GENERAL INTRODUCTION TO VOL. I. (continued 8)

[1] P. 491. [Book I, part IV., sec. II.]

Fiction of identity thus implied as source of the propensity which is to account for it.

305. Thus without professedly admitting into consciousness anything but the succession of feelings he gets such individual objects as Locke would have called objects of ‘actual present sensation.’ When ‘I survey the furniture of my chamber,’ according to him, I see sundry ‘identical objects’—this chair, this table, this inkstand, &c. [1] So far there is no fiction to be accounted for. It is only when, having left my chamber for an interval and returned to it, I suppose the objects which I see to be identical with those I saw before, that the ‘propensity to feign’ comes into play, which has to be explained as above. But in fact the original ‘survey’ during which, seeing the objects, I suppose them to continue the same with themselves, involves precisely the same fiction. In that case, says Hume, I ‘suppose the change’ (which is necessary to constitute the idea of identity) ‘to lie only in the time.’ But without ‘succession of perceptions,’ different however resembling, there could according to him be no change of time. The continuous survey of this table, or this chair, then, involves the notion of its remaining the same with itself throughout a succession of different perceptions—i.e. the full-grown fiction of identity—just as much as does the supposition that the table I see now is identical with the one I saw before. The ‘reality,’ confusion with which of ‘a smooth passage along resembling ideas’ is supposed to constitute the ‘fiction,’ is already itself the fiction—the fiction of an object which must be other than our feelings, since it is permanent while they are successive, yet so related to them that in virtue of reference to it, instead of being merely different from each other, they become changes of a thing.

[1] P. 493. [Book I, part IV., sec. II.]

With Hume continued existence of perceptions a fiction different from their identity. Can perceptions exist when not perceived?

306. Having thus in effect imported all three ‘fictions of imagination’—identity, continued existence, and existence distinct from perception—into the original ‘perception,’ Hume, we may think, might have saved himself the trouble of treating them as separate and successive formations. Unless he had so treated them, however, his ‘natural history’ of consciousness would have been far less imposing than it is. The device, by which he represents the ‘vulgar’ belief in the reality of the felt thing as a belief that the mere feeling is the real object, enables him also to represent the identity, which a smooth transition along closely resembling sensations leads us to suppose, as still merely identity of a perception. ‘The very image which is present to the senses is with us the real body; and ’tis to these interrupted images we ascribe a perfect identity’. [1] The identity lying thus in the images or appearances, not in anything to which they are referred, a further fiction seems to be required by which we may overcome the contradiction between the interruption of the appearances and their identity—the fiction of ‘a continued being which may fill the intervals’ between the appearances. [2] That a ‘propension’ towards such a fiction would naturally arise from the uneasiness caused by such a contradiction, we may readily admit. The question is how the propension can be satisfied by a supposition which is merely another expression for one of the contradictory beliefs. What difference is there between the appearance of a perception and its existence, that interruption of the perception, though incompatible with uninterruptedness in its appearance, should not be so with uninterruptedness in its existence? It may be answered that there is just the difference between relation to a feeling subject and relation to a thinking one—between relation to a consciousness which is in time, or successive, and relation to a thinking subject which, not being itself in time, is the source of that determination by permanent conditions, which is what is meant by the real existence of a perceived thing. But to Hume, who expressly excludes such a subject—with whom ‘it exists’ = ‘it is felt’—such an answer is inadmissible. He can, in fact, only meet the difficulty by supposing the existence of unfelt feelings, of unperceived perceptions. The appearance of a perception is its presence to ‘what we call a mind,’ which ‘is nothing but a heap or collection of different perceptions, united together by certain relations, and supposed, though falsely, to be endowed with a perfect simplicity and identity’. [3] To consider a perception, then, as existing though not appearing is merely to consider it as detached from this ‘heap’ of other perceptions, which, on Hume’s principle that whatever is distinguishable is separable, is no more impossible than to distinguish one perception from all others. [4] In fact, however, it is obvious that the supposed detachment is the very opposite of such distinction. A perception distinguished from all others is determined by that distinction in the fullest possible measure. A perception detached from all others, left out of the ‘heap which we call a mind,’ being out of all relation, has no qualities—is simply nothing. We can no more ‘consider’ it than we can see vacancy. Yet it is by the consideration of such nonentity, by supposing a world of unperceived perceptions, of ‘existences’ without relation or quality, that the mind, according to Hume—itself only ‘a heap of perceptions’—arrives at that fiction of a continued being which, as involved in the supposition of identity, is the condition of our believing in a world of real things at all.

[1] P. 493. [Book I, part IV., sec. II.]

[2] Pp. 494, 495. [Book I, part IV., sec. II.]

[3] P. 495. [Book I, part IV., sec. II.]

[4] Ibid.

Existence of objects, distinct from perceptions, a further fiction still.

307. It is implied, then, in the process by which, according to Hume, the fiction of a continued being is arrived at, that this being is supposed to be not only continued but ‘distinct from the mind’ and ‘independent’ of it. With Hume, however, the supposition of a distinct and ‘independent’ existence of the perception is quite different from that of a distinct and independent object other than the perception. The former is the ‘vulgar hypothesis,’ and though a fiction, it is also a universal belief: the latter is the ‘philosophical hypothesis,’ which, if it has a tendency to obtain belief at all, at any rate derives that tendency, in other words ‘acquires all its influence over the imagination,’ from the vulgar one. [1] Just as the belief in the independent and continued existence of perceptions results from an instinctive effort to escape the uneasiness, caused by the contradiction between the interruption of resembling perceptions and their imagined identity, so the contradiction between this belief and the evident dependence of all perceptions ‘on our organs and the disposition of our nerves and animal spirits’ leads to the doctrine of representative ideas or ‘the double existence of perceptions and objects.’ ‘This philosophical system, therefore, is the monstrous offspring of two principles which are contrary to each other, which are both at once embraced by the mind and which are unable mutually to destroy each other. The imagination tells us that our resembling perceptions have a continued and uninterrupted existence, and are not annihilated by their absence. Reflection tells us that even our resembling perceptions are interrupted in their existence and different from each other. The contradiction betwixt these opinions we elude by a new fiction which is conformable to the hypotheses both of reflection and fancy, by ascribing these contrary qualities to different existences; the interruption to perceptions, and the continuance to objects’. [2]

[1] P. 500. [Book I, part IV., sec. II.]

[2] P. 502. [Book I, part IV., sec. II.]

Are these several ‘fictions’ really different from each other?

308. Here, again, we find that the contradictory announcements, which it is the object of this new fiction to elude, are virtually the same as those implied in that judgment of identity which is necessary to the ‘perception’ of this pen or this paper. That ‘interruption of our resembling perceptions,’ of which ‘reflection’ (in the immediate context ‘Reason’) is here said to ‘tell us,’ is merely that difference in time, or succession, which Hume everywhere else treats as a datum of sense, and which, as he points out, is as necessary a factor in the idea of identity, as is the imagination of an existence continued throughout the succession. Thus the contradiction, which suggests this philosophical fiction of double existence, has been already present and overcome in every perception of a qualified object. Nor does the fiction itself, by which the contradiction is eluded, differ except verbally from that suggested by the contradiction between the interruption and the identity of perceptions. What power is there in the word ‘object’ that the supposition of an unperceived existence of perceptions, continued while their appearance is broken, should be an unavoidable fiction of the imagination, while that of ‘the double existence of perceptions and objects’ is a gratuitous fiction of philosophers, of which ‘vulgar’ thinking is entirely innocent?

Are they not all involved in the simplest perception?

309. That it is gratuitous we may readily admit, but only because a recognition of the function of the Ego in the primary constitution of the qualified individual object—this pen or this paper—renders it superfluous. To the philosophy, however, in which Hume was bred, the perception of a qualified object was simply a feeling. No intellectual synthesis of successive feelings was recognized as involved in it. It was only so far as the dependence of the feeling on our organs, in the absence of any clear distinction between feeling and felt thing, seemed to imply a dependent and broken existence of the thing, that any difficulty arose—a difficulty met by the supposition that the felt thing, whose existence was thus broken and dependent, represented an unfelt and permanent thing of which it is a copy or effect. To the Berkeleian objections, already fatal to this supposition, Hume has his own to add, viz. that we can have no idea of relation in the way of cause and effect except as between objects which we have observed, and therefore can have no idea of it as existing between a perception and an object of which we can only say that it is not a perception. Is all existence then ‘broken and dependent’? That is the ‘sceptical’ conclusion which Hume professes to adopt—subject, however, to the condition of accounting for the contrary supposition (without which, as he has to admit, we could not think or speak, and which alone gives a meaning to his own phraseology about impressions and ideas) as a fiction of the imagination. He does this, as we have seen, by tracing a series of contradictions, with corresponding hypotheses invented, either instinctively or upon reflection, in order to escape the uneasiness which they cause, all ultimately due to our mistaking similar successive feelings for an identical object. Of such an object, then, we must have an idea to begin with, and it is an object permanent throughout a variation of time, which means a succession of feelings; in other words, it is a felt thing, as distinct from feelings but to which feelings are referred as its qualities. Thus the most primary perception—that in default of which Hume would have no reality to oppose to fiction, nor any point of departure for the supposed construction of fictions—already implies that transformation of feelings into changing relations of a thing which, preventing any incompatibility between the perpetual brokenness of the feeling and the permanence of the thing, ‘eludes’ by anticipation all the contradictions which, according to Hume, we only ‘elude’ by speaking as if we had ideas that we have not.

