinitely repeated
beyond this limit and accordingly speak of the attribute as infinite,
will our idea of the attribute vary at all from what it was to
begin with. Its content will be the same. There will be nothing
to be said of it which could not have been said of the experience
from which it was originally abstracted, and of which the essential
characteristic--that it is one of a series of events of which no two
can be present together--is incompatible with divine perfection.
God only infinite in a sense in which time is _not_ infinite, and
which Locke could not recognize ...
141. It appears then that it is the subjection of our experience
to the form of time which unfits the ideas derived from it for
any combination into an idea of God; nor by being ‘joined with
an infinity,’ which itself merely means the absence of limit to
succession in time, is their unfitness in any way modified. On the
contrary, by such conjunction from being latent it becomes patent.
In one important passage Locke becomes so far aware of this that,
though continuing to ascribe infinite duration to God, he does it
under qualifications inconsistent with the very notion of duration.
‘Though we cannot conceive any duration without succession, nor put
it together in our thoughts that any being does now exist to-morrow
or possess at once more than the present moment of duration; yet
we can conceive the eternal duration of the Almighty far different
from that of man, or any other finite being: because man comprehends
not in his knowledge or power all past and future things ... what
is once past he can never recall, and what is yet to come he cannot
make present. ... God’s infinite duration being accompanied with
infinite knowledge and power, he sees all things past and to come’
(Book II. chap. xv. sec 12). It is clear that in this passage
‘infinite’ changes its meaning; that it is used in one sense--the
proper sense according to Locke--when applied to duration, and in
some wholly different sense, not a figurative one derived from the
former, when applied to knowledge and power; and that the infinite
duration of God, as ‘accompanied by infinite power and knowledge,’ is
no longer in any intelligible sense duration at all. It is no longer
‘the idea we have of perishing distance,’ derived from our fleeting
consciousness in which ‘what is once past can never be recalled,’ but
the attribute of a consciousness of which, if it is to be described
in terms of time at all, in virtue of its ‘seeing all things past
and to come’ at once, it can only be said that it ‘does now exist
to-morrow.’ If it be asked, What meaning can we have in speaking
of such a consciousness? into what simple ideas can it be resolved
when all our ideas are determined by a before and after?--the answer
must be, Just as much or as little meaning as we have when, in like
contradiction to the successive presentation of ideas, we speak
of a self, constituted by consciousness, as identical with itself
throughout the years of our life.
... the same sense in which the self is infinite.
142. A more positive answer it is not our present business to give.
Our concern is to show that ‘eternity and immensity,’ according to
any meaning that Locke recognises, or that the observation of our
ideas could justify, do not express any conception that can carry
us beyond the perpetual incompleteness of our experience; but that
in his doctrine of personal identity he does admit a conception
which no observation of our ideas of reflection--since these are
in succession and could not be observed if they were not--can
account for; and that it is just this conception, the conception of
a constant presence of consciousness to itself incompatible with
conditions of space and time, that can alone give such meaning to
‘eternal and infinite’ as can render them significant epithets of
God. Such a conception (we say it with respect) Locke admits when
it is wanted without knowing it. It must indeed always underlie
the idea of God, however alien to it may be attempted adaptations
of the other ‘infinite’--the _progressus ad indefinitum_ in space
and time--by which, as with Locke, the idea is explained. But it is
one for which the psychological method of observing what happens in
oneself cannot account, and which therefore this method, just so far
as it is thoroughly carried out, must tend to discard. That which
happens, whether we reckon it an inward or an outward, a physical or
a psychical event--and nothing but an event can, properly speaking,
be observed--is as such in time. But the presence of consciousness to
itself, though, as the true ‘punctum stans,’ [1] it is the condition
of the observation of events in time, is not such an event itself.
In the ordinary and proper sense of ‘fact,’ it is not a fact at all,
nor yet a possible abstraction from facts. To the method, then, which
deals with phrases about the mind by ascertaining the observable
‘mental phenomena’ which they represent, it must remain a mere
phrase, to be explained as the offspring of other phrases whose real
import has been misunderstood. It can only recover a significance
when this method, as with Hume, has done its worst, and is found to
leave the possibility of knowledge, without such ‘punctum stans,’
still unaccounted for.
[1] Locke, Essay II. chap. xvii. sec. 16.
How do I know my own real existence?--Locke’s answer.
143. We have finally to notice the way in which Locke maintains
our knowledge of the ‘real existence’ of thinking substance, both
as that which ‘we call our mind,’ and as God. Of the former first.
