GENERAL INTRODUCTION TO VOL. I. (continued 9)

341. The supposition of spiritual substance being thus at once absurd, and of a tendency the very opposite of the purpose it was meant to serve, can anything better be said for the supposition of a spiritual cause? It was to the representation of spirit as cause rather than as substance, it will be remembered, that both Locke and Berkeley trusted for the establishment of a Theism which should not be Pantheism. [1] Locke, in his demonstration of the being of God, trusted for proof of a first cause to the inference from that which begins to exist to something having power to produce it, and to the principle of necessary connexion—connexion in the way of agreement of ideas—between cause and effect for proof that this first cause must be immaterial, even as its effect, viz. our thought, is. Hume’s doctrine of causation, of course, renders both sides of the demonstration unmeaning. Inference being only the suggestion by a feeling of the image of its ‘usual attendant,’ there can be no inference to that which is not a possible image of an impression. Nor, since causation merely means the constant conjunction of impressions, and there is no such contrariety between the impression we call ‘motion of matter’ and that we call ‘thought,’ anymore than between any other impressions, [2] as is incompatible with their constant conjunction, is there any reason why we should set aside the hourly experience, which tells us that bodily motions are the cause of thoughts and sentiments. If, however, there were that necessary connexion between effect and cause, by which Locke sought to show the spirituality of the first cause, it would really go to show just the reverse of infinite power in such cause. It is from our impressions and ideas that we are supposed to infer this cause; but in these—as Berkeley had shown, and shown as his way of proving the existence of God—there is no efficacy whatever. They are ‘inert.’ If then the cause must agree with the effect, the Supreme Being, as the cause of our impressions and ideas, must be ‘inert’ likewise. If, on the other hand, with Berkeley we cling to the notion that there must be efficient power somewhere, and having excluded it from the relation of ideas to each other or of matter to ideas, find it in the direct relation of God to ideas, we fall ‘into the grossest impieties;’ for it will follow that God ‘is the author of all our volitions and impressions.’ [3]

[1] See above, §§ 147, 171, 193.

[2] There is no contrariety, according to Hume, except between existence and non-existence (p. 323) [Book I, part I., sec. V.] and as all impressions and ideas equally exist (p. 394) [Book I, part III., sec. VII.], there can be no contrariety between any of them. He does indeed in certain leading passages allow himself to speak of contrariety between ideas (e.g. pp. 494 and 535 [Book I, part IV., secs. II. and VI.]), which is incidental evidence that the ideas there treated of are not so, according to his account of ideas, at all.

[3] Pp. 529-531 [Book I, part IV., sec. V.], a commentary on the argument here given has been in effect supplied in paragraphs 148-152, and 194.

Disposes of ‘personal’ identity by showing contradictions in Locke’s account of it.

342. Against the doctrine of a real ‘identity of the self or person’ Hume had merely to exhibit the contradictions which Locke’s own statement of it involves. [1] To have transferred this identity definitely from ‘matter’ to consciousness was in itself a great merit, but, so transferred, in the absence of any other theory of consciousness than Locke’s, it only becomes more obviously a fiction. If there is nothing real but the succession of feelings, identity of body, it is true, disappears as inevitably as identity of mind; and so we have already found it to do in Hume. [2] But whereas the notion of a unity of body throughout the succession of perceptions only becomes contradictory through the medium of a reduction of body to a succession of perceptions, the identity of a mind, which has been already defined as a succession of perceptions, is a contradiction in terms. There can be ‘properly no simplicity in it at one time, nor identity at different; it is a kind of theatre where several perceptions successively make their appearance.’ But this comparison must not mislead us. ‘They are the successive perceptions only, that constitute the mind; nor have we the most distant notion of the place where these scenes are represented, or of the materials of which it is composed.’ The problem for Hume then in regard to personal, as it had been in regard to bodily, identity is to account for that ‘natural propension to imagine’ it which language implies.