Yet they are not possible ideas, because copied from no impressions.

310. ‘Ideas that we have not;’ for no one of the fictions by which we elude the contradictions, nor indeed any one of the contradictory judgments themselves, can be taken to represent an ‘idea’ according to Hume’s account of ideas. He allows himself indeed to speak of our having ideas of identical objects, such as this table while I see or touch it—though in this case, as has been shown, either the object is not identical or the idea of it cannot be copied from an impression—and of our transferring this idea to resembling but interrupted perceptions. But the supposition to which the contradiction involved in this transference gives rise—the supposition that the perception continues to exist when it is not perceived—is shown by the very statement of it to be no possible copy of an impression. Yet according to Hume it is a ‘belief,’ and a belief is ‘a lively idea associated with a present impression.’ What then is the impression and what the associated idea? ‘As the propensity to feign the continued existence of sensible objects arises from some lively impressions of the memory, it bestows a vivacity on that fiction; or, in other words, makes us believe the continued existence of body’. [1] Well and good: but this only answers the first part of our question. It tells us what are the impressions in the supposed case of belief, but not what is the associated idea to which their liveliness is communicated. To say that it arises from a propensity to feign, strong in proportion to the liveliness of the supposed impressions of memory, does not tell us of what impression it is a copy. Such a propensity indeed would be an ‘impression of reflection,’ but the fiction itself is neither the propensity nor a copy of it. The only possible supposition left for Hume would be that it is a ‘compound idea;’ but what combination of ‘perceptions’ can amount to the existence of perceptions when they are not perceived?

[1] P. 496. [Book I, part IV., sec. II.]

Comparison of present experience with past, which yields relation of cause and effect, pre-supposes judgment of identity;

311. From this long excursion into Hume’s doctrine of relation in the way of identity—having found him admitting explicitly that it is only by a ‘fiction of the imagination’ that we identify this table as now seen with this table as seen an hour ago, and implicitly that the same fiction is involved in the perception of this table as an identical object even when hand or eye is kept upon it, while yet he says not a word to vindicate the possibility of such a fiction for a faculty which can merely reproduce and combine ‘perishing impressions’—we return to consider its bearing upon his doctrine of relation in the way of cause and effect. According to him, as we saw, [1] that relation, ‘considered as a philosophical’ one, is founded on a comparison of present experience with past, in the sense that we regard an object, precedent and contiguous to another, as its cause when all like objects have been found similarly related. The question then arises whether the experiences compared—the present and the past alike—do not involve the fiction of identity along with the whole family of other fictions which Hume affiliates to it? Does the relation of precedence and sequence, which, if constant, amounts to that of cause and effect, merely mean precedence and sequence of two feelings, indefinitely like an indefinite number of other feelings that have thus the one preceded and the other followed; or is it a relation between one qualified thing or definite fact always the same with itself, and another such thing or fact always the same with itself? The question carries its own answer. If in the definition quoted Hume used the phrase ‘all like objects’ instead of the ‘same object,’ in order to avoid the appearance of introducing the ‘fiction’ of identity into the definition of cause, the device does not avail him much. The effect of the ‘like’ is neutralized by the ‘all.’ A uniform relation is impossible except between objects of which each has a definite identity.

[1] Above, pars. 298 and 299.

… without which there could be no recognition of an object as one observed before.

312. When Hume has to describe the experience which gives the idea of cause and effect, he virtually admits this. ‘The nature of experience,’ he tells us, ‘is this. We remember to have had frequent instances of the existence of one species of objects, and also remember that the individuals of another species of objects have always attended them, and have existed in a regular order of contiguity and succession with regard to them. Thus we remember to have seen that species of object we call flame, and to have felt that species of sensation we call heat. We likewise call to mind their constant conjunction in all past instances. Without any farther ceremony we call the one cause, and the other effect, and infer the existence of the one from the other’. [1] It appears, then, that upon experiencing certain sensations of sight and touch, we recognize each as ‘one of a species of objects’ which we remember to have observed in certain constant relations before. In virtue of the recognition the sensations become severally this flame and this heat; and in virtue of the remembrance the objects thus recognized are held to be related in the way of cause and effect. Now it is clear that though the recognition takes place upon occasion of a feeling, the object recognized—this flame or this heat—is by no means the feeling as a ‘perishing existence.’ Unless the feeling were taken to represent a thing, conceived as permanently existing under certain relations and attributes—in other words, unless it were identified by thought—it would be no definite object, not this flame or this heat, at all. The moment it is named, it has ceased to be a feeling and become a felt thing, or, in Hume’s language, an ‘individual of a species of objects.’ And just as the present ‘perception’ is the recognition of such an individual, so the remembrance which determines the recognition is one wholly different from the return with lessened liveliness of a feeling more strongly felt before. According to Hume’s own statement, it consists in recalling ‘frequent instances of the existence of a species of objects.’ It is remembrance of an experience in which every feeling, that has been attended to, has been interpreted as a fresh appearance of some qualified object that ‘exists’ throughout its appearances—an experience which for that reason forms a connected whole. If it were not so, there could be no such comparison of the relations in which two objects are now presented with those in which they have always been presented, as that which according to Hume determines us to regard them as cause and effect. The condition of our so regarding them is that we suppose the objects now presented to be the same with those of which we have had previous experience. It is only on supposition that a certain sensation of sight is not merely like a multitude of others, but represents the same object as that which I have previously known as flame, that I infer the sequence of heat and, when it does follow, regard it as an effect. If I thought that the sensation of sight, however like those previously referred to flame, did not represent the same object, I should not infer heat as effect; and conversely, if, having identified the sensation of sight as representative of flame, I found that the inferred heat was not actually felt, I should judge that I was mistaken in the identification. It follows that it is only an experience of identical, and by consequence related and qualified, objects, of which the memory can so determine a sequence of feelings as to constitute it an experience of cause and effect. Thus the perception and remembrance upon which, according to Hume, we judge one object to be the cause of another, alike rest on the ‘fictions of identity and continued existence.’ Without these no present experience would, in his language, be an instance of an individual of a certain species existing in a certain relation, nor would there be a past experience of individuals of the same species, by comparison with which the constancy of the relation might be ascertained.

[1] P. 388. [Book I, part III., sec. VI.]

Hume makes conceptions of identity and cause each come before the other. Their true correlativity.

313. Against this derivation of the conception of cause and effect, as implying that of identity, may be urged the fact that when we would ascertain the truth of any identification we do so by reference to causes and effects. As Hume himself puts it at the outset of his discussion of causation, an inference of identity ‘beyond the impressions of our senses can be founded only on the connexion of cause and effect.’ … ‘Whenever we discover a perfect resemblance between a new object and one which was formerly present to the senses, we consider whether it be common in that species of objects; whether possibly or probably any cause could operate in producing the change and resemblance; and according as we determine concerning these causes and effects, we form our judgment concerning the identity of the object’. [1] This admission, it may be said, though it tells against Hume’s own subsequent explanation of identity as a fiction of the imagination, is equally inconsistent with any doctrine that would treat identity as the presupposition of inference to cause or effect. Now undoubtedly if the identity of interrupted perceptions is one fiction of the imagination and the relation of cause and effect another, each resulting from ‘custom,’ to say with Hume, that we must have the idea of cause in order to arrive at the supposition of identity, is logically to exclude any derivation of that idea from an experience which involves the supposition of identity. The ‘custom’ which generates the idea of cause must have done its work before that which generates the supposition of identity can begin. Hume therefore, after the admission just quoted, was not entitled to treat the inference to cause or effect as a habit derived from experience of identical things. But it is otherwise if the conceptions of causation and identity are correlative—not results of experience of which one must be formed before the other, but co-ordinate expressions of one and the same synthetic principle, which renders experience possible. And this is the real state of the case. It is true, as Hume points out, that when we want to know whether a certain sensation, precisely resembling one that we have previously experienced, represents the same object, we do so by asking how otherwise it can be accounted for. If no difference appears in its antecedents or sequents, we identify it—refer it to the same thing—as that previously experienced; for its relations (which, since it is an event in time, take the form of antecedence and sequence) are the thing. The conceptions of identity and of relation in the way of cause and effect are thus as strictly correlative and inseparable as those of the thing and of its relations. Without the conception of identity experience would want a centre, without that of cause and effect it would want a circumference. Without the supposition of objects which ‘existing at one time are the same with themselves as existing at other times’—a supposition which at last, when through acquaintance with the endlessness of orderly change we have learnt that there is but one object for which such identity can be claimed without qualification, becomes the conception of nature as a uniform whole—there could be no such comparison of the relations in which an object is now presented with those in which it has been before presented, as determines us to reckon it the cause or effect of another; but it is equally true that it is only by such comparison of relations that the identity of any particular object can be ascertained.

