was in some sense an abstract idea of space, which the existence
of geometry required of him, really carried with it the admission
either of a distinct impression of the same, or of some transmuting
process by which the idea may become what the impression is not.
His way of evading this consequence has been already noticed in our
examination of his doctrine of ‘abstract ideas’ generally, though
without special reference to extension. [1] It consists in asserting
figure and colour to be ‘really,’ or as an impression, ‘the same and
indistinguishable,’ but different as ‘relations and resemblances’ of
the impression; in other words, different according to the ‘light in
which the impression is considered’ or ‘the aspect in which it is
viewed.’ Of these ‘separate resemblances and relations,’ however, are
there ideas or are there not? If there are not, they are according
to Hume nothing of which we are conscious at all; if there are,
there must be distinguishable, and therefore separable, impressions
corresponding. To say then that figure and colour form one and the
same indistinguishable impression, and yet that they constitute
‘different resemblances and relations,’ without such explanation
as Hume cannot consistently give, is in fact a contradiction in
terms. The true explanation is that the ‘impression’ has a different
meaning, when figure and colour are said to be inseparable in the
impression, from that which it has when spoken of as a subject of
different resemblances and relations. In the former sense it is
the feeling pure and simple--_one_ as presented singly in time,
after another and before a third. In this sense it is doubtless
insusceptible of distinction into qualities of figure and colour,
because (for reasons already stated) it can have no qualities at
all. But the ‘simplicity in which many different resemblances and
relations may be contained’ is quite other than this singleness. It
is the unity of an object thought of under manifold relations--a
unity of which Hume, reducing all consciousness to ‘impression’ and
impression to feeling, has no consistent account to give. Failing
such an account, the unity of the intelligible object, and the
singleness of the feeling in time, are simply confused with each
other. It is only an object as thought of, not a feeling as felt,
that can properly be said to have qualities at all; while it is only
because it is still regarded as a feeling that qualities of it, which
cannot be referred to separate impressions, are pronounced the same
and indistinguishable. If the idea of space is other than a feeling
grown fainter, the sole reason for regarding it as originally an
impression of colour disappears; if it _is_ such a feeling, it cannot
contain such ‘different resemblances and relations’ as render it
representative of objects not only coloured in every possible way,
but not coloured at all.
[1] Above, paragraph 218.
... yet avoids appearance of doing so, by treating ‘consideration’ of
the relations of a felt thing as if it were itself the feeling.
253. It is thus by playing fast and loose with the difference between
feeling and conception that Hume is able, when the character of
extension as an intelligible relation is urged, to reply that it is
the same with the feeling of colour; and on the other hand, when
asked how there then can be an abstract idea of it, to reply that
this does not mean a separate idea, but coloured objects considered
under a certain relation, viz. under that which consists in the
disposition of their parts. The most effective way of meeting him on
his own ground is to ask him how it is, since ‘consideration’ can
only mean a succession of ideas, and ideas are fainter impressions,
that extension, being one and the same impression with colour, can
by any ‘consideration’ become so different from it as to constitute
a resemblance to objects that are not coloured at all. The true
explanation, according to his own terminology, would be that the
resemblance between the white globe and all other globes, being
a resemblance not of impressions but of such relations between
impressions as do not ‘depend on the nature of the impressions’
related, is unaffected by the presence or absence of colour or any
other sensation. Of such relations, however, there can properly,
if ideas are fainter impressions, be no ideas at all. In regard
to those of cause and identity Hume virtually admits this; but
the ‘propensities to feign’ by which in the case of these latter
relations he tries to account for the appearance of there being
ideas of them, cannot plausibly be applied to relations in space and
time, of which, as we shall see, ideas must be assumed in order to
account for the ‘fictions’ of body and necessary connexion. Since
then they cannot be derived from any separate impression without the
introduction in effect of a sixth sense, and since all constitutive
action of thought as distinct from feeling is denied by Hume, the
only way to save appearances is to treat the order in which a
multitude of impressions present themselves as the same with each
impression, even though immediately afterwards it may have to be
confessed, that it is so independent of the nature of any or all of
the impressions as to be the foundation of an abstract idea, which is
representative of other impressions having nothing whatever in common
with them but the order of appearance. This once allowed--an abstract
idea having been somehow arrived at which is not really the copy of
any impression--it is easy to argue back from the abstract idea to an
impression, and because there is an idea of the composition of points
to substitute a ‘composition of coloured points’ for colour as the
original impression. From such impression, being already extension,
the idea of extension can undoubtedly be abstracted.
Summary of contradictions in his account of extension.
254. We now know what becomes of ‘extended matter’ when the doctrine,
which has only to be stated to find acceptance, that we cannot ‘look
for anything anywhere but in our ideas’--in other words that for
us there is no world but consciousness--is fairly carried out. Its
position must become more and more equivocal, as the assumption, that
consciousness reveals to us an alien matter, has in one after another
of its details to be rejected, until a principle of synthesis within
consciousness is found to explain it. In default of this, the feeling
consciousness has to be made to take its place as best it may; which
means that what is said of it as feeling has to be unsaid of it as
extended, and _vice versâ_. As _feeling_, it carries no reference to
anything other than itself, to an object of which it is a quality;
as _extended_, it is a qualified object. As _extended_ again, its
qualities are relations of coexistent parts; as _feeling_, it is an
unlimited succession, and therefore, not being a possible whole, can
have no parts at all. Finally as _feeling_, it must in each moment of
existence either be ‘on the same footing’ with pain and pleasure or
else--a distinction between impressions of sensation and reflection
being unwarrantably admitted--be a colour, a taste, a sound, a smell,
or ‘tangibility;’ as _extended_, it is an ‘order of appearance’ or
‘disposition of corpuscles,’ which, being predicable indifferently
at any rate of two of these sensations, can no more be the same with
either than either can be the same with the other. It is not the
fault of Hume but his merit that, in undertaking to maintain more
strictly than others the identification of extension with feeling,
he brought its impossibility more clearly into view. The pity is
that having carried his speculative enterprise so far before he was
thirty, he allowed literary vanity to interfere with its consistent
pursuit, caring only to think out the philosophy which he inherited
so far as it enabled him to pose with advantage against Mystics and
Dogmatists, but not to that further issue which is the entrance to
the philosophy of Kant.
He gives no account of quantity as such.
255. As it was, he never came fairly to ask himself the fruitful
question. How the sciences of quantity ‘continuous and discreet,’
which undoubtedly do exist, are possible to a merely feeling
consciousness, because, while professedly reducing all consciousness
to this form, he still allowed himself to interpret it in the terms
of these sciences and, having done so, could easily account for their
apparent ‘abstraction’ from it. If colour is already for feeling a
magnitude, as is implied in calling it a ‘composition of coloured
points,’ the question, how a knowledge of magnitude is possible, is
of course superfluous. It only remains to deal, as Hume professes to
do, with the apparent abstraction in mathematics of magnitude from
colour and the consequent suppositions of pure space and infinite
divisibility. Any ulterior problem he ignores. That magnitude is not
any the more a feeling for being ‘endowed with colour’ he shows no
suspicion. He pursues his ‘sensationalism’ in short, in its bearing
on mathematics, just as far as Berkeley did and no further. The
question at issue, as he conceived it, was not as to the possibility
of magnitude altogether, but only as to the existence of a vacuum;
not as to the possibility of number altogether, but only as to the
infinity of its parts. Just as he takes magnitude for granted as
found in extension, and extension as equivalent to the feeling of
colour, so he takes number for granted, without indeed any explicit
account of the impression in which it is to be found, but apparently
as found in time, which again is identified with the succession of
impressions. In the second part of the Treatise, though the idea of
number is assumed and an account is given of it which is supposed
to be fatal to the infinite divisibility of extension, we are told
nothing of the impression or impressions from which it is derived.
In the Fourth Part, however, there is a passage in which a certain
consideration of time is spoken of as its source.
His account of the relation between Time and Number.
256. In the latter passage, in order to account for the idea of
identity, he is supposing ‘a single object placed before us and
surveyed for any time without our discovering in it any variation
or interruption.’ ‘When we consider any two points of this time,’
he proceeds, ‘we may place them in different lights. We may either
survey them at the very same instant; in which case they give us the
idea of number, both by themselves and by the object, which must be
multiplied in order to be conceived at once, as existent in these
two different points of time: or, on the other hand, we may trace
the succession of time by a like succession of ideas, and conceiving
first one moment, along with the object then existent, imagine
afterwards a change in the time without any variation or interruption
in the object; in which case it gives us the idea of unity’. [1]
[1] P. 490. [Book I, part IV., sec. II.]
What does it come to?
257. A slight scrutiny of this passage will show that it is a
prolonged tautology. The difference is merely verbal between the
processes by which the ideas of number and unity are severally
supposed to be given, except that in the former process it is the
moment of surveying the times that is supposed to be one, while
the times themselves are many; in the latter it is the object that
is supposed to be one, but the times many. According to the second
version of the former process--that according to which the different
times surveyed together are said to give the idea of number ‘by
their object’--even this difference disappears. The only remaining
distinction is that in the one case the object is supposed to be
given as one, ‘without interruption or variation,’ but to become
multiple as conceived to exist in different moments; in the other the
objects are supposed to be given as manifold, being ideas presented
in successive times, but to become one through the imaginary
restriction of the multiplicity to the times in distinction from the
object. Undoubtedly any one of these verbally distinct processes will
yield indifferently the ideas of number and of unity, since these
ideas in strict correlativity are presupposed by each of them. ‘Two
points of time surveyed at the same time’ will give us the idea of
number because, being a duality in unity, they are already a number.
So, too, and for the same reason, will the object, one in itself but
multiple as existent at different times. Nor does the idea given by
imagining ideas, successively presented, to be ‘one uninterrupted
object,’ differ from the above more than many-in-one differs from
one-in-many. The real questions of course are, How two times can be
surveyed at one time; how a single object can be multiplied or become
many; how a succession of ideas can be imagined to be an unvaried and
uninterrupted object. To these questions Hume has no answer to give.
His reduction of thought to feeling logically excluded an answer, and
the only alternative for him was to ignore or disguise them.
Unites alone really exist: number a ‘fictitious denomination’. Yet
‘unites’ and ‘number’ are correlative; and the supposed fiction
unaccountable.
258. In the passage from part II. of the Treatise, already referred
to, he distinctly tells us that the unity to which existence
belongs excludes multiplicity. ‘Existence itself belongs to unity,
and is never applicable to number but on account of the unites of
which the number is composed. Twenty men may be said to exist, but
’tis only because one, two, three, four, &c., are existent. ... A
unite, consisting of a number of fractions, is merely a fictitious
denomination, which the mind may apply to any quantity of objects
it collects together; nor can such an unity any more exist alone
than number can, as being in reality a true number. But the unity
which can exist alone, and whose existence is necessary to that of
all number, is of another kind and must be perfectly indivisible
and incapable of being resolved into any lesser unity’. [1] What
then is the ‘unity which can exist alone’? The answer, according
to Hume, must be that it is an impression separately felt and not
resoluble into any other impressions. But then the question arises,
how a succession of such impressions can form a number or sum; and
if they cannot, how the so-called real unity or separate impression
can in any sense be a unite, since a unite is only so as one of a
sum. To put the question otherwise, Is it not the case that a unite
has no more meaning without number than number without unites, and
that every number is not only just such a ‘fictitious denomination,’
as Hume pronounces a ‘unite consisting of a number of fractions’
to be, but a fiction impossible for our consciousness according to
Hume’s account of it? It will not do to say that such a question
touches only the fiction of ‘abstract number,’ but not the existence
of numbered objects; that (to take Hume’s instance) twenty men exist
with the existence of each individual man, each real unit, of the
lot. It is precisely the numerability of objects--not indeed their
existence, if that only means their successive appearance, but their
existence _as a sum_--that is in question. If such numerability
is possible for such a consciousness as Hume makes ours to be; in
other words, if he can explain the fact that we count; ‘abstract
number’ may no doubt be left to take care of itself. Is it then
possible? ‘Separate impressions’ mean impressions felt at different
times, which accordingly can no more co-exist than, to use Hume’s
expression, ‘the year 1737 can concur with the year 1738;’ whereas
the constituents of a sum must, as such, co-exist. Thus when we are
told that ‘twenty may be said to exist because one, two, three, &c.,
are existent,’ the alleged reason, understood as Hume was bound
to understand it, is incompatible with the supposed consequence.
The existence of an object would, to him, mean no more than the
occurrence of an impression; but that one impression should occur,
and then another and then another, is the exact opposite of their
coexistence as a sum of impressions, and it is such co-existence that
is implied when the impressions are counted and pronounced so many.
Thus when Hume tells us that a single object, by being ‘multiplied
in order to be conceived at once as existent in different points of
time,’ gives us the idea of number, we are forced to ask him what
precisely it is which thus, being one, can become manifold. Is it a
‘unite that can exist alone’? That, having no parts, cannot become
manifold by resolution. ‘But it may by repetition?’ No, for it is
a separate impression, and the repetition of an impression cannot
co-exist, so as to form one sum, with its former occurrence. ‘But it
may be _thought of_ as doing so?’ No, for that, according to Hume,
could only mean that feelings might concur in a fainter stage though
they could not in a livelier. Is the single object then a unite which
already consists of parts? But that is a ‘fictitious denomination,’
and presupposes the very idea of number that has to be accounted for.
[1] P. 338. [Book I, part II., sec. II.]
Idea of time even more unaccountable on Hume’s principles.
259. The impossibility of getting number, as a many-in-one, out of
the succession of feelings, so long as the self is treated as only
another name for that succession, is less easy to disguise when the
supposed units are not merely given in succession, but are actually
the moments of the succession; in other words, when time is the
many-in-one to be accounted for. How can a multitude of feelings
of which no two are present together, undetermined by relation to
anything other than the feelings, be at the same time a consciousness
of the relation between the moments in which the feelings are given,
or of a sum which these moments form? How can there be a relation
between ‘objects’ of which one has ceased before the other has
begun to exist? ‘For the same reason,’ says Hume, ‘that the year
1737 cannot concur with the present year 1738, every moment must be
distinct from, and posterior or antecedent to, another’. [1] How
then can the present moment form one sum with all past moments,
the present year with all past years; the sum which we indicate
by the number 1738? The answer of common sense of course will be
that, though the feeling of one moment is really past before that
of another begins, yet thought retains the former, and combining
it with the latter, gets the idea of time both as a relation and
as a sum. Such an answer, however, implies that the retaining and
combining thought is other than the succession of the feelings, and
while it takes this succession to be the reality, imports into it
that determination by the relations of past and present which it can
only derive from the retaining and combining thought opposed to it.
It is thus both inconsistent with Hume’s doctrine, which allows no
such distinction between thought, _i.e._ the succession of ideas,
and the succession of impressions, and inconsistent with itself. Yet
Hume by disguising both inconsistencies contrives to avail himself
of it. By tacitly assuming that a conception of ‘the manner in which
impressions appear to the mind’ is given in and with the occurrence
of the impressions, he imports the consciousness of time, both as
relation and as numerable quantity, into the sequence of impressions.
He thus gains the advantage of being able to speak of this sequence
indifferently under predicates which properly exclude each other.
He can make it now a consciousness in time, now a consciousness
of itself as in time; now a series that cannot be summed, now a
conception of the sum of the series. The sequence of feelings, then,
having been so dealt with as to make it appear in effect that time
can be _felt_, that it should be _thought of_ can involve no further
difficulty. The conception, smuggled into sensitive experience as
an ‘impression,’ can be extracted from it again as ‘idea,’ without
ostensible departure from the principle that the idea is only the
weaker impression.
[1] P. 338. [Book I, part II., sec. II.]
His ostensible explanation of it.
260. ‘The idea of time is not derived from a particular impression
mixed up with others and plainly distinguishable from them, but
arises altogether from the manner in which impressions appear to the
mind, without making one of the number. Five notes played on the
flute give us the impression and idea of time, though time be not a
sixth impression which presents itself to the hearing or any other of
the senses. Nor is it a sixth impression which the mind by reflection
finds in itself. These five sounds, making their appearance in this
particular manner, excite no emotion or affection in the mind, which
being observed by it can give rise to a new idea. For _that_ is
necessary to produce a new idea of reflection; nor can the mind, by
revolving over a thousand times all its ideas of sensation, ever
extract from them any new original idea, unless nature has so framed
its faculties that it feels some new original impression arise from
such a contemplation. But here it only takes notice of the _manner_
in which the different sounds make their appearance, and that it may
afterwards consider without considering these particular sounds, but
may conjoin it with any other objects. The ideas of some objects it
certainly must have, nor is it possible for it without these ever to
arrive at any conception of time; which, since it appears not as any
primary distinct impression, can plainly be nothing but different
ideas or impressions or objects disposed in a certain manner, _i.e._
succeeding each other. [1]
[1] P. 343. [Book I, part II., sec. III.]
It turns upon equivocation between feeling and conception of
relations between felt things.
261. In this passage the equivocation between ‘impression’ as
feeling, and ‘impression’ as conception of the manner in which
feelings occur, is less successfully disguised than is the like
equivocation in the account of extension--not indeed from any failure
in Hume’s power of statement, but from the nature of the case. In
truth the mere reproduction of impressions can as little account for
the one conception as for the other. Just as, in order to account
for the ‘impression’ from which the abstract idea of space may
be derived, we have to suppose first that the feeling of colour,
through being presented by the self-conscious subject to itself,
becomes a coloured thing, and next, that this thing is viewed as
a whole of parts limiting each other; so, in order to account for
the ‘impression’ from which the idea of time may be abstracted,
we have to suppose the presentation of the succession of feelings
to a consciousness not in succession, and the consequent view of
such presented succession as a sum of numerable parts. It is a
relation only possible for a thinking consciousness--a relation,
in Hume’s language, not depending on the nature of the impressions
related--that has in each case to be introduced into experience in
order to be extracted from it again by ‘consideration:’ but there is
this difference, that in one case the relation is not really between
feelings at all, but between things or parts of a thing; while in the
other it is just that relation between feelings, the introduction
of which excludes the possibility that any feeling should be the
consciousness of the relation. Thus to speak of a feeling of
extension does not involve so direct a contradiction as to speak in
the same way of time. The reader gives Hume the benefit of a way of
thinking which Hume’s own theory excludes. Himself distinguishing
between feeling and felt thing, and regarding extension as a relation
between parts of a thing, he does not reflect that for Hume there is
no such distinction; that a ‘feeling of extension’ means that feeling
is extended, which again means that it has co-existent parts; and
that what is thus said of feeling as _extended_ is incompatible with
what is said of it as _feeling_. But when it comes to a ‘feeling
of time’--a feeling of the successiveness of all feelings--the
incompatibility between what is said of feeling as the object and
what is implied of it as the subject is less easy to disguise. In
like manner because we cannot really think of extension as being that
which yet according to Hume it is, it does not strike us, when he
speaks of it as coloured or of colour as extended, that he is making
one feeling a quality of another. But it would be otherwise if any
specific feeling were taken as a quality of what is ostensibly a
relation between all feelings. There is thus no ‘sensible quality’
with which time can be said to be ‘endowed,’ as extension with
‘colour and solidity;’ none that can be made to do the same duty in
regard to it as these do in regard to extension, ‘giving the idea’ of
it without actually being it.
He fails to assign any impression or compound of impressions from
which idea of time is copied.