[1] See above, §§ 134 and foll.

[2] See above, §§ 306 and foll.

Yet can only account for it as a ‘fiction’ by supposing ideas which with him are impossible.

343. The method of explanation in each case is the same. He starts with two suppositions, to neither of which he is logically entitled. One is that we have a ‘distinct idea of identity or sameness,’ i.e. of an object that remains invariable and uninterrupted through a supposed variation of time’—a supposition which, as we have seen, upon his principles must mean that a feeling, which is one in a succession of feelings, is yet all the successive feelings at once. The other is that we have an idea ‘of several different objects existing in succession, and connected together by a close’ (natural) ‘relation’—which in like manner implies that a feeling, which is one among a succession of feelings, is at the same time a consciousness of these feelings as successive and under that qualification by mutual relation which implies their equal presence to it. These two ideas, which in truth are ‘distinct and even contrary’ [1] we yet come to confuse with each other, because ‘that action of the imagination, by which we consider the uninterrupted and invisible object, and that by which we reflect on the succession of related objects, are almost the same to the feeling.’ Thus, though what we call our mind is really a ‘succession of related objects,’ we have a strong propensity to mistake it for an ‘invariable and uninterrupted object.’ To this propensity we at last so far yield as to assert our successive perceptions to be in effect the same, however interrupted and variable; and then, by way of ‘justifying to ourselves this absurdity, feign the continued existence of the perceptions of our senses, to remove the interruption; and run into the notion of a soul and self, and substance, to disguise the variation’. [2]

[1] See note to § 341.

[2] Pp. 535-536. [Book I, part IV., sec. VI.].

In origin this ‘fiction’ the same as that of ‘Body’.

344. It will be seen that the theory, which we have just summarised, would merely be a briefer version of that given in the section on ‘Scepticism with regard to the Senses,’ if in the sentence, which states its conclusion, for ‘the notion of a soul and self and substance’ were written ‘the notion of a double existence of perceptions and objects’. [1] To a reader who has not thoroughly entered into the fusion of being and feeling, which belongs to the ‘new way of ideas,’ it may seem strange that one and the same process of so-called confusion has to account for such apparently disparate results, as the notion of a permanently identical self and that of the distinct existence of body. If he bears in mind, however, that with Hume the universe of our experience is the same when it is called ‘the universe of objects or of body’ and when it is called the ‘universe of thought or my impressions and ideas’, [2] he will see that on the score of consistency Hume is to be blamed, not for applying the same method to account for the fictions of material and spiritual identity, but for allowing himself, in his preference for physical, as against theological, pretension, to write as if the supposition of spiritual were really distinct from that of material identity, and might be more contemptuously disposed of. The original ‘mistake,’ out of which according to him the two fictitious suppositions arise, is one and the same; and though it is a ‘mistake’ without which, as we have found [3] from Hume’s own admissions, we could not speak even in singular propositions of the most ordinary ‘objects of sense’—this pen, this table, this chair—it is yet one that on his principles is logically impossible, since it consists in a confusion between ideas that we cannot have. Of this original ‘mistake’ the fictions of body and of its ‘continued and distinct existence’ are but altered expressions. They represent in truth the same logical category of substance and relation. And of the Self according to Locke’s notion of it [4] (which was the only one that Hume had in view), as a ‘thinking thing’ within each man among a multitude of other thinking things, the same would have to be said. But in order to account for the ‘mistake,’ of which the suppositions of thinking and material substance are the correlative expressions, and which it is the net result of Hume’s speculation to exhibit at once as necessary and as impossible, we have found another notion of the self forced upon us—not as a double of body, but as the source of that ‘familiar theory’ which body in truth is, and without which there would be no universe of objects, whether ‘bodies’ or ‘impressions and ideas,’ at all.

[1] Above, §§ 306-310.

[2] Above, § 340.

[3] Above, §§ 303 & 304.