[1] P. 376. [Book I, part III., sec. II.]

Hume quite right in saying that we do not go more beyond sense in reasoning than in perception.

314. Thus, though we may concede to Hume that neither in the inference to the relation of cause and effect nor in the conclusions we draw from it do we go ‘beyond experience,’ [1] this will merely be, if his account of it as a ‘philosophical relation’ be true, because in experience we already go beyond sense. ‘There is nothing,’ says Hume, ‘in any object considered in itself that can afford us a reason for drawing a conclusion beyond it’ [2]—a statement which to him means that, if the mind really passes from it to another, this is only because as a matter of fact another feeling follows on the first. But, in truth, if each feeling were merely ‘considered in itself,’ the fact that one follows on another would be no fact for the subject of the feelings, no starting-point of intelligent experience at all; for the fact is the relation between the feelings—a relation which only exists for a subject that considers neither feeling ‘in itself,’ as a ‘separate and perishing existence,’ but finds a reality in the determination of each by the other which, as it is not either or both of them, so survives, while they pass, as a permanent factor of experience. Thus in order that any definite ‘object’ of experience may exist for us, our feelings must have ceased to be what according to Hume they are in themselves. They cease to be so in virtue of the presence to them of the Ego, in common relation to which they become related to each other as mutually qualified members of a permanent system—a system which at first for the individual consciousness exists only as a forecast or in outline, and is gradually realized and filled up with the accession of experience. It is quite true that nothing more than the reference to such a system, already necessary to constitute the simplest object of experience, is involved in that interpretation of every event as a changed appearance of an unchanging order, and therefore to be accounted for, which we call inference to a cause or the inference of necessary connection; or, again, in the identification of the event, the determination of its particular nature by the discovery of its particular cause.

[1] Above, pars. 285 & 286.

[2] P. 436 and elsewhere. [Book I, part III., sec. XII.]

How his doctrine might have been developed. Its actual outcome.

315. The supposed difference then between immediate and mediate cognition is no absolute difference. It is not a difference between experience and a process that goes beyond experience, or between an experience unregulated by a conception of a permanent system and one that is so regulated. It lies merely in the degree of fullness and articulation which that conception has attained. If this had been what Hume meant to convey in his assimilation of inference to perception, he would have gone far to anticipate the result of the enquiry which Kant started. And this is what he might have come to mean if, instead of playing fast and loose with ‘impression’ and ‘object,’ using each as plausibility required on the principle of accommodation to the ‘vulgar,’ he had faced the consequence of his own implicit admission, that every perception of an object as identical is a ‘fiction’ in which we go beyond present feeling. As it is, his ‘scepticism with regard to the senses’ goes far enough to empty their ‘reports’ of the content which the ‘vulgar’ ascribe to them, and thus to put a breach between sense and the processes of knowledge, but not far enough to replace the ‘sensible thing’ by a function of reason. In default of such replacement, there was no way of filling the breach but to bring back the vulgar theory under the cover of habits and ‘tendencies to feign,’ which all suppose a ready-made knowledge of the sensible thing as their starting-point. Hence the constant contradiction, which it is our thankless task to trace, between his solution of the real world into a succession of feelings and the devices by which he sought to make room in his system for the actual procedure of the physical sciences. Conspicuous among these is his allowance of that view of relation in the way of cause and effect as an objective reality, which is represented by his definition of it as a ‘philosophical relation.’ It is in the sense represented by that definition that his doctrine has been understood and retained by subsequent formulators of inductive logic; but on examining it in the light of his own statements we have found that the relation, as thus defined, is not that which his theory required, and as which to represent it is the whole motive of his disquisition on the subject. It is not a sequence of impression upon impression, distinguished merely by its constancy; nor a sequence of idea upon impression, distinguished merely by that transfer of liveliness to the idea which arises from the constancy of its sequence upon the impression. It is a relation between ‘objects’ of which each is what it is only as ‘an instance of a species’ that exists continuously, and therefore in distinction from our ‘perishing impressions,’ according to a regular order of ‘contiguity and succession.’ As such existence and order are by Hume’s own showing no possible impressions, and by consequence no possible ideas, so neither are the ‘objects’ which derive their whole character from them.

No philosophical relation admissible with Hume that is not derived from a natural one.

316. It may be said, however, that wherever Hume admits a definition purporting to be of a ‘philosophical relation,’ he does so only as an accommodation, and under warning that every such relation is ‘fictitious’ except so far as it is equivalent to a natural one; that according to his express statement ‘it is only so far as causation is a natural relation, and produces an union among our ideas, that we are able to reason upon it or draw any inference from it’; [1] and that therefore it is only by his definition of it as a ‘natural relation’ that he is to be judged. Such a vindication of Hume would be more true than effective. That with him the ‘philosophical’ relation of cause and effect is ‘fictitious,’ with all the fictitiousness of a ‘continued existence distinct from perceptions,’ is what it has been the object of the preceding paragraphs to show. But the fictitiousness of a relation can with him mean nothing else than that, instead of having an idea of it, we have only a ‘tendency to suppose’ that we have such an idea. Thus the designation of the philosophical relation of cause and effect carries with it two conditions, one negative, the other positive, on the observance of which the logical value of the designation depends. The ‘tendency to suppose’ must not after all be itself translated into the idea which it is to replace; and it must be accounted for as derived from a ‘natural relation’ which is not fictitious. That the negative condition is violated by Hume, we have sufficiently seen. He treats the ‘philosophical relation’ of cause and effect, in spite of the ‘fictions’ which it involves, not as a name for a tendency to suppose that we have an idea which we have not, but as itself a definite idea on which he founds various ‘rules for judging what objects are really so related and what are not’. [2] That the positive condition is violated also—that the ‘natural relation’ of cause and effect, according to the sense in which his definition of it is meant to be understood, already itself involves ‘fictions,’ and only for that reason is a possible source of the ‘philosophical’—is what we have next to show.

[1] P. 394. [Book I, part III., sec. VII.]

[2] Part III. § 15.

Examination of his account of cause and effect as ‘natural relation’.

317. That definition, it will be remembered, runs as follows: ‘A cause is an object precedent and contiguous to another, and so united with it in the imagination that the idea of the one determines the mind to form the idea of the other, and the impression of the one to form a more lively idea of the other.’ Now, as has been sufficiently shown, the object of an idea with Hume can properly mean nothing but the impression from which the idea is derived, which again is only the livelier idea, even as the idea is the fainter impression. The idea and the object of it, then, only differ as different stages in the vivacity of a feeling. [1] It must be remembered, further, in regard to the ‘determination of the mind’ spoken of in the definition, that the ‘mind’ according to Hume is merely a succession of impressions and ideas, and that its ‘determination’ means no more than a certain habitualness in this succession. Deprived of the benefit of ambiguous phraseology, then, the definition would run thus: ‘A cause is a lively feeling immediately precedent to another, [2] and so united with it that when either of the two more faintly recurs, the other follows with like faintness, and when either occurs with the maximum of liveliness the other follows with less, but still great, liveliness.’ Thus stated, the definition would correspond well enough to the process by which Hume arrives at it, of which the whole drift, as we have seen, is to merge the so-called objective relation of cause and effect, with the so-called inference from it, in the mere habitual transition from one feeling to another. But it is only because not thus stated, and because the actual statement is understood to carry a meaning of which Hume’s doctrine does not consistently admit, that it has a chance of finding acceptance. Its plausibility depends on ‘object’ and ‘mind’ and ‘determination’ being understood precisely in the sense in which, according to Hume, they ought not to be understood, so that it shall express not a sequence of feeling upon feeling, as this might be for a merely feeling subject, but that permanent relation or law of nature which to a subject that thinks upon its feelings, and only to such a subject, their sequence constitutes or on which it depends.

[1] See above, paragraphs 195 and 208. Cf. also, among other passages, one in the chapter now under consideration (p. 451) [Book I, part III., sec. XIV.]—‘Ideas always represent their objects or impressions.’

[2] The phrase ‘immediately precedent’ would seem to convey Hume’s meaning better than his own phrase ‘precedent and contiguous.’ Contiguity in space (which is what we naturally understand by ‘contiguity,’ when used absolutely) he could not have deliberately taken to be necessary to constitute the relation of cause and effect, since the impressions so related, as he elsewhere shows, may often not be in space at all.

Double meaning of natural relation. How Hume turns it to account.