‘Experience convinces us that we have an intuitive knowledge of our
own existence.... If I know I feel pain, it is evident I have as
certain perception of my own existence as of the pain I feel. If I
know I doubt, I have as certain perception of the existence of the
thing doubting as of that thought which I call doubt’ (Book IV. chap.
ix. sec. 3). Upon this the remark must occur that the existence of a
painful feeling is one thing; the existence of a permanent subject,
remaining the same with itself, when the feeling is over, and
through the succession of other feelings, quite another. The latter
is what is meant by my own existence, of which undoubtedly there
is a ‘certain perception,’ if the feeling of pain has become the
‘knowledge that I feel pain,’ and if by the ‘I’ is understood such
a permanent subject. That the feeling, as ‘simple idea,’ is taken
to begin with by Locke for the knowledge that I feel something, we
have sufficiently seen. [1] Just as, in virtue of this conversion,
it gives us ‘assurance’ of the real existence of the outer thing or
material substance on the one side, so of the thinking substance
on the other. It carries with it the certainty at once that I have
a feeling, and that something makes me feel. But whereas, after
the conversion of feeling into a felt thing has been throughout
assumed--as indeed otherwise feeling could not be spoken of--a
further question is raised, which causes much embarrassment, as to
the real existence of such thing; on the contrary, the reference of
the feeling to the _thinking_ thing is taken as carrying with it the
real existence of such thing. The question whether it really exists
or no is only once raised, and then summarily settled by the sentence
we have quoted, while the reality whether of existence or of essence
on the part of the outward thing, as we have found to our cost, is
the main burden of the Third and Fourth Books.
[1] See above, paragraphs 26 and following, and 59 and following.
It cannot be known consistently with Locke’s doctrine of real
existence.
144. In principle, indeed, the answer to both questions, as given
by Locke, is the same: for the reasons which he alleges for being
assured of the ‘existence of a thing without us corresponding to
the idea of sensation’ reduce themselves, as we have seen, to the
reiteration of that reference of the idea to a thing, which according
to him is originally involved in it, and which is but the correlative
of its reference to a subject. This, however, is what he was not
himself aware of. To him the outer and the inner substance were
separate and independent things, for each of which the question of
real existence had to be separately settled. To us, according to the
view already indicated, it is the presence of self-consciousness, or
thought as an object-to-itself, to feeling that converts it into a
relation between feeling thing and felt thing, between ‘cogitative
and incogitative substance.’ The source of substantiation upon
each side being the same, the question as to the real existence of
either substance must be the same, and equally so the answer to it.
It is an answer that must be preceded by a counter question.--Does
real existence mean existence independent of thought? To suppose
such existence is to suppose an impossibility--one which is not the
less so though the existence be supposed material, if ‘material’
means in ‘space’ and space itself is a relation constituted by the
mind, ‘bringing things to and setting them by one another.’ Yet is
the supposition itself but a mode of the logical substantiation
we have explained, followed by an imaginary abstraction of the
work of the mind from this, its own creation. Does real existence
mean a possible feeling? If so, it is as clear that what converts
feeling into a relation between felt thing and feeling subject
cannot in this sense be real, as it is that without such conversion
no distinction between real and fantastic would be possible. Does
it, finally, mean individuality, in such a sense that unless I can
say this or that is substance, thinking or material, substance does
not really exist? If it does, the answer is that substance, being
constituted by a relation by which self-conscious thought is for ever
determining feelings, and which every predication represents, cannot
be identified with any ‘this or that,’ though without it there could
be no ‘this or that’ at all.
But he ignores this in treating of the self.
145. We have already found that Locke accepts each of the above as
determinations of real existence, and that, though in spite of them
he labours to maintain the real existence of outward things, he is
so far faithful to them as to declare real essence unknowable. In
answering the question as to ‘his own existence’ he wholly ignores
them. He does not ask how the real existence of the thinking Ego
sorts with his ordinary doctrine that the real is what would be in
the world whether there were a mind or no; or its real identity,
present throughout the particulars of experience, with his ordinary
doctrine of the fictitiousness of ‘generals.’ A real existence of the
mind, however, founded on the logical necessity of substantiation,
rests on a shifting basis, so long as by the mind is understood a
thinking thing, different in each man, to which his inner experience
is referred as accidents to a substance. The same law of thought
which compels such reference requires that the thinking thing in
its turn, as that which is born grows and dies, be referred as an
accident to some ulterior substance. ‘A fever or fall may take away
my reason or memory, or both; and an apoplexy leave neither sense
nor understanding, no, nor life.’ [1] Just as each outer thing turns
out to be a ‘retainer to something else,’ so is it with the inner
thing. Such a dependent being cannot be an ultimate substance; nor
can any natural agents to which we may trace its dependence really
be so either. The logical necessity of further substantiation would
affect them equally, appearing in the supposition of an unknown
something beyond, which makes them what they are. It is under such
logical necessity that Locke, in regard to all the substances which
he commonly speaks of as ultimate--God, spirit, body--from time
to time gives warning of something still ulterior and unknowable,
whether under the designation of substance or real essence (Book II.
chap. xxiii. secs. 30 and 36). If, then, it will be said, substance
is but the constantly-shifting result of a necessity of thought--so
shifting that there is nothing of which we can finally say, ‘This
is substance, not accident’--there can be no evidence of the ‘real
existence’ of a permanent Ego in the necessary substantiation therein
of my inner experience.