[4] Above, §§ 129-132.

Possibility of such fictitious ideas implies refutation of Hume’s doctrine.

345. Thus the more strongly Hume insists that ‘the identity which we ascribe to the mind of man is only a fictitious one’, [1] the more completely does his doctrine refute itself. If he had really succeeded in reducing those ‘invented’ relations, which Locke had implicitly recognised as the framework of the universe, to what he calls ‘natural’ ones—to mere sequences of feeling—the case would have been different. With the disappearance of the conception of the world as a system of related elements, the necessity of a thinking subject, without whose presence to feelings they could not become such elements, would have disappeared likewise. But he cannot so reduce them. In all his attempts to do so we find that the relation, which has to be explained away, is pre-supposed under some other expression, and that it is ‘fictitious’ not in the sense which Hume’s theory requires—the sense, namely, that there is no such thing either really or in imagination, either as impression or idea—but in the sense that it would not exist if we did not think about our feelings. Thus, whereas identity ought for Hume’s purpose to be either a ‘natural relation,’ or a propensity arising from such relation, or nothing, we find that according to his account, though neither natural relation nor propensity, it yet exists both as idea and as reality. He saves appearances indeed by saying [2] that natural relations of ideas ‘produce it,’ but they do so, according to his detailed account of the matter, in the sense that, the idea of an identical object being given, we mistake our successive and resembling feelings for such an object. In other words, the existence of numerically identical things is a ‘fiction,’ not as if there were no such things, but because it implies a certain operation of thought upon our feelings, a certain interpretation of impressions under direction of an idea not derived from impressions. By a like equivocal use of ‘fiction’ Hume covers the admission of real identity in its more complex forms—the identity of a mass, whose parts undergo perpetual change of distribution; of a body whose form survives not merely the redistribution of its materials, but the substitution of others; of animals and vegetables, in which nothing but the ‘common end’ of the changing members remains the same. The reality of such identity of mass, of form, of organism, he quietly takes for granted. [3] He calls it ‘fictitious’ indeed, but only either in the sense above given or in the sense that it is mistaken for mere numerical identity.

[1] P. 540. [Book I, part IV., sec. VI.]

[2] P. 543 [Book I, part IV., sec. VI.]. ‘Identity depends on the relations of ideas; and these relations produce identity by means of that easy transition they occasion.’ Strictly it should be ‘that easy transition in which they consist;’ since, according to Hume, the ‘easiness of transition’ is not an effect of natural relation, but constitutes it. Cf. pp. 322 & 497 [Book I, part I., sec. V. and part IV., sec. II.], and above, § 318.

[3] Pp. 536-538. [Book I, part IV., sec. VI.]

346. After he has thus admitted, as constituents of the ‘universe of objects,’ a whole hierarchy of ideas of which the simplest must vanish before the demand to ‘point out the impression from which it is derived,’ we are the less surprised to find him pronouncing in conclusion ‘that the true idea of the human mind is to consider it as a system of different perceptions or different existences, which are linked together by the relation of cause and effect, and mutually produce, destroy, influence and modify each other’. [1] A better definition than this, as a definition of nature, or one more charged with ‘fictions of thought,’ could scarcely be desired. If the idea of such a system is a true idea at all, which we are only wrong in confusing with mere numerical identity, we need be the less concerned that it should be adduced as the true idea not of nature but of the ‘human mind.’ Having learnt, through the discipline which Hume himself furnishes, that the recognition of a system of nature logically carries with it that of a self-conscious subject, in relation to which alone ‘different perceptions’ become a system of nature, we know that we cannot naturalise the ‘human mind’ without presupposing that which is neither nature nor natural, though apart from it nature would not be—that of which the designation as ‘mind,’ as ‘human,’ as ‘personal,’ is of secondary importance, but which is eternal, self-determined, and thinks.

[1] P. 541. [Book I, part IV., sec. VI.]

T.H. Green