318. It is this essential distinction between the sequence of feeling upon feeling for a sentient subject and the relation which to a thinking subject this sequence constitutes—a distinction not less essential than that between the conditions, through which a man passes in sleep, as they are for the sleeping subject himself, and as they are for another thinking upon them—which it is the characteristic of Hume’s doctrine of natural relation in all its forms to disguise. Only in virtue of the presence to feelings of a subject, which distinguishes itself from them, do they become related objects. Thus, with Hume’s exclusion of such a subject, with his reduction of mind and world alike to the succession of feelings, relations and ideas of relation logically disappear. But by help of the phrase ‘natural relation,’ covering, as it does, two wholly different things—the involuntary sequence of one feeling upon another, and that determination of each by the other which can only take place for a synthetic self-consciousness—he is able on the one hand to deny that the relations which form the framework of knowledge are more than sequences of feeling, and on the other to clothe them with so much of the real character of relations as qualifies them for ‘principles of union among ideas.’ Thus the mere occurrence of similar feelings is with him already that relation in the way of resemblance, which in truth only exists for a subject that can contemplate them as permanent objects. In like manner the succession of feelings, which can only constitute time for a subject that contrasts the succession with its own unity, and which, if ideas were feelings, would exclude the possibility of an idea of time, is yet with him indifferently time and the idea of time, though ideas are feelings and there is no ‘mind’ but their succession.

If an effect is merely a constantly observed sequence, how can an event be an effect the first time it is observed? Hume evades this question;

319. The fallacy of Hume’s doctrine of causation is merely an aggravated form of that which has generally passed muster in his doctrine of time. If time, because a relation between feelings, can be supposed to survive the exclusion of a thinking self and the reduction of the world and mind to a succession of feelings, the relation of cause and effect has only to be assimilated to that of time in order that its incompatibility with the desired reduction may disappear, The great obstacle to such assimilation lies in that opposition to the mere sequence of feelings which causation as ‘matter of fact’—as that in discovering which we ‘discover the real existence and relations of objects’—purports to carry with it. Why do we set aside our usual experience as delusive in contrast with the exceptional experience of the laboratory—why do we decide that an event which has seemed to happen cannot really have happened, because under the given conditions no adequate cause of it could have been operative—if the relation of cause and effect is itself merely a succession of seemings, repeated so often as to leave behind it a lively expectation of its recurrence? This question, once fairly put, cannot be answered: it can only be evaded. It is Hume’s method of evasion that we have now more particularly to notice.

Still, he is a long way off the Inductive Logic, which supposes an objective sequence.

320. In its detailed statement it is very different from the method adopted in those modern treatises of Logic which, beginning with the doctrine that facts are merely feelings in the constitution of which thought has no share, still contrive to make free use in their logical canon of the antithesis between the real and apparent. The key to this modern method is to be found in its ambiguous use of the term ‘phenomenon,’ alike for the feeling as it is felt, ‘perishing’ when it ceases to be felt, and for the feeling as it is for a thinking subject—a qualifying and qualified element in a permanent world. Only if facts were ‘phenomena’ in the former sense would the antithesis between facts and conceptions be valid; only if ‘phenomena’ are understood in the latter sense can causation be said to be a law of phenomena. So strong, however, is the charm which this ambiguous term has exercised, that to the ordinary modern logician the question above put may probably seem unmeaning. ‘The appearance,’ he will say, ‘which we set aside as delusive does not consist in any of the reports of the senses—these are always true—but in some false supposition in regard to them due to an insufficient analysis of experience, in some reference of an actual sensation to a group of supposed possibilities of sensation, called a “thing,” which are either unreal or with which it is not really connected. The correction of the false appearance by a discovery of causation is the replacement of a false supposition, as to the possibility of the antecedence or sequence of one feeling to another, by the discovery, through analysis of experience, of what feelings do actually precede and follow each other. It implies no transition from feelings to things, but only from a supposed sequence of feelings to the actual one. Science in its farthest range leaves us among appearances still. It only teaches us what really appears.’

Can the principle of uniformity of nature be derived from sequence of feelings?

321. Now the presupposition of this answer is the existence of just that necessary connexion as between appearances, just that objective order, for which, because it is not a possible ‘impression or idea,’ Hume has to substitute a blind propensity produced by habit. Those who make it, indeed, would repel the imputation of believing in any ‘necessary connexion,’ which to them represents that ‘mysterious tie’ in which they vaguely suppose ‘metaphysicians’ to believe. They would say that necessary connexion is no more than uniformity of sequence. But sequence of what? Not of feelings as the individual feels them, for then there would be no perfect uniformities, but only various degrees of approximation to uniformity, and the measure of approximation in each case would be the amount of the individual’s experience in that particular direction. The procedure of the inductive logician shows that his belief in the uniformity of a sequence is irrespective of the number of instances in which it has been experienced. A single instance in which one feeling is felt after another, if it satisfy the requirements of the ‘method of difference,’ i.e. if it show exactly what it is that precedes and what it is that follows in that instance, suffices to establish a uniformity of sequence, on the principle that what is fact once is fact always. Now a uniformity that can be thus established is in the proper sense necessary. Its existence is not contingent on its being felt by anyone or everyone. It does not come into being with the experiment that shows it. It is felt because it is real, not real because it is felt. It may be objected indeed that the principle of the ‘uniformity of nature,’ the principle that what is fact once is fact always, itself gradually results from the observation of facts which are feelings, and that thus the principle which enables us to dispense with the repetition of a sensible experience is itself due to such repetition. The answer is, that feelings which are conceived as facts are already conceived as constituents of a nature. The same presence of the thinking subject to, and distinction of itself from, the feelings, which renders them knowable facts, renders them members of a world which is one throughout its changes. In other words, the presence of facts from which the uniformity of nature, as an abstract rule, is to be inferred, is already the consciousness of that uniformity in concreto.

With Hume the only uniformity is in expectation, as determined by habit; but strength of such expectation must vary indefinitely.

322. Hume himself makes a much more thorough attempt to avoid that pre-determination of feelings by the conception of a world, of things and relations, which is implied in the view of them as permanent facts. He will not, if he can help it, so openly depart from the original doctrine that thought is merely weaker sense. Such conceptions as those of the uniformity of nature and of reality, being no possible ‘impressions or ideas,’ he only professes to admit in a character wholly different from that in which they actually govern inductive philosophy. Just as by reality he understands not something to which liveliness of feeling may be an index, but simply that liveliness itself, and by an inferred or believed reality a feeling to which this liveliness has been communicated from one that already has it; so he is careful to tell us ‘that the supposition that the future resembles the past is derived entirely from habit, by which we are determined to expect for the future the same train of objects to which we have been accustomed’. [1] The supposition then is this ‘determination,’ this ‘propensity,’ to expect. Any ‘idea’ derived from the propensity can only be the propensity itself at a fainter stage; and between such a propensity and the conception of ‘nature,’ whether as uniform or otherwise, there is a difference which only the most hasty reader can be liable to ignore. But if by any confusion an expectation of future feelings, determined by the remembrance of past feelings, could be made equivalent to any conception of nature, it would not be of nature as uniform. As is the ‘habit’ which determines the expectation, such must be the expectation itself; and as have been the sequences of feeling in each man’s past, such must be the habit which results from them. Now no one’s feelings have always occurred to him in the same relative order. There may be some pairs of feelings of which one has always been felt before the other and never after it, and between which there has never been an intervention of a third—although (to take Hume’s favourite instance) even the feeling of heat may sometimes precede the sight of the flame—and in these cases upon occurrence of one there will be nothing to qualify the expectation of the other. But just so far as there are exceptions in our past experience to the immediate sequence of one feeling upon another, must there be a qualification of our expectation of the future, if it be undetermined by extraneous conceptions, with reference to those particular feelings.

[1] P. 431. [Book I, part III., sec. XII.]

It could not serve the same purpose as the conception of uniformity of nature.

323. Thus the expectation that ‘the future will resemble the past,’ if the past means to each man (and Hume could not allow of its meaning more) merely the succession of his own feelings, must be made up of a multitude of different expectations—some few of these being of that absolute and unqualified sort which alone, it would seem, can regulate the transition that we are pleased to call ‘necessary connexion;’ the rest as various in their strength and liveliness as there are possible differences between cases where the chances are evenly balanced and where they are all on one side. From Hume’s point of view, as he himself says, ‘every past experiment,’ i.e. every instance in which feeling (a) has been found to follow feeling (b), ‘may be considered a kind of chance’. [1] As are the instances of this kind to the instances in which some other feeling has followed (b), such are the chances or ‘probability’ that (a) will follow (b) again, and such upon the occurrence of (b) will be that liveliness in the expectation of (a), which alone with Hume is the reality of the connexion between them. In such an expectation, in an expectation made up of such expectations, there would be nothing to serve the purpose which the conception of the uniformity of nature actually serves in inductive science. It could never make us believe that a feeling felt before another—as when the motion of a bell is seen before the sound of it has been heard—represents the real antecedent. It could never set us upon that analysis of our experience by which we seek to get beyond sequences that are merely usual, and admit of indefinite exceptions, to such as are invariable; upon that ‘interrogation of nature’ by which, on the faith that there is a uniformity if only we could find it out, we wrest from her that confession of a law which she does not spontaneously offer. The fact that some sequences of feeling have been so uniform as to result in unqualified expectations (if it be so) could of itself afford no motive for trying to compass other expectations of a like character which do not naturally present themselves. Nor could there be anything in the appearance of an exception to a sequence, hitherto found uniform, to lead us to change our previous expectation for one which shall not be liable to such modification. The previous expectation would be so far weakened, but there is nothing in the mere weakening of our expectations that should lead to the effort to place them beyond the possibility of being weakened. Much less could the bundle of expectations come to conceive themselves as one system so as that, through the interpretation of each exception to a supposed uniformity of sequence as an instance of a real one, the changes of the parts should prove the unchangeableness of the whole.