[1] Locke, Book III. chap. vi. sec. 4.
Sense in which the self is truly real.
146. The first result of such a consideration in a reader of Locke
will naturally be an attempt to treat the inner synthesis as a
fiction of thought or figure of speech, and to confine real existence
to single feelings in the moments of their occurrence. This, it
will seem, is to be faithful to Locke’s own clearer mind, as it
frequently emerges from the still-returning cloud of scholasticism.
The final result will rather be the discovery that the single feeling
is nothing real, but that the synthesis of appearances, which alone
for us constitutes reality, is never final or complete: that thus
absolute reality, like ultimate substance, is never to be found by
us--in a thinking as little as in a material thing--belonging as it
does only to that divine self-consciousness, of which the presence
in us is the source and bond of the ever-growing synthesis called
knowledge, but which, because it is the source of that synthesis and
not one of its partial results, is neither real nor knowable in the
same sense as is any other object. It is this presence which alone
gives meaning to ‘proofs of the being of God;’ to Locke’s among
the rest. For it is in a sense true, as he held, that ‘my own real
existence’ is evidence of the existence of God, since the self, in
the only sense in which it is absolutely real or an ultimate subject,
is already God. [1]
[1] See below, paragraph 152.
Locke’s proof of the real existence of God. There must have been
something from eternity to cause what now is.
147. Our knowledge of God’s existence, according to him, is
‘demonstrative,’ based on the ‘intuitive’ knowledge of our own.
Strictly taken, according to his definitions, this must mean that the
agreement of the idea of God with existence is perceived mediately
through the agreement of the idea of self with existence, which is
perceived immediately; that thus the idea of God and the idea of
self ‘agree’. [1] We need not, however, further dwell either on
the contradiction implied in the knowledge of real existence, if
knowledge is a perception of agreement between ideas and if real
existence is the antithesis of ideas; or on the embarrassments which
follow when a definition of reasoning, only really applicable to the
comparison of quantities, is extended to other regions of knowledge.
Locke virtually ignores his definitions in the passage before us. ‘If
we know there is some real being’ (as we do know in the knowledge
of our own existence) ‘and that non-entity cannot produce any real
being, it is an evident demonstration that from eternity there has
been something; since what was not from eternity had a beginning,
and what had a beginning must be produced by something else’ (Book
IV. chap. x. sec. 3). Next as to the qualities of this something
else. ‘What had its being and beginning from another must also have
all that which is in, and belongs to, its being from another too’
(Ibid, sec. 4.). From this is deduced the supreme power and perfect
knowledge of the eternal being upon the principle that whatever is in
the effect must also be in the cause--a principle, however, which has
to be subjected to awkward limitations in order that, while proving
enough, it may not prove too much, it might seem that, according to
it, since the real being, from which as effect the eternal being as
cause is demonstrated, is ‘both material and cogitative’ or ‘made up
of body and spirit,’ matter as well as thought must belong to the
eternal being too. That thought must belong to him, Locke is quite
clear. It is as impossible, he holds, that thought should be derived
from matter, or from matter and motion together, as that something
should be derived from nothing. ‘If we will suppose nothing first
or eternal, matter can never begin to be: if we suppose bare matter
without motion eternal, motion can never begin to be: if we suppose
only matter and motion first or eternal, thought can never begin
to be’ (Book IV. chap. x. sec. 10). The objection which is sure to
occur, that it must be equally impossible for matter to be derived
from thought, he can scarcely be said to face. He takes refuge in the
supreme power of the eternal being, as that which is able to create
matter out of nothing. He does not anticipate the rejoinder to which
he thus lays himself open, that this power in the eternal being to
produce one effect not homogeneous with itself, viz. matter, may
extend to another effect, viz. thought, and that thus the argument
from thought in the effect to thought in the cause becomes invalid,
and nothing but blind power, we know not what, remains as the
attribute of the eternal being. Nor does he remember, when he meets
the objection drawn from the inconceivability of matter being made
out of nothing by saying that what is inconceivable is not therefore
impossible (_ibid_. sec. 19), that it is simply the inconceivability
of a sequence of something upon nothing that has given him his
‘evident demonstration’ of an eternal being.
[1] See above, paragraphs 25 and 24.
How ‘eternity’ must be understood if this argument is to be valid: