ashamed, if only he had understood and avowed its necessity. Body
is to solidity and to the primary qualities in general simply as a
substance to the relations that determine it; and the ‘circle’ in
question merely represents the logical impossibility of defining
a substance except by relations, and of defining these relations
without presupposing a substance. It was only Locke’s confusion
of the order of logical correlation with the sequence of feelings
in time, that laid him open to the charge of making body and the
ideas of primary qualities, and again the latter ideas and those
of secondary qualities, at once precede and follow each other. To
avoid this confusion by recognising the logical order--the order of
intellectual ‘fictions’--as that apart from which the sequence of
feelings would be no order of knowable reality at all, would be of
course impossible for one who took Locke’s antithesis of thought
and fact for granted. The time for that was not yet. A way of
escape had first to be sought in a more strict adherence to Locke’s
identification of the sequence of feelings with the order of reality.
Hence Hume’s attempt, reversing Locke’s derivation of ideas of sense
from primary qualities of body, to derive what with Locke had been
primary qualities, as compound impressions of sense, from simple
impressions and to reduce body itself to a name not for any ‘just
and consistent idea,’ but for a ‘propensity to feign,’ the gradual
product of custom and imagination. The question by which the value of
such derivation and reduction is to be tried is our old one, whether
it is not a tacit conversion of the supposed original impressions
into qualities of body that alone makes them seem to yield the result
required of them. If the Fourth Book of the ‘Treatise on Human
Nature,’ with its elimination of the idea of body, had come before
the second, would not the plausibility of the account of mathematical
ideas contained in the latter have disappeared? And conversely, if
these ideas had been reduced to that which upon elimination of the
idea of body they properly become, would not that ‘propensity to
feign,’ which is to take the place of the excluded idea, be itself
unaccountable?
With Hume ‘body’ logically disappears. What then?
232. ‘After exclusion of colours, sounds, heat and cold, from the
rank of external existences, there remains nothing which can afford
us a just and consistent idea of body.’ Now, no one can ‘exclude
them from the rank of external existences’ more decisively than
Hume. They are impressions, and ‘all impressions are internal and
perishing existences, and appear as such.’ Nor does he shirk the
consequence, that we have no ‘just and consistent idea of body.’ It
is true that we cannot avoid a ‘belief in its existence’--a belief
which according to Hume consists in the supposition of ‘a continued
existence of objects when they no longer appear to the senses, and of
their existence as distinct from the mind and perceptions;’ in other
words, as ‘external to and independent of us.’ This belief, however,
as he shows, is not given by the senses. That we should feel the
existence of an object to be continued when we no longer feel it, is
a contradiction in terms; nor is it less so, that we should feel it
to be distinct from the feeling. We cannot, then, have an impression
of body; and, since we cannot have an idea which does not correspond
to an impression or collection of impressions, it follows that we can
have no idea of it. How the ‘belief in its existence’ is accounted
for by Hume in the absence of any idea of it, is a question to be
considered later. [1] Our present concern is to know whether the idea
of extension can hold its ground when the idea of body is excluded.
[1] See below, paragraph 303, and foll.
Can space survive body? Hume derives idea of it from sight and
feeling. Significance with him of such derivation.
233. ‘The first notion of space and extension,’ he says, ‘is derived
solely from the senses of sight and feeling: nor is there anything
but what is coloured or tangible that has parts disposed after
such a manner as to convey the idea.’ Now, there may be a meaning
of ‘derivation,’ according to which no one would care to dispute
the first clause of this sentence. Those who hold that _really_,
i.e. _for a consciousness to which the distinction between real and
unreal is possible_, there is no feeling except such as is determined
by thought, are yet far from holding that the determination is
arbitrary; that any and every feeling is potentially any and every
conception. Of the feelings to which the visual and tactual nerves
are organic, as they would be for a merely feeling consciousness,
nothing, they hold, can be said; in that sense they are an ἄπειρον;
[1] but for the thinking consciousness, or (which is the same) as
they _really_ are, these feelings do, while those to which other
nerves are organic do not, form the specific possibility of the
conception of space. According to this meaning of the words, all
must admit that ‘the first notion of space and extension is derived
from the senses of sight and feeling;’ though it does not follow
that a repeated or continued activity of either sense is necessary
to the continued presence of the notion. With Hume, however, the
derivation spoken of must mean that the notion of space is, to begin
with, simply a visual or tactual feeling, and that such it remains,
though with indefinite abatement and revival in the liveliness of the
feeling, according to the amount of which it is called ‘impression’
or ‘idea.’ If we supposed him to mean, not that the notion of space
was either a visual or tactual feeling indifferently, but that it
was a compound result of both, [2] we should merely have to meet
a further difficulty as to the possibility of such composition of
feelings when their inward synthesis in a soul, and the outward in a
body, have been alike excluded. In the next clause of the sentence,
however, we find that for visual and tactual feelings there are
quietly substituted ‘coloured and tangible objects, having parts so
disposed as to convey the idea of extension.’ It is in the light of
this latter clause that the uncritical reader interprets the former.
He reads back the plausibility of the one into the other, and, having
done so, finds the whole plausible. Now this plausibility of the
latter clause arises from its implying a three-fold distinction--a
distinction of colour or tangibility on the one side from the
disposition of the parts on the other; a distinction of the colour,
tangibility and disposition of parts alike from an object to which
they belong; and a distinction of this object from the idea that it
conveys. In other words, it supposes a negative answer to the three
following questions:--Is the idea of extension the same as that of
colour or tangibility? Is it possible without reference to something
other than a possible impression? Is the idea of extension itself
extended? Yet to the two latter questions, according to Hume’s
express statements, the answer must be affirmative; nor can he avoid
the affirmative answer to the first, to which he would properly be
brought, except by equivocation.
[1] [Greek ἄπειρον (apeiron) = unlimited, indefinite or infinite. Tr.]
[2] It is not really in this sense that the impression of space
according to Hume is a ‘compound’ one, as will appear below.
It means, in effect, that colour and space are the same, and that
feeling may be extended.
234. The _pièces justificatives_ for this assertion are not far to
seek. Some of them have been adduced already. The idea of space, like
every other idea, must be a ‘copy of an impression.’ [1] To speak of
a feeling in its fainter stage as an ‘image’ of what it was in its
livelier stage may, indeed, seem a curious use of terms; but in this
sense only, according to Hume’s strict doctrine, can the idea of
space be spoken of as an ‘image’ of anything at all. The impression
from which it is derived, _i.e._ the feeling at its liveliest,
cannot properly be so spoken of, for ‘no impression is presented
by the senses as the image of anything distinct, or external, or
independent.’ [2] If no impression is so presented, neither can
any idea, which copies the impression, be so. It can involve no
reference to anything which does not come and go with the impression.
Accordingly no distinction is possible between space on the one hand,
and either the impression or idea of it on the other. All impressions
and ideas that can be said to be of extension must be themselves
extended; and conversely, as Hume puts it, ‘all the qualities of
extension are qualities of a perception.’ It should follow that space
is either a colour or feeling of touch. In the terms which Hume
himself uses with reference to ‘substance,’ ‘if it be perceived by
the eyes, it must be colour; if by the ears, a sound; and so on, of
the other senses.’ As he expressly tells us that it is ‘perceived by
the eyes,’ the conclusion is inevitable.
[1] P. 340 [Book I, part II., sec. III.]
[2] P. 479 [Book I, part IV., sec. II.]
The parts of space are parts of a perception.
235. Hume does not attempt to reject the conclusion directly. He
had too much eye to the appearance of consistency for that. But,
in professing to admit it, he wholly alters its significance. The
passage in question must be quoted at length. ‘The table, which just
now appears to me, is only a perception, and all its qualities are
qualities of a perception. Now, the most obvious of all its qualities
is extension. The perception consists of parts. These parts are so
situated as to afford us the notion of distance and contiguity,
of length, breadth, and thickness. The termination of these three
dimensions is what we call figure. The figure is moveable, separable,
and divisible. Mobility and separability are the distinguishing
properties of extended objects. And, to cut short all disputes, the
very idea of extension is copied from nothing but an impression,
and consequently must perfectly agree to it. To say the idea of
extension agrees to anything is to say it is extended.’ Thus ‘there
are impressions and ideas that are really extended.’ [1]
[1] P. 523 [Book I, part IV., sec. V.]
Yet the parts of space are co-existent not successive.
236. In order to a proper appreciation of this passage it is
essential to bear in mind that Hume, so far as the usages of
language would allow him, ignores all such differences in modes of
consciousness as the Germans indicate by the distinction between
‘Empfindung’ and ‘Vorstellung,’ and by that between ‘Anschauung’
and ‘Begriff;’ or, more properly, that he expressly merges them in
a mode of consciousness for which, according to the most consistent
account that can be gathered from him, the most natural term
would be ‘feeling.’ [1] It is true that Hume himself, admitting a
distinction in the degree of vivacity with which this consciousness
is at different times presented, inclines to restrict the term
‘feeling’ to its more vivacious stage, and to use ‘perception’ as
the more general term, applicable whatever the degree of vivacity
may be. [2] We must not allow him, however, in using this term to
gain the advantage of a meaning which popular theory does, but his
does not, attach to it. ‘Perception’ with him covers ‘idea’ as well
as ‘impression;’ but nothing can be said of idea that cannot be
said of impression, save that it is less lively, nor of impression
that cannot be said of idea, save that it is more so. It is this
explicit reduction of all consciousness virtually, if not in name, to
feeling that brings to the surface the difficulties latent in Locke’s
‘idealism.’ These we have already traced at large; but they may be
summed up in the question, How can feelings, as ‘particular in time’
or (which is the same) in ‘perpetual flux,’ constitute or represent
a world of permanent relations? [3] The difficulty becomes more
obvious, though not more real, when the relations in question are not
merely themselves permanent, like those between natural phenomena,
but are ‘relations between permanent parts,’ like those of space.
It is for this reason that its doctrine about geometry has always
been found the most easily assailable point of the ‘sensational’
philosophy. Locke distinguishes the ideas of space and of duration
as got, the one ‘from the permanent parts of space,’ the other ‘from
the fleeting and perpetually perishing parts of succession.’ [4] He
afterwards prefers the term ‘expansion’ to space, as the opposite
of duration, because it brings out more clearly the distinction
of a relation between permanent parts from that between ‘fleeting
successive parts which never exist together.’ How, then, can a
consciousness consisting simply of ‘fleeting successive parts’ either
be or represent that of which the differentia is that its parts are
permanent and co-exist?
[1] As implying no distinction from, or reference to, a thing causing
and a subject experiencing it. See above, paragraphs 195 and 208, and
the passages there referred to.
[2] ‘To hate, to love, to think, to feel, to see; all this is nothing
but to perceive.’ p. 371 [Book I, part II., sec. IV.]. ‘When I
shut my eyes and _think_ of my chamber, the ideas I form are exact
representations of the impressions I _felt_.’ p. 312 [Book I, part
I., sec. I.].
[3] See above, paragraphs 172 & 176.
[4] Essay Book II. chap. xiv. sec. 1.
Hume cannot make space a ‘perception’ without being false to his own
account of perception;
237. If this crux had been fairly faced by Hume, he must have seen
that the only way in which he could consistently deal with it was
by radically altering, with whatever consequence to the sciences,
Locke’s account of space. As it was, he did not face it, but--whether
intentionally or only in effect--disguised it by availing himself of
the received usages of language, which roughly represent a theory
the exact opposite of his own, to cover the incompatibility between
the established view of the nature of space, and his own reduction
of it to feeling. A very little examination of the passage, quoted
at large above, will show that while in it a profession is made
of identifying extension and a certain sort of perception with
each other, its effect is not really to reduce extension to such a
perception as Hume elsewhere explains all perceptions to be, but
to transfer the recognised properties of extension which with such
reduction would disappear, to something which for the time he chooses
to reckon a perception, but which he can only so reckon at the cost
of contradicting his whole method of dealing with the ideas of God,
the soul, and the world. The passage, in fact, is merely one sample
of the continued shuffle by which Hume on the one hand ascribes to
feeling that intelligible content which it only derives from relation
to objects of thought, and on the other disposes of these objects
because they are not feelings.
... as appears if we put ‘feeling’ for ‘perception’ in the passages
in question.
238. ‘The table, which just now appears to me, is only a perception,
and all its qualities are qualities of a perception. Now, the most
obvious of all its qualities is extension. The perception consists
of parts. These parts are so situated as to afford us the notion
of distance and contiguity, of length, breadth, and thickness,’
&c., &c. If, now, throughout this statement (as according to Hume’s
doctrine we are entitled to do) we write _feeling_ for ‘perception’
and ‘notion,’ it will appear that this table is a feeling, which
has another feeling, called extension, as one of its qualities; and
that this latter feeling consists of parts. These, in turn, must be
themselves feelings, since the parts of which a perception consists
must be themselves perceived, and, being perceived, must, according
to Hume, be themselves perceptions which = feelings. These feelings,
again, afford us other feelings of certain relations--distance and
contiguity, &c.--feelings which, as Hume’s doctrine allows of no
distinction between the feeling and that of which it is the feeling,
must be themselves relations. Thus it would seem that a feeling may
have another feeling as one of its qualities; that the feeling, which
is thus a quality, has other feelings as its co-existent parts; and
that the feelings which are parts ‘afford us’ other feelings which
are relations. Is that sense or nonsense?
To make sense of them, we must take perception to mean perceived
thing,
239. To this a follower of Hume, if he could be brought to admit the
legitimacy of depriving his master of the benefit of synonyms, might
probably reply, that the apparent nonsense only arises from our being
unaccustomed to such use of the term ‘feeling;’ that the table is a
‘bundle of feelings,’ actual and possible, of which the actual one
of sight suggests a lively expectation, easily confused with the
presence, of the others belonging to the other senses; that any one
of these may be considered a quality of the total impression formed
by all; that the feeling thus considered, if it happens to be visual,
may not improperly be said to consist of other feelings, as a whole
consists of parts, since it is the result of impressions on different
parts of the retina, and from a different point of view even itself
to be the relation between the parts, just as naturally as a mutual
feeling of friendship may be said either to consist of the loves of
the two parties to the friendship, or to constitute the relation
between them. Such language represents those modern adaptations of
Hume, which retain his identification of the real with the felt but
ignore his restrictions on the felt. Undoubtedly, if Hume allowed
us to drop the distinction between feeling as it might be for a
merely feeling consciousness, and feeling as it is for a thinking
consciousness, the objection to his speaking of feeling in those
terms, in which it must be spoken of if extension is to be a feeling,
would disappear; but so, likewise, would the objection to speaking of
thought as constitutive of reality. To appreciate his view we must
take feeling not as we really know it--for we cannot know it except
under those conditions of self-consciousness, the logical categories,
which in his attempt to get at feeling, pure and simple, Hume is
consistent enough to exclude--but as it becomes upon exclusion of
all determination by objects which Hume reckons fictitious. What it
would thus become _positively_ we of course cannot say, for of the
unknowable nothing can be said; but we can decide _negatively_ what
it cannot be. Can that in any case be said of it, which must be said
of it if a feeling may be extended, and if extension is a feeling?
Can it be such a quality of an object, so consisting of parts, and
such a relation, as we have found that Hume takes it to be in his
account of the perception of this table?
... which it can only mean as the result of certain ‘fictions’.
240. After having taken leave throughout the earlier part of the
‘Treatise on Human Nature’ to speak in the ordinary way of objects
and their qualities--and otherwise of course he could not have
spoken at all--in the fourth book he seems for the first time to
become aware that his doctrine did not authorise such language.
To perceive qualities of an object is to be conscious of relation
between a subject and object, of which neither perishes with the
moment of perception. Such consciousness is self-consciousness,
and cannot be reduced to any natural observable event, since it is
consciousness of that of which we cannot say ‘Lo, here,’ or ‘Lo,
there,’ ‘it is now but was not then,’ or ‘it was then but is not
now.’ It is therefore something which the spirit of the Lockeian
philosophy cannot assimilate, and which Hume, as the most consistent
exponent of that spirit, most consistently tried to get rid of.
The subject as self, the object as body, he professes to reduce to
figures of speech, to be accounted for as the result of certain
‘propensities to feign:’ nor will he allow that any impression or
idea (and impressions and ideas with him, be it remembered, exhaust
our consciousness) carries with it a reference to an object other
than itself, any more than do pleasure or pain to which ‘in their
nature’ all perceptions correspond. [1] He cannot, indeed, avoid
speaking of the consciousness thus reduced to the level of simple
pain and pleasure, as being that which in fact it can only be when
determined by relation to a self-conscious subject, _i.e._ as itself
an object; but he is so far faithful in his attempt to avoid such
determination, that he does not reckon the object more permanent
than the impression. It, too, is a ‘perishing existence.’ As the
impression disappears with a ‘turn of the eye in its socket,’ so does
the object, which really is the impression, and cannot appear other
than it is any more than a feeling can be felt to be what it is not.
[2]
[1] ‘Every impression, external and internal, passions, affections,
sensations, pains, and pleasures, are originally on the same footing;
and, whatever other differences we may observe among them, appear,
all of them, in their true colours, as impressions or perceptions.’
p. 480. [Book I, part IV., sec. II.]
‘All sensations are felt by the mind such as they really are; and,
when we doubt whether they present themselves as distinct objects or
as mere impressions, the difficulty is not concerning their nature,
but concerning their relations and situation.’ p. 480. [ibid.]
[2] See above, paragraph 208, with the passages there cited.
If felt thing is no more than feeling, how can it have qualities?
241. Such being the only possible object, how can qualities of it
be perceived? We cannot here find refuge in any such propensity to
feign as that which, according to Hume, leads us to ‘endow objects
with a continued existence, distinct from our perceptions.’ If such
propensities can give rise to impressions at all, it can only be to
impressions of reflection, and it cannot be in virtue of them that
extension, an impression of sensation, is given as a quality of an
object. Now if there is any meaning in the phrase ‘qualities of an
object,’ it implies that the qualities co-exist with each other and
the object. Feelings, then, which are felt as qualities of another
feeling must co-exist with, _i.e._ (according to Hume) be felt at
the same time as, it and each other. Thus, if an impression of sight
be the supposed object, no feeling that occurs after this impression
has disappeared can be a quality of it. Accordingly, when Hume speaks
of extension being seen as one of the qualities of this table, he
is only entitled to mean that it is one among several feelings,
experienced at one and the same time, which together constitute
the table. Whatever is not so experienced, whether extension or
anything else, can be no quality of that ‘perception.’ How much
of the perception, then, will survive? Can any feelings, strictly
speaking, be cotemporaneous? Those received through different senses,
as Hume is careful to show, may be; _e.g._ the smell, taste, and
colour of a fruit. [1] In regard to them, therefore, we may waive
the difficulty, How can feelings successive to each other be yet
co-existent qualities? but only to find ourselves in another as to
what the object may be of which the cotemporaneous feelings are
qualities. It cannot, according to Hume, be other than one or all
of the cotemporaneous feelings. Is, then, the taste of an apple a
quality of its colour or of its smell, or of colour, smell, and taste
put together? It will not help us to speak of the several feelings
as qualities of the ‘total impression;’ for the ‘total impression’
either merely means the several feelings put together, or else
covertly implies just that reference to an object other than these,
which Hume expressly excludes.
[1] ‘The taste and smell of any fruit are inseparable from its other
qualities of colour and tangibility, and ... ’tis certain they are
always co-existent. Nor are they only co-existent in general, but
also cotemporary in their appearance in the mind.’ p. 521. (Contrast
p. 370, where existence and appearance are identified.) [Book I, part
IV., sec. V. and part II, sec. IV.]
The thing will have ceased before the quality begins to be.
242. In fact, however, when he speaks of the feeling, which is
called extension, as a quality of the feeling, which is called
sight, of the table, he has not even the excuse that he might have
had if the feelings in question, being of different senses, might be
cotemporary. According to him they are feelings of the same sense.
The extension of the table he took to be a datum of sight just as
properly as its colour; yet he cannot call it the same as colour, but
only ‘a quality of the coloured object.’ As the ‘coloured object,’
however, apart from ‘propensities to feign,’ can, according to him,
be no other than the feeling of colour, his doctrine can only mean
that, colour and extension being feelings of the same sense, the
latter is a quality of the former. Is this any more possible than
that red should be a quality of blue, or a sour taste of a bitter
one? Must not the two feelings be successive, however closely
successive, so that the one which is object will have disappeared
before the other, which is to be its quality, will have occurred? [1]