[1] P. 433. [Book I, part III., sec. XII.]

Hume changes the meaning of this expectation by his account of the ‘remembrance’ which determines it. Bearing of his doctrine of necessary connexion upon his argument against miracles. This remembrance, as he describes it, supposes conception of a system of nature.

324. That a doctrine which reduces the order of nature to strength of expectation, and exactly reverses the positions severally given to belief and reality in the actual procedure of science, [1] should have been ostensibly adopted by scientific men as their own—with every allowance for Hume’s literary skill and for the charm which the prospect of overcoming the separation between reason and instinct exercises over naturalists—would have been unaccountable if the doctrine had been thus nakedly put or consistently maintained. But it was not so. Hume’s sense of consistency was satisfied when expectation determined by remembrance had been put in the place of necessary connexion, as the basis of ‘inference to matters of fact.’ It does not lead him to adjust his view of the fact inferred to his view of the basis on which the inference rests. Expectation is an ‘impression of reflection,’ and if the relation of cause and effect is no more than expectation, that which seemed most strongly to resist reduction to feeling has yet been so reduced. But if the expectation is to be no more than an impression of reflection, the object expected must itself be no more than an impression of some kind or other. The expectation must be expectation of a feeling, pure and simple. Nor does Hume in so many words allow that it is otherwise, but meanwhile though the expectation itself is not openly tampered with, the remembrance that determines it is so. This is being taken to be that, which it cannot be unless ideas unborrowed from impressions are operative in and upon it. It is being regarded, not as the recurrence of a multitude of feelings with a liveliness indefinitely less than that in virtue of which they are called impressions of sense, and indefinitely greater than that in virtue of which they are called ideas of imagination, but as the recognition of a world of experience, one, real and abiding. An expectation determined by such remembrance is governed by the same ‘fictions’ of identity and continued existence which are the formative conditions of the remembrance. Expectation and remembrance, in fact, are one and the same intellectual act, one and the same reference of feelings, given in time, to an order that is not in time, distinguished according to the two faces which, its ‘matter’ being in time, it has to present severally to past and future. The remembrance is the measure of the expectation, but as the remembrance carries with it the notion of a world whose existence does not depend on its being remembered, and whose laws do not vary according to the regularity or looseness with which our ideas are associated, so too does the expectation, and only as so doing becomes the mover and regulator of ‘inference from the known to the unknown.’

[1] It is by a curious fate that Hume should have been remembered, at any rate in the ‘religious’ world, chiefly by the argument against miracles which appears in the ‘Essays’—an argument which, however irrefragable in itself, turns wholly upon that conception of nature as other than our instinctive expectations and imaginations, which has no proper place in his system (see Vol. IV. page 89). If ‘necessary connexion’ were really no more than the transition of imagination, as determined by constant association, from an idea to its usual attendant—if there were no conception of an objective order to determine belief other than the belief itself—the fact that such an event, as the revival of one four-days-dead at the command of a person, had been believed, since it would show that the imagination was at liberty to pass from the idea of the revival to that of the command (or vice versa) with that liveliness which constitutes reality, would show also that no necessary connexion, no law of nature in the only sense in which Hume entitles himself to speak of such, was violated by the sequence of the revival on the command. At the same time there would be nothing ‘miraculous,’ according to his definition of the miraculous as distinct from the extraordinary, in the case. Taken strictly, indeed, his doctrine implies that a belief in a miracle is a contradiction in terms. An event is not regarded as miraculous unless it is regarded as a ‘transgression of a law of nature by a particular volition of the Deity or by the interposition of some invisible agent’ (page 93, note 1); but it could not transgress a law of nature in Hume’s sense unless it were so inconsistent with the habitual association of ideas as that it could not be believed. Hume’s only consistent way of attacking miracles, then, would have been to show that the events in question, as miraculous, had never been believed. Having been obliged to recognize the belief in their having happened, he is open to the retort ‘ad hominem’ that according to his own showing the belief in the events constitutes their reality. Such a retort, however, would be of no avail in the theological interest, which requires not merely that the events should have happened but that they should have been miraculous, i.e. ‘transgressions of a law of nature by a particular volition of the Deity.’

325. In the passage already quoted, where Hume is speaking of the expectation in question as depending simply on habit, he yet speaks of it as an expectation ‘of the same train of objects to which we have been accustomed.’ These words in effect imply that it is not habit, as constituted simply by the repetition of separate sequences of feelings, that governs the expectation—in which case, as we have seen, the expectation would be made up of expectations as many and as various in strength as have been the sequences and their several degrees of regularity—but, if habit in any sense, habit as itself governed by conceptions of ‘identity and distinct continued existence,’ in virtue of which, as past experience is not an indefinite series of perishing impressions of separate men but represents one world, so all fresh experience becomes part ‘of the same train of objects;’ part of a system of which, as a whole, ‘the change lies only in the time’. [1] If now we look back to the account given of the relation of memory to belief we shall find that it is just so far as, without distinct avowal, and in violation of his principles, he makes ‘impressions of memory’ carry with them the conception of a real system, other than the consciousness of their own liveliness, that he gains a meaning for belief which makes it in any respect equivalent to the judgment, based on inference, of actual science.

[1] P. 492. [Book I, part IV., sec. II.]

This explains his occasional inconsistent ascription of an objective character to causation.

326. Any one who has carefully read the chapters on inference and belief will have found himself frequently doubting whether he has caught the author’s meaning correctly. A clear line of thought may be traced throughout, as we have already tried to trace it [1]—one perfectly consistent with itself and leading properly to the conclusion that ‘all reasonings are nothing but the effect of custom, and that custom has no influence but by enlivening the imagination’ [2]—but its even tenour is disturbed by the exigency of showing that proven fact, after turning out to be no more than enlivened imagination, is still what common sense and physical science take it to be. According to the consistent theory, ideas of memory are needed for inference to cause or effect, simply because they are lively. Such inference is inference to a ‘real existence,’ that is to an ‘idea assented to,’ that is to a feeling having such liveliness as, not being itself one of sense or memory, it can only derive from one of sense or memory through association with it. That the inferred idea is a cause or effect and, as such, has ‘real existence,’ merely means that it has this derived liveliness or is believed; just as the reality ascribed to the impression of memory lies merely in its having this abundant liveliness from which to communicate to its ‘usual attendant.’ But while the title of an idea to be reckoned a cause or effect is thus made to depend on its having the derived liveliness which constitutes belief, [3] on the other hand we find Hume from time to time making belief depend on causation, as on a relation of objects distinct from the lively suggestion of one by the others. ‘Belief arises only from causation, and we can draw no inference from one object to another except they be connected by this relation.’ ‘The relation of cause and effect is requisite to persuade us of any real existence’. [4] In the context of these disturbing admissions we find a reconsideration of the doctrine of memory which explains them, but only throws back on that doctrine the inconsistency which they exhibit in the doctrine of belief.

[1] Above, paragraphs 289 and ff.

[2] P. 445. [Book I, part III., sec. XIII.]

[3] It may be as well here to point out the inconsistency in Hume’s use of ‘belief.’ At the end of sec. 5 (Part III.) the term is extended to ‘impressions of the senses and memory.’ We are said to believe when ‘we feel an immediate impression of the senses, or a repetition of that impression in the memory. But in the following section the characteristic of belief is placed in the derived liveliness of an idea as distinct from the immediate liveliness of impression.

[4] Pp. 407 & 409. [Book I, part III., sec. IX.]

Reality of remembered ‘system’ transferred to ‘system of judgment’.

327. This reconsideration arises out of an objection to his doctrine which Hume anticipates, to the effect that since, according to it, belief is a lively idea associated ‘to a present impression,’ any suggestion of an idea by a resembling or contiguous impression should constitute belief. How is it then that ‘belief arises only from causation’? His answer, which must be quoted at length, is as follows:—‘’Tis evident that whatever is present to the memory, striking upon the mind with a vivacity which resembles an immediate impression, must become of considerable moment in all the operations of the mind and must easily distinguish itself above the mere fictions of the imagination. Of these impressions or ideas of the memory we form a kind of system, comprehending whatever we remember to have been present either to our internal perception or senses, and every particular of that system, joined to the present impressions, we are pleased to call a reality. But the mind stops not here. For finding that with this system of perceptions there is another connected by custom or, if you will, by the relation of cause and effect, it proceeds to the consideration of their ideas; and as it feels that ’tis in a manner necessarily determined to view these particular ideas, and that the custom or relation by which it is determined admits not of the least change, it forms them into a new system, which it likewise dignifies with the title of realities. The first of these systems is the object of the memory and senses; the second of the judgment. ’Tis this latter principle which peoples the world, and brings us acquainted which such existences as, by their removal in time and place, lie beyond the reach of the senses and memory’. [1]

[1] P. 408. [Book I, part III., sec. IX.]

Reality of the former ‘system’ other than vivacity of impressions.

328. From this it appears that ‘what we are pleased to call reality’ belongs, not merely to a ‘present impression,’ but to ‘every particular of a system joined to the present impression’ and ‘comprehending whatever we remember to have been present either to our internal perception or senses.’ This admission already amounts to an abandonment of the doctrine that reality consists in liveliness of feeling. It cannot be that every particular of the system comprehending all remembered facts, which is joined with the present impression, can have the vivacity of that impression either along with it or by successive communication. We can only feel one thing at a time, and by the time the vivacity had spread far from the present impression along the particulars of the system, it must have declined from that indefinite degree which marks an impression of sense. It is not, then, the derivation of vivacity from the present impression, to which it is joined, that renders the ‘remembered system’ real; and what other vivacity can it be? It may be said indeed that each particular of the system had once the required vivacity, was once a present impression; but if in ceasing to be so, it did not cease to be real—if, on the contrary, it could not become a ‘particular of the system,’ counted real, without becoming other than the ‘perishing existence’ which an impression is—it is clear that there is a reality which lively feeling does not constitute and which involves the ‘fiction’ of an existence continued in the absence, not only of lively feeling, but of all feelings whatsoever. So soon, in short, as reality is ascribed to a system, which cannot be an ‘impression’ and of which consequently there cannot be an ‘idea,’ the first principle of Hume’s speculation is abandoned. The truth is implicitly recognized that the reality of an individual object consists in that system of its relations which only exists for a conceiving, as distinct from a feeling, subject, even as the unreal has no meaning except as a confused or inadequate conception of such relations; and that thus the ‘present impression’ is neither real nor unreal in itself, but may be equally one or the other according as the relations, under which it is conceived by the subject of it, correspond to those by which it is determined for a perfect intelligence. [1]

[1] See above, paragraphs 184 & 183.

It is constituted by relations, which are not impressions at all; and in this lies explanation of the inference from it to ‘system of judgment’.

329. A clear recognition of this truth can alone explain the nature of belief as a result of inference from the known to the unknown, which is, at the same time, inference to a matter of fact. The popular notion, of course, is that certain facts are given by feeling without inference and then other facts inferred from them. But what is ‘fact’ taken to mean? If a feeling, then an inferred fact is a contradiction, for it is an unfelt feeling. If (as should be the case) it is taken to mean the relation of a feeling to something, then it already involves inference—the interpretation of the feeling by means of the conception of a universal, self or world, brought to it—an inference which is all inference in posse, for it implies that a universe of relations is there, which I must know if I would know the full reality of the individual object: so that no fact can be even partially known without compelling an inference to the unknown, nor can there be any inference to the unknown without modification of what already purports to be known. Hume, trying to carry out the equivalence of fact and feeling, and having clearer sight than his masters, finds himself in the presence of this difficulty about inference. Unless the inferred object is other than one of sense (outer or inner) or of memory, there is no reasoning, but only perception; [1] but if it is other, how can it be real or even an object of consciousness at all, since consciousness is only of impressions, stronger or fainter? The only consistent way out of the difficulty, as we have seen, is to explain inference as the expectation of the recurrence of a feeling felt before, through which the unknown becomes known merely in the sense that from the repetition of the recurrence the expectation has come to amount to the fullest assurance. But according to this explanation the difference between the inferences of the savage and those of the man of science will lie, not in the objects inferred, but in the strength of the expectation that constitutes the inference. Meanwhile, if a semblance of explanation has been given for the inference from cause to effect, that from effect to cause remains quite in the dark. How can there be inference from a given feeling to that felt immediately before it?

[1] Pp. 376 & 388. [Book I, part III., secs. II. and VI.]

Not seeing this, Hume has to explain inference to latter system as something forced upon us by habit.

330. From the avowal of such paradoxical results, Hume only saved himself by reverting, as in the passage before us, to the popular view—to the distinction between two ‘systems of reality,’ one perceived, the other inferred; one ‘the object of the senses and memory,’ the other ‘of the judgment.’ He sees that if the educated man erased from his knowledge upon us by of the world all ‘facts’ but those for which he has ‘the evidence of his senses and memory,’ his world would be unpeopled; but he has not the key to the true identity between the two systems. Not recognizing the inference already involved in a fact of sense or memory, he does not see that it is only a further articulation of this inference which gives the fact of judgment; that as the simplest fact for which we have the ‘evidence of sense’ is already not a feeling but an explanation of a feeling, which connects it by relations, that are not feelings, with an unfelt universe, so inferred causes and effects are explanations of these explanations, by which they are connected as mutually determinant in the one world whose presence the simplest fact, the most primary explanation of feeling, supposes no less than the most complete. Not seeing this, what is he to make of the system of merely inferred realities? He will represent the relation of cause and effect, which connects it with the ‘system of memory,’ as a habit derived from the constant de facto sequence of this or that ‘inferred’ upon this or that remembered idea. The mind, ‘feeling’ the unchangeableness of this habit, regards the idea, which in virtue of it follows upon the impression of memory, as equally real with that impression. In this he finds an answer to the two questions which he himself raises: (a) ‘Why is it that we draw no inference from one object to another, except they be connected by the relation of cause and effect;’ or (which is the same, since inference to an object implies the ascription of reality to it), ‘Why is this relation requisite to persuade us of any real existence?’ and (b), ‘How is it that the relations of resemblance and contiguity have not the same effect?’ The answer to the first is, that we do not ascribe reality to an idea recalled by an impression, unless we find that, owing to its customary sequence upon the impression, we cannot help passing from the one to the other. The answer to the second corresponds. The contiguity of an idea to an impression, if it has been repeated often enough and without any ‘arbitrary’ action on our part, is the relation of cause and effect, and thus does ‘persuade us of real existence.’ A ‘feigned’ contiguity, on the other hand, because we are conscious that it is ‘of our mere good-will and pleasure’ that we give the idea that relation to the impression, can produce no belief. ‘There is no reason why, upon the return of the same impression, we should be determined to place the same object in the same relation to it’. [1] In like manner we must suppose (though this is not so clearly stated) that when an impression—such as the sight of a picture—calls up a resembling idea (that of the man depicted) with much vivacity, it does not ‘persuade us of his real existence’ because we are conscious that it is by the ‘mere good-will and pleasure’ of some one that the likeness has been produced.

[1] P. 409. [Book I, part III., sec. IX.]

But if so, ‘system of judgment’ must consist of feelings constantly experienced;

331. Now this account has the fault of being inconsistent with Hume’s primary doctrine, inasmuch as it makes the real an object of thought in distinction from feeling, without the merit of explaining the extension of knowledge beyond the objects of sense and memory. It turns upon a conception of the real, as the unchangeable, which the succession of feelings, in endless variety, neither is nor could suggest. It implies that not in themselves, but as representing such an unchangeable, are the feelings which ‘return on us whether we will or no,’ regarded as real. The peculiar sequence of one idea on another, which is supposed to constitute the relation of cause and effect, is not, according to this description of it, a sequence of feelings simply; it is a sequence reflected on, found to be unchangeable, and thus to entitle the sequent idea to the prerogative of reality previously awarded (but only by the admission as real of the ‘fiction’ of distinct continued existence) to the system of memory. But while the identification of the real with feeling is thus in effect abandoned, in saving the appearance of retaining it, Hume makes his explanation of the ‘system of judgment’ futile for its purpose. He saves the appearance by intimating that the relation of cause and effect, by which the inferred idea is connected with the idea of memory and derives reality from it, is only the repeated sequence of the one idea upon the other, of the less lively feelings upon the more lively, or a habit that results from such repetition. But if the sequence of the inferred idea upon the other must have been so often repeated in order to the existence of the relation which renders the inference possible, the inferred idea can be no new one, but must itself be an idea of memory, and the question, how any one’s knowledge comes to extend beyond the range of his memory, remains unanswered.

… which only differ from remembered feelings inasmuch as their liveliness has faded. But how can it have faded, if they have been constantly repeated?

332. What Hume himself seems to mean us to understand is, that the inferred idea is one of imagination, as distinct from memory; and that the characteristic of the relation of cause and effect is that through it ideas of imagination acquire the reality that would otherwise be confined to impressions of sense and memory. But, according to him, ideas of imagination only differ from those of memory in respect of their less liveliness, and of the freedom with which we can combine ideas in imagination that have not been given together as impressions. [1] Now the latter difference is in this case out of the question. A compound idea of imagination, in which simple ideas are put together that have never been felt together, can clearly never be connected with an impression of sense or memory by a relation derived from constant experience of the sequence of one upon the other, and specially opposed to the creations of ‘caprice’. [2] We are left, then, to the supposition that the inferred idea, as idea of imagination, is one originally given as an impression of sense, but of which the liveliness has faded and requires to be revived by association in the way of cause and effect with one that has retained the liveliness proper to an idea of memory. Then the question recurs, how the restoration of its liveliness by association with an impression, on which it must have been constantly sequent in order that the association may be possible, is compatible with the fact that its liveliness has faded. And however this question may be dealt with, if the relation of cause and effect is merely custom, the extension of knowledge by means of it remains unaccounted for; the breach between the expectation of the recurrence of familiar feelings and inductive science remains unfilled; Locke’s ‘suspicion’ that ‘a science of nature is impossible,’ instead of being overcome, is elaborated into a system.

[1] Part I., sec. 3; cf. note on p. 416 [Book I, part III., sec. IX.].

[2] P. 409. [Book I, part III., sec. IX.]

Inference then can give no new knowledge.

333. Thus inference, according to Hume’s account of it as originating in habit, suffers from a weakness quite as fatal as that which he supposes to attach to it if accounted for as the work of reason. ‘The work of reason’ to a follower of Locke meant either the mediate perception of likeness between ideas, which the discovery of cause or effect cannot be; or else syllogism, of which Locke had shown once for all that it could yield no ‘instructive propositions.’ But if an idea arrived at by that process could be neither new nor real—not new, because we must have been familiar with it before we put it into the compound idea from which we ‘deduce’ it; not real, because it has not the liveliness either of sensation or of memory—the idea inferred according to Hume’s process, however real with the reality of liveliness, is certainly not new. ‘If this means’ (the modern logician may perhaps reply), ‘that according to Hume no new phenomenon can be given by inference, he was quite right in thinking so. If the object of inference were a separate phenomenon, it would be quite true that it must have been repeatedly perceived before it could be inferred, and that thus inference would be nugatory. But inference is in fact not to such an object, but to a uniform relation of certain phenomena in the way of co-existence and sequence; and what Hume may be presumed to mean is not that every such relation must have been perceived before it can be inferred, much less that it must have been perceived so constantly that an appearance of the one phenomenon causes instinctive expectation of the other, but (a) that the phenomena themselves must have been given by immediate perception, and (b) that the conception of a law of causation, in virtue of which a uniformity of relation between them is inferred from a single instance of it, is itself the result of an “inductio per enumerationem simplicem,” of the accumulated experience of generations that the same sequents follow the same antecedents.’

Nor does this merely mean that it cannot constitute new phenomena, while it can prove relations, previously unknown, between phenomena. Such a distinction inadmissible with Hume.

334. At the point which our discussion has reached, few words should be wanted to show that thus to interpret Hume is to read into him an essentially alien theory, which has doubtless grown out of his, but only by a process of adaptation which it needs a principle the opposite of his to justify. Hume, according to his own profession, knows of no objects but impressions and ideas—feelings stronger or more faint—of no reality which it needs thought, as distinct from feeling, to constitute. But a uniform relation between phenomena is neither impression nor idea, and can only exist for thought. He could not therefore admit inference to such relation as to a real existence, without a double contradiction, nor does he ever explicitly do so. He never allows that inference is other than a transition to a certain sort of feeling, or that it is other than the work of imagination, the weakened sense, as enlivened by custom to a degree that puts it almost on a level with sense; which implies that in every case of inference the inferred object is not a uniform relation—for how can there be an image of uniform relation?—and that it is something which has been repeatedly and without exception perceived to follow another before it can be inferred. Even when in violation of his principle he has admitted a ‘system of memory’—a system of things which have been felt, but which are not feelings, stronger or fainter, and which are what they are only through relation—he still in effect, as we have seen, makes the ‘system of judgment,’ which he speaks of as inferred from it, only the double of it. To suppose that, on the strength of a general inference, itself the result of habit, in regard to the uniformity of nature, particular inferences may be made which shall be other than repetitions of a sequence already habitually repeated, is, if there can be degrees of contradiction, even more incompatible with Hume’s principles than to suppose such inferences without it. If a uniformity of relation between particular phenomena is neither impression nor idea, even less so is the system of all relations.

His distinction of probability of causes from that of chances might seem to imply conception of nature, as determining inference.

335. There is language, however, in the chapters on ‘Probability of Chances and of Causes,’ which at first sight might seem to warrant the ascription of such a supposition to Hume. According to the distinction which he inherited from Locke all inference to or from causes or effects, since it does not consist in any comparison of the related ideas, should be merely probable. And as such he often speaks of it. His originality lies in his effort to explain what Locke had named; in his treating that ‘something not joined on both sides to, and so not showing the agreement or disagreement of, the ideas under consideration’ which yet ‘makes me believe’, [1] definitely as Habit. But ‘in common discourse,’ as he remarks, ‘we readily affirm that many arguments from causation exceed probability’; [2] the explanation being that in these cases the habit which determines the transition from impression to idea is ‘full and perfect.’ There has been enough past experience of the immediate sequence of the one ‘perception’ on the other to form the habit, and there has been no exception to it. In these cases the ‘assurance,’ though distinct from knowledge, may be fitly styled ‘proof,’ the term ‘probability’ being confined to those in which the assurance is not complete. Hume thus comes to use ‘probability’ as equivalent to incompleteness of assurance, and in this sense speaks of it as ‘derived either from imperfect experience, or from contrary causes, or from analogy’. [3] It is derived from analogy when the present impression, which is needed to give vivacity to the ‘related idea,’ is not perfectly like the impressions with which the idea has been previously found united; ‘from contrary causes,’ when there have been exceptions to the immediate sequence or antecedence of the one perception to the other; ‘from imperfect experience’ when, though there have been no exceptions, there has not been enough experience of the sequence to form a ‘full and perfect habit of transition.’ Of this last ‘species of probability,’ Hume says that it is a kind which, ‘though it naturally takes place before any entire proof can exist, yet no one who is arrived at the age of maturity can any longer be acquainted with. ’Tis true, nothing is more common than for people of the most advanced knowledge to have attained only an imperfect experience of many particular events; which naturally produces only an imperfect habit and transition; but then we must consider that the mind, having formed another observation concerning the connexion of causes and effects, gives new force to its reasoning from that observation; and by means of it can build an argument on one single experiment, when duly prepared and examined. What we have found once to follow from any object we conclude will for ever follow from it; and if this maxim be not always built upon as certain, ’tis not for want of a sufficient number of experiments, but because we frequently meet with instances to the contrary’—which give rise to the other sort of weakened assurance or probability, that from ‘contrary causes’. [4]

[1] Locke, 4, 15, 3.

[2] P. 423. [Book I, part III., sec. XI.]

[3] P. 439. [Book I, part III., sec. XIII.]

[4] Pp. 429 & 430. [Book I, part III., sec. XII.]

But this distinction he only professes to adopt in order to explain it away.

336. There is a great difference between the meaning which the above passage conveys when read in the light of the accepted logic of science, and that which it conveys when interpreted consistently with the theory in the statement of which it occurs. Whether Hume, in writing as he does of that conclusion from a single experiment, which our observation concerning the connexion of cause and effect enables us to draw, understood himself to be expressing his own theory or merely using the received language provisionally, one cannot be sure; but it is certain that such language can only be justified by those ‘maxims of philosophers’ which it is the purpose or effect of his doctrine to explain away—in particular the maxims that ‘the connexion between all causes and effects is equally necessary and that its seeming uncertainty in some instances proceeds from the secret opposition of contrary causes;’ and that ‘what the vulgar call chance is but a concealed cause’. [1] These maxims represent the notion that the law of causation is objective and universal; that all seeming limitations to it, all ‘probable and contingent matter,’ are the reflections of our ignorance, and exist merely ex parte nostrâ. In other words, they represent the notion of that ‘continued existence distinct from our perceptions,’ which with Hume is a phrase generated by ‘propensities to feign.’ Yet he does not profess to reject them; nay, he handles them as if they were his own, but after a very little of his manipulation they are so ‘translated’ that they would not know themselves. Because philosophers ‘allow that what the vulgar call chance is nothing but a concealed cause,’ ‘probability of causes’ and ‘probability of chances’ may be taken as equivalent. But chance, as ‘merely negation of a cause,’ has been previously explained, on the supposition that causation means a ‘perfect habit of imagination,’ to be the absence of such habit—the state in which imagination is perfectly indifferent in regard to the transition from a given impression to an idea, because the transition has not been repeated often enough to form even the beginning of a habit. Such being mere chance, ‘probability of chances’ means a state of imagination between the perfect indifference and that perfect habit of transition, which is ‘necessary connexion.’ ‘Probability of causes’ is the same thing. Its strength or weakness depends simply on the proportion between the number of experiments (‘each experiment being a kind of chance’) in which A has been found to immediately follow B, and the number of those in which it has not. [2] Mere chance, probability, and causation then are equally states of imagination. The ‘equal necessity of the connexion between all causes and effects’ means not that any ‘law of causation pervades the universe,’ but that, unless the habit of transition between any feelings is ‘full and perfect,’ we do not speak of these feelings as related in the way of cause and effect.

[1] Pp. 429 & 430. [Book I, part III., sec. XII.]

[2] Pp. 424-428, 432-434. [Book I, part III., secs. XI. and XII.]

Laws of nature are unqualified habits of expectation.

337. Interpreted consistently with this doctrine, the passage quoted in the last paragraph but one can only mean that, when a man has arrived at maturity, his experience of the sequence of feelings cannot fail in quantity. He must have had experience enough to form not only a perfect habit of transition from any impression to the idea of its usual attendant, but a habit which would act upon us even in the case of novel events, and lead us after a single experiment or a sequence confidently to expect its recurrence, if only the experience had been uniform. It is because it has not been so, that in many cases the habit of transition is still imperfect, and the sequence of A on B not ‘proven,’ but ‘probable.’ The probability then which affects the imagination of the matured man is of the sort that arises from ‘contrary causes,’ as distinct from ‘imperfect experience.’ This is all that the passage in question can fairly mean. Such ‘probability’ cannot become ‘proof,’ or the ‘imperfect habit,’ perfect, by discovery of any necessary connexion or law of causation, for the perfect habit of transition, the imagination enlivened to the maximum by custom, is the law of causation. The formation of the habit constitutes the law: to discover it would be to discover what does not yet exist. The incompleteness of the habit in certain directions, the limitation of our assurance to certain sequences as distinct from others, must be equally a limitation to the universality of the law. It is impossible then that on the faith of the universality of the law we should seek to extend the range of that assurance which is identical with it. Our ‘observation concerning the connexion of causes and effects’ merely means the sum of our assured expectations, founded on habit, at any given time, and that on the strength of this we should ‘prepare an experiment,’ with a view to assuring ourselves of a universal sequence from a single instance, is as unaccountable as that, given the instance, the assurance should follow.

Experience, according to his account of it, cannot be a parent of knowledge.

338. The case then stands thus. In order to make the required distinction between inference to real existence and the lively suggestion of an idea, Hume has to graft on his theory the alien notion of an objective system, an order of nature, represented by ideas of memory, and on the strength of such a notion to interpret a transition from these ideas to others, because we cannot help making it, as an objective necessity. Of such alien notion and interpretation he avails himself in his definition (understood as he means it to be understood) of cause as a ‘natural relation’. [1] But he had not the boldness of his later disciples. Though he could be inconsistent so far, he could not be inconsistent far enough to make his theory of inference fit the practice of natural philosophers. Bound by his doctrine of ideas as copied from impressions, he can give no account of inferred ideas that shall explain the extension of knowledge beyond the expectation that we shall feel again what we have felt already. It was not till another theory of experience was forthcoming than that given by the philosophers who were most fond of declaring their devotion to it, that the procedure of science could be justified. The old philosophy, we are often truly told, had been barren for want of contact with fact. It sought truth by a process which really consisted in evolving the ‘connotation’ of general names. The new birth came when the mind had learnt to leave the idols of the tribe and cave, and to cleave solely to experience. If the old philosophy, however, was superseded by science, science itself required a new philosophy to answer the question. What constitutes experience? It was in effect to answer this question that Locke and Hume wrote, and it is the condemnation of their doctrine that, according to it, experience is not a possible parent of science. It is not those, we know, who cry ‘Lord, Lord!’ the loudest, that enter into the kingdom of heaven, nor does the strongest assertion of our dependence on experience imply a true insight into its nature. Hume has found acceptance with men of science as the great exponent of the doctrine that there can be no new knowledge without new experience. It has not been noticed that with him such ‘new experience’ could only mean a further repetition of familiar feelings, and that if it means more to his followers, it is only because they have been less faithful than he was to that antithesis between thought and reality which they are not less loud in asserting.

[1] See above, paragraph 317.

His attitude towards doctrine of thinking substance.

339. From the point that our enquiry has reached, we can anticipate the line which Hume could not but take in regard to Self and God. His scepticism lay ready to his hand in the incompatibility between the principles of Locke and that doctrine of ‘thinking substance,’ which Locke and Berkeley alike maintained. If the reader will revert to the previous part of this introduction, in which that doctrine was discussed, [1] he will find it equally a commentary upon those sections of the ‘Treatise on Human Nature’ which deal with ‘immateriality of the soul’ and ‘personal identity.’ Substance, we saw, alike as ‘extended’ and as ‘thinking,’ was a ‘creation of the mind,’ yet real; something of which there was an ‘idea,’ but of which nothing could be said but that it was not an ‘idea.’ The ‘thinking’ substance, moreover, was at a special disadvantage in contrast with the ‘extended,’ because, in the first place, it could not, like body, be represented as given to consciousness in the feeling of solidity, and secondly it was not wanted. It was a mere double of the extended substance to which, as the ‘something wherein they do subsist and from which they do result’ our ideas had already been referred. Having no conception, then, of Spirit or Self before him but that of the thinking substance, of which Berkeley had confessed that it was not a possible idea or object of an idea, Hume had only to apply the method, by which Berkeley himself had disposed of extended substance, to get rid of Spirit likewise. This could be done in a sentence, [2] but having done it, Hume is at further pains to show that immateriality, simplicity, and identity cannot be ascribed to the soul; as if there were a soul left to which anything could be ascribed.

[1] Above, paragraphs 127-135, 144-146, & 192.

[2] P. 517. [Book I, part IV., sec. V.]

As to Immateriality of the Soul, he plays off Locke and Berkeley against each other, and proves Berkeley a Spinozist.

340. There were two ways of conceiving the soul as immaterial, of which Hume was cognizant. One, current among the theologians and ordinary Cartesians and adopted by Locke, distinguishing extension and thought as severally divisible and indivisible, supposed separate substances—matter and the soul—to which these attributes, incapable of ‘local conjunction,’ severally belonged. The other, Berkeley’s, having ostensibly reduced extended matter to a succession of feelings, took the exclusion of all ‘matter’ to which thought could be ‘joined’ as a proof that the soul was immaterial. Hume, with cool ingenuity, turns each doctrine to account against the other. From Berkeley he accepts the reduction of sensible things to sensations. Our feelings do not represent extended objects other than themselves; but we cannot admit this without acknowledging the consequence, as Berkeley himself implicitly did, [1] that certain of our impressions—those of sight and touch—are themselves extended. What then becomes of the doctrine, that the soul must be immaterial because thought is not extended, and cannot be joined to what is so? Thought means the succession of impressions. Of these some, though the smaller number, are actually extended; and those that are not so are united to those that are by the ‘natural relations’ of resemblance and of contiguity in time of appearance, and by the consequent relation of cause and effect. [2] The relation of local conjunction, it is true, can only obtain between impressions which are alike extended. The ascription of it to such as are unextended arises from the ‘propensity in human nature, when objects are united by any relation, to add some new relation in order to complete the union’. [3] This admission, however, can yield no triumph to those who hold that thought can only be joined to a ‘simple and indivisible substance.’ If the existence of unextended impressions requires the supposition of a thinking substance ‘simple and indivisible,’ the existence of extended ones must equally imply a thinking substance that has all the properties of extended objects. If it is absurd to suppose that perceptions which are unextended can belong to a substance which is extended, it is equally absurd to suppose that perceptions which are extended can belong to a substance that is not so. Thus Berkeley’s criticism has indeed prevailed against the vulgar notion of a material substance as opposed to a thinking one, but meanwhile he is himself ‘hoist with his own petard.’ If that thinking substance, the survival of which was the condition of his theory serving its theological purpose, [4] is to survive at all, it can only be as equivalent to Spinoza’s substance, in which ‘both matter and thought were supposed to inhere.’ The universe of our experience—‘the sun, moon, and stars; the earth, seas, plants, animals, men, ships, houses, and other productions, either of art or nature’—is the same universe when it is called ‘the universe of objects or of body,’ and when it is called ‘the universe of thought, or of impressions and ideas;’ but to hold, according to Spinoza’s ‘hideous hypothesis,’ that ‘the universe of objects or of body’ inheres in one simple uncompounded substance, is to rouse ‘a hundred voices of scorn and detestation;’ while the same hypothesis in regard to the ‘universe of impressions and ideas’ is treated ‘with applause and veneration.’ It was to save God and Immortality that the ‘great philosopher,’ who had found the true way out of the scholastic absurdity of abstract ideas, [5] had yet clung to the ‘unintelligible chimaera’ of thinking substance; and after all, in doing so, he fell into a ‘true atheism,’ indistinguishable from that which had rendered the unbelieving Jew ‘so universally infamous’. [6]

[1] See above, par. 177.

[2] Pp. 520-521. [Book I, part IV., sec. V.]

[3] P. 521. [Book I, part IV., sec. V.]

[4] See page 325. [Book I, part I., sec. VII.]

[5] See above, paragraphs 191 and foll.

[6] Pp. 523-526. [Book I, part IV., sec. V.]

Causality of spirit treated in the same way.