namely, from there being something now to there having been something
from eternity--must be differently estimated according to the meaning
attached to ‘something’ and ‘from eternity.’ If the existence of
something means the occurrence of an event, of this undoubtedly
it can always be said that it follows another event, nor to this
sequence can any limit be supposed, for a first event would not be
an event at all. It would be a contingency contingent upon nothing.
Thus understood, the argument from a something now to a something
from eternity is merely a statement of the infinity of time according
to that notion of infinity, as a ‘progressus ad indefinitum,’ which
we have already seen to be Locke’s. [1] It is the exact reverse of
an argument to a creation or a first cause. If we try to change
its character by a supplementary consideration that infinity in
the series of events is inconceivable, the rejoinder will be that
a first event is not for that reason any less of a contradiction,
and that the infinity which Locke speaks of only professes to be a
negative idea, representing the impossibility of conceiving a first
event (Book II. chap. xvii. sec. 13, &c.). In truth, however, when
Locke speaks of ‘something from eternity’ he does not mean--what
would clearly be no God at all--a series of events to which, because
_of events_, and therefore in time, no limit can be supposed; but a
being which is neither event nor series of events, to which there is
no before or after. The inference to such a being is not of a kind
with the transition from one event to another habitually associated
with it; and if this be the true account of reasoning from effect to
cause, no such reasoning can yield the result which Locke requires.
As we have seen, however, this is not his account of it, [2] however
legitimately it may follow from his general doctrine.
[1] See above, paragraph 138.
[2] See above, paragraph 68.
... and how ‘cause’.
149. The inference of cause with him is the inference from a change
to something having power to produce it. [1] The value of this
definition lies not in the notion of efficient power, but in that
of an order of nature, which it involves. If instead of ‘something
having power to produce it’ we read ‘something that accounts for the
change,’ it expresses the inference on which all science rests, but
which is as far as possible from being merely a transition from one
event to another that usually precedes it. An event, interpreted as
a change of something that remains constant, is no longer a mere
event. It is no longer merely in time, a present which next moment
becomes a past. It takes its character from relation to the thing or
system of things of which it is an altered appearance, but which in
itself is always the same. Only in virtue of such a relation does it
require to be accounted for, to be referred to a ‘cause’ which is in
truth the conception that holds together or reconciles the endless
flux of events with eternal unity. The cause of a ‘phenomenon,’ even
according to the authoritative exponent of the Logic which believes
itself to follow Hume, is the ‘sum total of its conditions.’ In its
fulness, that is, it is simply that system of things, conceived
explicitly, of which there must already have been an implicit
conception in order that the event might be regarded as a change
and thus start the search for a cause. An event in time, apart from
reference to something not in time, could suggest no enquiry into
the sum of its conditions. Upon occurrence of a certain feeling
there might indeed be spontaneous recollection of a feeling usually
precedent, spontaneous expectation of another usually sequent. But
such association of feelings can never explain that conception of
cause in virtue of which, when accounting for a phenomenon, we set
aside the event which in our actual experience has usually preceded
it, for one which we only find to precede it in the single case of
a crucial experiment. That we do so shows that it is not because of
antecedence in time, however apparently uniform, that an educated man
reckons a certain event to be the cause of another, but that, because
of its sole sufficiency under the sum of known conditions to account
for the given event, he decides it to be its uniform antecedent,
however much ordinary appearances may tell to the contrary. Thus,
though he may still strangely define cause as a uniformly antecedent
event (in spite of its being a definition that would prevent him
from speaking of gravity as the cause of the fall of a stone), it
is clear that by such event he means one determined by a complex of
conditions in an unchanging universe. These conditions, again, he may
speak of as contingencies, _i.e._ as events contingent upon other
events in endless series, but he must add ‘contingent in accordance
with the uniformity of nature’--in other words, he must determine the
contingencies by relation to what is not contingent; he must suppose
nature unchanging, though our experience of it through sensation
be a ‘progressus ad indefinitum’--if he is to allow a possibility
of knowledge at all. In short, if events were merely events,
feelings that happen to me now and next moment are over, no ‘law
of causation’ and therefore no knowledge would be possible. If the
knowledge founded on this law actually exists, then the ‘argumentum
a contingentiâ mundi’ rightly understood--the ‘inference’ from
nature to a being neither in time nor contingent but self-dependent
and eternal, that constant reality of which events are the changing
appearances--is valid because the conception of nature, of a
world to be known, already implies such a being. To the rejoinder
that implication in the conception of nature does not prove real
existence, the answer must be the question. What meaning has real
existence, the antithesis of illusion, except such as is equivalent
to this conception?
[1] cf. Book II. chap. xxvi. sec. 1, and chap. xxi. sec. 1.
The world which is to prove an eternal God must be itself eternal.
150. The value, then, of Locke’s demonstration of the existence of
God, as an argument from there being something now to an eternal
being from which the real existence that we know ‘has all which is in
and belongs to it,’ depends on our converting it into the ‘argumentum
a contingentiâ mundi,’ stated as above. In other words, it depends on
our interpreting it in a manner which may be warranted by his rough
account of causation, and by one of the incompatible views of the
real that we have found in him, [1] but which is inconsistent with
his opposition of reality to the work of the mind, and his reduction
of it to ‘particular existence,’ as well as with his ordinary view
that ‘infinite’ and ‘eternal’ can represent only a ‘progressus ad
indefinitum.’ If by ‘real existence corresponding to an idea’ is
meant its presentation in a particular ‘here and now,’ an attempt
to find a real existence of God can bring us to nothing but such a
contradiction in terms as a first event. To prove it from the real
existence of the self is to prove one impossibility from another.
If, on the other hand, real existence implies the determination
of our ideas by an order of nature--if it means ideas ‘in ordine
ad universum’ (to use a Baconian phrase), in distinction from ‘in
ordine ad nos’--then the argument from a present to an eternal real
existence is valid, but simply in the sense that the present is
already real, and ‘has all that is in and belongs to it,’ only in
virtue of the relation to the eternal.
[1] See above, paragraphs 49 and 91.
But will the God, whose existence is so proven, be a thinking being?
151. This, it may be said, is to vindicate Locke’s ‘proof’ only
by making it Pantheistic. It gives us an eternity of nature, but
not God. Our present concern, however, is not with the distinction
between Pantheism and true Theism, but with the exposition of Locke’s
doctrine according to the only development by which it can be made
to show the real existence of an eternal being at all. It is only
by making the most of certain Cartesian elements that appear in his
doctrine, irreconcileable with its general purport, that we can find
fair room in it for such a being, even as the system of nature.
Any attempt to exhibit (in Hegelian phrase) ‘Spirit as the truth
of nature,’ would be to go wholly beyond our record; yet without
this the ‘ens realissimum’ cannot be the God whose existence Locke
believes himself to prove--a _thinking_ being from whom matter and
motion are derived, but in whom they are not. It is true that,
according to the context, it is the real existence of the self from
which that of the eternal being is proved. This is because, in the
Fourth Book, where the ‘proof’ occurs, following the new train of
enquiry started by the definition of knowledge, Locke has for the
time left in abeyance his fundamental doctrine that all simple ideas
are types of reality, and is writing as if ‘my own real existence’
were the only one known with intuitive certainty. This, however,
makes no essential difference in the effect of his argument. The
given existence, from which the divine is proved, is treated
expressly as _both_ ‘material and cogitative:’ nor, since according
to Locke the world is both and man is both, and even the ‘thinking
thing’ takes its content from impressions made by matter, could it be
otherwise. To have taken thought by itself as the basis of the proof
would have been to leave the other part of the world, as he conceived
it, to be referred to another God. The difficulty then arises, either
that there is no inference possible from the nature of the effect
to the nature of the eternal being, its cause; in which case no
attribute whatever can be asserted of the latter: or that to it too,
like the effect, matter as well as thought must belong.
Yes, according to the true notion of the relation between thought and
matter.
152. As we have seen, neither of these alternative views is really
met by Locke. To the former we may reply that the relation between
two events, of which neither has anything in common with the other,
but which we improperly speak of as effect and cause (_e.g._ death
and a sunstroke), has no likeness to that which we have explained
between the world in its contingency and the world as an eternal
system--a relation according to which the cause is the effect in
unity. Whatever is part of the reality of the world must belong, it
would seem, to the ‘ens realissimum,’ its cause. We are thus thrown
back on the other horn of the dilemma. Is not matter part of the
reality of the world? This is a question to which the method of
observing the individual consciousness can give none but a delusive
answer. A true answer cannot be given till for this method has been
substituted the enquiry, How knowledge is possible, and it has been
found that it is only possible as the progressive actualisation in
us of a self-consciousness in itself complete, and which in its
completeness includes the world as its object. From the point of view
thus attained the question as to matter will be, How is it related to
this self-consciousness?--a question to which the answer must vary
according to what is understood by ‘matter.’ If it means the abstract
opposite of thought--that which is supposed void of all determination
that comes of thinking--we must pronounce it simply a delusion, the
creation of self-consciousness in one stage of its communication to
us. If it means the world as in space and time, this we may allow to
be real enough as a stage in the process by which self-consciousness
constitutes reality. Thus understood, we may speak of it roughly as
part of the ‘ens realissimum’ which the complete self-consciousness,
or God, includes as its object, without any limitation of the divine
perfectness. The limitation only seems to arise so far as we, being
ourselves (as our knowledge and morality testify), though formally
self-conscious, yet parts of this partial world, interpret it amiss
and ascribe to it a reality, in abstraction from the self-conscious
subject, which it only derives from relation to it. Thus while on
the one hand it is the presence in us of God, as the self-conscious
source of reality, that at once gives us the idea of God and of an
eternal self, and renders superfluous the further question as to
their real existence; on the other hand it is because, for all this
presence, we are but emerging from nature, of which as animals we are
parts, that to us there must seem an incompatibility of existence
between God and matter, between the self and the flux of events which
makes our life. This necessary illusion is our bondage, but when the
source of illusion is known, the bondage is already being broken.
Locke’s antinomies--Hume takes one side of them as true.
153. We have now sufficiently explored the system which it was Hume’s
mission to try to make consistent with itself. We have found that it
is governed throughout by the antithesis between what is given to
consciousness--that in regard to which the mind is passive--as the
supposed real on the one side, and what is ‘invented,’ ‘created,’
‘superinduced’ by the mind on the other: while yet this ‘real’ in all
its forms, as described by Locke, has turned out to be constituted by
such ideas as, according to him, are not given but invented. Stripped
of these superinductions, nothing has been found to remain of it
but that of which nothing can be said--a chaos of unrelated, and
therefore unmeaning, _individua_. Turning to the theory of the mind
itself, the source of the superinduction, we have found this to be a
reduplication of the prolonged inconsistency which forms the theory
of the ‘real.’ It impresses itself with that which, according to the
other theory, is the impress of matter, and it really exists as that
which it itself invents. The value of Hume’s philosophy lies in its
being an attempt to carry out the antithesis more rigorously--to
clear the real, whether under the designation of mind or of its
object, of all that could not be reckoned as given in feelings which
occur to us ‘whether we will or no.’ The consequence is a splendid
failure, a failure which it might have been hoped would have been
taken as a sufficient proof that a theory, which starts from that
antithesis, cannot even be stated without implicitly contradicting
itself.
Hume’s scepticism fatal to his own premises. This derived from
Berkeley.
154. Such a doctrine--a doctrine founded on the testimony of
the senses, which ends by showing that the senses testify to
nothing--cannot be criticised step by step according to the order in
which its author puts it, for its characteristic is that, in order
to state itself, it has to take for granted popular notions which it
afterwards shows to be unmeaning. Its power over ordinary thinkers
lies just in this, that it arrives at its destructive result by
means of propositions which every one believes, but to the validity
of which its result is really fatal. An account of our primitive
consciousness, which derives its plausibility from availing itself of
the conceptions of cause and substance, is the basis of the argument
which reduces these conceptions to words misunderstood. It cannot,
therefore, be treated by itself, as it stands in the first part of
the Treatise on the Understanding, but must be taken in connection
with Part IV., especially with the section on ‘Scepticism with regard
to the Senses;’ not upon the plan of discrediting a principle by
reference to the ‘dangerous’ nature of its consequences, but because
the final doctrine brings out the inconsistencies lurking in that
assumed to begin with. On this side of his scepticism Hume mainly
followed the orthodox Berkeley, of whose criticism of Locke, made
with a very different purpose, some account must first be given.
The connection between the two authors is instructive in many ways;
not least as showing that when the most pious theological purpose
expresses itself in a doctrine resting on an inadequate philosophical
principle, it is the principle and not the purpose that will regulate
the permanent effect of the doctrine.
Berkeley’s religious interest in making Locke consistent.
155. Berkeley’s treatises, we must remember, though professedly
philosophical, really form a theological polemic. He wrote as the
champion of orthodox Christianity against ‘mathematical atheism,’
and, like others of his order, content with the demolition of the
rival stronghold, did not stay to enquire whether his own untempered
mortar could really hold together the fabric of knowledge and
rational religion which he sought to maintain. He found practical
ungodliness and immorality excusing themselves by a theory of
‘materialism’--a theory which made the whole conscious experience of
man dependent upon ‘unperceiving matter.’ This, whatever it might
be, was not an object which man could love or reverence, or to
which he could think of himself as accountable. Berkeley, full of
devout zeal for God and man, and not without a tincture of clerical
party-spirit (as appears in his heat against Shaftesbury, whom he
ought to have regarded as a philosophical yoke-fellow), felt that
it must be got rid of. He saw, or thought he saw, that the ‘new
way of ideas’ had only to be made consistent with itself, and the
oppressive shadow must vanish. Ideas, according to that new way (or,
to speak less ambiguously, feelings) make up our experience, and
they are not matter. Let us get rid, then, of the self-contradictory
assumption that they are either copies of matter--copies of that,
of which it is the sole and simple differentia that it is not an
idea, or its effects--effects of that which can only be described
as the unknown opposite of the only efficient power with which we
are acquainted--and what becomes of the philosopher’s blind and
dead substitute for the living and knowing God? It was one thing,
however, to show the contradictions involved in Locke’s doctrine of
matter, another effectively to replace it. To the latter end Berkeley
cannot be said to have made any permanent contribution. That explicit
reduction of ideas to feelings ‘particular in time,’ which was his
great weapon of destruction, was incompatible with his doing so.
He adds nothing to the philosophy, which he makes consistent with
itself, while by making it consistent he empties it of three parts of
its suggestiveness. His doctrine, in short, is merely Locke purged,
and Locke purged is no Locke.
What is meant by relation of mind and matter?
156. The question which he mainly dealt with may be stated in general
terms as that of the relation between the mind and the external
world. Under this general statement, however, are covered several
distinct questions, the confusion between which has been a great
snare for philosophers--questions as to the relations _(a)_ between
a sensitive and non-sensitive body, _(b)_ between thought and its
object, _(c)_ between thought and something only qualified as the
negation of thought. The last question, it will be observed, is what
the second becomes upon a certain notion being formed of what the
object of thought must be. Upon this notion being discarded a further
question _(d)_, also covered by the above general statement, must
still remain as to the relation between thought, as in each man, and
the world which he does not make, but which, in some sort, makes
him what he is. In what follows, these questions, for the sake of
brevity, will be referred to symbolically.
Confusions involved in Locke’s materialism.
157. Locke’s doctrine of matter, as we have seen, involves a
confusion between _(a)_ and _(b)_. The feeling of touch in virtue of
an intellectual interpretation--_intellectual_ because implying the
action of the mind as (according to Locke) the source of ideas of
relation--becomes the idea of solidity, _i.e._ the idea of a relation
between bodies in the way of impulse and resistance. But the function
of the intellect in constituting the relation is ignored. Under cover
of the ambiguous ‘idea,’ which stands alike for a nervous irritation
and the intellectual interpretation thereof, the feeling of touch
and conception of solidity are treated as one and the same. Thus the
true _conceived_ outwardness of body to body--an outwardness which
thought, as the source of relations, can alone constitute--becomes
first an imaginary _felt_ outwardness of body to the organs of
touch, and then, by a further fallacy--these organs being confused
with the mind--an outwardness of body to mind, which we need only
kick a stone to be sure of. Meanwhile the consideration of question
_(d)_ necessitates the belief that the real world does not come and
go with each man’s fleeting consciousness, and no distinction being
recognised between consciousness as fleeting and consciousness as
permanent, or between feeling and thought, the real world comes to
be regarded as the absolute opposite of thought and its work. This
opposition combines with the supposed externality of body to mind to
give the notion that body is the real. The qualities which ‘the mind
finds inseparable from body’ thus become qualities which would exist
all the same ‘whether there were a perceiving mind or no,’ and are
primarily real; while such as consist in our feelings, though real
in so far as, ‘not being of our own making, they imply the action
of things without us,’ are yet only secondarily so because this
action is relative to something which is not body. Then, finally, by
a renewed confusion of the relation between thought and its object
with that between body and body, qualities, which are credited with
a primary reality as independent of and antithetical to the mind,
are brought within it again as ideas. They are supposed to copy
themselves upon it by impact and impression; and that not in touch
merely, but (visual feelings being interpreted by help of the same
conception) in sight also.
Two ways of dealing with it. Berkeley chooses the most obvious.
158. Such ‘materialism’ invites two different methods of attack.
On the one hand its recognised principle, that all intellectual
‘superinduction’ upon simple feeling is a departure from the real,
may be insisted on, and it may be shown that it is only by such
superinduction that simple feeling becomes a feeling of body. Matter,
then, with all its qualities, is a fiction except so far as these
can be reduced to simple feelings. Such in substance was Berkeley’s
short method with the materialists. In his early life it seemed
to him sufficient for the purposes of orthodox ‘spiritualism,’
because, having posed the materialist, he took the moral and
spiritual attributes of God as ‘revealed,’ without enquiring into the
possibility of such revelation to a merely sensitive consciousness.
As he advanced, other questions, fatal to the constructive value of
his original method, began to force themselves upon him. Granting
that intellectual superinduction = fiction, how is the fiction
possible to a mind which cannot originate? Exclude from reality all
that such fiction constitutes, and what remains to be real? These
questions, however, though their effect on his mind appears in the
later sections of his ‘Siris,’ he never systematically pursued. He
thus missed the true method of attack on materialism--the only one
that does not build again that which it destroys--the method which
allows that matter is real but only so in virtue of that intellectual
superinduction upon feeling without which there could be for us no
reality at all: that thus it is indeed opposed to thought, but only
by a position which is thought’s own act. For the development of
such views Berkeley had not patience in his youth nor leisure in his
middle life. Whatever he may have suggested, all that he logically
achieved was an exposure of the equivocation between feeling and felt
body; and of this the next result, as appears in Hume, was a doctrine
which indeed delivers mind from dependence on matter, but only by
reducing it in effect to a succession of feelings which cannot know
themselves.
His account of the relation between visible and tangible extension.
We do not see bodies without the mind ...